Sponsorship: Marketing measurement’s biggest blind spot?

The Olympics once again brought into sharp relief the large sums brands spend on sponsorship.

Dubbed “fashion’s most exciting new arena” by Business of Fashion, sports sponsorship is big business. From title sponsorship, to sponsoring athletes, and world record sponsorship bonuses that are thought to have resulted in Duplantis’ centimetre by centimetre approach to the pole vault, these are huge investments by brands.

But do they have the desired impact? Often, brands just don’t know.

The infamous Nike case study of ambush marketing from 2012 may be ringing in brands’ ears. While Adidas was the London Olympics title sponsor at a reported cost of $100-150m, Nike was popularly believed to have ‘outsmarted’ Adidas by targeting 400 athletes to wear their neon Volt running shoes and advertising based on ‘other’ Londons around the World, to avoid restrictions on using London, England. The result was that 10% more Americans identified Nike as the sponsor than Adidas, as Nike garnered more than double the online mentions of Adidas and increased followers at a rate of nearly three times more.

Fundamentally, sponsorship is not just about sales impact, but long-term brand building. According to WARC, “sports sponsorship is considered better in delivering awareness and reach” but is “more complex to navigate” as say 73% of marketers, while 59% agree that it “lacks transparency” and one in four has “no confidence at all in measuring business return from sponsorships”.

The trouble is, the right measurement practices to understand this are rarely in place. Brands are often unable to get the right data and use the right metrics to truly integrate sponsorship into measurement solutions. Yet adopting best practice sponsorship measurement allows them to negotiate better deals as they can clearly see the pay off, as opposed to investing in something they believe in but can’t prove.

It’s important to be clear about what you’re hoping to achieve through sponsorship and then maximise investment against that objective.

That’s why the first port of call is capturing upper funnel impact in marketing mix decisions. Because it’s so very easy to get it wrong, and waste a lot of money on an expensive and misguided endeavour. Or to be ‘lucky’ once and assume you’ve uncovered the formula to get it right in future. After all, you wouldn’t spend $10m on a TV ad without measuring it. So why do so with sponsorship?

While it’s a commonly held belief that you can’t measure brand impact, the reality is that sponsorship is measurable. And some big brands are doing it already with us.

Here’s how. Make sure you:

• Define the brand metric you’re trying to move with the sponsorship, and ensure you are tracking that brand metric beforehand so you can measure the uplift
• Understand the most valuable aspects of the sponsorship for your objective and how to maximize exposure – is it tv sponsorship / athletes / location / event / influencers?
• Negotiate a comprehensive data agreement, or budget to buy the exposure measures you need to quantify the reach from the sponsorship across all relevant channels
• Integrate brand KPI and long-term impact into your marketing measurement program, the key needles sponsorship is aimed to move
• Measure the full picture – including your owned and paid media amplification, and the synergistic impact

Sponsorship investment no longer needs to be based on beliefs or hope. And frankly, if your competitors are doing it, given the sums involved, can you really afford not to?