Is sponsorship the channel for our new era hiding in plain sight?

For most of its history, sport sponsorship has been classified as a reach vehicle. A very specific kind of outdoor advertising with some hospitality attached. That classification made sense when the primary output was a single, static perimeter board, or a front-of-shirt logo. It makes much less sense now, when a major sponsorship routinely spans broadcast, social, experiential, PR, athlete-led content, in-store activation, and digital media, all unified around a single rights relationship.

The perception of sponsorship hasn't kept pace with reality, and the consequences aren't just taxonomic.

Sponsorship has been living with this for decades, doing more than it often gets credit for, and being evaluated in ways that don’t fully capture what it actually does.

Charlie Ebdy's recent IPA article makes this point, inadvertently and rather elegantly. In arguing for a post-hierarchical era of effectiveness, one where there is no longer a dominant strategy and the right channel is simply the one that fits the objective, he cites Guinness across the Six Nations, Rolex at Augusta every spring, and Coca-Cola alongside FIFA across nearly five decades, as his proof points for sustained cultural consistency delivering reach and mental availability in ways that purely paid channels find difficult to replicate.

The one word he doesn’t mention is sponsorship.

That's not a criticism of Charlie, whose piece is excellent at describing the complex media ecosystem we now live with. It's more an observation about how deeply the misclassification runs. When some of the most compelling examples of long-term brand building are drawn from sponsorship, but not identified as sponsorship, you start to understand why the discipline has struggled to get taken seriously in the wider effectiveness debate.

Bringing sponsorship within the effectiveness framework

Last year, I founded the Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum to close that gap and we will be partnering with the IPA on forthcoming research into effectiveness practice in the sports sponsorship sector. 

Our approach is deliberate: we code sponsorship case studies in strict alignment with IPA conventions and the frameworks established by Binet and Field, using the same effect categories the effectiveness community already recognises: business effects, brand effects, sales effects, behavioural effects. We deliberately wanted to replicate the language and methodology, in order to bring sponsorship inside the same analytical frame.

Our first white paper, The Sponsorship Effect, analyses 92 publicly available sport sponsorship cases, drawn from the IPA, WARC, Effie, APG and ESA award databases. The findings are, in places, striking.

Across the full dataset, brand effects outnumber sales effects five to one. Taken at face value, that looks like confirmation of the old story: sponsorship is a brand vehicle, not a commercial one. But that reading misses something important. Among the strongest-performing cases in the dataset, what we call Tier 1 cases defined by breadth of effect, hard commercial outcomes, and rigorous attribution, 73% delivered sales results and 54% delivered business effects.

Sponsorship Business Effects

We also found a strong correlation between sponsorships that set business objectives and those that achieve them. Those that treat the activity as a logo reach exercise struggle to demonstrate business results. Effectiveness follows design.

Sponsorship, when it's working properly, is not doing something different to effective advertising. It's doing the same thing in a more culturally embedded context.

What reclassification looks like

The starting point for change isn't better measurement frameworks. It's a more honest diagnosis of what sponsorship actually is.

Most sponsorship sits at one end of a spectrum. At that end, you have an exposure buy: primarily used for visibility and access, evaluated on impressions, justified on relationships. It's legitimate, in the same way that a roadside billboard is legitimate, but it isn't the whole story, and treating it as the whole story is where the misclassification lies.

Move along the spectrum and something different starts to happen. Rights get activated across channels. A repeatable creative idea emerges and builds memory structures. The sponsorship becomes an ownable asset, easily recalled and attributed to the brand by category buyers. At the far end, the sponsorship is fully integrated into the brand's overarching story; the brand would be meaningfully different without it. That's where Guinness x Six Nations lives.

The Sponsorship Integration Model, a framework I've developed to help brands and agencies understand the role of a sponsorship within a brand - or the different roles of different sponsorships within a portfolio - maps this progression explicitly, across six stages from Exposure Buy through to Brand Narrative, with commercial value rising as integration deepens. It's not a prescription for how to plan a sponsorship. It's a diagnostic tool: a way of locating where a given sponsorship actually sits, and having an honest conversation about whether that's where it should be.

Sponsorship Integration Model

The misclassification problem persists partly because that conversation rarely happens. A front-of-shirt deal signed because the Chair is a fan gets evaluated as a branding exercise for the next five years, regardless of what it's actually capable of delivering. The integration model forces a different question: not what did we buy, but what are we building?

Charlie Ebdy's post-hierarchical world is good news for sponsorship, not because the channel gets an easier ride, but because in the old hierarchy sponsorship was an afterthought; the thing you did if you had some budget left over after TV, OOH and radio advertising. The frameworks, awards databases, and effectiveness conversation resulting from that hierarchy were very good at describing the effects of advertising.

The evidence from 92 coded case studies suggests sponsorship belongs in that conversation. Getting it there requires the industry to stop describing what sponsorship looks like at its worst and start measuring what it delivers at its best.

The Sponsorship Effect white paper, analysing 92 sport sponsorship case studies coded to IPA and Binet & Field conventions, is available at www sponsorshipeffect.org.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.