• by Jon Last , Columnist, September 17, 2025

Clutter has become a bit of a double-edged sword in sports marketing.  On the positive side, the proliferation of innovative new promotional inventory has opened up sponsorship to a deeper array of brands across a wide swath of categories and investment levels.  Still, all this variety behooves brands to be more creative in developing activations that can cut through that clutter, which is easier said than done.

Still, many subscribe to a flawed, reach-driven approach that believes that quantity of assets used is more important than understanding their quality, and how assets work together.  Some sponsors blindly follow a tired, long-held belief that total impressions are the appropriate measure to value a sponsorship, rather than taking a deeper dive into examining the impact of their activations.

I’ve long espoused in this space that reach and CPM equivalent metrics alone are insufficient. Rather, to truly optimize the return on sports marketing investment, brands need to take a rigorous approach to understand the engagement impact of sponsorship at the macro and micro level. 

This manifests itself in several ways.  While we haven’t seen a significant number of brands that actually pretest the potential impact of their activations, those who do can gain significant insights on what resonates and what can fall flat.  Pretesting can help tighten messaging and create an appropriate alignment between the values and differentiating characteristics of both property and brand.

Even more effective is actual in-event testing of sponsorship asset impact, looking to identify the trend across a number of combinations of variables that include sponsorship category and certain sports property or event characteristics.  Among the more intuitive insights we’ve seen generated: that interactive components and full-motion video board activations yield greater results across key engagement and recall metrics. 

But there are always subtleties as well as situation-specific independent variables that are unique to each particular partnership. The data bears this out -- and that’s why today’s best sports marketers aim to rigorously assess impact beyond eyeballs.