Ever wondered why companies sponsor people and teams who are always last and never seem to get any TV time during their big events? Well besides helping to promote a sport and helping a team stay in the sport, sponsoring the back runners or team that always loses does have its advantages.

Sponsoring the lower down teams is cheaper, you find that these teams have more loyal followers who will seek out who sponsors them and then support those sponsors, and sometimes those underdogs come up trumps, they beat the better team or they win a race and the TV coverage when something like that happens goes crazy.

During the Formula 1 over the weekend something like this happened.

The Spyker Formula 1 team is a back runner, always a few seconds off the pace, they have car upgrades coming in a few weeks which they are boasting will make them more competitive, but at the moment, they are consistently last.

But just like in any car race Mother Nature changes everything and in the last race in Europe the rain came early, caused a bunch of crashes and caused a restart, a restart with a spiker for the first time ever in position 1 on the grid and for the first time ever leading a race.

This of course has resulted in heaps of media focused on the team and their car, lots of TV time while their car sat on the grid in P1 for 5 minutes waiting for the restart, they are on the front page of the f1.com website and all over the formula 1 / sports sites and TV shows there’s news of the event.

The team wins from the media and so do the sponsors who paid much less for their sponsorship then companies like Vodafone do for their sponsorship.

The big teams have lots of coverage, but it comes at a big price, I like the underdogs and the cost to advertise with the bottom team is cheap so why not try it from time to time?

The same goes for the internet at times, advertising with the smaller sites but spreading your money across a bunch of them can pay off just as much and more than spending the same amount of money with one bigger site – as long as the small sites you choose aren’t lying about their stats and what not.

You’ll also find that if you help support these up and coming smaller sites when you want to advertise again in the future you can get a better deal on advertising then what the retail rates would be.

Edit: I’ve just noticed that a blog I like Zoomstart had a post about the underdog, check it out it’s a good post…