• by Seth Leeds , Op-Ed Contributor, July 9, 2015

As we reach the mid-year point for 2015, a year already chock-full of incredibly memorable sports marketing moments, we offer some insights into how well American brands are meeting their objectives through sport sponsorships.

Every brand has different specific goals they try to reach through their sponsorships and endorsements. Some top examples can be found here. It takes a lot of teamwork to craft the right strategy, but just like setting out to create a “viral” video, some things just are not in your hands as a brand.

Case in point, we can think about the past few months with events like golfer Jordan Spieth winning both the Masters and U.S. Open, or American Pharoah capturing the Triple Crown, or the recent NBA Finals with Golden State claiming the trophy after a 40-year hiatus. The brands connected to these teams/athletes (yes, a horse can be an athlete, I think?), also got incredibly lucky, and that’s part of the allure of sports marketing. Sponsoring a consumer show is undoubtedly a safer bet, and actually our data shows higher return on objectives for those partnerships, but no one is talking about that at the office water cooler on Monday morning.

Consider where the few sports mentioned above measure in terms of score against brand objectives so far this year (U.S. sponsorships only):

Golf, 41%

Horse Racing, 57%

Professional Basketball, 51%

And a few others … you can think about the current events related to these:

Stock Car Racing, 51%

Professional Baseball, 56%

Professional Soccer, 49%

This is actual data extracted from the tool that many brands use to manage and evaluate their partnerships. 

The point being here that brands may not reach as high a score as they do with other categories (currently some consumer shows are reaching as high as 65%, festivals and fairs at 68%), but when coupled with the other large-scale impact measurements we can track, there’s no other place brands can win as big.

We’ll update this article later in the year with revised figures as they get aggregated.