Media sponsorship as a new promotional tool for tour operators in Poland

Promotion understood as a combination of forms and methods of social communication in the area of satisfying needs through material and intellectual products of human ingenuity, entrepreneurship, activity and economy is a field that has been dynamically evolving together with the changing society. In order for a product offered on the market to be selected by a potential customer out of all the other available ones, market entities (including tour operators) have to use more and more modern forms of market communication. Surely, such a form of communication is media sponsorship that is based on promoting own image, name, trademark or offer through participation in the production and broadcast costs of television or radio programs, as well as newspaper articles. Information about an enterprise, which finances a given media material, may come in a form of so called sponsorship billboard or television program trailer. The paper seeks to clarify the theoretical issues on media sponsorship as a tool and to attempt to estimate the usage of such a tool by tour operators functioning in the Polish tourism market. The research method used in this study is primarily desk research in the form of an analysis of literature on the subject and industry reports, whereas the empirical part is based on the secondary research conducted by the Institute of Media Monitoring (IMM). Furthermore, logical operations (mainly deduction and induction) and an observation method (especially in terms of practical aspects) were also applied.