Sponsorship ROI: the most expensive marketing investment brands still struggle to measure

Media buying is measured down to the last impression. Pricing is modeled. Promotions are tracked to the euro. Sponsorship, often one of the largest line items on the marketing budget, is the exception.

Only 19% of advertisers say they’re confident they can measure sponsorship ROI and the business return of their sponsorships, according to Kantar. On a line item that regularly runs into the tens of millions, most brands are operating  without the instrumentation they'd insist on for any other channel.

A multi-million-euro investment with surprisingly little proof of return on investment

Sports sponsorship has become one of the most competitive arenas in marketing. Shirt deals, stadium naming rights, official partnerships, and athlete endorsements: brands across insurance, QSR, financial services, FMCG, retail, and gaming are committing significant budgets to be associated with major sporting properties.

The intent is usually right: increase brand awareness, improve brand visibility and build long-term partnerships. The follow-through rarely is. Most advertisers can describe what they bought: logo placement, broadcast exposure, and hospitality. Few can answer the question that actually matters to a CFO: how much incremental revenue did this generate, what measurable outcomes did it create, and was it worth the price?

Without an answer, decisions about sponsorship renewals and future sponsorship deals get made on belief rather than evidence. That’s a strange place to land on a multi-year, multi-million-euro commitment.

The mistake: treating sponsorship as a single lever

Here’s the insight that changes the conversation: sponsorship ROI doesn’t come from a single source. The entry fee buys media exposure and visibility: logo placement, broadcast exposure, stadium presence, and association with the property. Some of that value appears immediately through brand visibility, while some accumulates slowly through brand awareness and brand image over months or even years.

In the short term, however, the commercial return, is largely unlocked through activation. Media campaigns, promotions, CRM programs retail initiatives, and in-venue activations transform sponsorship visibility into customer action, conversion rates, and direct sales.

In practice, sponsorship ROI comes from two distinct mechanisms:

• The direct impact of partnership visibility, which combines short-term exposure and longer-term brand-building effects.
• The associated impact of sponsorship-linked activation, the marketing activity built around the partnership that converts visibility into demand.

Understanding these two mechanisms is the foundation for measuring sponsorship ROI correctly.

Benchmarked against classical media performance (indexed at 100)*, the gap between the two is stark:

• The direct impact of partnership visibility indexes at just 51. Below benchmark, on its own, despite the price tag attached to it.
• The associated impact of sponsorship-linked activation indexes at 146, well above the benchmark, with a relationship that keeps climbing the more that is invested.

That index of 51, however, only tells part of the story. It captures the entry fee's short-term return, and on that horizon alone, the weak score isn't surprising: a passive logo placement was never going to outperform a targeted media campaign. But its long-term brand image contribution is where some of its value quietly sits, invisible to any model that only looks at immediate sales. Brands that judge the entry fee on short-term performance alone are underestimating two things at once: the activation they haven't funded, and the slow-burn equity effect they aren't measuring.

What matters in practice is whether brands are funding enough activation to make sponsorship work in the short term and measuring its full impact in the long term. Activation is typically the engine behind short-term sales performance. Sponsorship itself plays a different, broader role: building brand equity over time. Across our client portfolio, we regularly see sponsorship investments drive meaningful uplifts in brand awareness, brand recall, brand perception, consideration, and the like, which in turn translate into incremental sales growth in the years that follow.

This is the part most advertisers get backwards. They treat the entry fee as the investment and the activation as the optional extra. The most successful brands do neither. They treat sponsorship as both a performance lever and a brand-building asset, funding activation to win in the short term while tracking the slower equity build that pays off over the long term.

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_{* Ekimetrics proprietary benchmark, based on Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) analysis across 10+ advertisers in gaming, food & beverage, and major sporting event sponsorship categories.}

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Why this was hard to measure and why it isn't anymore

For a long time, sponsorship sat in a measurement no-man's-land, too different from a standard media buy to be evaluated by the same standards. Brands tracked key metrics such as media value estimates, exposure value, share of voice, sentiment scores, and other brand-relevant KPIs. But these lived outside the marketing measurement program rather than feeding into it, so they never connected to revenue.

That's no longer the case. Two shifts have changed the equation:

• better visibility data from partners such as Nielsen Sports
• more advanced Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) techniques capable of capturing both short- and long-term effects

Together, these new measures make measuring sponsorship far more reliable than it was just a few years ago.

Step 1: Turn sponsorship visibility into a measurable media variable

Partners like Nielsen Sports now quantify sponsorship visibility the same way media buyers quantify a TV spot, through metrics such as Advertising Equivalent Value (the monetary value of brand exposure) and a Quality Index that weighs logo size, placement, and visibility duration. Combined into a single QI Media Value score, this turns a logo on a shirt into a clean, time-series variable, ready to be modeled rather than estimated.

These sponsorship metrics create a standardized dataset that can be used alongside media investments.

Step 2: Isolate sponsorship's incremental impact on sales

Once sponsorship visibility and sponsorship-linked activation are expressed as structured variables, MMM can separate their contribution from media, pricing, distribution, seasonality, and every other factor influencing demand.

The result is a clear estimate of the sales sponsorship actually generated using sales data, rather than the sales that occurred while sponsorship was running.

Step 3: Capture both short-term sales and long-term brand effects

Multistage MMM goes further, tracking effects from awareness to consideration to conversion, and capturing impact for up to 24 months after exposure. Brand-building effects that were once dismissed as unmeasurable now show up in the model.

The result: a logo placement that used to be a leap of faith becomes a tracked, time-stamped variable with quantitative metrics that allow marketers to measure ROI with confidence.

The golden rule for short-term ROI: match your activation budget to your entry fee

Once sponsorship is measurable, a simple operating rule is evident from the data for its short-term return: activation spend should be at least equal to the entry fee.

This simple rule helps marketers make informed decisions before committing to new sponsorship opportunities.

If a partnership costs €5 million a year, plan to invest at least another €5 million in the media, promotions, and CRM activity that brings it to life. Below that ratio, the sponsorship is a net cost, generating visibility but underperforming the benchmark. At or above that ratio, every additional euro put into activation returns more than classical media, and the relationship keeps climbing the more that is invested.

This reframes the negotiation entirely. The entry fee should never be evaluated on its own. The real question is the total envelope, entry fee plus activation, and whether that combined number can be justified by the return it is modeled to produce.

Why the other 81% are leaving ROI on the table

None of this requires brands to spend less on sponsorship. It requires them to stop spending on it the way they have been: paying the entry fee and hoping the exposure speaks for itself. Most marketing levers force a trade-off between short-term performance and long-term brand building. Sponsorship, done right, delivers both short-term performance and long-term value. The entry fee builds equity in the background while the right activation strategy delivers sales today, the same investment working on both horizons at once.

The advertisers achieving the greatest success aren't the ones with the biggest sponsorship budgets. They're the ones who decided, before signing anything, how much activation they would commit alongside the fee, and who built sponsorship ROI measurement into the partnership from day one.

That's the real shift. Sponsorship stops being a brand statement taken on faith and becomes a measurable investment whose sponsorship value can be demonstrated through robust measures.

Sponsorship ROI can become as measurable as any other marketing investment when brands combine robust data, activation, and modern Marketing Mix Modeling.

The 19% of advertisers who say they're confident in their sponsorship ROI have likely already made that shift.

The other 81% don't have a sponsorship problem. They have a measurement problem.

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Learn how Marketing Mix Modeling helps measure sponsorship ROI, compare performance against industry benchmarks, and support better strategic decisions.