So when the Sponsorship Effect content schedule called for a new addition to the Sponsorship Hall of Fame, I wanted to find one that exemplifies the principle of longevity. But I also wanted to showcase examples aren’t necessarily the most obvious, most salient, or most written-about.

And in my research for deals that ran for twenty years or more, I found one I didn’t initially know much about: the Mars x NASCAR that ran from 1990 to 2022. It’s a fascinating case, and it earns its place not for the length of the tenure but for the intent visible at every stage of it.

Some in the sponsorship sector will argue for short-term deals over long-term. This is one of the clearest cases I’ve found to counter that argument.

Let’s get stuck in and see how it stacks up against the manifesto.

1. Plan for decades: 10/10

As a company, Mars was in NASCAR for 33 years, steadily building a presence within the sport. Snickers entered as a team sponsor in 1990 with Snickers on Bobby Hillin Jr’s car. M&M’s took over Ernie Irvan’s No. 36 at the end of the 90s. The Official Partnership with the league came in 2000, and primary sponsorship of Kyle Busch’s No. 18 at Joe Gibbs Racing ran from 2008 to the end in 2022. Each stage was incremental, designed to increased share of voice in the sport. We can infer the decisions were based on the evidence of what happened before, which is what planning in decades actually means: not signing a long contract, but treating the sponsorship as an asset whose value compounds and expanding the rights to grow with it. It is a perfect example of consistency over decades.

2. Start with business objectives: 9/10

Commercial intent is on the public record, which in sponsorship is vanishingly rare. Mars described the sponsorship as creating a fifth selling season on a par with its Christmas trade. NASCAR’s 2019 renewal release describes the company using the sport to “debut new products, build experiential marketing platforms for consumers and drive business-to-business deals”. The missing point is for the lack of a concrete, declared goal of sales volume or market share.

3. Align the rights schedule to the objective: 9/10

The rights grew in step with the job they were asked to do. Team sponsorship bought visibility, and the car livery then became launch media: Mars introduced the M&M’s Chocolate Bar to the United States with the Daytona 500 as its stage, via a special paint scheme on the No. 18 and an on-site activation, and gave Caramel, Flavor Vote and White Chocolate the same treatment. The Official Partnership unlocked the piece that made the whole system commercial, with retail point-of-sale tied to the sport, with regional sell-through linked to race windows. When you look at the rights schedule across the decade, you can reconstruct the objectives without ever seeing the brief.

4. Integrate into the brand narrative: 8/10

The candy-coloured car is the brand’s distinctive asset moving at 190 miles an hour.

The colour system, the characters and the register of colourful family fun translated into NASCAR without any adaptation at all, because the visual world of the brand and the visual world of the sport were already neighbours. The M&M’s characters extended into television work alongside Busch, and the No. 18 became one of the most recognisable cars in the field.

I’ve kept the score at eight because the integration lived mostly in the livery and the visual system. There was never an owned narrative platform above the paint, an organising idea that could have made the sponsorship the brand campaign rather than the brand campaign’s most colourful medium, and our SEF research finds that the strongest cases are exactly that.

5. Activate with conviction and scale: 8/10

The conviction is not in doubt: grocery-scale retail activation across the country, experiential platforms at the tracks, the #18n18 social programme through Busch’s own channels, and, in the farewell season, a first-ever Cup race entitlement, the M&M’s Fan Appreciation 400 at Pocono. The deduction is for how late the broadcast multiplier arrived. NASCAR’s own VP of partnership marketing dated Mars’s first television spot in the sport to around 2011, more than a decade into the tenure. Les Binet and Will Davis’s Go Big or Go Home work puts budget, and the reach it buys, at the centre of what drives incremental profit, and for 10 years the deal went without it despite the business having pockets deep enough to fund it.

6. Understand the fan: 9/10

NASCAR fans are deeply proud of their sport, and that translates as into purchase as an act of identity. Mars saw that in their own data: 69% of fans said the sponsorship influenced which candy they bought, with 72% brand loyalty over competitors. It’s a mechanism no other American sport reproduces at the same intensity (nor any other British sport, for that matter). Some deeper evidence of understanding NASCAR culture is the partnership with Busch himself. He was, for most of his career, the sport’s most polarising figure, booed as often as cheered, but Mars understood that there is an element of what pro-wrestling calls ‘kayfabe’ within NASCAR, and Bush was NASCAR’s most prominent heel. It kept him for fifteen years because it understood that NASCAR fans value a divisive winner. It also kept the brand in every argument at every race. At the exit, Busch thanked the Mars family for accepting him as he was. Busch tragically died from pneumonia earlier this year, and in a touch of class M&Ms announed it would return to NASCAR for September’s Bristol Night Race, with Joe Gibbs Racing carrying its iconic livery, as a tribute. That’s fan insight expressed as a talent policy.

7. Invest in creativity: 7/10

The candy car is a genuinely good distinctive-asset decision, with the brand’s colours and characters made mobile, while the paint-scheme-as-launch-vehicle idea turned a rights asset into a repeatable creative format. What the case never produced is a genuinely famous campaign built on top of the sponsorship, a film or an idea that travelled beyond the sport the way the strongest creative work in the dataset travels. The creativity concentrated in liveries and characters, executed consistently for decades, which builds memory but does not multiply it the way the Creative Dividend evidence says a big campaign idea can. Seven is a good score on this principle, but it’s also where there might have been room for this sponsorship to be more than what it was.

8. Incorporate talent with intention: 9/10

The direct deal with Busch was a key addition to the Official Partter deal with NASCAR. He secured 55 wins while carrying Mars livery, Cup titles in 2015 and 2019, and had a social presence the brand ran product work through directly. SEF’s dataset finds athlete talent over-represented in the campaigns that drive sales rather than the ones that drive brand, and Mars used its athlete precisely that way, as the conversion engine for a sponsorship whose fame was built by the car and the league rights. The intention ran in both directions. When Busch’s conduct in a 2011 Truck Series race crossed the brand’s values, Mars pulled its branding from the car for the final races of that season, then returned, then stood by him for another decade.

9. Measure broadly: 8/10

This is where evidence being on the public record is so useful in helping understand the impact of long-term deal like this. Brand tracking, recognition ranking, loyalty measurement, purchase-influence surveys and a financial ROI calculation, have cited publicly across a decade. In our dataset of 92 coded cases, only 21 per cent produced any financial ROI figure at all, and 2 per cent quantified profit. Mars reported a 4:1 ROI at a time when most of the industry was still reporting AVE. The measurement clearly informed decision-making, because the expansion of the partnerhip track it. Two points held back for the limits of what is public: everything we can see is self-reported through the brand’s and the league’s own channels, and no econometric or profit-level evidence ever surfaced; an IPA case like Guinness’s would have taken it to 10. On the record available, this is still among the most measured sponsorships of its era.

10. Build a partnership, not a sponsorship: 9/10

Mars spent 33 years in the sport, 22 years as an Official Partner for NASCAR, fifteen years with one team, with renewals in 2014, 2015 and 2019, each announced jointly with executive quotes on both sides. Its exit was conducted as collaboratively as the tenure: private notice was given in the summer of 2021, public announcement that December, a farewell season co-produced with the team, and a race entitlement bought as a parting investment in the fans. Joe Gibbs described the Mars relationship as the best example of what the sport makes possible, and the departure was material enough that it factored into the end of Busch’s sixteen-year relationship with the team. Mars gave its reason for leaving in plain commercial language: a finite budget and a desire to try new things, which is the same language it had used about staying.

The final total: 85/100

It’s a pretty stunning score, and this case is strongest on some of the principles the sponsorship sector finds hardest: objectives, measurement, rights design and talent discipline, and weakest only on creativity, where a very good distinctive asset was never topped with a famous idea, and on the decade lost reach before the first television spot.

The lesson I take from it is that longevity is not necessarily a virtue in and of itself, but what it enables. 33 years of functional logo exposure wouldn’t have earned a place in the Hall of Fame. But 33 years of escalating, measured, publicly accountable commercial decisions is why it does. It’s also striking that a brand knows why it stays also knows when it is done.

The last thing Mars bought in NASCAR was called the Fan Appreciation 400. On the evidence of the previous 33 years, the name was accurate.

The Hall of Fame is a regular series on The Sponsorship Effect.

Manx had been walking for six weeks, after setting himself the hardest task the mad Victorian sport of pedestrianism had ever devised: a thousand miles inside five hundred hours.

He walked through the day and through the night, snatching sleep in the gaps and being hauled upright when the next mile came due. He was kept going on game and poultry, roast beef and mutton, strong beef tea and old ale, and tea laced with brandy in the small hours. On one bad morning he woke from five minutes’ rest and punched the person sent to wake him.

But on that final day, after weeping and asking to be left alone, he did the miraculous: he got up. He finished.

And when the course was measured properly afterwards, it turned out he had walked 12 miles more than he needed to.

New stadiums needed bums on seats

Manx’s story will be familiar to any of you who listen to The Rest Is History, and caught their episode last summer about mad Victorian sport. In it, Tom Holland argues that the creation of The Kennington Oval marks the transition from pre-modern entertainment to modern sport.

It was just six years old when it was used as the venue for Manx’s feat. By the time he finished, it was full to its three thousand seat capacity, and the surrounding streets were lined with people who couldn’t get in. It was a boon to the consortium that established it, and they made decent money. But the Oval’s finances were precarious during its early days and it had to be saved from developers twice.

What made it the progenitor of the sporting landscape we would recognise today was a single commercial insight, and the man who had it most clearly was Charles Alcock, secretary of both the Football Association and Surrey County Cricket Club. In 1872 he invented the FA Cup and staged the first final at the Oval, which went on to host nineteen FA Cup finals in total, the first football and rugby internationals, and in 1880 the first cricket Test played in England.

But underneath the romance was a business model. A one-off fixture pays you once, but a league or a cup pays you every week, because it manufactures a reason for the next match, and the one after that. The Football League was founded in 1888, and its great innovation was the fixture list. For the first time, grounds up and down the country knew which teams would be playing when, months in advance. It changed the economics of the whole enterprise.

The Oval was the first great ground to run itself as a business rather than a gentlemen’s leisure amenity. Soon enough, entrepreneurial football patrons across the country were expanding their own ground to accommodate, and monetise, the demand for weekly football.

Money has been there since the start

I was thinking about this when the FIFA furore kicked off last month. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Gianni Infantino announced a plan to fold FIFA’s tournaments into a new company valued at roughly twenty billion dollars and to sell about a fifth of it to private investors, among them a firm run by Joshua Kushner. He then had to swiftly cancel the plan after UEFA voted to boycott the World Cup and said the plan put football’s soul up for sale.

On the terraces, fans have a shorter version of the same complaint: “the game’s gone”. Both objections rest on the idea that underneath all the money, there is something purer, older and truer than the commerce, which the commerce now threatens to defile.

I’m no fan of Infantino’s scheme, the way he went about it, or the proposed buyer. But what I’d question is the idea of ‘pure’ sport that money will inevitably spoil.

It’s wider than football. Take the origins of cricket: it grew from a loose village game into the codified sport we know today on the back of gambling; the connection was so open that in 1664 Parliament felt the need to pass an act limiting a single wager to a hundred pounds. Through the eighteenth century the game was run by wealthy patrons who hired the best players they could find to help them win their bets, and in doing so created the first professional cricketers, who were paid not to honour the game but to protect an investment. The first proper rulebook, drawn up at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall in 1744, was written primarily to make the gambling fair and the disputes settleable.

The (not so) Corinthian ideal

Football is different, in that its codification was largely motivated by a need to resolve conflict between those who wanted to play the Cambridge game or the Rugby game, with matches frequently breaking down into screaming arguments because neither side could agree on the legality of handling or hacking.

The Football Association was founded to create a single set of rules for the game, and its first members were mostly upper-middle-class men who viewed sport as a tool for character building, discipline, and healthy exercise. They aggressively resisted commercialism and professionalism for decades, with an attitude to sport that would later come to be known as The Corinthian Ideal.

Its tempting to view this as evidence of a pure, anti-commercial, founding principle of football. But note who those people were; they were not ‘the people’ UEFA is currently arguing football belongs too. They were well-to-do professional men and ex-public-schoolboys, playing a very different game to what constituted football at a street level, which was more like the Shrovetide football still played in Ashbourne, Derbyshire to this day.

The upper-class belief in the Corinthian ideal was itself a direct product of the public school system, and George Cotton is the man usually credited with introducing organised games to English public schools. He taught under the influential Thomas Arnold at Rugby school before arriving at Marlborough College in 1852. It was the year after the “Marlborough Rebellion” of 1851, in which pupils protested against harsh discipline and chronic hunger with four days of anarchy and a coordinated explosion of fireworks. It sounds quite the scene.

Wilkinson resigned soon after, and Cotton took over. The first thing he did was clamp down on drinking. After that, he realised sport channelled the boys’ energies and introduced organised, staff-led games, and he was the first person to appoint masters specifically to supervise sport. Harrow and Uppingham quickly followed suit, and their influence transformed the public schools adoption of sport. From there it hardened into the ideology called athleticism, consolidating from the 1850s through the 1880s, leading to the codification of many sports at the end of the 19th century.

The public school approach to sport became a central pillar of the British Empire's geopolitical and imperial strategy. The historian J.A. Mangan argues that it acted as a highly effective human resources tool, manufacturing the ideal workforce for the fundamentally commercial enterprise of global imperialism.

The prefect system used on sports pitches taught boys how to govern peers and manage large groups. The physical conditioning and psychological indoctrination of the playing fields was viewed as directly translating to military success; it was famously claimed that Wellington said the Battle of Waterloo was “won on the playing fields of Eton” (although those words were likely put in his mouth).

Nevertheless, the concept of “fair play” and “doing the decent thing”, again honed on the sports pitches, became a valuable corporate brand that lubricated international commerce. And, by exporting codified sports like football and cricket to the colonies, Britain broke down local cultural barriers and integrated conquered societies into the British economic orbit, extracting trillions of dollars of wealth in today’s money in the process.

Maybe not such a pure origin story after all.

The (not so) philanthropic benefactor

When football clubs began forming out of ordinary life in the 1870s, they came overwhelmingly from the workplace and the church. West Bromwich Albion started at a spring works, Manchester United among railwaymen at Newton Heath, Arsenal among munitions workers in Woolwich.

This meant the first owners of the football clubs the workers supported also owned the factory they worked in. An employer who backed a team got his workforce entertained, kept off the drink and away from the union meeting, and got the reputational benefit of being perceived as a benefactor in a town where he was also the man banking the profit from the labour.

The churches, from which Aston Villa, Everton and Manchester City all sprang, wanted young men occupied, sober and morally improved, and worked hand in hand with the factory owners who wanted the same. All of it depended on the working man having a free Saturday afternoon, which was itself recent and hard-won. Free time was created, then filled, then sold back.

None of this was new even then. As far back as Roman times, games and circuses were paid for by magistrates and emperors who wanted the crowd’s affection and a return on the outlay. Tom Holland makes the point that sport has become a way for entire states, not merely rich individuals, to project power and prestige. There is nothing modern in it - the visible funder of sport has always been buying something other than the sport.

So the pure thing everyone reaches for, the soul being sold or the game that has supposedly gone, is the one thing there isn’t any real evidence for at all. Which means commercialism is one of the foundational pillars that sport, as we know it, was built on.

The hardest part to accept is that even the idea of sport for the simple joy of it is as much a product of the same forces. The Victorian reformers were frightened of working-class free time, and their answer was organised recreation, pushed by schools, churches and employers who wanted a calmer, fitter, more governable population that used their time “wisely”.

And while there are undoubtedly naturally occurring competitive urges in human beings to see who can jump the highest or throw the furthest, the taste for organised sport was not an innate constant waiting to be freed. It was promoted, by emperors, companies, churches and governments who found it useful, and it spread because powerful people wanted it to. By some amazingly lucky coincidence it turned out to be one of the top five things human beings have ever invented (the other four are punk, acid house, poppadoms, and Back To The Future, if you’re wondering).

But let’s not pretend their motivations were pure.

People run for fun?

Talking of Back to the Future, there is a scene Part III where Doc, stranded in 1885, gets drunk and tries to explain the coming century to a saloon full of cowboys. In the future, he says, we still run, but we do it for recreation, for fun. A grizzled old timer stares at him and asks, “Run for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?”

The joke is meant to be on the old man, but it’s an interesting question. Running for fun is a strange, recent, manufactured idea, and somebody would need to sell it and the shoes to do it, in just the same way somebody sold a Victorian walking race, a weekly league, a works team and a World Cup.

The game may have always been beautiful, but it was never pure and then lost.

I had great fun chatting with my former Iris mucker Rob Voase for his Everybody Hates Your Brand podcast, and it's dropped today.

We cover sponsorship's effectiveness gap, how sponsorship can be directed towards solving almost any marketing challenge, and how the best use logo exposure as the foundational layer of multi-channel, fame-driving campaigns.

You can listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1. What the sponsorship industry claims about trust

   • A hunch based on experience

   • The growing prominence of trust

   • Why trust may be mental availability by another name

2. How academics define brand trust

   • Chauduri and Hobrook

   • What happens when the parcel doesn’t show up

   • The centrality of risk

   • What 549 studies say about risk

   • Why Amazon’s tax bill doesn’t dent trust in Amazon

3. How Byron Sharp questioned conventional academic wisdom

   • Familiarity breeds trust

   • Usage drives attitudes

   • Academic research takes familiarity as a given

   • Brand size drives trust, not the other way round

4. What the marketing industry knows about trust

   • Edelman tracks the state of trust

   • Morning Consult: 3,200 brands, tracked daily

   • Trust behaves like an availability asset

5. Peter Field’s trust framework

   • Trust’s rise in the IPA rankings

   • 41% more business effects

   • Field’s four building blocks of trust

   • An improvement on the academic definition

6. Is brand trust mental availability in disguise?

   • Any framework must survive Sharp

   • What Sharp means by mental availability

   • Sharp’s seven rules of brand growth

   • Mapping Field’s building blocks

   • The one Sharp doesn’t discuss

   • Same finding, different vocabulary

7. How media signalling creates trust

   • What advertising signals about a brand

   • Perceived expense

   • Where trust-building campaigns put their money

   • How trusted contexts transfer to the brand

   • The glaring omission of sponsorship signals

8. Does sponsorship build brand trust?

   • Why one observation proves nothing

   • Sponsorship arrives with defences lowered

   • How goodwill generates fame

   • What Crypto.com’s World Cup sponsorship did to trust

   • Why the evidence base is so thin

9. How to measure and value brand trust

   • Measure the four building blocks

   • Separate your data sources

   • Control for familiarity

   • Converting trust into financial value

   • Measure the outcome not attitude

   • Show the arithmetic

10. How to plan sponsorships to build brand trust

    • 7 things to start doing tomorrow

1. What the sponsorship industry thinks about trust

A hunch based on experience

Earlier this year the European Sponsorship Association published a member profile of the agency The Value Xchange. In it, their VP of Growth, Tara Honeywell, set out sponsorship’s strength as its ability to work through the funnel. It “builds trust, meaning and mental availability at the top”, then relevance and engagement in the middle, then commercial momentum further down.

I have no objection to anything Tara said - she’s an experienced practitioner, as well as being a subscriber to this newsletter who came along to the last SEF event, and lives down the road from me (hi Tara!).

The sentence is a fair summary of what our industry believes. It is also, as far as I can establish, an assertion rather than an evidence-based finding. Nobody has looked for sponsorship trust effects in a case study database in the way Peter Field has run advertising trust effects through the IPA Databank. The industry claims it because it sounds right, and because for thirty years there was no particular risk to saying it.

The growing prominence of trust

The issue we face is there’s an increasing amount of risk now. Peter Field’s work and research from various other sources have turned trust into an increasingly loaded word in marketing effectiveness. Which means the claim is doing real work in sponsorship sales negotiations and evaluation. If sponsorship creates trust, the industry should be making that argument with evidence. If it doesn’t, or if the effect is smaller than we all assume, then a lot of proposals could be making promises they can’t keep.

My own research shows how anecdotal the assertion is. When we coded 92 sponsorship case studies from the IPA, WARC, Effie, APG and ESA award databases for The Sponsorship Effect, we found only four (7.7%) reported an increase in trust, and only two put a number on the size of the effect.

Just to be clear: I’m not saying sponsorship doesn’t build trust. I’m saying we don’t have data or evidence to prove that it does. And if we don’t have that, we can’t understand how to deliver more of it.

Why trust may be mental availability by another name

On the advertising side of the marketing industry, Edelman and Morning Consult have run regular trust studies. More recently, Field’s analysis of the IPA databank has identified four building blocks of trust, tucked away in a relatively unknown Newsworks report, that I believe could be the best description of how mental availability is constructed we currently have.

It could be that trust, viewed through the four building blocks, is a better proxy for mental availability than top-of-mind awareness or consideration. Which would also explain why there is a growing link between trust and profit in the effectiveness research.

If sponsorship has a genuine claim to build trust more effectively than other marketing options (which I think is likely), it could be a boon to the sector. Not least because trust is much more concrete than brand awareness or consideration; a CFO can understand trust.

What follows over the next few thousand words is a comprehensive deep dive on what we know brand trust is, and how sponsorship can be planned to deliver it.

If you missed last week’s summer update, this is the first of the new format Effectiveness in Practice newsletters. They’re much more extensive than before, and exclusive to paid subscribers, along with new monthly podcasts and quarterly webinars.

If you want to stay on your free subscription, everything else will remain free, starting with next week’s newsletter.

Whatever your subscription level, thanks for reading.

Rory

I had planned to get a newsletter out today, but I'm now two weeks through my first experience of the school holidays (my son just finished reception/kindergarten). I’ve realised the summer holidays are yet another thing people don't tell you about before you have kids, or you'd never have them.

I do actually have a post in final draft, but the reason I didn't publish it is it's a new format I'm working on - and it's linked to why I've decided to turn on paid subscriptions once new service resumes.

It's partly because the work required to get a good quality weekly newsletter out there is significant, and that time could otherwise be spent on paid endeavours. But also because there are methods, tools and insights I can share that I would typically expect to include within a paid-for training session or conference, if I go into more detail on particular topics.

So the monthly Effectiveness In Practice newsletters will now be subscriber-only. They will also much more substantial (5k-10k words compared to my usual 1.5k-2k), with comprehensive deep dives that will both inform and provide tools to put into practice. The first will be next week's Complete Guide to Brand Trust and Sponsorship (currently sitting at 11k words… hence the need for an edit and a delayed release!)

I will also be adding a monthly subscriber-only podcast featuring conversations with people from both the sponsorship sector and the wider effectiveness community, and a quarterly Ask Me Anything webinar.

Free subscribers will continue to have full access to the Historical Deep Dives, Hall of Fame and Problems to Fix newsletters, as well as continued access to all the content I've published to date.

I've intentionally kept the monthly subscription low at £4 per month, and of course will continue to aim for insightful, interesting and useful content for everyone irrespective.

And whether you decide to subscribe or not, thanks for your continued support.

Rory

A couple of conferences

In a slightly pinch-me, career-bucket-list kind of moment, I'll be at the IPA Effectiveness Conference in October, sharing the stage with the likes of Orlando Wood and Les Binet. I'll be representing SEF, and presenting the findings of our research into the current state of sponsorship effectiveness practice.

Grab your tickets here https://events.ipa.co.uk/events/ipa-effectiveness-conference-2026/?uid=ebcc4d86-8bcb-f011-8544-7ced8d6b404f

If you haven't taken part in the research yet, please do. You can find the details via the SEF website www.sponsorshipeffect.org

And if you’re in the Central European region, there really is no better sport business event than the annual SPORTO Conference in Slovenia. It's got a brilliant speaker line up, and I can't wait to visit Slovenia for the first time.

Catch up links

I’ve had a few conversations recently that made me realise there's some potentially useful bits of content tucked away in articles that people have missed, so here's a selection of my favourite articles from the first six months of The Sponsorship Effect.

The Power of Integrated Sponsorship Objectives (includes the sponsorship objective framework)

In Defence of Exposure (includes the Sponsorship Integration Model)

Sponsorship Is A Rainforest, Not A Machine

What Gary Lineker and the Honey Monster can teach us about partnering with sport celebrities

Sponsorship Hall of Fame: Guinness x Six Nations

A common expression is “we need to move beyond exposure and awareness to demonstrating impact.”

Even more curiously, I’ve spoken with sponsorship salespeople who have been trained, explicitly, never to mention brand awareness in sponsorship sales meetings.

I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps there’s a sense that awareness sounds primitive, like badging; the thing sponsorship did in the 1990s before we all got sophisticated and started talking about engagement, purpose, and fandom. Or perhaps it’s hard-won experience that if you say “awareness” in a sales meeting, it’s akin to saying it’s all just vibes, and you’ll get told to jog on.

This seems peculiar to me. Awareness is one of the most valuable things sponsorship can deliver, and the evidence for that value stretches back the best part of a century.

My concern is the sector’s squeamishness about the word is costing it money, whether that’s a rights holder negotiating a rights fee, or a Head of Sponsorship requesting more budget.

So, much like I previously felt the need to speak up in defence of exposure, I think it’s time to speak up for its cousin, awareness.

The conflation problem

I’d guess the primary reason awareness gets a bad name in sponsorship is because it’s used interchangeably with exposure.

In the worst cases, you’ll see a post-season report with awareness stated as an objective, and the level of exposure or impressions in the results column. I’ve personally seen someone stand up in a global marketing conference and say “we wanted to increase awareness, and we got 600,000 YouTube views”.

So let’s get one thing straight: exposure and awareness are not the same thing.

Exposure is something you create. In effectiveness language, it’s an input, because it’s something you’ve generated, and it’s under your control. Spend more, and you can generally get more.

Awareness is different. It’s what happens inside someone’s brain; it’s about memory, and the ability of an audience to recall the brand as a result of the exposure. It’s an output; an effect.

The conjoining problem

Conjoining them - as if awareness inevitably follows exposure - is equally flawed. You can’t build awareness without exposure, but you can absolutely rack up exposure without increasing awareness at all.

If the exposure wasn’t big enough and/or if the creative was dull, the brand’s presence may never be noticed in the first place, which means it won’t be encoded in people’s memory, and the brand won’t be recalled.

My hunch is that, when the industry says “we need to move beyond exposure and awareness”, what it usually means is “we need to move beyond pretending impressions are an outcome”. Which is true. But that’s an argument against poor measurement, not against awareness.

We’ve thrown out the effect because of how badly we measured it.

A hundred years of evidence

The value of awareness has one of the strongest evidence bases in all of marketing; research into the recall of brands goes back almost 100 years. But it was intuitively understood much further back than that.

Paul Feldwick, in his history of advertising theory The Anatomy of Humbug, traces a whole school of thought, Showmanship, back to P.T. Barnum. Barnum built an entertainment empire in the nineteenth century on the understanding that being known was a commercial asset in itself. His advance men would paper a town with posters weeks before the circus arrived, on the theory that by the time the tents went up, there should be nobody left who hadn't heard of it. He couldn't measure what that familiarity was worth, but he behaved, expensively and consistently, as if it was worth a great deal. It's a line Feldwick would later draw all the way to Byron Sharp.

Measurement began to arrive in the 1930s, when the political polling pioneer George Gallup ran the first asking consumers to name brands in a category without prompting. Louis Cheskin’s influential System of Consumer Attitude Research added word-association in the 1950s, and the recall and recognition measures that brand trackers still use today are direct descendants of that work.

Interbrand, founded in 1974 by John Murphy, announced the first proprietary brand valuation method in 1987. Its method used “common factors of Brand Strength such as awareness, market position, customer satisfaction, loyalty and advertising & marketing support”. In the late 1980s Rank Hovis McDougall, the UK flour miller, used Interbrand’s valuation to fend off a hostile takeover bid from Goodman Fielder Wattie in a move endorsed by the London Stock Exchange. Brand valuation is now part of mainstream accounting practice.

In the 1990s, academic research confirmed the value of awareness. David Aaker, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, identified it as a foundational component of brand equity in 1991.

Kevin Lane Keller’s 1993 paper in the Journal of Marketing, one of the most cited works in the field, argued that brand equity is derived from brand knowledge, which has two key components: brand awareness and brand image. Keller also argued that awareness has to come first, because you can’t recognise, recall, or form an image of a brand you aren’t aware of.

As recently as 2024, TikTok and Tracksuit’s paper, The Awareness Advantage, found that high levels of awareness were linked to a nearly 2.86x increase in conversion rates in performance media compared low awareness brands, suggesting that it is anything but a ‘fluffy brand metric’.

That’s a hundred years of showmen, statisticians, academics, accountants, and social platforms, all converging on the same conclusion: being known is worth money.

Awareness and mental availability

Running alongside all of this, Andrew Ehrenberg’s work on double jeopardy, first observed in the 1960s and formalised in 1990, showed that small brands have have fewer buyers, and those buyers are slightly less loyal. It has been borne out over more than half a decade, across multiple categories, and is arguably the closest marketing comes to a law in the truly scientific sense.

The underlying cause of double jeopardy, as Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk have spent over a decade pointing out, is mental availability, which is different from awareness.

As Sharp himself says: “a brand’s mental availability refers to the probability that a buyer will notice, recognise and/or think of a brand in buying situations … it is much more than awareness, whether that is top-of-mind awareness, recognition or recall.”

In other words:

• Awareness (Unprompted) = what beer brands you can name?

• Awareness (Prompted) = which of these beer brands do you recognise?

• Mental availability = if you’ve just got to the pub to watch England in the World Cup semi-final on a hot summer’s day, which beer brands come to mind?

The current consensus amongst effectiveness-focussed marketers is that mental availability is the primary predictor of brand growth. In Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp’s recent head-to-head in Cannes, the importance of mental availability was first on the list of the five things they agreed on.

It’s tracked using category entry point (CEP) analysis - which brands are most associated with particular purchase occasions in a given category - and often requires a separate study to a standard brand tracker.

Some might interpret the primacy of mental availability as an argument against awareness. But mental availability results from brand memory structures, and you can’t have memory structures for a brand you’ve never heard of.

This is a line Feldwick again draws all the way back to Barnum. In his later book Why Does the Pedlar Sing?, he connects Showmanship directly to Ehrenberg-Bass, arguing that Barnum was practising mental availability - getting yourself talked about, kept in front of people, and lodged in memory - a century before Sharp named it. It’s why buying a ticket to see Jennie Lind came to mind when New Yorkers were at a loose end in the summer of 1850 (one for all you Greatest Showman fans out there).

Fast forward to 2026, and sponsorship has intrinsic structural advantages when it comes to mental availability. In a fragmented media landscape, the number of platforms that can put a brand in front of tens of millions of people, repeatedly, over years, in contexts loaded with emotion and attention, keeps shrinking. Live sport is one of the last of them.

My own analysis in The Sponsorship Effect found brand effects outnumbering sales effects five to one. Sponsorship is structurally tilted towards exactly the thing the industry has been trained not to mention.

What a point of awareness is worth

The final refuge of the awareness sceptic is that it can’t be valued. It’s a “soft” metric, the argument goes, and it doesn’t survive contact with a CFO.

Except it can be valued, with numbers most businesses already have:

Value of one point of awareness = addressable market × 1% × conversion rate from aware to consideration × conversion rate from consideration to purchase × customer lifetime value

Suppose a brand operates in a market of 20 million category buyers. One point of awareness represents 200,000 people. If 30% of those aware of the brand would consider it, and 10% of considerers become customers within the relevant window, 200,000 people who are aware becomes 6,000 customers. With a customer lifetime value of £400, that point of awareness is worth £2.4 million.

Those numbers are illustrative, a method template rather than a benchmark, and come with caveats. A person who’s only recently become aware is less likely to buy than the person who has been aware for a decade. The funnel isn’t a rigid pipe, and the stages interact. And you’re multiplying several estimates together, which means the output carries the uncertainty of all of them. While nobody should present the calculations as audited fact, Brand Finance will have used a method like that to calculate the incremental value of Deutsche Telekom’s Bayern Munich sponsorship to be €1.9bn.

The truth is, the output doesn’t need to be precise to be useful. The entire finance discipline is built on valuing intangible assets, discounting uncertain future cash flows, and pricing risk. Which means the calculation just needs to be defensible, and this calculation puts awareness in the same language as every other investment the business makes.

If a CFO can’t engage with the value of being known by the people who might buy from the business, it’s not the metric’s fault.

The one thing better than awareness

There is a brand effect the evidence rates more highly, and that’s fame. Binet and Field’s analysis of the IPA Databank found that fame-driven campaigns, the ones that proactively get talked about, outperform every other communications model on hard business measures, with the highest rate of very large profit growth in the databank.

Fame goes beyond being known into being currently, socially, conspicuously known. Paul Feldwick describes it as a social construct rather than a psychological one, something that lives between people rather than inside them.

Sponsorship can produce fame. When Guinness owns the Six Nations, or when a sponsor’s activation becomes part of the cultural memory of a tournament, as I wrote about John Barnes and Lucozade last week, that’s fame at work. The uncomfortable part, for anyone selling sponsorship, is that fame can’t be guaranteed and is highly dependent on the sponsor’s approach. It depends on media investment, creative quality, cultural timing, and a degree of luck that no rights package can underwrite.

But just as with mental availability, to be famous you first need to have awareness. And awareness is the thing sponsorship can reliably, repeatedly, provably deliver.

Its value is supported by a century of evidence, and can be expressed in terms of revenue and profit. So let’s stop saying we need to improve on it, when it’s one of the things sponsorship does best.

A couple of reminders: SEF:03 will be held on Thursday 23rd July at Sport Industry Group in Holborn, and will look at how spatial analytics can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of live events and experiential activations. Head over to Eventbrite to get your tickets.

Secondly, a request for ten minutes of your time to complete a survey for our research on sponsorship effectiveness with the IPA. Completing the survey is the only way to get full access to the findings ahead of the IPA Effectiveness Conference in October.

• For brands https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FBYJQ2J

• For rights holders https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3J2JWLF

• For agencies https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3RQJMST

Secondly, a request for ten minutes of your time to complete a survey for our research on sponsorship effectiveness with the IPA. Completing the survey is the only way to get full access to the findings ahead of the IPA Effectiveness Conference in October.

• For brands https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FBYJQ2J

• For rights holders https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3J2JWLF

• For agencies https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3RQJMST

Thirty years of shirts (part 2)

2013: the shirt changes hands

In 2013 the kit relationship that had defined England since the fifties ended. Nike, the American giant that had bought Umbro in 2008 and then decided to sell it, replaced its own subsidiary as England’s kit maker, ending roughly sixty years of Umbro and timing the switch to the FA’s hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary and the opening of St George’s Park. The first Nike shirt carried a small gold mark under the crest, marking 1863 to 2013.

The evolution of the deal itself tells you how Nike’s understanding of its effectiveness had grown. The original was six years. In 2018, the FA and Nike signed again, a twelve-year extension running to 2030, reported to be among the largest national-team kit deals in the world, second in Europe only to Germany’s. The figures quoted publicly range from roughly £30m to £40m per year, depending on the period and the source, and I would not stake a claim on the exact number without the FA’s own filing in front of me.

What is interesting is the structure. I talked last time about the volatility of England’s performances (or at least the men’s team). The renewal reportedly built in contingency clauses for the first time. There’s a financial penalty if the senior men’s team fails to qualify for a major tournament. Incentive payments if the team reached the latter stages, the semi-finals or beyond, of World Cups and EUROs.

It’s an example of a rights-holder and a sponsor sitting down and explicitly sharing the risk of the very thing that has burned England’s commercial partners for decades.

The purpose era

Something changed at the FA after 2018, and the sponsor roster did too. The organisation set out to be more inclusive and to push money into the grassroots, the women’s game and disability football, and the commercial partnerships started to look less like mass-reach brand association and more like brand purpose.

Mars Wrigley, a partner since 2009 and one of the last veterans standing, became the clearest example. Its latest renewals moved the activation off chocolate and onto, in turn, the KIND nutrition bar in 2023 and the sugar-free gum brand Extra in 2024, across the men’s, women’s and para teams. M&S Food arrived in 2022 with an “Eat Well, Play Well” campaign built around what the players supposedly eat. E.ON signed in 2024, committing to decarbonise grassroots clubs.

Chase became the official banking partner across all four home nations’ men’s, women’s, youth and para teams, with its logo on the training kit, and a deal built around funding coaching qualifications in disadvantaged communities rather than around match-day exposure at all.

That Chase deal is the purpose idea in a nutshell. Denied the shirt like everyone before it, the brand paid for the one piece of player-worn fabric FIFA allows, the training top, and builds the rest of its value from social impact initiatives.

I’m not going to do a deep dive into the purpose era here - more to come on that later in the year - but suffice to say that the concept of brand purpose as an enabler of commercial growth has been shown to be fundamentally flawed.

Irrespective, this era saw the roster swell. Where 2001 had five partners, the FA today lists around thirty across the Group: Nike, EE, Adobe, Barclays, Budweiser, Carling, Chase, Emirates, Lucozade, and the rest, tiered by property and price. It also sees the FA getting smart about how it structures its rights: two beer brands sit side by side because one has the FA Cup and the other has the national team; neither can touch the shirt, so the conflict that would be fatal in club football simply does not arise.

The constraint that limits the headline revenue number also makes the portfolio possible. You can sell the same team to thirty brands precisely because none of them can own the bit everyone would fight over.

Lucozade and the power of product in the hand

You can’t put your name on the England shirt. But, if you’re a sports drink brand, you can put your product in the player’s hand, on live television, at the exact moment it is meant to count. Lucozade worked that out and built the better part of four decades of success on it.

Side note: I should provide a disclaimer here that I have worked with the Lucozade sponsorship team, but my admiration for their FA sponsorship predates that engagement. It was fascinating to see their culture of marketing effectiveness up close once I got the chance to work with them.

The Lucozade x FA partnership is a masterclass in effectiveness. It is built on a foundation of long-term thinking. Lucozade has been the official sports drink of the England team since 2007, for close to two decades, across the men’s and the women’s sides. That level of consistency is not a by-product of Lucozade’s strategy. It is the strategy. And consistency, as we know from Andrew Tindall’s research with the IPA, is a hallmark of the most effective brands.

But to understand the true commitment to the long term, you need to go back another decade, before the partnership began. The Lucozade Sport pouch was a fixture on football touchlines right through the 1990s, squeezed by real players in real matches in front of the largest audience the country assembles. It was a live product demonstration that every aspiring footballer in the country could see.

It’s the kind of endorsement no ad can provide, because it is not an advert. Nobody really knows if Joe Hart used Head & Shoulders once he got home.
But everyone could see the world's best footballers drinking Lucozade when they needed hydration. The England deal in 2007 added the additional benefit of being seen in the hands of national heroes wearing the three lions.

Many brands might have stopped with that level of product demonstration and exposure. But again, showing a deep understanding of the factors that drive effectiveness, Lucozade put fame on top.

In 1990, as Lucozade Sport launched, the brand made John Barnes its face. But rather than relying on a famous face to capture attention, Lucozade handed him lines that created fame for the brand itself:

It is a near-perfect example of what Paul Feldwick and Peter Field mean by fame in the context of marketing effectiveness: advertising that works by being known and repeated rather than by arguing a case. People could not get the line, delivered brilliantly by Barnes in his distinctive accent, out of their heads. As a result, Barnes and the brand were fused in the national imagination to the point that the association required no upkeep or explanation.

You can measure how completely it worked by how long it kept paying. In April 2025, thirty-five years after the advert, Barnes stood at mile twenty-three of the London Marathon handing cups of Lucozade to exhausted runners, and the Guardian introduced him with the words “after twenty-three miles of sheer hell.” No reminder was needed of who he was or why he was holding the drink.

That is the power of brand fame: a generation later, Lucozade can still rely on the memory.

Now move to 2026. The face is Jude Bellingham, but the strategy is identical. Note here how Lucozade is constructing a rights schedule and sponsorship portfolio tailored to its objectives. The national deal creates year-round awareness and exposure, generating long-term brand effects. For short-term sales-driving campaigns during the key summer sales window, the brand doubles down on athlete talent as a sales driver (something highlighted in The Sponsorship Effect). But it doesn’t simply leverage three-player appearances from the national team. Instead, it has secured a separate deal from the one with the FA, allowing it to put Bellingham front and centre in mass-reach media buys.

What’s even smarter is that partnering with both individual players and the England team mitigates the risk of Bellingham not being selected, something several brands came a cropper on with Cole Palmer partnerships this summer.

But it’s the consistency that I ultimately have to come back to. Lucozade has resisted the urge to reinvent the playbook for thirty-six. Barnes to Bellingham, underpinned by broad exposure via the national team, is one idea that has been used for 36 years. Most brands cannot hold a thought for a single tournament cycle, let alone across the engagement era, the purpose era, and now the fragmentation era.

Denied the shirt like everyone else, Lucozade bought the moment of use and wrapped it in fame, which is about the most effectiveness-literate answer to the constraint that anyone in this whole history has managed.

The rise of the Lionesses

If you want to watch this fifty-year logic play out without the noise of changing fashions and decades of context, look at the Lionesses, because they are the same experiment run under controlled conditions.

Same rights-holder. Same FIFA constraint, no shirt to sell. The only variable that changed was that this team started winning and kept winning from 2022 onwards. So you can watch, in close to real time, what happens to commercial value when the borrowed glory a sponsor is always hoping for actually turns up.

For years, the honest truth is that backing women’s football was about CSR. Brands typically did it because it looked right.

Then England won a home Euro at Wembley in 2022, reached a World Cup final in 2023 and won the Euros again in 2025, and everything changed. The same agency now describes a property generating a genuine commercial return rather than goodwill.

The 2025 final against Spain peaked at 16.2 million viewers across ITV and the BBC. The Lionesses’ social following surpassed 1 million during the 2023 World Cup. This is fame being built at speed and then priced in, and the brands that did best are the ones that bought early, while it was still cheap. Nike committed to a bespoke Lionesses kit back in 2016, the first manufacturer to make a women-specific England shirt rather than hand the team men’s cuts. Barclays took the Women’s Super League. Players picked up deals well outside football, Leah Williamson with Gucci among them.

Side note: I worked with a brand in the spring of 2022 and put forward a proposal for them to enter women’s football, given that their competitors were all in the men’s game. They doubted the audience size and prevaricated, but even during the early group stage of the tournament, a deal with a player was on the table that was unbelievably cheap by today’s standards. Two weeks later, the price was unaffordable, and the ship had sailed.

The commercial success of the Lionesses shows that the playbook is now established. There’s no shirt to sell, so you buy fame and association. The team wins, fame builds, and commercial value follows.

It even supplies its own cautionary tale. When demand for Mary Earps’ goalkeeper shirt was obvious and loud, Nike initially declined to make it available to buy, and only relented under pressure. That is one error Byron Sharp says you must never make: create mental availability, but then make the thing hard to purchase.

Admiral’s entire insight in 1974 was that you make the asset buyable. Forty-nine years later, with a goalkeeper the country adored, someone forgot.

Lessons from a beautiful constraint

Stand back from fifty years of England sponsorship, the pattern is hard to miss.

You cannot own the England shirt. So the history is one long lesson about what you buy instead, and the same answer keeps cropping up: you buy fame. You buy the country’s relationship with the team, the ritual, and the hope and the heartbreak, which pays out whether or not the football does. And, ideally, you buy it early and run it for decades, because consistency pays off.

The England shirt will always stay logo-free, as long as FIFA has partners to protect. But brands will keep queuing up to buy everything around it - the training tops and the perimeter boards and the access and the summers - because the one thing they want and cannot have is the very thing that makes the rest worth having.

Fxunny how a rule designed to protect someone else’s money ended up teaching everyone a lesson about their own.

There is one piece still missing from this story. Almost everything I have described as valuable in this history is about reach, fame, and salience, but I cannot show you a proven business effect. So if any current FA partners are reading, this is an offer to change that and start working together on the first England sponsorship to win an IPA Effectiveness Award.

• The origin and evolution of the World Cup

• How FIFA built the tournament as a commercial product

• The influence of Adidas and Coca-Cola

• Differences between the World Cup and the Olympics

• The shift from teams to star players as “IP”

• Sponsorship tiers: global, regional, and host-city partners

• The US market and the commercial opportunity of 2026

• Guerrilla marketing by brands like Levi’s and Heinz

• The impact of hydration breaks and product changes on the fan experience

• Maradona, memory, and the emotional power of football
  

Apologies for any tech glitches; despite being an audio producer for the past 30 years, it’s my first time using this particular software. And I’ll make a note to avoid leaving a large fan blowing right next to my desk the next time I record!

I hope you enjoy it, and if you like it or have any suggestions for future content, please let me know.

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Thirty years of shirts

When I first joined the integrated creative agency Iris in 2019, I was invited to do a ‘Stop and Think’ presentation to the strategy team. Desperate to prove my chops to the bona fide Strategy Directors whose company I somehow seemed to have blagged my way into, I swiftly read Adam Morgan and Mark Barden’s A Beautiful Constraint and gave a presentation on it.

Fortunately, the presentation went well, and I managed to prove I deserved the job (to myself as much as anyone else). But the idea at the centre of the book has stuck with me ever since.

It is a simple one: stop viewing constraints - such as a lack of time, budget, or resources - as roadblocks, and instead use them as stimuli for better solutions. When you embrace this idea, a limitation is not the enemy of good work. Handled right, it is the enabler of it.

The book’s key call to action is to swap ‘we can’t, because’ for ‘we can, if’. The constraint stops being the thing that wrecks the plan and starts being the starting point for a better one.

I have had a lot of time for that idea ever since. And it came to mind when I began researching the commercial history of the English football team. One might assume that partnering with England works pretty much like partnering with a club.

But there is one fundamental constraint: a national team can’t sell the front of its shirt.

FIFA prohibits commercial sponsors on the front of national-team match jerseys, and the only non-national branding it allows is the kit manufacturer’s logo, deliberately kept small. This is because FIFA wants the exposure at its own tournaments reserved for its own partners. If England turned up at a World Cup with a rival brand splashed across the shirt, every pitch-side board that FIFA sold to Coca-Cola, adidas, or Visa would be worth less.

So national federations’ shirts stay clean to protect FIFA’s golden goose, and the brands that pay tournament money keep what they paid for. This is the constraint at the heart of the Football Association's commercial history.

It’s a beautiful constraint in Morgan and Barden’s exact sense. The ban was a gift. Not to the FA’s revenue line, which has spent fifty years smaller than it might have been. But, ironically, it was a gift to effectiveness. Because the ban on the easy option kept pushing England’s sponsors, decade after decade, towards things that actually build brands: fame, breadth, a cultural relationship, and an asset people will physically buy.

Before there was anything to sell

For the first part of the story, there is no sponsorship at all. Umbro, the Cheshire firm founded in 1924, had been making England’s kit since the early 1950s. At the 1966 World Cup, the tournament England won, Umbro clothed fifteen of the sixteen teams on the pitch. But none of those shirts carried a maker’s logo.

Then, in 1973, German club Eintracht Braunschweig put the Jägermeister logo on its shirts and the first shirt sponsor in football existed.

The authorities hated it. In England, the football establishment spent the rest of the decade refusing to allow shirt sponsors at all, even as clubs, squeezed by inflation and falling gates, were desperate for the money.

That fight, the clubs versus the blazers, is its own story (and one Ill return to sometime). But the national teams sat outside the debate, because they had stumbled into something different and, as it turned out, more durable.

1974: the real beginning

When England failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup, the FA sacked Alf Ramsey, the man who had won the thing eight years earlier. They brought in Leeds’ Don Revie, who set about changing everything, including the kit.

Revie had appointed a small sportswear firm from Leicester called Admiral to supply Leeds’s kit the year before; Admiral had spotted an opportunity nobody in football had taken seriously: the replica market.

Its 1973 deal with Leeds was revolutionary. Admiral became the first brand to pay a club to place its logo on a football shirt, and the first to sell replica kits to fans. When Revie took the England job in ‘74, he took Admiral with him. The firm signed a deal with the FA, which led to England breaking the same new ground for national federations that Leeds had broken for clubs.

But the innovation didn’t stop there. Admiral’s designs were loud by the standards of the day, collared, striped in red and blue, built to look good on the colour televisions that were just then becoming affordable in British homes.

They were designed by a woman called Lindsay Jelley who, by her own account, knew absolutely nothing about football. But she did know about fashion, which was why the shirts looked like nothing the game had produced before. People bought them. Children wore them. The England shirt stopped being something only eleven men wore on matchday and became something the whole country could put on every day.

From an effectiveness perspective, it was a masterstroke from the Football Association. The first commercial deal England did gave birth to a distinctive asset in the purest Byron Sharp sense: a thing that was unmistakably England, that built mental availability every time someone wore it down the street, and that the public paid for the privilege of advertising. In much the same way as adidas’s Official Match Ball partnership with FIFA, Admiral didn’t buy attention. They manufactured an object that generated it, and sold the object.

The Admiral story does not end well, which is part of why it teaches so much. The company was modest and privately owned, but it suddenly found itself in competition with adidas. It took over £1m in orders (c. £7m in today’s money), and over-reached with a failed investment in a German factory that cost it dearly. By 1980, the receivers were called in.

Side note: unfortunately, ITV’s Get Shirty documentary about the rise and fall of Admiral isn’t available to stream, but I might start a campaign to get it back online. It looks like a hoot. There’s a podcast interview with the film-maker, Andy Wells, available via YouTube, and he’s also turned the story into a book.

Admirals travails aside, the success of the deal had shown the FA, and the game, that the shirt itself was a hugely valuable asset.

The return of Umbro, and the golden era

After Admiral, Umbro resumed as England's kit maker around 1984 and held the contract through what most people remember as the golden age of the England shirt, the back half of the eighties and the whole of the nineties. Italia 90 and the tears. Euro 96 and the three lions on a shirt that fans still hunt down on resale sites today. The grey 1996 away kit. The sky-blue third shirt worn once, against Turkey, and mourned ever since.

This is the period where the manufacturer relationship matured from making kit into making culture's wardrobe. The kits were distinctive, they were tied to summers the country lived through together, and they were buyable. The replica was doing exactly what Admiral's had done, just at far greater scale, on the back of a team that, for a few summers, carried the nation's hope further than it had in a generation. Umbro's double diamond became, for a while, part of what England looked like. What Umbro could not do, what nobody could do, was put anyone else's name on that shirt. Which meant that all the other brands who wanted a piece of England had to find another door.

Selling everything that isn't the shirt

For four decades the only commercial relationship the England team had was with whoever made the kit. Then, in the mid-nineties, the FA worked out it could sell the team itself, separately from the shirt, as a sponsorship property. Whiel it couldn’t offer front of shirt rights, it could sell access and association - the right to call yourself a backer of England and to wrap your marketing around the team without ever appearing on it during play. Green Flag, the breakdown firm, was first, around 1994, in a deal worth roughly four million pounds over four years.

Nationwide arrive in 1998 and stayed eleven years, which makes the building society one of the longest and least celebrated relationships in the whole history. The initial deal was around fifteen million pounds, with later renewals nearer twenty million over four years, and it ran until 2010 and the wreckage of that summer's World Cup in South Africa.

Eleven years is a long time in a category that often churns every tournament cycle. It is also, not coincidentally, long enough for brand effects to compound. The boring, durable, decade-long deal is exactly the kind that Binet and Field would tell you to want, even if it’s not one that anybody would write nostalgia pieces about.

In 2001 the FA tried a different structure, the FA Partners model, five brands sharing England and FA Cup rights with no single title sponsor above them. Umbro, Nationwide, McDonald's, Carlsberg and Pepsi, each buying a slice, none owning the whole. It ran to 2006, is the antecedent of the sprawling roster the FA runs today, and was the moment the commercial model stopped being one big relationship and became a portfolio.

Carlsberg, Vauxhall, and buying the relationship instead of the result

The brands that got the most out of England in this era understood something the brands that struggled did not. You are not buying a winning team. England, for most of this history, has not been a winning team. You are buying the country's relationship with the team, which is a different and far more reliable asset.

Carlsberg understood it. A lager brand whose entire English identity was built on tournament summers, on the pub, on the ritual of hope and the ritual of disappointment, did not need England to lift a trophy. It needed England to be the thing the country gathered (and drank) around, win or lose, and England has always been reliably that.

From an effectiveness perspective, Carlsberg was one of the first brands to commit to significant TV advertising to promote its partnership (principle 7 of the sponsorship effectiveness manifesto: activate with conviction and scale). At UEFA EUROs 2004, the brand executed its most integrated campaign at the time, with heavy TV bumper idents, print ads, and in-store promotions.

By World Cup 2010, it launched £30m media campaign that relied heavily on rousing, emotional TV ads (classic showmanship, I must check in with System1 - I’m sure it score well).

Vauxhall understood this too. The carmaker had first gone near football backing Euro 96, and in 2011 it replaced Nationwide as England's lead sponsor on a deal worth c. £6m pounds a year, covering not just England but the other home nations, all twenty-three sides including the women's and disability teams. It ran to 2018.

Again that beautiful constraint forced the Vauxhall’s hand. It couldn’t buy the shirt, so it bought everything around it, the training-ground access, the player time, the perimeter boards, the right to drive every England moment back to a Vauxhall showroom.

In both cases, the constraint forced the brands into ‘we can, if’ thinking. Denied the shirt, they bought as much access as possible. But, most importantly, they recognised there was an opportunity to sponsor not just the ritual, but the relationship between England’s team and its fans itself.

Creatively, that took both brands into the emotional space that we know is most effective for long-term brand building and value creation. It was a smart move: the relationship doesn’t ultimately depend on the team winning, which makes it the most valuable asset the FA has.

Because, let’s face it, England’s men’s team is volatile. I’m writing this 24 hours after the 0-0 draw with a physical and well-organised Ghana team - a pertinent reminder that it can and always has come crashing down, eventually. And that is the risk sitting under all of this for any partner.

When the underlying property is volatile, the most valuable thing you can own is a something that is insulated from the volatility. A sponsor anchored to the relationship and whose creative leans into the ups and downs, has de-risked itself against the one variable it can’t influence. And that insulation is useful precisely because England, of all teams, will let you down eventually.

I say this as a country-before-club football fan. I have literally dreamed of us winning the World Cup since Mexico ‘86. I live in eternal hope that I will one day see England lift the trophy.

But while the semi-finals of 1990, 1996, the two European finals, and the Lionesses’ victories are the highs, the repeated disappointments of the 2000s, the chronic underperformance of the ‘Golden Generation’, and the defeat to Iceland in 2016, are the lows. A brand that buys England has to understand that it’s buying both.

Heartbreak is, after all, the most English part of the whole thing.

I’m going to leave it there, as this has turned into a bit of a beast. There’s plenty more to come: the arrival of Nike from 2013, the purpose era, and how the rise of the Lionesses opened up a whole new chapter. See you next week.

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A while back, before young children and Dad-bod got in the way, I was a pretty handy age-group triathlete. I got involved with London Fields Triathlon Club, served as Chair for a couple of years, and even earned my Level 1 Triathlon Coaching qualification.

As a result, many people have asked me for training advice over the years, so I’ll suggest that a club runner train the way the best distance runners train. Periodise the year. Spend the majority of your time at very low intensities, but do the threshold work properly. Add regular strength training to your week. I’m always surprised by the kind of answer that comes up again and again: “I’m not Mo Farah. I’m not a professional.”

The implication is that elite methods are necessary for being elite, and that someone who’s just trying to run a marathon comfortably has no place borrowing them.

It is exactly the wrong instinct. The methods aren’t what you do once you get good. They are how you get good in the first place. The runner who trains as if they were a professional, inside whatever hours they actually have, is the one who improves most. Acting bigger than you are is how you improve.

I hear the same modesty in sponsorship, and it costs a lot more than a parkrun PB. “I don’t need that kind of measurement; I’m a small rights-holder.” “We can’t activate like that; our budget’s tiny.” “Econometrics, brand tracking, proper money behind the rights, that’s for the Cokes and the adidases of this world.” The instinct feels sensible and humble, but it’s actually one of the most expensive mistakes a sponsor can make, and there is now some new evidence to prove it.

Go Big or Go Home

Les Binet and Will Davis have published a new (free) report for the IPA called Go Big or Go Home. Do go and read it, because what I’ll cover today doesn’t do it full justice. But the short version is that the marketing industry has fallen in love with efficiency and forgotten about effectiveness, and that the love affair is making everyone poorer. It draws on the IPA Databank, a survey of 500 senior marketers and Gartner spend data, and its conclusion should change how every sponsor sets a budget.

So, as an update for you all on the latest in effectiveness research, I want to walk through some key charts before coming back to what they mean for sponsorship in particular.

Start with the chart that frames everything. Since Covid, the median advertising ROI in the Databank has risen by 4%, from £3.07 to £3.15 for every pound spent. Great news, right?

The issue is that over the same period, the incremental profit those campaigns generated has fallen by 11% in real terms, from £33m to £29m on average. As I’ve written before, this is the problem with ROI: focus on it, and you become more efficient, but less effective.

But what’s driving that decline in profitability? They next asked the 500 marketers what drives effectiveness: ROI, creative, or media plan. 65% thought creative or media plan, and only 35% thought budget. Put another way, the majority of marketers believe that how you spend the money is more important than how much you spend. In their minds, efficiency beats scale two to one.

When asked to choose between budget and ROI, again, 65% (I’d guess the same 65%) chose ROI. But an independent regression analysis across the Databank from 1998 to 2024, separating how much of the variation in profit is explained by ROI versus budget size, shows that ROI (how you spend) accounts for 11%. Budget (how much you spend) accounts for 89%. Budget is roughly eight times more important than the efficiency everyone obsesses over.

Which brings us to the most eye-opening pair of charts that’s invaluable for any marketer who reports to a CFO. Plot profit against spend and you get an inverted U. It rises, peaks, and eventually falls as each extra pound buys less. But plot ROI against the same spend, and it falls the whole way down, because efficiency is always highest when you spend almost nothing. The two curves point in opposite directions. Maximum ROI sits at minimum profit. The point of maximum profit is the point where the last pound you spend returns nothing at all. So a business that optimises for ROI will always stop spending too early, leaving money on the table.

Binet (he and Davis take it in turns to author different sections of the report) makes it concrete with two plans. Plan A spends £1m, returns a stunning 100%, and nets £1m. Plan B spends £10m at a feeble 20% return, netting £2m. If your metric is ROI, you pick A and feel clever. If your goal is profit, you pick B and go home richer. The frugal, efficient plan is the one that makes less money

So when a CFO asks “what’s the ROI on the sponsorship?” and uses the answer to trim the activation budget, they are doing precisely what the report warns against. They are polishing the ratio and shrinking the prize. The key question should never be whether the sponsorship is efficient; it should be whether it is generating enough profit and whether spending more on it would generate more still.

Gartner’s data shows that marketing budgets as a share of revenue have fallen by about 40% since before the pandemic, from over 10% to under 8%. Budgets are being cut as a proportion of the business at the exact moment when the evidence shows that budget is what counts most.

Worse, the report shows how those budgets get set. 76% of firms do no financial modelling at all. 52% use ROI as their primary metric. Only 38% use econometrics. The single most common rule is “last year plus a bit.” Most of the industry, in Binet’s phrase, is flying blind.

Pull these together, and you get the death spiral the report describes. A tight budget forces a focus on short-term efficiency. Short-term efficiency maximises ROI but suppresses profit, and Binet’s data show that long-term strategies generate far more profit and far more often than short-term ones. Lower profit invites another cut. Round and down it goes.

“Do more with less” is not a clever operating principle - it is the first symptom of a business eating itself.

Some implications for sponsorship

All of which tees up a principle I’ve argued before: activate with conviction and scale. It is the seventh of the ten in the sponsorship effectiveness manifesto, and Binet’s research validates it.

Conviction, because half-committing to a sponsorship is the surest way to waste the rights fee. Scale, because effectiveness is mostly a question of how much you put behind a good idea, invested steadily over years, rather than how cleverly you optimise a small amount.

I’ve also written in the past in defence of exposure and of the fact that reach is an incredibly important aspect of sponsorship. In Will Davis’s section of the research, he shows that fewer than half of CMO’s maximise reach.

In advertising, reach is only achieved through paid media spend. Sponsorship is slightly different in that a certain level of reach is baked into the rights - the exposure you’ll receive from the rights holder even if not a single pound more is spent on activation.

But, in one of the most crucial tables in the report, we see just how much exposure is needed to achieve measurable sales or market share growth, and how much more is needed to achieve strong growth. You need 100s of millions of exposures for strong growth.

The implication for sponsorship isn’t that there’s no need to activate because you’ll get loads of exposure. The implication is that you can take the level of exposure that’s been forecasted by the rights holder and use that to work out how much additional exposure you’ll need to achieve a measurable bottom-line result, and how much on top of that you’ll need to achieve strong growth.

There has always been a question about the right ratio of activation budget to rights fee. I’ve seen 3:1; a common rule of thumb is 1:1, but in reality it’s rarely that.

But this new research suggests that the answer to the activation budget is simple: as much as possible (or, at least, until the ROI is less than 1). And when the CFO asks why we’re not seeing a sales uplift, the answer may well be that you’ve not spent enough to see one.

The problem with ‘small thinking’

The report finishes with a great slide about all the dangers with small thinking. It lists all the ways that thinking small leads to a death spiral for businesses that think the answer to falling revenues is to cut budget, when increasing it is one of the best ways you can reverse decline or, on the other hand, grow more than you did last year.

But another problem with small thinking goes back to my original point: if you only act in line with how you perceive a business of your size should act, you’re much less likely to grow.

“That’s all right for the big brands/rights holders/agencies, but we’re different from them” is a limiting mindset whether you’re training for sport or growing a brand. Rosabeth Kanter, writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2012 said:

One secret of successful business and social entrepreneurs is that they act bigger than they are. Not bigger in the bad sense, with the arrogance and complacency that has made some banks, for example, feel they are above the rules. But bigger in terms of having the confidence to propel growth and set courageous goals.

Tom Roach wrote about this last week in Marketing Week, arguing that “marketers shouldn’t restrict themselves by the size of their brand – and acting bigger than you are is a powerful signal that your brand means business.”

In a piece a while back, I mentioned Richard Shotton’s work on costly signalling, and it’s relevant here too. Shotton has shown that people read the medium itself as a message about the brand. Ask the public to guess what a million views cost and they will say roughly £25,000 on TV and £5,000 on YouTube. Their guesses are beside the point. The perception is the point. The Thinkbox Signalling Success study, which Shotton helped shape, found that the channel a brand chooses moves perceptions of its financial strength, quality, popularity and trust before a single word of the ad has been processed. Where you show up tells people who you are.

Sponsorship is one of the loudest signals available. Putting your name alongside a major property, and backing it with real money and real ideas, tells every customer, competitor and employee that you can afford to be there and intend to stay.

A timid, under-funded activation throws that signal away. It says the opposite of what you paid to say. The scale is not the waste. The scale is the message.

So when a small brand or a modest rights-holder tells me they can’t activate like the big players, I think of the club runner who wants to take a few minutes off their PB.

The methods aren’t a reward for arriving. They are how you get there. Act, invest and measure as if you are already the size you want to be. That is the part most people skip, and it is the part that works.

A big thank you to The Attention Shift podcast that invited me on recently. The episode dropped today and you can listen here.

First, a disclaimer: I’m an adidas person. When you work agency-side in sports advertising, you’re likely going to end up working on either adidas or Nike at some point. In my experience, whichever one you work on first tends to get under your skin. And if that happens to be adidas, from that point on, you will find yourself removing anything with a swoosh on it from your home, arguing publicly with other strategists in online forums about which brand has greater athletic pedigree, and indoctrinating your children to prefer the three stripes.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Ultimately, they’re both incredible businesses that have built two of the world’s most enduringly famous brands, each in its own unique way. And one day I’ll write the Hall of Fame entry for Nike x Michael Jordan.

But I’m starting with adidas because, when it comes to the FIFA World Cup, Nike is a bit player in comparison. adidas x FIFA is also, as it happens, a partnership that exemplifies every point of my Sponsorship Effectiveness Manifesto. It’s not a coincidence; effectiveness is ultimately about an evidence-led approach to marketing, so it’s hardly surprising that when a sponsorship is this deeply embedded in a brand’s global success, you’ll see the principles in action.

The formal relationship between adidas and FIFA was first signed in 1970, granting adidas official partner, supplier and licensee rights for the FIFA World Cup. The deal has been renewed several times since and currently runs until 2030, with rights reportedly worth approximately $70 million per four-year World Cup cycle.

That’s the official record. But the real story starts sixteen years earlier, in the rain, in Bern.

The foundational legend

The 1954 World Cup final is one of sport’s defining upsets. West Germany, thrashed 8-3 by Hungary in the group stage, faced the same opponents in the final. Hungary were unbeaten for four years. They were the overwhelming favourites.

As the rain fell on World Cup Final day and the pitch at the Wankdorf Stadium deteriorated, the boots Adi Dassler designed came into their own. The adidas ‘Argentina’ boot’s key innovation was the introduction of the removable stud, which enabled the Germans to screw in longer ones for the final.

As the game progressed, it became clear that they had a better grip in the muddy conditions and were quicker on their feet than the Hungarians, whose rain-soaked boots were slowing them down. West Germany came from 2-0 down to win 3-2. The victory became known as the Miracle of Bern. The German team wore adidas boots throughout.

That result launched adidas as a global brand. The 1954 World Cup win using adidas screw-in studs created explosive international demand and validated the brand’s technical approach, accelerating exports across Europe.

Notice what happened there. The brand didn’t buy awareness. It solved a problem. The product was the proof. The World Cup was the stage. That founding logic has never really changed.

A commercial infrastructure, not a media buy

Being the Official Match Ball (OMB) supplier for the World Cup means your brand is literally at the centre of every goal, every save, every iconic moment, in every market, for four weeks every four years. adidas describes it as “one of the most successful partnerships in the history of sports marketing.”

Since 1970, adidas has supplied the OMB for fourteen FIFA World Cup tournaments. Each ball was designed as both a technical product and a cultural object: the iconic Telstar in 1970 was designed to be visible on black-and-white television. The Azteca in 1986 was the first synthetic ball used at a major tournament, built to endure the heat of Mexico. The Brazuca in 2014 was tested by over 600 players across two and a half years before a single fan touched one.

The package adidas holds through its FIFA deal - ball supply, match officials’ kit, matchday tournament branding - is less a collection of logo placements and more a commercial infrastructure. It sits alongside a parallel ecosystem of kit deals with national federations: Germany, Spain, Argentina, Japan, Mexico, and others, each negotiated separately and reinforcing the same brand position (although Germany’s will end, controversially, after this World Cup).

Ultimately, the FIFA sponsorship is not a mere brand-building tactic for adidas. It is the primary partnership around which the business has been organised since 1954, and the cornerstone of the brand’s indelible association with world-class football.

Rights are the entry ticket, not the performance

What adidas has built around the World Cup is not a media buy with a ball in it. It is a layered platform. Yes, their rights are fully activated, but for decades, the brand has supported the partnership with integrated multi-channel campaigns and global media buys. The campaigns the brand has built around the World Cup are the mechanism by which the rights investment is amplified into cultural presence. When you look across them not year by year but as a body of work, a consistent creative logic emerges - one that maps closely onto what Orlando Wood has documented in Lemon and Look Out as the conditions for long-term advertising effectiveness.

Wood’s argument, drawn from System1’s testing of thousands of ads, is that the most commercially powerful work is “right-brained”: rooted in vivid characters and the relationships between them, anchored in a specific place and time, carried by music and physical performance, and built around narrative rather than product demonstration. This is showmanship, not salesmanship. It builds broad emotional memory that compounds over time, rather than nudging the narrow slice of consumers already ready to buy. Wood’s data shows that right-brain campaigns are significantly more likely to generate very large business effects on IPA measures, and that the industry has been moving in the wrong direction, progressively stripping these features out as it has optimised for digital performance metrics.

adidas’s best World Cup work runs directly against that trend. Its signature creative device - the dream team assembled on the neighbourhood pitch, legends conjured up alongside today’s stars, football as universal fantasy rather than product proposition - is almost a textbook illustration of Wood’s principles.

Vivid, named characters with clear relationships. A rooting in place: the backyard, the beach, the street corner that anyone who has ever kicked a ball can recognise. Music threaded through the action. And crucially, no product pitch. The boots are there. The shirts are there. But no one is told to buy them. The work earns its commercial return through memory and warmth, not persuasion.

The 2010 “Cantina” spot is worth a closer look through this lens. Dropping David Beckham, Snoop Dogg, Daft Punk and Noel Gallagher into the Mos Eisley cantina scene from Star Wars to watch the World Cup - the premise being that everyone, even aliens, gathers for it - is pure right-brain execution. It is funny, unexpected, rooted in shared cultural reference, and built around the relationship between disparate characters unified by a single moment. Wood specifically identifies humour as one of the most powerful and most neglected right-brain tools: it forces the brain to resolve incongruity, and the reward is an emotional spike that encodes memory. The industry largely stopped using it. The Cantina spot is a reminder of what it can do.

The 2026 “Backyard Legends” film - five minutes, Timothée Chalamet recruiting a street team, AI-de-aged Zidane and Beckham recalled as previous challengers, Messi and Bad Bunny as spectators - is the fullest recent expression of the same logic. Andrew Tindall has described it as “a moonshot with studs on,” and the testing data supports that reading. The 40-second cut scores 4.5 Stars in System1 testing, a strong predictor of long-term brand growth with sufficient media spend. The 60-second social trailer scores 3.1 Stars against a UK social norm of 2.3, beating the channel average on Star Rating, Spike Rating and Brand Fluency. The adidas logo is the standout distinctive asset in the social cut, mentioned by more than half the sample.

What Andrew identifies as the key structural achievement is that adidas has built a creative system, not just a film: the long version creates the cultural object; the 40-second cut does the paid-media job at scale; the social edits top up memory in lower-attention environments. Each format has a specific role. None carries the whole load alone.

That is exactly how Wood says right-brain work should be deployed - built for broad reach, in multiple formats, with each exposure reinforcing the same emotional memory structure rather than starting from scratch.

A complex, profitable ecosystem

What’s interesting from a results and measurement standpoint is how the adidas x FIFA deal is a case in point of sponsorship being a complex system.

The commercial correlation across the partnership is consistent. In 2010, adidas reported an independent market research figure of 34% global football market share, describing it as the strongest position it had held at any tournament to that point, with jersey sales more than doubling compared to 2006. By 2014, the year of “All In or Nothing” and the Posto Adidas newsroom in Rio, adidas was the most talked-about brand of the tournament, with 917,000 Twitter mentions of #allin - more than three times any other brand, and again achieved record football sales.

The 2014 World Cup was specifically cited as a driver of the brand’s football revenue jumping from €179m to €1.575bn in Latin America over the preceding decade. The Qatar 2022 tournament generated an estimated €150m boost in a single quarter. And ahead of 2026, football grew 49% in Q1 with approximately €250m in World Cup product orders already secured.

None of that is attributable solely to the advertising. The match ball deal, the federation kit agreements, the player deals, the product innovation cycle - all of it contributes. And it would be a fool’s errand to try to isolate the contribution of each individual component to the partnership's overall revenue gains. The partnership and the wider football ecosystem are too complex for anyone to truly understand how they all work together.

What adidas does know is that it all combines to boost brand, change behaviour, grow sales, and generate profit that far outweighs the investment in rights, production and media. True ROI.

The exception that proves the rule

The one moment where this broke down is also interesting. The 2010 Jabulani ball was heavily criticised by players for erratic flight behaviour, and the backlash was immediate and public. It is a reminder that the right-brain warmth Wood describes is built on a foundation of product credibility; when the product fails, no amount of showmanship covers it. The response from adidas was methodical. The 2014 Brazuca was tested by more than 600 players over two and a half years before it reached a tournament, adopted by the Bundesliga and MLS en route. Product rigour and brand warmth were re-integrated.

But that’s really just one glitch and, looking back, it’s really the legacy of the match ball that highlights just how valuable the partnership is, in a way that few business metrics or marketing KPIs can: the Telstar ball design from 1970 that has become so deeply embedded in the world’s collective memory that 99% of people, when asked to draw a football from imagination, draw something that resembles it.

More than half a century after its launch, a single product decision has become the universal visual shorthand for the sport. That is the kind of true brand fame that happens when product, brand and cultural moment combine, consistently, over a very long time.

The one effectiveness gap

The only fly in the effectiveness ointment is that the brand’s public statements of World Cup returns lean toward input metrics. Post-2014 statements led with social media mentions and community growth - useful signals, but not the same as an econometric model of incremental revenue attributable to the sponsorship investment. That work was done, to IPA-winning depth, by Guinness and AMV BBDO for the Six Nations.

Having worked with adidas, I know you’ll never see an effectiveness paper from like that them. The business guards its data tightly. From an effectiveness perspective it’s a shame, because the industry could do with more examples of how to plan, execute and maintain a partnership as successful as this one. And adidas deserves recognition for being one of the most effective brands in the world.

Why the partnership belongs here

I created the Hall of Fame to recognise partnerships that demonstrate what effective sponsorship looks like when designed and measured with commercial intent (and to give you all a break from me moaning about the ways it often isn’t).

The adidas x FIFA World Cup partnership belongs in it for reasons that go beyond longevity, though longevity is part of the case. Any partnership as long as this one has clearly done something right.

It belongs because the commercial mechanism is clear and consistent. Every four years, football sales spike. The World Cup platform drives jersey demand, ball sales, national team merchandise, and an association with world-class football that no other brand can replicate.

It belongs because the product-brand loop is unique. The match ball is both the most visible object in world football and a piece of product R&D. Each iteration has to perform technically. When it succeeds - as the Telstar did, as the Brazuca did - the brand’s technical credibility grows in line with its fame.

It belongs because the brand has demonstrated a consistent commitment to showmanship. They didn’t just take the contractual rights; they activated, repeatedly, and at scale. Long before Orlando Wood and System1 came along, adidas proved that emotional, entertaining advertising is the most effective advertising. The World Cup gives the brand a global platform to showcase that commitment.

But most of all, the partnership belongs in the Hall of Fame because the founding logic was sound. Adi Dassler did not go to Bern to get the brand onto a perimeter board. He went to win. The boots worked. The commercial results followed. The brand saw the positive signal, and invested in a partnership that has endured for decades.

That is still, fifty-six years later, how sponsorship should be done.

In fact, Paul is something of an effectiveness hero of mine, and I often cite his excellent Why Does The Pedlar Sing? as the one book about marketing and advertising that I’d recommend to everyone. So big ups to Paul.

If you have any questions or thoughts on this week’s topic, I’d love to hear them - please leave a comment or start a thread in the chat.

Rory

The Myth of the B2B Customer

There’s a classic B2B ad from 1958 for McGraw-Hill Magazines called The Man In The Chair. It shows a ‘typical’ B2B buyer, telling a sales representative that he has no idea who their company is or what it stands for, and then asks, passive-aggressively: “Now-what was it you wanted to sell me?” It elegantly makes the point that, in the world of B2B sales, brand awareness, fame and perception are crucial.

Another famous B2B maxim is ‘nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM’. Again, it goes to show just how much the emotional reassurance brand fame provides can overcome deficiencies in technical features and even pricing.

Those of us who have been involved in agency pitches (another B2B sales environment) will know this to be true, too. VCCP, McCann, Uncommon and Mother don’t just win pitches because they have excellent strategic and creative work; their reputation precedes them, and, all things being equal, the more famous agency tends to win more often.

The question for much of the marketing community is, therefore: if we can all agree on the value of brand fame in B2B marketing, why does a majority of B2B marketers behave as though it’s only the sales pipeline that matters?

For some reason, the received wisdom is that B2B buyers are completely different from B2C buyers; that B2B buyers are rational, risk-averse, many-headed, slow, and therefore need a fundamentally different playbook from consumers. We see the consequences of this everywhere, from job specs that require B2B experience to the creation of ‘demand-gen’ teams and CFOs who fund demand-gen because it appears to measure cleanly.

When it comes to sponsorship, there’s a sense that a partnership used to promote a B2B brand is inherently different from one for a B2C brand and may not fit within the broader discussion of effectiveness, primarily because much of the B2B work is done through hospitality and one-to-one relationship-building, not broad-reach comms.

That’s nonsense. I’ve judged Effie entries in which the target audience was one person.

But there are some genuine differences, so let’s have a look at them…

1. Smaller, more identifiable audiences

A shampoo brand is talking to tens of millions of people it will never meet. A business selling enterprise software might have a total addressable market of a few thousand companies, and inside those companies, a few dozen people who actually sign the contract. You can often name them. You can find them on LinkedIn, see where they have worked before, and find out which conferences they attend. The audience is not a faceless mass. It is a list.

That is true, and it changes what is possible. Account-based marketing exists because in B2B, you genuinely can market to a named account, sometimes to a named person. So the instinct to treat the audience as a tightly targetable set of individuals is not stupid. It is a fair reading of the situation before you.

2. Long purchase cycles

Consumers buy many categories fast and often. A lot of businesses do not. Around 75% of companies buy a new computer system once every five years, and roughly 80% change their principal bank once every ten (figures from the LinkedIn B2B Institute and Ehrenberg-Bass). A shampoo decision is made in seconds in front of a shelf. A core banking decision is made once a decade by a committee.

So the buying cycle really is longer, and the moment of purchase really is rarer. Again, no argument from me.

3. Buying groups, not buyers

The consumer is, more or less, one person. The B2B buyer is usually several. The boss, the board, the finance director, the end users, and at some point procurement, who exist mainly to ask all the difficult questions you were hoping wouldn’t come up. Paul Feldwick makes this point well in his introduction to the B2B Institute’s Feldwick on Fame: B2B decisions, far more than B2C ones, involve many stakeholders and decision influencers. Consensus has to be built. One person’s enthusiasm is not enough.

4. Higher stakes, more scrutiny

The price is higher. The personal risk is higher. Choosing the wrong shampoo costs you a few quid. Choosing the wrong supplier can cost you your job. So there is due diligence, there are RFPs, there are specs to be matched, references to be checked. The process is more rigorous because the consequences are more serious.

So there it is. Four genuine differences, all real, all defensible. If you stopped reading here, you would conclude that B2B buyers are a different animal and need a different playbook. But that would be a mistake.

B2B customers are humans too

Nobody is saying that buying a fleet of trucks is the same as buying a chocolate bar. But in both cases, the people doing the buying are human beings, meaning they have the same kind of mind, and their responses to marketing follow the same patterns. Let’s have a look at some of the key principles.

Start with the single most important number in B2B marketing. At any given moment, only about 5% of business buyers are in the market for what you sell. The other 95% are out of market, not looking, not listening for a sales call (the 95-5 rule, from John Dawes, again for the B2B Institute and Ehrenberg-Bass).

If your entire effort is aimed at capturing demand that already exists, you are fishing in 5% of the pond and ignoring the rest. The demand-gen model is not wrong so much as small, because it caters to the 5%. It does nothing for the 95% who will be in market next year, or the year after, and who are more likely, when that day comes, to put the brand that is salient on the shortlist, and buy the company that is more famous. You cannot generate demand from people who are not looking. You can only be remembered by them when the time comes.

Then the growth laws themselves. When Les Binet and Peter Field analysed the IPA Databank for B2B specifically, in The 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing, they found that B2B brands respond to share of voice in almost exactly the same way as B2C brands. Set your share of voice above your share of the market, and you tend to grow.

Long-term campaigns that build mental availability and make the company more famous typically deliver the best business results. On their own cut of the B2B data, brand-building produced more very large business effects than activation did. The same laws were found in B2B, using the same evidence base that built the B2C playbook.

The media budget conclusion follows. For consumer brands, the well-known optimum is roughly 60% brand to 40% activation. For B2B, Binet and Field land near a 50:50 split, slightly more weight on activation than in B2C, which makes sense given the long cycles and the value of the eventual sale. At least half the budget should be spent on the 95% who are not buying yet.

Emotion rules in B2B too

Now comes the part that tends to surprise people. The received wisdom says consumers buy on emotion and businesses buy on logic. The evidence pretty much says the opposite.

Research by CEB and Google, From Promotion to Emotion, found that B2B buyers were more emotionally connected to their suppliers than consumers were to their brands, and that personal value, career advancement, reduced personal risk, the confidence of having chosen well, drove purchase far harder than business value did. The same work found that only 14% of business decision makers would pay a premium for a brand’s business-value differentiation. The spec sheet, the thing B2B marketing pours itself into, moves almost nobody.

I would not lean on the precise percentages there, because that study is now over a decade old and the numbers warrant some nuance. But the direction has held up. The B2B Institute, Binet and Field, and System1 have all pointed the same way since. The business buyer is not a rational machine in a suit. The brain does not change on the way into the office.

Which brings us to what most B2B advertising actually looks like. Because the industry believes its buyer is rational, it must therefore make rational decisions. Features, benefits, pricing, proof points, and a strong call to action. In Orlando Wood’s terms, it is relentlessly left-brained, and in System1’s terms, working with Peter Field and Adam Morgan on The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, it is simply dull. It sparks no feeling, and work that sparks no feeling builds no memory, and memory is the only thing that survives the years between this moment and the moment the customer is finally ready to buy.

The exceptions prove the rule. Volvo Trucks put Jean-Claude Van Damme in the splits between two reversing lorries and made a piece of B2B advertising that millions of people who will never buy a truck still remember.

That is fame, built the same way fame is always built, on character, incident and craft, not on payload specifications.

Side note: Jane Deehan outlines many of the creative principles brilliantly in her LinkedIn article B2B Marketing in a Right-Brained World.

How marketing science applies to B2B

The B2B audience is smaller and more identifiable. But a small audience that buys once a decade is the audience you most need to reach years before they buy, not the one you can safely ignore until they raise their hand. Long cycles do not argue for activation. They argue for the longest-memory tool you have, which is brand.

The buying group is many-headed, yes. And fame is the only thing that travels easily across a committee. Feldwick’s second reason a famous brand wins: fame is social, so it is far easier to get agreement, acceptance, even enthusiasm, for a name everyone in the room already knows. The finance director, the end user and the sceptic on the board do not need to be individually persuaded if the brand has already done the persuading. Nobody has to defend the obvious choice.

The stakes are higher and the scrutiny is greater. Which is precisely why emotion does more work, not less. When the downside is your own job, you want to feel safe, and the famous brand is the one that feels safe. And it is Feldwick’s third reason: however hard we try to decide rationally, there are always unknowns no spec sheet can close. Who will actually deliver? Whose technology will actually perform here? When the suppliers all promise much the same thing, the famous one wins, because it gets onto more shortlists, reaches consensus more easily, and is the one everyone feels comfortable signing off. As Feldwick puts it, the most important search engine is still the one in somebody’s head.

Every genuine difference, examined honestly, points the same way. Not to a different playbook than B2C marketing, but to the same one, applied harder.

What does this mean for sponsorship?

As I’ve argued repeatedly, sponsorship is one of the few remaining marketing tools that enables brand-building at scale. If the laws are the same, it should work in B2B for the same reasons it works anywhere: build fame, build mental availability, attach emotion, reach the 95% before they are looking.

Which is why B2B companies have long used sponsorship to do the brand job, and continue to do so today. Intel sponsored the 2018 Winter Olympics to drag its perception from chipmaker to technology leader, and shifted “Intel is essential to transforming business” by sixteen points. Smartsheet, a project-management tool nobody outside the category had heard of, bought its way into the conversation through McLaren’s Formula 1 team. Xero, selling accounting software to small businesses, and used the Women’s World Cup to double the number of UK grassroots clubs using its product. iShares used NBA rookies to make long-term investing feel exciting rather than boring. All of them B2B or near enough, all of them using consumer sport to build mental availability among buyers who were overwhelmingly out of market.

But B2B has always asked sponsorship to do a second job as well, one that consumer sponsorship rarely carries on its own, and with no real B2C equivalent: hospitality.

The box. The paddock. The golf day. The hospitality suite where you take the client who is worth a seven-figure contract and let the event do the warming-up for you. This is older than it looks, but its modern, industrial form has a birthplace. At the Los Angeles Games in 1984, Peter Ueberroth’s organising committee pulled television rights, licensing, team partnerships and hospitality into a single commercial architecture, and hospitality centres appeared for the first time - curated environments built to host executives, reward staff and deepen corporate participation. That is the institutional birth of structured corporate hospitality at scale, and B2B has leaned on it ever since.

Which is usually where someone folds their arms. Whenever the conversation turns to effectiveness, you can rely on the question coming up: “but what about B2B and hospitality?” It is the great get-out. Because the relationship work happens in private, over years, between people, it gets treated as unknowable, and so the whole of B2B sponsorship gets quietly excused from the effectiveness conversation.

That seems counterintuitive. Hospitality is not the hardest part of sponsorship to measure. It is the easiest.

Go back to the first thing we said about the B2B buyer: the audience is a list. You know who you invited to the box. You know their name, their company, the size of the account and where they sit in the buying group. That is not a measurement problem, it is a measurement gift.

Track the named guests into the CRM. Did the relationship deepen? Did the opportunity progress? Did the account renew, expand, sign? This is the closest thing marketing has to a closed loop, from invited guest to meeting to opportunity to contract, to profit and ROI.

That is also why the “you can’t measure it” complaint confuses two jobs that need two scorecards. The brand work answers brand questions: are we more salient, more famous, year on year? The hospitality answers a commercial one: did these named relationships convert? Trying to judge one with the other’s yardstick is what makes the whole thing look like a black box.

The honest caveat is that a long B2B sales cycle has many touches, and no single day in the paddock closes a seven-figure deal on its own. So the discipline is to measure influence and account progression rather than claim sole attribution, exactly as you would for any activation channel in a considered purchase.

The reason hospitality has escaped measurement is not really about effort, but due to two factors: its success is often assessed by sales rather than marketing, and the long sales cycle makes the link genuinely fiddly. Both are fixable. Effectiveness follows intent, so when brand and sales agree up front what the hospitality is for and who it is aimed at, the loop can be closed like any other.

Do we need a different approach for B2B?

So, to answer the question I started with. Does B2B sponsorship need a fundamentally different approach? No. The same laws apply, the same priority on fame and reach, the same long-term logic.

Where I’d suggest there’s an opportunity for improvement, is in the prioritisation of the two jobs sponsorship can do for B2B brands. It is often treated as a relationship tool first, with brand fame as a pleasant side effect, when the evidence says it should be the other way round. The hospitality is real and it has value. But it works on the 5%, the people already in market, already in the room, already worth entertaining. The fame works on the 95%. Sponsorship is the rare tool that does both at once: builds the memory among the many who are not buying yet, and provides the infrastructure to entertain the few who are.

What it needs is the priority the right way up. Build the fame first, among the 95% who will remember you when their decade-long cycle finally turns, and treat the hospitality as what it is, the thing that closes people who already know who you are. The suite cannot manufacture the knowing. It can only trade on it.

The man in the chair told the salesman that his name meant nothing because his company’s name meant nothing. B2B has spent more than sixty years quoting him approvingly and then spending its money as though the salesman were the whole story.

He was telling you the fame had to come first. I think he still is.

Recommended Reads

1. A brilliant 5-part series from Carla Biche of Off Ball Logic on the Business of the World Cup

2. A one-pager on how subculture gets funded by Andy Crysell, who quite literally wrote the book on the relationship between brands and nightlife.

3. An oldie but a goodie from my former boss Phil Adams - Did I Do A Strategy is great for anyone involved in strategy, whether agency-side or in-house

4. The indomitable Zoe Scaman on how AI risks hollowing out the ‘heartwood’ of the organisations it touches

5. Nick Meacham on eight things the sports industry keeps telling itself - and why most of them aren’t true

Two speaking gigs

As promo’d previously, I have two speaking slots coming up in quick succession

What Does Effective Sponsorship Look Like?

Wednesday 10 June, 6pm-8:30pm @ VCCP Media, London

In partnership with MediaCat UK, hosted by VCCP Media. Free to all, with drinks and nibbles, there are still a few places left.

Sponsorhip Masters

Thursday 10 June, 9:15am-4:00pm @ Asia House, London

A one-day masterclass for the brand-side marketers with briefings, roundtables and workshops. I have a few tickets available with a speaker’s discount, so if you would like to attend, get in touch via rory@boxcount.co

That’s all for now, see you next week.

It’s easy to talk about sponsorship to marketers. We share a vocabulary. When I talk about brand salience, top-of-mind awareness, or category entry points, you know what I mean and roughly why it matters. I can be imprecise and still be understood.

But awareness, salience, and consideration, however important they are as levers, are not always the language of the person who controls the budget. In most organisations, that person is a CFO, a finance director, or a managing director whose decision-making mental model is financial rather than marketing-oriented.

They’re not necessarily hostile to sponsorship by nature, but they are asking a different question. And if you answer the question you understand as a marketer, rather than the one they’re actually asking, you’re likely to lose the room.

So, here are my thoughts on how to make the case to a CFO.

First, let’s be clear about what you’re not trying to do

The understandable instinct is to chase perfect attribution. To find the single, irrefutable ROI number that closes the argument. Every pound in, this many pounds back.

That instinct is wrong. Not because rigour or ROI doesn’t matter, but because perfect attribution isn’t what a CFO needs.

They demand it from any other investment they make. They don’t ask for bulletproof causal proof down to the last penny before approving an R&D budget, a capital expenditure on infrastructure, or an acquisition. They get a business case: a set of assumptions, a set of indicators, and an argument they can defend upwards. That is exactly what you need to give them, and the sooner you stop trying to deliver something different, the better your chances.

Our own research at the Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum showed how often current practice falls short of answering this question. Only 21% of the 92 sport sponsorship case studies we coded included any financial ROI calculation. Just 2% quantified profit generated. The sector is not failing to deliver perfect attribution. It is failing to attempt the conversation in the right currency.

Understand what the CFO is actually doing

Before you can build the right case, you need to understand the decision the CFO is making.

They are not evaluating your sponsorship in isolation. They are doing capital allocation, i.e. deciding how to allocate a finite budget across competing claims. Your sponsorship sits in a queue with media spend, headcount, technology investment, and customer acquisition. The CFO’s job, as one senior consulting partner described it to FCLTGlobal, is to make “honest tradeoffs in an integrated way, versus letting politics or the first pig to the trough drive decisions.”

That means the CFO does not need to be convinced that your sponsorship worked in the abstract. They need enough evidence to make a defensible comparison: is this a better use of money than the next best alternative? And they need to be able to defend that comparison to whoever is looking over their shoulder.

A McKinsey survey of Fortune 1000 C-suites, published in 2025, found that 70% of CEOs measure marketing’s impact through year-on-year revenue growth and profit margin, but only 35% of CMOs track these metrics as top priorities. One CFO interviewed for the research said they had no interest in hearing about brand awareness unless the C-suite had first agreed that brand awareness was a company goal. That is not an unreasonable position. It is, actually, the right one, because brand awareness is a means to achieving a commercial end.

The disconnect isn’t that CFOs don’t understand marketing. It’s that most sponsorship reporting doesn’t connect sponsorship’s marketing outcomes to the things CFOs are paid to care about.

Six proof points that work for a CFO

A CFO isn’t looking for one single watertight number. They know enough about CapEx and OpEx to understand things are more complex than that. What you need are five or six coherent proof points that, taken together, make a plausible and comparative case.

1. A business metric

Start with something the business already tracks. Revenue contribution. Market share. Customer penetration. Retention rate. Price elasticity. These are not marketing metrics dressed in financial language; they are the actual business metrics the CFO uses to evaluate company performance. If your sponsorship has shifted one of them, even modestly, you have the beginning of a case.

If you cannot point to any of these, you have a measurement problem that needs fixing before you are anywhere near a CFO conversation. Brand awareness in the absence of any commercial indicator is not a credible proof point.

2. A triangulated attribution argument

You are not expected to produce a single-source proof. No investment, anywhere in the business, can do that. What you can do is triangulate: point three independent sources in the same direction. Brand tracking, market share data, sales uplift in geographies or segments with sponsorship exposure.

Our research shows that the strongest sponsorship cases used an average of 3.1 measurement approaches, compared with 2.4 for weaker cases. The CFO is not looking for certainty. They are looking for coherence. Three sources pointing in the same direction are coherent.

3. Comparative efficiency

This is the proof point most sponsorship teams fail to build, partly because it requires data they often don’t have. But without it, the CFO cannot make the comparison they need. What did it cost you to achieve a given commercial outcome - a percentage point of market share, a unit of new customer penetration, a revenue contribution -relative to what the same outcome would have cost through other marketing investments?

You will not always be able to answer this with precision. But you should be able to approximate it. Making the attempt signals that you understand the decision you’re asking them to make.

4. A payback horizon

CFOs understand payback periods. They use them for capital investments, technology purchases, and property decisions. They can apply the same thinking to sponsorship, but only if you frame it for them.

Be explicit about the timeframe for the investment. Short-term return from activation: here is what we expect within twelve months. Long-term brand equity: here is the mechanism by which the sponsorship builds pricing power, reduces customer acquisition cost, or expands mental availability over three to five years. Separating these is not hedging. It is honest, and it mirrors how any sophisticated long-term investment is presented. Effective sponsorships usually deliver both.

5. Downside risk

This is the most underused proof point in sponsorship, and arguably the most persuasive in a renewal conversation. Rather than asking the CFO to justify continuing the spend, put the cost of cutting it on the table.

Analytic Partners found that brands which reduced media investment during the last recession suffered an average 18% loss in incremental sales. Those that increased investment grew by 17%. That is a 35-point swing. The brands that cut thought they were saving money, but what they were actually doing was spending it differently, at a worse rate of return, with longer-term damage to market position that took years to recover.

While that example is about media more broadly, the same lens can be applied to sponsorship, and the defensive value of sustained investment is a CFO-legible argument. It reframes the question from “why should we keep spending this?” to “what does cutting this actually cost us?”

6. The multiplier effect

Does the sponsorship make your other marketing work harder? This is a proof point that is undervalued because it is hard to attribute in isolation, yet it is often where the biggest returns lie.

Sponsorship that provides the creative platform for a brand campaign, rather than running alongside one as a bolt-on, will generate effects that compound across paid media, PR, social, and retail activation. In the strongest cases from our dataset, the sponsorship wasn’t an activation of the brand; it was the brand campaign itself. If you can show that combination effect, even directionally rather than precisely, you are making an argument that a line-by-line budget review simply cannot counter, because it cannot see the integrated whole.

What not to bring

Think about means and ends. Brand exposure, social engagement, and reach are valuable only inasmuch as they serve commercial ends. Presenting them as proof of success in and of themselves, without connection to any commercial metric, is where sponsorship teams often fall down.

I am not dismissing these as measurement tools. Some have a legitimate place in a broader measurement architecture. But in a CFO conversation, they actively undermine your credibility rather than merely failing to help. The CFO knows that an impression is not a sale. Presenting it as a proxy for value signals that you don’t know the difference, either. Or that you’re hoping they don’t.

A Gartner survey found that up to 52% of CFOs remain neutral or sceptical toward marketing. A global study by Transmission and Savanta, covering 414 B2B organisations, found that 69% of CFOs consider brand marketing an expense rather than a revenue driver, and only 36% have complete confidence in their CMO’s budget decisions.

These numbers aren’t the CFO’s fault. They are the accumulated consequence of marketing and sponsorship teams showing up with the wrong evidence.

Make the case

The CFO is not asking you to solve the problem of marketing measurement. They are asking you to make a case.

Those are different skills, and conflating them is how the sector ends up paralysed, waiting for perfect data before attempting the conversation. You can build five or six coherent proof points from the measurement you already have, frame them as a comparative argument, and give the CFO something they can defend.

Because that is what every other investment in the business looks like.

I’m speaking at Media Cat’s event What does effective sponsorship look like? on the evening of June 10th. If you’re a media planner, or someone who oversees media budgets, this session is for you. Sign up for free today.

The first hour of the workshop focused on strategy: time horizons, business objectives, rights selection, brand integration, and scale. The principles I set out in Part 1 of this manifesto. But the group exercise emphasised execution.

Because while strategy gives you a plan, as Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a plan til they get punched in the mouth. It's execution that wins the race.

Which is why the next five principles are about execution. Fans, creativity, talent, measurement, and the relationship between the two organisations that have to make the thing work.

A quick reminder of how I'm framing these. A premise. What the evidence says. The implications for sponsorship. None of these are laws; they're more a set of conclusions I've drawn after a year of thinking about the data and listening to feedback from people across the sponsorship and marketing industries.

PRINCIPLE SIX

Understand the fan

Fans aren’t impressed that you've turned up. They're watching how you behave once you do.

The premise

Sponsorship is perhaps the only marketing discipline in which the audience cares more about the medium than they ever will about the brands using it. Fans have a relationship with the property, whether that's a team, a league, an athlete or an artist, that long pre-dates the brand's involvement, will continue long after the deal expires, and

A brand that fails to understand that relationship can buy all the rights it likes and still be regarded as an unwelcome interloper. A brand that does understand it, however, can become a genuine part of the experience, valued by fans rather than tolerated.

What the evidence says

In his 2001 paper “Understanding sponsorship effects”, Professor Tony Meenaghan identified two factors that drive the commercial impact of a sponsorship: linkage and goodwill. Linkage is the extent to which the fan correctly connects the brand and the property. Goodwill is whether the fan believes the brand is genuinely contributing to the property or to their experience of it. Its existence and effectiveness have subsequently been validated in several other independent academic papers.

In 2019, Prof Meenaghan collaborated with Core Ireland on Generating Fan Goodwill: The Key to Increased Sponsorship Effectiveness and found that goodwill has roughly twice the commercial impact of linkage. Yet most brand-tracking measures only capture the first.

The key to understanding the fan is research. Unless you are a fan of a club or a team, you’ll never understand the mindset, the media, and the experience from a fan’s perspective.

System1's Creative Dividend research, published earlier this year, looked at the relationship between research methods and business outcomes. Campaigns that used five different research tools to understand their audience reported incremental profit at three times the rate of campaigns that used none, with average business results 35% higher. Knowing the audience is the cheapest performance multiplier available.

The implication

A pre-deal phase of audience research is not a luxury. Before signing, a brand should be able to answer four questions: who are these fans, what do they actually care about, where does our category fit into that, and what could we credibly contribute that they would value?

A brand that has the answers is more likely to go beyond badging and design activations that earn goodwill from day one. A brand that arrives without them is paying full rights fees to gain less than half the value on offer.

PRINCIPLE SEVEN

Invest in creativity

The rights fee buys you a stage. Creativity decides whether anyone in the audience notices.

The premise

Of all the controllable inputs in a marketing campaign, creative quality has by far the largest effect on returns. That's true of advertising. It's more true of sponsorship, where the rights fee is fixed and the creative is the only variable left to differentiate one brand from the dozen others sharing the same property.

Yet sponsorship activation is, on average, the least creatively ambitious work the industry produces. Logos on hoardings, fan competitions, meet-the-player, a behind-the-scenes social edit. None of it is terrible, but none of it is memorable.

What the evidence says

Paul Dyson's 2023 analysis of advertising profitability isolated each input that contributes to ROI and asked how much each provides as a multiplier. Targeting, brand size, media mix, and budget setting all matter. Creative quality multiplies returns by 12x, more than any other lever within the marketer's control.

Meanwhile, Nielsen Catalina’s analysis from 2019 covering nearly 500 campaigns attributed 47% of sales contribution to creative. Targeting accounted for 9%. Reach for 22%. Brand for 15%.

System1 and the IPA's Creative Dividend extended this into a planning matrix that plots creative quality relative to category completion a.k.a. Excess Share of Creativity (ESOC), against share of voice relative to share of market a.k.a. Excess Share of Voice (ESOV). Campaigns that have both positive ESOC and ESOV are classified as Growth Engines. Brands with negative ESOC but positive ESOC are classified as Paid Noise, and guided to fix the creative before adding more media budget.

The implication

Many sponsorship activation budgets are set to the agreed rights at the lowest possible cost. The resulting lack of creativity means they produce a lot of competent content that fans see, register, and forget. Reallocating a meaningful share of that budget, or investing further, in fewer and bolder creative platforms would generate disproportionate returns.

This isn't necessarily an argument for bigger production budgets (although that wouldn't hurt). It's an argument for sharper ideas. And a real look at the level of creative quality of the agency the brand is briefing to deliver the activation campaign; in many cases, that might not be the agency that brokered the real.

PRINCIPLE EIGHT

Incorporate talent with intention

Hiring an athlete is the easy bit. Knowing what you actually hired them for is harder.

The premise

Athletes have become some of the most sought-after marketing assets in the world. They have the cultural reach of Hollywood actors, the engagement of social creators, and the credibility of someone who can actually do the thing they're talking about. Brands queue up for them. Agencies build entire businesses around brokering the deals.

But the use cases are blurry. Athletes get hired for awareness. They get hired for credibility. They get hired for content. They get hired to launch a new range. They get hired because a CEO is a fan. The activation flows from the deal, rather than the deal flowing from a clear definition of what the athlete is meant to do.

What the evidence says

The Sponsorship Effect data showed something counterintuitive. Athlete appearances featured in 34.4% of cases that delivered sales effects, but only 24.6% of cases that delivered brand effects. The most effective brand-building campaigns were less likely to use athletes than the average. The most effective sales-driving ones were more likely.

The reading is that athletes are persuaders rather than farmers. They're credible, specific, human endorsers who help convert affinity into action. They are less effective at the broad-reach, distinctive-asset work that builds long-term mental availability.

That aligns with Orlando Wood's research on brand characters versus celebrity endorsements, set out in Look Out. Wood found that brand characters generated significantly larger market-share gains (41% vs 24%) and profit gains (34% vs 24%) than hired celebrity endorsers. Characters are owned. Celebrities are rented.

The implication

If the objective is sales activation, athletes are an excellent choice. If the objective is long-term brand fame, the better question is whether the brand has its own distinctive assets, the kind of characters, taglines, sonic logos and visual codes that compound over time and travel between sponsorships rather than being tied to a single talent contract.

Walkers signed Gary Lineker in 1995, then turned him into a fluent brand ambassador who has carried the brand for 30 years. While that is unlikely to ever happen again due to the volume of opportunities on offer to athletes, you should consider how you will achieve Excess Share of Talent (ESOT - you heard it here first), so they become more associated with your brand than the others they work with. The more exclusive and enduring the relationship, the more valuable it is.

PRINCIPLE NINE

Measure broadly

A single number is reassuring. It's also usually wrong.

The premise

The instinct to reduce sponsorship effectiveness to one headline figure is understandable. CFOs want a single ROI number. Marketing directors want a defensible KPI. Agencies want a clear metric to optimise toward.

But sponsorship sits in what Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework calls a complex domain rather than a simple or complicated one. There are many causes, many effects, and many feedback loops between them. A single metric, however carefully constructed, will misrepresent the truth more often than it captures it.

This isn't an argument against a focused set of objectives and measures; it is an argument about measuring those metrics and ignoring all others.

What the evidence says

The Sponsorship Effect data found that the most effective sponsorships used 3.1 different measurement approaches on average, compared with 2.4 in other cases. The strongest combined brand tracking with sales uplift, market share data, econometric modelling, and third-party valuation. Weaker cases relied on one or two sources.

The wider context is more troubling. The IPA's Crisis in Creative Effectiveness (2019) showed that as short-term metrics have come to dominate marketing measurement over the past two decades, the average effectiveness of advertising campaigns has declined.

It's not just that what gets measured gets prioritised; it's that the short-term digital measures create the false illusion that advertising is a simple system with predictable outcomes. Complexity science teaches us that focusing on one metric in a complex system increases the fragility on the whole. Effectiveness research highlights this is exactly what happens in marketing too.

Sponsorship is particularly vulnerable to this. Its strongest effects are long-term and brand-led; it’s weaker in delivering short-term sales. A measurement framework that captures only the second will systematically under-report the value of the first.

The implication

Sponsorship is a complex system activated through multiple channels that interact unpredictably. It will deliver a combination of brand, behavioural, sales and business effects that are impossible to predict at the outset.

As I’ve written not too long ago, sponsors should have a focused set of integrated objectives but view them as hypotheses. Let the system run, and see if the hypothesis is correct. But be open to the fact that other patterns will emerge that may be more effective. To see those, you need to measure more than your original set of KPIs.

PRINCIPLE TEN

Build a partnership, not a sponsorship

The contract says one thing. The way the two teams behave decides how well any of it works.

The premise

The sales-based culture of the sponsorship sector has led to secrecy, in which brands are less willing to share data and results with rights-holders when a renewal conversation is approaching in year three.

The negotiation tactic, which sees (some) brands deliberately underplay the sponsorship's effectiveness to bring the renewal price down, would be scuppered if both sides had transparency into its impact.

However, the strongest sponsorships are those in which the brand-side team and the rights-holder-side team are genuinely working on the same problem, defining solutions and learning together.

What the evidence says

There’s less evidence for this, though my new research with the IPA will aim to validate the premise, so please do complete the survey when it’s circulated!

However, it’s borne out from my observations and conversations I’ve had across the sector.

Sarah Kendall, Marketing Director at the Football Association, put it well in her contribution to The Sponsorship Effect last year. When brands hold back internal performance data, rights holders don't know which assets are genuinely driving outcomes, so they keep selling the same standard packages, and brands keep buying things they don't activate.

In her words, the dynamic should look more like the one between brands and their advertising agencies. When data flows both ways, the work improves, conversations become more evidence-based, and the partnership delivers measurable value for both sides.

The implication

The renewal conversation gets easier when both organisations are looking at the same data and pointing at the same outcomes. Until they are, every renewal is a negotiation between people working without evidence of what the previous deal achieved.

What this requires is a shift away from the transactional posture of buyer and seller. Brands need to share data they're currently guarding. Rights holders need to develop the analytical and creative capabilities to interpret that data and propose better activations.

Both need to behave as if the deal is meant to deliver marketing solutions, not advertising inventory.

Wrapping up

That's the ten. Five strategy principles last week, five execution principles this week. My best attempt at distilling a year of research and conversations into something usable. None of this is settled, but that’s how this is meant to work.

I have new research coming, the dataset behind The Sponsorship Effect will grow, the evidence base will sharpen, and my thinking will develop.

Apply them where they fit, and let me know about those that don't. The debate is usually where I learn most.

You can find part one of the manifesto here:

The Sponsorship Effect

A Modern Manifesto for Sponsorship Effectiveness (Part 1)

The thing I’ve enjoyed most about going solo and focusing 100% of my time on sponsorship effectiveness is the breadth of conversations I’ve had with people across the sector. I’ve spoken to brands, rights holders, agencies, tech vendors, salespeople, journalists, and academics at a volume and pace I simply wouldn’t have been able to as part of the leade…

Read more

4 months ago · 6 likes · Rory Natkiel

A common misconception I encounter is that I’m a data and measurement specialist. Or, perhaps more accurately, that when I talk about sponsorship effectiveness, I’m talking about data and measurement. Several people have also pointed out that poor measurement in sponsorship isn’t particularly new; it’s a topic that resurfaces every few years.

Which is why I feel it’s necessary to try to land a key point:

Measurement is just one part of effectiveness. It is the sponsorship itself - the objectives, the strategy, the partner selection, the rights schedule, the creative platform, the integrated campaign, the media plan, the experiential activations, the social content, the PR, the corporate hospitality - that is effective. Measurement simply tells us how effective it is.

While there is undoubtedly a need for the sector to improve its approach to measurement, it would be possible to build the perfect data stack and econometric model and still not generate a single penny of incremental profit for the business if the sponsorship isn’t executed effectively.

To crystallise this philosophy and perspective, I’ve decided to distil my thinking into some fundamental Principles of Sponsorship Effectiveness. Each principle is one that I’ve arrived at through a combination of my own research, the application of marketing science to sponsorship, and conversations with practitioners over the past year. I’ll set out a premise, what the evidence says, and the implications for sponsorship.

There are 10 in total, but for time's sake, I’ll keep it to five this week, none of which are about measurement. There are 2 measurement principles in total; it intuitively feels about right to say that about 20% of effectiveness is measurement. Crucially, the other 80% is in strategy, planning, and activation.

Take these principles as a system. Take them as an argument. Take them as a way of thinking clearly about some of the issues that have caused confusion for decades. But, ultimately, take them as a toolkit to go and apply to the sponsorships you work on today, and in the future.

A Modern Manifesto for Sponsorship Effectiveness

PRINCIPLE ONE

Plan for decades

Sponsorship is one of the only marketing disciplines with long-term thinking built into the contract.

The premise

The most effective sponsorships in the world have lasted for decades.

In some cases, the association between a brand and a sport is the more enduring aspect, served through numerous sponsorships: think Red Bull and extreme sports.

In others, it is the partnerships themselves that endure: think Barclays and The Premier League.

In all cases, the brand in question has committed to the long term and has seen results compound over time.

What the evidence says

Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow put forward seven laws of brand growth. The multi-year nature of most sponsorship deals squarely addresses four of them:

Get noticed (grab attention and focus on brand salience to prime the users mind)

Refresh and build memory structures (respect existing associations that make the brand easy to notice and easy to buy)

Create and use distinctive brand assets (use sensory cues to get noticed and stay top of mind)

Be consistent (avoid unnecessary changes, whilst keeping the brands fresh and interesting)

Sponsorship enables a brand to get noticed by creating exposure for its distinctive assets. When repeated consistently year after year, this helps build and refresh memory structures.

One of Binet and Field’s core findings in The Long and the Short of it was that profit growth takes 3+ years to fully realise. OMD published research into UEFA Champions League sponsorships, showing that they reached peak profitability after 6 years, suggesting the payback window for sponsorship could be even longer.

Most recently, System1 and The IPA’s 2024 research on Compound Creativity found that consistent brands saw a range of benefits, not least that they were significantly more likely to generate very large increases in the key business effects of sales, market share and penetration, and profit.

The implication

Sponsorship should be viewed as a long-term investment. While it can be bought to address a short-term need, the ideal scenario is that it becomes an enduring asset for the brand; something that a CMO will hand on to their successor, and has the potential to be in place in twenty, thirty, or forty years’ time.

If the need is short-term, the most effective approach would be to direct sponsorship activation toward that need and then refocus it on the next short-term business challenge that arises, as appropriate. This will achieve both the short and the long.

Planning with this mindset also has key implications for partner selection: if this will last decades, the alignment between the two brands is crucial. More to come on that later.

PRINCIPLE TWO

Start with business objectives

Sponsorship without a business objective is hospitality with a logo on it

The premise

Sponsorship is part of marketing, and marketing exists to help the business grow; it should always be in service of the top-line business objectives. When a deal is signed, a campaign is briefed, or an activation is launched without clear business objectives, the likelihood of achieving a business outcome is drastically reduced.

What the evidence says

My research for SEF, The Sponsorship Effect, showed that the most effective Tier 1 sponsorships were 2.6 times more likely to set a business objective, with over half of them doing so. This shows that the direction of planning - objective to property, not property to objective - is a key predictor of effectiveness. If you set out with a business objective in mind, you’re more likely to focus activations on achieving it. You’re also more likely to measure that outcome.

Strikingly, there was a clear correlation in Tier 1 cases between setting a business objective and achieving it; Tier 1s were 12 times more likely to achieve a business effect than other cases.

The implication

Before the rights are signed, the brand, the rights holder and any agency involved should be able to complete this sentence: we are entering this sponsorship because we need to [insert business objective]. If that sentence can’t be finished, the wrong rights will be bought, the wrong campaign will be briefed, and the wrong measurement framework will be created.

Three years down the line, when the renewal discussions start, you’ll have done loads of stuff but likely be left answering that most awkward of questions: what has this actually done for the business?

PRINCIPLE THREE

Align the rights schedule to the objective

Rights packages are sold as standard bundles. They should be bought as strategic briefs.

The premise

Once an objective is clear, the rights schedule should be constructed in the optimal way to achieve the objective. In practice, most rights deals don’t work this way. Properties sell standardised packages: logo placement, hospitality allocation, LED board time, content rights, social mentions, all bundled to reach the total budget. Many sponsors simply accept the bundle, but activate only the rights they can afford.

The mismatch this creates is expensive in two directions. Sponsors are paying for rights they can’t use. But they’re also directing budget away from additional media that could increase the reach of the activations they do run.

What the evidence says

The Sponsorship Effect research highlighted that not all rights are equal. For example, it shows that athlete appearances may be more effective for generating short-term sales but less effective for increasing brand awareness.

This aligns with research from Binet & Field, who, in Media in Focus, showed how individual channels were better for brand building and sales activation.

Side note: In this diagram, Sponsorship means TV sponsorship, i.e. idents.

The implication

Rights schedules should be tailored much more closely to a partner’s business and marketing objectives.

A brand-building objective requires reach and emotional association: broadcast visibility and content rights deliver these. Hospitality does very little for them. A B2B relationship objective requires access and experience: hospitality and player activation deliver these. LED board time does almost nothing. A sales objective requires data capture and retail integration, but many standard rights packages lack both.

The question to bring into every rights negotiation is not what the property is offering. It’s what the objective actually demands, and whether those specific rights are available.

PRINCIPLE FOUR

Integrate into the brand narrative

Sponsorship that sits next to the brand is a placement. Sponsorship that extends the brand is an asset.

The premise

The more that a sponsorship is integrated into the wider brand narrative, the more effective it will be. This relates to Principle One, in that it requires years of consistent repetition to become true, but it is not just about timescales. It is about brand strategy, the development of distinctive brand assets, and fluent devices.

Rolex’s sponsorship portfolio is no reach-based accident. Whether it’s Wimbledon, the Masters, Formula One, or the America’s Cup, each is a sport defined by precision, mastery, and the relationship between human performance and time. Each is completely aligned with the brand’s own positioning.

When that is consistently activated over decades, the sponsorship can become what is known as a distinctive brand asset, and a fluent device.

And when that sponsorship is fully integrated into the wider brand communications campaign, it can generate significant commercial uplift.

What the evidence says

Guinness won IPA Gold in 2019 with its paper covering eight years of its Made of More brand campaign, with a particular focus on the introduction of its Six Nations sponsorship into the core brand advertising. It generated the highest Profit ROI of any iteration of the campaign.

Meanwhile, Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp’s work on distinctive brand assets, set out in How Brands Grow, How Brands Grow Part 2, and Building Distinctive Brand Assets, established that non-brand-name cues - colours, shapes, sounds, characters, taglines - can become retrieval cues that activate brand memory independently of the brand name itself. An asset becomes famous when 50%+ of category consumers associate with the brand; it becomes unique when 50%+ of category consumers connect it to that brand and that brand only.

Given that framing, it is clear that a sponsorship can become a Distinctive Asset.

The implication

Integration into the brand’s wider communications is not a nice-to-have on top of the rights. It is the mechanism by which a sponsorship ceases to be a logo placement and becomes a brand asset. A brand that sponsors a property but keeps it separate from its mainstream advertising is paying for an association it never fully realises.

A sport, a tournament, a team, an athlete, or a venue can become distinctive if a brand is consistently present, for long enough, across enough touchpoints, and with enough scale, to make it famous and uniquely associated. Which means a brand that runs the sponsorship through everything, consistently, for years, is building something that compounds in value over time.

PRINCIPLE FIVE

Activate with conviction and scale

The rights fee is table stakes; only activation at scale delivers meaningful returns.

The premise

Sponsorship needs to be seen at far larger scales than commonly assumed to begin to work.

The old industry rule is that for every pound spent on rights, at least another pound should go on activation. Some practitioners say two or three. In reality, it rarely reaches 1:1.

Having spent a significant amount of money on a schedule of rights, the majority of sponsors think small when it comes to activation; this means most simply isn’t seen by enough people to move any meaningful commercial needle.

What the evidence says

Les Binet and Will Davis’s “Go Big or Go Home,” presented at the IPA, makes one core argument: budget is what drives marketing effectiveness, not efficiency. In fact, the budget is eight times more important than ROI.

Drawing on the IPA Databank from 1998 to 2025, Binet and Davis show that budget accounts for 89% of the variation in incremental profit generated by advertising. Media ROI, the metric most marketers focus on, accounts for the remaining 11%. In their framing: effectiveness equals efficiency multiplied by effort. Profit equals ROI multiplied by spend. You can optimise the ROI figure all you like. If the spend isn’t there, the profit isn’t either.

Their diagnosis of why advertisers underperform is direct. Tight budgets and a focus on efficiency push brands toward what they call small thinking: 56% target sub-segments rather than all potential customers, 62% neglect over-45s despite that group accounting for 50% of consumer spending, 68% focus on the 5% who are already in market. Thinking small increases efficiency a little and reduces effectiveness a lot.

They also set out what they call ‘exposure thresholds’: the scale of audience contact needed before a campaign starts to move commercial metrics. To simply pay for a video advertisement, a brand needs one to three million exposures. To generate a statistically significant sales uplift, the threshold rises to 30 to 60 million exposures. For a meaningful market-share gain, the range is 200 million to 1 billion.

Meanwhile, Analytics Partners’ ROI Genome project has consistently shown that every additional channel within a campaign increases the ROI of the campaign.

The implication

The activation budget is where returns are made or lost. A brand visible on a pitch-side board at a single match reaches 40,000 to 80,000 people in the ground and perhaps a few million via broadcast. A social campaign run around a tournament might reach hundreds of thousands. Neither, on its own, comes close to the threshold at which sales effects become statistically detectable, at least for large brands.

Sponsors need to invest in activation at much greater scale, supporting the deal through as many channels as possible, to deliver its full potential.

When looking at brands with multiple sponsorships, the question worth asking is not how many properties the budget can afford. It’s how many it can afford to activate properly.

Wrapping up

That’s enough for today. Taken together, these principles begin to show how effectiveness affects every part of the sponsorship lifecycle.

While measurement is important, if we take an evidence-based approach at every stage, we can improve the returns for all involved.

You can find part two of the manifesto via the link below.

The Sponsorship Effect

A Modern Manifesto for Sponsorship Effectiveness (Part 2)

On Tuesday, I was at Wembley running a sponsorship effectiveness workshop with my SEF co-founder, Charlie Dundas of GSIQ, at Suntory's European Marketing Forum…

Read more

4 months ago · 1 like · Rory Natkiel

Speaking gigs

I’m looking forward to speaking at two events in June.

On the evening of the 10th, I’ll be with MediaCat UK for What does effective sponsorship look like? at VCCP Media’s offices in London. It’s a free event focusing on sponsorship from a media perspective.

The next day I’ll be hosting a Sponsorship Effectiveness round table at Sponsorship Masters, a full day event hosted by The Sponsor, with speakers from brands including BMW, Sage, Kia, and Canon.

I also now have a speaking agent, so if you’d like me to speak at your company or conference, please contact anna@theilluminari.com

“Advertising used to work like this: you sat on your sofa while creatives were paid to throw a bucket of shit in your face. Today you’re expected to sit on the bucket, fill it with your own shit, and tip it over your head while filming yourself on your mobile. Then you upload the video to the creatives. You do the work; they still get paid.”

Charlie Brooker, Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn, The Guardian, 2009

Something odd happened to the word “engagement” around 2010: UK search interest in the term doubled, and has kept climbing ever since. But it had nothing to do with marriage. Over roughly the same period, the proportion of adults in England and Wales who were married fell from 55% to 49%.

It’s a complete coincidence. But it also shows that there can only be one culprit: social media.

YouTube had launched in 2005. Facebook opened to the public in 2006. Twitter arrived the same year. By 2010, the social platforms had reached the scale where they needed a metric they could sell to advertisers, and the marketing industry needed a way to defend its rapidly growing digital spend to CFOs who were starting to ask what they were getting for it.

Engagement was the answer both sides landed on. It sounded active rather than passive - who wouldn’t want customers ‘leaning forward’ to interact with your brand? Engagement came with satisfyingly large numbers that could be updated in real time on dashboards.

And, let’s be honest, it sounded vaguely plausible to a generation of budget-holders who had no clue what social media was or how it worked.

Sponsorship embraced engagement with both hands

Like the rest of the marketing sector, sponsorship didn’t resist this. In fact, its enthusiasm for engagement may have been because it lacked confidence in other measures.

In June 2010 the Association of National Advertisers and IEG published a survey under the headline ‘Marketers Want Sponsorship and Event Metrics but Lack Necessary Capabilities’. Only 35% of respondents always or almost always measured the returns from their sponsorship activity. More than half had no standardised measurement process. TV logo exposure was the second most commonly used metric, but ranked among the lowest in terms of value delivered.

The measurement deficit was real, and the ANA’s problem statement was accurate. But the answer the industry reached for wasn’t.

By 2013, Tony Meenaghan, one of the most cited academics in sponsorship research, had curated a special issue of Psychology & Marketing on measuring sponsorship performance. His framing was that digital media had transformed sponsorship measurement, and a shift from brand exposure to engagement demanded evolving metrics to match.

In 2014, Steven Falk was writing in iSportConnect under the title “Engagement is the Real Thing.” His argument was that sports sponsorship was no longer just about how many fans a club could claim, but about how many of those fans a sponsor could actively ‘engage’ with commercially.

The tone across the sponsorship trade press since then has been near-unanimous. Everybody knows that exposure and AVE isn’t the perfect measure; engagement was offered as the solution.

And the narrative hasn’t moved. In June 2025, iSportConnect ran a piece titled “From Exposure to Engagement: Data-Driven Evolution of Sports Sponsorships”, which could have been lifted straight from Meenaghan’s 2013 editorial. The headline proof points offered were Heineken’s UEFA Champions League and F1 sponsorship, yielding $143 million in “social media return” in 2022, and Atlassian’s 2025 F1 launch, generating 233,700 Instagram engagements for a race suit reveal. You can find variations of the same framing across every trade publication covering sponsorship right now.

The only issue is that, as far back as 2012, Ehrenberg-Bass research was already underway that undermined the whole premise. In all the excitement around social media, very few appear to have been reading it.

Fourteen years after Ehrenberg-Bass published the numbers showing engagement rates meant almost nothing, flagship sponsorship reports are still citing engagement as evidence of success.

What the research actually found

I’ve not mentioned Karen Nelson-Field in this newsletter before, but she’s a pioneering figure in marketing science who, alongside her Ehrenberg Bass colleagues, built the empirical case against engagement over 2012 and 2013, publishing across three major outputs.

In May 2012, Nelson-Field and Jennifer Taylor published “Facebook fans: A fan for life?” in Admap. They looked at the top 200 brand pages on Facebook. Just one brand achieved an engagement rate above 2%. Only 10% reached 1%. The remaining 180 brands averaged 0.54%. Even so-called passion brands managed only 0.64%. Their observation was understated and devastating. Even if these brands achieved ten times their current engagement rate, what that actually meant for the brand was unclear.

Later that year, Nelson-Field, Emma Riebe and Byron Sharp published “What’s Not to Like? Can a Facebook Fan Base Give a Brand The Advertising Reach It Needs?” in the Journal of Advertising Research. They found that 57% of a typical brand’s Facebook fans were already heavy buyers. Engagement was measuring behaviour among customers the brand already had, rather than the light and non-buyers who actually drive growth. It was a loyalty metric dressed up as a growth metric.

Nelson-Field then extended the argument into a book. Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, drawing on two years of research across nine studies and around a thousand social videos. The finding across all of it was the same. The old rules of buyer behaviour that governed how brands grow through advertising still applied in social media. Engagement, likes and shares followed the same patterns Andrew Ehrenberg had documented in conventional media decades earlier. The “free ride” promise of viral marketing was a myth. Her line was blunt. “Wake up and smell the well-branded coffee.”

Byron Sharp has been more direct about it since. At a 2025 Mi3-LinkedIn event, he warned that the industry’s hunger for engagement with consumers was a category error rather than a solution to anything. His argument from How Brands Grow onward has been consistent. Brands grow through reach into light and non-buyers, not through deeper relationships with people who already buy them.

This isn’t exactly a fringe theory. It’s published in peer-reviewed journals and by Oxford University Press. It’s been taught in marketing science faculties for over a decade.

Why my boss banned engagement

I got my first marketing job in 2009, with social media being my ‘transferable skill’ from a career in the music industry. I was as much an engagement advocate as the next Digital Marketing Manager.

However, that changed when I met Phil Adams, the first Planning Director I ever worked under, in my first agency role. Most of what I know about how to think properly, I learned sitting across from him. I got back in touch with him this week about one slide from a talk of his I’ve never forgotten.

The talk was Good strategy is Purposeful, Precise, Prosaic and Profound, delivered at Google Firestarters 16 in London on 10 June 2015. One of the slides was titled “The A-Z of engagement” and listed thirty verbs. Adding. Backing. Bookmarking. Buying. Checking in. Clicking. Commenting. Downloading. Embedding. Entering. Favouriting. Following. Joining. Liking. Listening. Mashing up. Opting in. Reading. Reblogging. Recommending. Registering. Retweeting. Reviewing. Searching. Sharing. Signing up. Tagging. Talking about. Viewing. Visiting.

I love the speaker note underneath it:

A like and a buy are not the same thing. A follow and a share are not the same thing. A download and a comment are not the same thing. Each of those verbs describes a distinct behaviour with a distinct strategic implication. Rolling 30 of them into one KPI doesn’t make measurement simpler. It makes it sloppier, because it pretends these behaviours are interchangeable when almost none of them are.

The precision problem

The argument isn’t that likes, shares, and follows are worthless. It’s that treating them as a single thing called “engagement” is where rigour collapses.

Each of those behaviours describes something specific and serves a distinct strategic purpose. A share is an act of advocacy. If your goal is reaching audiences you haven’t reached before, shares are the thing to optimise for because they do the work of extending distribution beyond your existing network. A follow is a signal of intent. Someone has opted in to hear more from you, which is useful for owned audience building, but tells you nothing about whether you reached anyone new this month. A comment is a signal of depth, useful for understanding resonance, hopeless as a growth metric. A like is closer to a reflex than a signal; it’s useful quantitative data on whether your creative is good or not, but it doesn’t tell you anything about what people thought or felt. A completed video view tells you something about attention that a click doesn’t. A sign-up tells you something about commercial intent that a share doesn’t.

The key question, every time, is to ask what you’re actually trying to do. If the answer is “build awareness among people who don’t know us yet,” shares are what you want and follows are noise. If the answer is “deepen consideration among people already leaning in,” completion rates and dwell time are what you want, and likes are noise. If the answer is “drive sales now,” click-throughs are what you want, and shares are noise. There is always a more precise way to describe the interaction that actually matters for the campaign in front of you.

Engagement collapses all of this into a single blob, which is why it can’t tell you whether anything worked. Precision about which specific interaction you want, and why, gets you a measurement framework that can answer the question. And it gets you closer to answering the real question: did any of this impact the bottom line?

Phil’s slide is ten years old, but the sloppy A-Z is still implied under one nebulous catch-all word in briefs and reports to this day.

So here’s a challenge: ban yourself from using the word engagement.

You’ll be a better marketer for it.

I’m delighted to be working with The IPA on a new piece of research into sponsorship effectiveness. We’ll be looking for participants from brands, rights holders, and agencies to complete an in-depth 10-12 minute survey about how sponsorship is planned, bought, activated, and measured. If you’d be interested in taking part, please click this link to provide your email, and we’ll send you the survey soon.

In all honesty, that analogy hasn’t ever felt 100% right. Not least because it could be confused with ‘tech platform', ‘brand platform’ and ‘creative platform’. But I couldn’t quite find the right word to replace ‘platform’.

Then I listened to JP Castlin on a recent WARC podcast about systems thinking, and he named it.

JP is one of the sharpest strategic thinkers I’ve ever met, working at the intersection of adaptive business strategy, systems theory, and marketing science; the WARC podcast was about systems thinking, and what he said about the difference between ordered and complex systems was the concept I’d had in my head, but hadn't found the right way to describe.

I got in touch, he was generous enough to give me an hour of his time earlier this week (and the analogy that I used for this week’s title), and so this piece is my attempt to work through how that conversation and my subsequent research into complex systems science are shaping my thinking.

What follows is a work in progress. Some of it feels solid, other bits need some development, and I’m writing it partly to test it, not just to share it.

A problem of mistaken identity

The critique of sponsorship’s effectiveness practice is well known: measurement is weak, metrics are inconsistent, and practitioners rely on exposure rather than engaging seriously with the marketing science literature that advertising has spent decades building.

All of that is a genuine problem. But fixing all of it might still not address the underlying issue, because beneath the measurement problem, I suspect there’s an ontological one.

In other words, it could be that we've misidentified what kind of thing sponsorship actually is.

Ordered versus complex systems

Complex systems science is a relatively new field, and a new way of thinking. If you fancy a laugh, have a listen to this 2013 episode of Radio 4’s In Our Time, where Melvyn Bragg gets audibly frustrated with the academics trying to explain it to him.

An ordered system is one where cause and effect are visible and repeatable. Most engineering works this way; if you know the system well enough, you can write down the rules, and the rules will hold. You press a button, and the machine does the same thing every time. You change one variable in the system, you observe one change in the output. The relationship between input and output is stable, predictable, and in principle can be optimised. If there are lots of intricate connected parts, such as in a jet engine, the system is said to be complicated.

A complex system, on the other hand, is an entirely different kind of system in which many parts interact with each other in ways that can’t be predicted.

The example that’s often given is a city. You can’t predict a city’s behaviour by studying its individual parts in isolation. You can’t work out what London will do next by cataloguing every resident’s intentions, every business’s plans, every building’s function. The city’s behaviour emerges from the interactions between all of those things, and those interactions are constantly changing each other.

A new tube line doesn’t just change travel times; it changes property prices, which changes who lives where, which changes what businesses open, which changes the character of an area, which feeds back into all the rest. There is no lever you can pull that produces only the effect you intended.

Weather systems work this way. Financial markets work this way - which is why economic forecasting is so often wrong when it assumes otherwise. Rainforests work this way too.

Despite their variety, scientists have found that the hallmarks of a complex system are consistent. Interactions between parts matter more than the parts themselves. Small changes can have disproportionate effects.

Critically, outcomes are said to be emergent, in that they arise from the system rather than being predetermined by any single input.

Managing a complex system, therefore, means responding to emergent signals that provide positive feedback, i.e. good outcomes, and gradually increasing resources in that direction to encourage more of that outcome. But a complex system also adapts. It responds to being acted upon, meaning the rules shift as you intervene.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s a legitimate scientific framework, built from observation, with practical implications for how we manage things, whether that’s cities, epidemics, a business, a stadium, or a sponsorship.

Sponsorship is a complex system

A brand entering a major sports property isn’t pulling a lever and watching a gauge move. It’s entering something that is already in motion.

The property has its own history, its own audience relationships, its own emotional weight, its own narrative arc. It exists in the broader cultural context of a sport, a season, and moments that the brand has no control over. And the brand participates across multiple touchpoints simultaneously. The shirt. The stadium. The broadcast. The social content. The hospitality. The partnership announcements. The co-created media campaigns.

None of these exists in isolation. Each changes the context in which the others are received. A spectacular shirt launch means something different in year nine of a consistent partnership than it does in year one of an opportunistic one. A stadium naming rights deal plays out differently when the team is winning. Hospitality affects a relationship that changes how a CFO behaves in a procurement review six months later.

These outputs can’t be predicted. They emerge from the interactions between all of it, and between the sponsorship and everything else the brand is doing in-market. The sponsorship is running alongside advertising, alongside product launches, alongside whatever is happening in culture, alongside what competitors are doing. All of it is touching the audience at once.

This is what complexity science would call a complex adaptive system. And it has profound implications for sponsorship, because you cannot manage a complex system with the tools you would use to manage an ordered one.

The risks of managing complexity with order

In the 1920s, wolves were removed from Yellowstone National Park. The logic was straightforward: fewer wolves meant safer livestock and a more manageable ecosystem. What actually happened was that elk populations exploded, overgrazing riverbanks, which caused erosion and began to alter river dynamics. When wolves were reintroduced decades later, elk started moving differently under predation pressure, vegetation recovered, and the rivers gradually restabilised. The ordered-system logic said: remove this input (wolves), solve this problem (loss of livestock). The emergent outcome from the complex system said something else entirely.

The Amazon tells a similar story. The rainforest doesn’t just sit in rainfall, it generates its own. Trees release moisture that travels thousands of miles inland, creating what scientists call flying rivers, sustaining the interior of the continent. When forest is cleared at the edges to optimise for agriculture, you don’t just lose those trees. You disrupt the water cycle and the remaining forest starts to dry out. Nobody knows exactly where the threshold is, but at some point enough has been removed that the system can no longer sustain itself and tips toward savanna. The complex system was running a continental weather pattern that nobody had modelled.

It sounds trite to link those kind of outcomes to sponsorship (the stakes are certainly lower) but the principles of complex systems still apply.

For example if you remove one touchpoint from an established sponsorship - cut the hospitality budget, drop the shirt deal, pull out of the community program - and you’re not just losing that specific output. You’re changing the context for everything everything else. The shirt deal isn’t only providing visibility; it also gives the broadcast integration meaning, lends the social content legitimacy, and changes how the hospitality feels to the people in the room. Pull it and the system reorganises around the absence. Similarly, removing women's football from a wider sponsorship portfolio because the eyeballs just aren't there right now may impact the perception and effectiveness of other partnerships. The metric for one component part might have looked weak, but that metric may not be able to tell you what else the component was holding up.

The second risk is false confidence. In an ordered system, a precise metric is a reliable signal that the system itself is working. In a complex one, a precise metric is often just the thing you happened to measure. Which means you don't just fail to see what's happening at a system-wide level, but you risk believing things that aren't true.

For example, say a brand tracks whether its target audience knows it sponsors a property; that number rises, and so the team declares the sponsorship is working. What the tracker didn’t ask was whether knowing about the sponsorship changed how people felt about the brand, whether it made them more likely to buy it, or whether any of that awareness had travelled anywhere near a commercial outcome. All anyone knows is that the sponsorship was noticed.

Even worse, when you optimise hard for a single metric in a complex system, it actively increases the fragility of everything around it. This implies that a brand that strips its sponsorship back to the two or three touchpoints that scored best on last year’s evaluation isn’t necessarily running a leaner, more efficient programme. It could be unintentionally removing interactions that produced beneficial outcomes that previously went undetected, whilst also making the remaining touchpoints more vulnerable to disruption. The youth programme that looked marginal on its own metrics might have been the thing that held the emotional context together. You won’t know that until it’s gone.

Underneath all of this is a cultural risk that becomes ingrained over time. Managing a complex system like an ordered one produces organisations that measure what’s measurable rather than what’s meaningful, resulting in an inability to read the system at all.

None of this means sponsorship is unmanageable. But it means the management approach has to match the system you’re actually operating in.

Why the current toolkit keeps failing

The standard evaluation apparatus in sponsorship - logo exposure time, advertising value equivalency, awareness tracking, social listening - isn’t just inadequate in the way that a small hammer is inadequate for a big nail. It’s inadequate in the way a hammer is for welding.

These metrics assume an ordered system. They assume you can isolate an input, measure an output, and draw a reliable line between them. AVE assumes that exposure functions like an equivalent piece of paid media. Logo exposure time assumes visibility and attention were complete. Brand tracking assumes awareness shifted because of this touchpoint, and not the seven others working in parallel.

The whole sponsorship industry knows this, and has been scratching its collective head for years about how to overcome these issues. The periodic industry discussion about finding a universal measure for sponsorship is a symptom of this confusion. I understand the appeal. But the problem is that it assumes an ordered system where a single input (sponsorship) reliably moves a single output (revenue) in a predictable direction.

What the right framework might look like

I'm still working this out. But the implications of complexity could mean some fundamental changes in how we manage sponsorship.

On objectives, the most important change is how we frame them. Currently, they exist as targets. But a target creates a closed system. You define the output in advance, measure against it, and declare success or failure. Everything outside the target becomes noise. That’s ordered-system thinking.

In a complex system, we still need integrated objectives, but they should function as a hypothesis rather than a target. A hypothesis makes the causal mechanism explicit - “we believe that growing awareness through this sponsorship, while creating opportunities for trial, will increase penetration and drive market share growth” - which is actually doing more intellectual work than a target, because it forces you to name what you think is happening and why.

In a complex system the hypothesis has to be built before the sponsorship starts, not retrofitted at evaluation stage, and it needs to be held as a proposition to be tested and validated rather than a promise to be delivered. In that context, unexpected signals aren’t anomalies to be ignored or explained away. They’re useful data.

This also changes the CFO conversation. A hypothesis shows rigour without implying false certainty. “We believe X causes Y, here is our evidence base, here is how we will know if we’re right, and here is what we will do if we find something more interesting” is a more honest and more defensible position than a projected ROI that was invented in a spreadsheet.

On evaluation, the measurement architecture needs to be broad enough to catch signals you didn’t anticipate, not just the ones your hypothesis predicted. That requires measuring far more than most sponsors currently do. Business metrics: market share, penetration, profit margin, price elasticity. Brand metrics: awareness, salience, associations, affinity, preference. Sales metrics: revenue, volume, mix, customer acquisition. Behavioural metrics: what people actually do, not just what they say they’ll do. None of these in isolation tells you much. Taken together, over time, they start to reveal what the system is doing - including things your original hypothesis didn’t account for.

The instinct to narrow measurement down to one or two headline numbers is understandable. It’s also how you guarantee you’ll miss a lot (maybe most) of what’s happening.

On planning, the job changes too. In a complex system, you might commit to a direction - consistent brand presence, memory structures built over time through distinctive assets, fan goodwill to build affinity - but you hold the specific tactics more loosely, because the system will tell you things your plan didn’t account for. You need to be able to react to feedback, not roll out the same cookie-cutter approach week after week, season after season.

On activation, the key to generating signals in a complex system is scale. Micro interventions are unlikely to create a signal strong enough to be noticed. Activation should be done with conviction, through a broad range of channels, with the investment required to achieve the reach and frequency to impact behaviour. This aligns with Binet and Davis’s recent IPA research, Go Big or Go Home, which highlighted the scale of reach and impressions required to meaningfully move the needle on business metrics.

On timescales, the most valuable patterns in a complex system are macro patterns, which are only visible over time. The brands that have built durable value through sponsorship - the ones that get referenced whenever someone asks for proof that this works - did so through decades of consistent presence that created effects a short-term campaign could never achieve. That’s not a romantic argument for brand building, it’s how complex systems work. Consistency creates the conditions for emergence. There aren’t any shortcuts.

The early years of a sponsorship should therefore as much about learning what the system is doing as about performing against targets. The sponsor needs to build genuine feedback loops from across the business, be open to unexpected signals rather than just reporting against a pre-agreed scorecard, and direct resources towards signals that provide positive feedback.

What it might look like in practice

Let’s take a real example I heard of recently. A brand partnered with a Premier League club, and as one strand of its activation, it introduced a third brand, which was an existing charity partner. The campaign was around mental health, and the initial set of KPIs was CSR-oriented.

However, because the brand has broad measurement capabilities, including econometrics, multi-touch attribution, brand tracking, and more, its Data & Insight team identified unexpected emergence: introducing the CSR element via the charity partner appeared to increase the partnership's commercial outcomes. CSR elements were then introduced into other partnerships, and the system generated similar positive feedback.

This then gave the brand the confidence to run the partnership’s ad during the UEFA Champions League - the first time any sponsorship campaign by the brand had run on TV - generating significant commercial gains. That emergent outcome would have been missed had the measurement of the initial activation been limited solely to its CSR goals.

How do you sell a complex system?

I’m aware this creates a problem I haven’t solved: if you can’t draw a straight line from input to output, how do you give a brand enough certainty to commit?

Rights-holders need to close deals. Brand-side teams need to justify budgets. CFOs need a number they can challenge. None of them is going to sign off on “the system will tell us things we didn’t anticipate.”

Two thoughts come to mind: firstly, that if you measure widely, plan with intention, and activate with commitment and scale, it’s likely you will see a short-term uplift in one particular area of the system, which should satisfy internal stakeholders that the partnership is working, and buy time for the macro patterns to emerge.

But secondly, I think it’s also worth being honest about the fact that the certainty most brands are currently sold regarding any media investment is illusory. A sponsorship framework that admits complexity and works with it is more useful than one that pretends the system is ordered and consistently fails to explain what happened.

Complex systems science intuitively feels like a useful way to think about sponsorship, particularly as bigger brands make ever bigger investments and want to answer that fundamental, messy question: what is this doing for my business?

Thanks again to JP Castlin for putting a name to something I’d been circling around. More to follow.

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Lineker was a classic number 9 who specialised in goals inside the six-yard box. He played before the era of modern analytics, but over a 16-year career, he scored 331 competitive goals in 654 games, due to an innate talent for taking up high-probability scoring positions. His expected goals figure, if calculated, would be very high indeed.

He remains the only player to have become the English top tier’s leading goal scorer with three different clubs: Leicester, Everton, and Tottenham. He was the first and only English player to score a hat trick for Barcelona (in an El Clásico, nonetheless).

When it came to his England career, the question of whether he might be the first player to surpass Bobby Charlton’s England scoring record was asked for years. He ultimately fell one short, at 48. It was Wayne Rooney who finally broke it, followed by Harry Kane; both played in an era with far more international fixtures each season.

Mexico 86: the Golden Boot and the Hand Of God

Mexico 86 is the first FIFA World Cup I remember. To give you an idea of the just how different the era was, the names of then-manager Bobby Robson’s first XI were: Pete, Gary, Kenny, Terry, Terry, Trevor, Glenn, Pete, Steve, Pete, and Gary.1

England got off to a shaky start in the group (some things never change), losing to Portugal 1-0 and drawing 0-0 with Morocco. The press were starting to ask questions. In a vital must-win final group game against Poland, Lineker scored a hat trick. England won 3-0 and progressed to the 2nd round against Paraguay, where he scored two more in another 3-0 win (Peter Beardsley got the other), to set us up with a quarter-final against Argentina.

This was a juicy sporting rematch. We’d played Argentina in a quarter-final before in 1966, when England won 1-0 en route to winning the Jules Rimet trophy. Manager Alf Ramsey described the Argentine players as ‘animals’ after a bruising encounter in which their captain Antonio Rattín was sent off.

But by 1986 it was also a politically loaded fixture. The UK and Argentina had been at war just four years earlier in a dispute over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands; when the two teams met, diplomatic relations between the two countries hadn’t been restored.

Which is why both countries were watching with heightened interest. The match is famous for Diego Maradona’s two goals, his first an infamous handball that he later attributed to the ‘Hand of God’, the other an all-time worldie in which he ran through the entire England team and tucked the ball away. Lineker scored in the 81st minute, but it was too late. England lost 2-1, and we were out.

That goal, however took Lineker to six goals for the tournament, earning him the Golden Boot. He was the first English player to become the World Cup’s highest scorer.

His fame was now worldwide, and secured him a move to Barcelona for three seasons, before returning to play for Tottenham in 1989. Heading into the 1990 World Cup he was part of an entertaining if ultimately unsuccessful Spurs team managed by Terry Venables, that also featured Paul Gascoigne in his absolute prime.

Italia 90

It’s hard to describe the cultural impact of the 1990 World Cup in England. The 1980s were a dark time for English football; English clubs had been banned from all UEFA competitions for five years following the Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985, when a stampede by casuals ‘supporting’ Liverpool caused the death of 39 people at the European Cup Final.

In the UK, fans were literally caged into terraced stands to prevent violence in the grounds. Those cages would turn into death-traps at Hillsborough in 1989, when 97 genuine Liverpool fans died in a crush at an FA Cup semi final. Four years before that 56 people died at a Bradford City match after a lit cigarette was dropped onto rubbish that had been allowed to accumulate under the main stand, which had a wooden roof.

The idea that football was a rough sport for violent fans in decrepit, unsafe grounds was widespread. It was a far cry from the safe, sanitised environment we know today; it would take the introduction of all-seater stadiums and the creation of the Premier League for it to become a nice (if expensive) day out for a typical middle-class family. But the seed was sown in the summer of 1990.

Italia 90 was the breath of fresh air football needed. The European ban had been lifted and English clubs would return to UEFA competitions the next season. Hooliganism had started to recede, in part thanks to 1988’s “Second Summer of Love”, in which acid house music swept the country and rival hooligans suddenly found themselves sharing dance floors, loved-up on ecstacy2. The official England World Cup single, ‘World In Motion’ was written by New Order who also owned Manchester’s Hacienda nightclub, an acid house institution; the single’s working title was “E is for England”. It featured a rap by John Barnes, was New Order’s only UK number one and is, without doubt, the greatest football song of all time.

Meanwhile the BBC’s coverage reached new heights of production for coverage of a sporting tournament; it set a new benchmark, and a template we would still recognise today, with Pavarotti’s iconic rendition of Nessun Dorma turning a whole generation of football fans into opera fans.

England were a better team this time. Despite yet another shaky start to the group, Bobby Robson showed tactical flexibility and switched to a 5-3-2 to suit the squad he had. Paul Gascoigne was arguably the best player in the tournament, David Platt scored an absolute beauty in the last minute of extra time to beat Belgium in the second round, and a tense quarter final against Cameroon saw Lineker score two of his four penalties in a 3-2 win.

We were genuinely unlucky in our semi-final against Germany. A Paul Parker deflection led to Germany’s first goal, and an agonisingly close back-post chance for Gascoigne could have won it late. But the iconic, enduring moment was undoubtedly Gazza’s yellow card. It was his second of the tournament, his first had come in the group stage, which in that era meant he would miss the final if England progressed. Gascoigne burst into tears. Lineker showed characteristic empathy and emotional maturity amongst the intensity of the fixture, famously signalling to Bobby Robson to ‘have a word’.

The game went to penalties; Chris Waddle skied his over the bar and England were out, thereby beginning the dreaded sequence of penalty losses at major tournaments that continues to haunt us to this day.

Lineker scored four goals at that World Cup, but they were his last at a major tournament. He played two more seasons at Tottenham before heading off to Japan to see out his career at Grampus Nagoya, finally retiring and heading back to the UK in 1995.

Lineker x Walkers Crisps

It should be clear how and why Lineker had become incredibly famous in England, in a way that none of his peers ever achieved. By playing a pivotal role in moments that reverberated through popular culture, he transcended football to become a national celebrity. The fact that he was articulate helped, and his ‘nice guy’ image was important too; he had never received a yellow or red card in his career.

Upon his return from Japan, he was moving into his ‘retirement’. He’d undoubtedly earned well during his career, but was on nothing like Premier League salaries, so brand deals were very much on his radar.

Walkers Crisps made the perfect approach. The Walkers factory in Leicester was, and still is, the largest crisp production plant in the world, producing over 11 million bags of crisps per day, using about 800 tons of potatoes. Lineker, born and bred in Leicester, would be the perfect ambassador to reinforce its English heritage despite being sold to Standard Brands in 1970, and PepsiCo in 1989.

Walkers’ agency was BMP DDB, who developed the brilliant creative platform of “No More Mister Nice Guy”, in which Gary revealed a hitherto unknown nasty side by stealing people’s crisps. It launched with an iconic ad called Welcome Home in 1995.

The campaign went onto feature more famous advertising, including this wonderful sport featuring Paul Gascoigne, riffing on his tears at Italia 90.

Lineker continued to make TV ads for Walkers until 2021, representing a 26 year run of the principal public face of the brand; he remains an ambassador to this day.

This is an absolutely first-class example of using sporting talent. The advertising is brilliant. The creative strategy is based on a famous characteristic of Lineker himself. It’s genuinely funny, there’s great use of music, it references other areas of culture. The ads feature characters with agency, in scenes and stories that unfold with progresssion. They use Lineker’s expressiveness to great effect, without falling into the trap of trying to get a footballer to act. These are all ‘showmanship’ features that System1 research suggests create greater emotion and attention.

But what is most commercially valuable isn’t the craft of the ads, although each on its own would have undoubtedly shifted brand, sales and commercial metrics. It’s the consistent and repeated use of Lineker, completely exclusively.

Walkers turned Gary Lineker into a Fluent Device.

Fluent Devices

Orlando Wood, from System1, is a very clever man, and he first described the concept of a Fluent Device in his 2017 book Lemon for the IPA. A fluent device is a recurring character or element that a brand brings back across multiple ads over time. It doesn’t explain the product; instead, it helps the audience to quickly recognise the brand, and to feel a positive emotion about it.

Some classic examples include Sugar Puff’s Honey Monster or Andrex’s labrador puppies, more recently comparethemarket’s Meerkats and Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot. But fluent devices aren’t limited to characters. It could be a repeated situation, such as ‘Should have gone to Specsavers’, or ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’ for Snickers.

At a technical level, Fluent Devices are a specific type of Distinctive Brand Assets (DBA) as defined by Ehrenberg-Bass. A DBA is anything - a colour, a logo, a jingle, a shape, a character - that has become so strongly associated with a brand that it triggers recognition on its own. The asset’s job is pure recognition.

A fluent device does that too, but it also generates active interest. It shows up in new situations and creates new stories while staying true to its established format or character. The recognition it builds isn’t just “I know that brand”, it’s “I like this character/format, and I’m curious to see what happens next.”

In my research, I’ve not been able to find any instances of Gary Lineker advertising any other brands until 2017. That is 22 years of complete exclusivity, with one of the most famous sportspeople in the country. If you saw Gary Lineker in a TV ad, you instantly recognised it as a Walker’s ad. Thanks to the investment in creativity and a brilliant, repeatable creative strategy, you were interested in what he did next.

Hired Devices

In the vast majority of cases, there is an important distinction between a true fluent device, which is 100% created and owned by a brand, and a hired device, in which a celebrity is used as the face of the brand. Gary Lineker is one of the few instances in which a hired device becomes a fluent device, due to the unusual length and exclusivity of the partnership. Harvey Keitel became similarly fluent for Direct Line.

But they are the exception that proves the rule that including a celebrity in adverting campaigns can be much less valuable than it first might appear.

By way of an example, I can still picture the Honey Monster scoring a diving header for Newcastle United more vividly than I can recall most ads I've seen featuring actual footballers.

In fact, I’d forgotten Kevin Keegan was even in that advert until I went to YouTube to find it. Think about what that for a second. A fictional yellow character, playing for a club it has no real connection to, carved a deeper memory than the real sporting talent placed in front of a camera. That's what happens when a brand owns its character outright: the creative freedom is total, the association is uncontested, the memorability compounds with every appearance, and the fee never goes up no matter how famous the character becomes.

System1 has done a lot of research into this field, and found no significant uplift in its Star or Spike ratings compared to the average ad when a sporting celebrity is added. But when you introduce a fluent device that a brand owns, there is a significant uplift in Star and Spike scores. In other words, introducing a sporting celebrity to a campaign may provide no benefit whatsoever.

Why might this be? There are a few key reasons:

1. Sports celebrities often partner with multiple brands, making it impossible for them to become synonymous with one brand

2. Ads featuring the sports celebrity are often celebrity-led, rather than brand-led i.e. for the audience it is the celebrity's ad promoting the brand, rather than an ad for the brand that happens to feature the celebrity

3. The creative work that the sports person appears in often doesn’t generate the kind of positive emotions that would create warmth towards them, and the resulting curiosity about how it will show up next

4. Most partnerships don’t last long enough, or receive enough exposure, for the sports celebrity to create widespread fluency for the brand

Let’s have a look at how each plays out in pracutice.

1. The multi-brand sport celebrity

The value of the Lineker deal was in large part due to its exclusivity. Many high profile sports people partner with multiple brands, making it less likely that they could ever become synonymous with one of them. Erling Haaland has partnerships with the obvious (Nike) to the bizarre (Midea kitchen appliances). Jose Mourinho is the ‘face’bof several brands at the same time.

The key function of a character in any ad is to make it easier for the viewer to quickly recognise the brand. It’s going to be much harder when that brand is one of ten.

2. Celebrity-led vs brand-led

I’ve posted before about how State Farm does a good job of bringing NFL players into the its highly-branded world, rather than putting the celebrity front and center and hoping they’ll do enough to hold people’s attention while some logo placement will do the heavy-lifting. Compare and contrast the two approaches below, the first of which is, ironically, for Lays (the brand name for Walkers in outside the UK).

Celebrity-led: Lays x Lionel Messi

Brand-led: State Farm x Aidan Hutchinson

3. The importance of emotion

There’s ample research showing the link between emotion and memory; it's why making us feel something is one of the most effective things advertising can do. Let’s look at some particularly egregious examples of a complete failure to achieve this.

I’m loathe to call out other people’s work, but these have to be two of the least imaginative ads I’ve seen in an incredibly long time, and are everything that’s wrong with the use of talent partnerships.

All the evidence we have suggests that just slapping athletes in your ads will do very little for you, whether you are trying to build your brand or drive sales, and yet we repeatedly see brands misuse athletes like this. The athlete alone will not create an emotional response.

It’s notable these both come from the trading/crypto space, a category where many digital brands have been built through performance marketing and are often using sponsorship as their first foray into brand building through broad reach channels. But it’s not just Fintech that’s at fault.

I recently spotted this creative from Nat West getting criticism on LinkedIn, again for its total lack of imagination in the activation of its Team GB partnership. It's particularly surprising given that we have Channel 4's Superhumans as a case in point of how to use creativity to showcase Paralympian athletes with real power and originality.

4. Committing for the long-term

If Lineker’s tenure of 25+ years is a case in point, IPA and System1 research from 2024 showed that consistent brands were more effective across multiple brands and categories. The research identified ‘fluent device tenure’ and ‘hired device tenure’ as key components of creative consistency, while showing that the most consistent brands were more famous on average, and significantly more popular, as per YouGov brand tracking data.

Meanwhile, athlete brand deals are increasingly short-term, with athletes increasingly used as part of a roster of influencers.3

This seems odd given it should be clear that when brands use athletes as a media channel rather than a creative platform, they get the cost without the return. When they commit to a single person, build a repeatable idea around who that person genuinely is, and sustain it long enough for fluency to develop, the commercial returns compound in ways that no short-term influencer roster can replicate.

Sport isn’t the only context in which this plays out. George Clooney has been the face of Nespresso since 2006, nearly two decades of a single, unwavering association built on one insight: his suave, self-aware Hollywood charm is the human embodiment of what Nespresso wants to be, which is a small daily luxury that is sophisticated but not pretentious. The ads are consistently witty, cinematic in production, and structured around Clooney as a character rather than a spokesman. Other celebrities have appeared alongside him over the years, but always as supporting cast. System1 measured the Nespresso partnership at 91% brand recognition, well above the coffee category average.

It’s the clearest proof that the Lineker/Walkers principle works across categories and in the modern day. The value derived from consistent use of talent doesn’t just accumulate, it compounds.

Four considerations for using sporting talent

1. Exclusivity is worth paying for

Agents will push category stacking because it maximises their client’s total income. That’s their job, not yours. The value of the Lineker deal was inseparable from the fact that he appeared for nobody else. Investing in one exclusive athlete is more commercially effective than spreading the same budget across several non-exclusives. Every brand partner that an athlete works with reduces their value to your brand. And if you can’t secure exclusivity, it’s worth asking whether you need an athlete at all.

2. Once you’ve found your talent, commit for the long-term

The IPA and System1’s 2024 research identified fluent device tenure as a key driver of effectiveness, with the most consistent brands significantly more famous and more popular than their less consistent peers. The right time horizon is years, not campaigns. The first two years of any new partnership are the establishment cost. The value starts compounding after that.

3. Bring the athlete into your world

State Farm doesn’t put NFL players in front of a camera and hope attention follows. It puts them into State Farm’s highly-branded world, where the brand is the constant and the athlete is the guest. The alternative is putting the athlete front and centre and relying on logo placement to do the heavy lifting, but that produces the Zlatan trading ad. Your audience will remember the celebrity. They will not necessarily remember the brand.

4. Don’t brief the athlete into the work, brief the athlete as the work

Most brands sign an athlete and then hand the brief to an agency with the athlete as a constraint. The creative team is then solving the wrong problem: how do we use this person? The right question is: what is the single most interesting, surprising or contradictory thing about who this person is, and can we build a repeatable creative world from that? “No More Mr Nice Guy” wasn’t a brief. It was an answer to that question, applied to Lineker’s famously unblemished reputation. If you can’t answer the question, you’re not ready to sign anyone.

The lesson of Lineker x Walkers isn't really about crisps, or football, or even fluent devices. It's about the difference between renting attention and building equity. For 26 years, Walkers did the latter.

The question worth asking of any athlete partnership you're considering is a simple one: in 26 years, will anyone remember this?

As someone with ADHD, I replied as respectfully as I could, saying AI could be revolutionary for neurodivergent people, and it would be ableist to suggest that the work we produce using it is unintelligent. The swift, immediate blocking felt like an overreaction.

Just for the record, I use AI to help me plan and organise my content, synthesise my ideas, and maintain a regular publishing schedule. It’s something my ADHD meant I’ve never been able to do before. I hope you’ll agree that I am using my brain and imagination, and that at least some of my posts are vaguely intelligent.

Then yesterday, Byron Sharp published an article in Marketing Week critiquing Andrew Tindall’s research in The Creative Dividend, which I’ve previously praised in this newsletter. He criticised some of Andrew’s statistical analysis and made a fair point about potential bias in the research (more on that below).

In my view, that isn’t a reason to reject the research entirely. I posted as much in a LinkedIn comments section, and actually ended up in a back-and-forth with Byron himself this morning.

Effectiveness is a debate

The reality is that effectiveness is an ongoing debate, like any intellectual pursuit. Byron Sharp is an academic; his bar for what constitutes evidence is exceptionally high. It’s why I think he’s justified in describing his findings in How Brands Grow as ‘laws’.

He’s also an opinionated, sometimes combative figure who has rejected much of the work of Binet & Field and Orlando Wood, even though it often supports his laws. I’m not the first person to observe that the Ehrenberg Bass Institute takes a ‘not made here’ view towards much external research. In EBI’s defence, that might be more accurately described as ‘not conducted to our levels of academic rigour’; one thing Sharp takes particular issue with is the use of effectiveness case studies as a data source.

Binet & Field’s use of IPA case studies to identify what the most effective campaigns had in common was a breakthrough. They set a precedent that others, including me, have followed in our own research. But there are flaws in using case studies in this way: the cases must already have been pretty successful for an agency to think it’s worth investing the time and money to enter, which means we don’t have data from unsuccessful campaigns, and any awards paper only tells part of the story. So, research that uses them as the primary data source wouldn’t meet Sharp’s criteria for evidence.

What I find compelling, and why I’m happy to call Binet & Field et al’s work ‘evidence’, is convergent validity. In other words, there is extensive subsequent research that replicates their findings. In particular, Profit Ability 2 by Ebiquity/Kanter, ROI Genome by Analytic Partners, and McKinsey’s research into the effects of short-termism. Each uses entirely different methodologies and datasets, is not awards-based, but reaches broadly consistent conclusions about the difference between brand building and sales activation, and the benefits of long-term thinking.

What Sharp is aiming for is pure, academic-standard statistical experiments. What Andrew has done in the Creative Dividend is an observational meta-analysis. And where I stand right now, given the conversations I’ve had with people in the effectiveness trenches, I would rather have a good enough understanding of how this whole thing we call marketing works than statistical perfection.

To say something is ‘good enough’ isn’t downplaying it - it’s good! It’s just not perfect. I’m happy to look at a range of data sources to get a decent idea of what’s going on, in the absence of a perfect understanding that would be enormously complicated, time-consuming, and very expensive.

And the cost of it all is another crucial point: The Creative Dividend is free; the most useful Ehrenberg Bass research is behind a particularly expensive paywall (the Institute's baseline sponsorship costs $70,000 per year). That means most of us need to use the research and evidence that is freely available to us.

All of which (finally) brings me to my intended topic this week.

How do I measure effectiveness on a budget?

A few weeks ago, I was on a call with Neil Callahan from 20-Fifteen SPORT. We were talking about effectiveness, and specifically about the gap between how the industry talks about it and what’s actually accessible to most businesses.

As someone who focuses on partnerships in disabled sport, Neil will always advocate for smaller organisations with limited budgets. Speaking to him, I realised that when effectiveness conversations consistently end up discussing econometrics, you’ve already lost half the room. Not because they don’t care, but because they’ve decided the whole thing isn’t for them.

The effectiveness community - and I say this as someone who sits inside it - has a tendency to make measurement feel like something you either do properly or don’t bother doing at all. The IPA Databank. Marketing Mix Modelling. Continuous brand tracking. Long-term profit curves. All of it rigorous, all of it valuable, and almost none of it available to the business turning over £2m that just wants to know if their marketing is working.

Something is better than nothing

My philosophy on measurement and effectiveness is quite simple.

So I’ve tried to build a practical starting point that any business, of any size, can use to get started on its effectiveness journey. It’s a framework of measurement tools organised by company size and by the type of effect you’re trying to measure. It covers brand, business, sales, and behavioural effects, and tries to match the right tools to the right budget.

It’s neither exhaustive nor definitive. Other tools exist, categories overlap, and the right answer for your business will always depend on your category, your model, and what decisions you’re actually trying to make. But I think it’s useful as a way to make measurement feel less like an all-or-nothing proposition.

Before we go through it by tier, a word about how to read this.

Looked at all at once, it can feel like a list of things you should be doing but aren’t. The honest truth is, you probably don’t need most of it to measure any one sponsorship. What you need depends entirely on what you’re trying to achieve. If your primary objective is penetration (reaching new buyers), then acquisition metrics and awareness tracking matter most, and the retention stack can wait. If you’re activating a sponsorship and trying to justify the renewal, a before-and-after brand tracker and some basic sales signals around the activation window might be all you need.

So think of the framework as more of a menu, not a full diet. Start with the question you actually need to answer, find the appropriate tool that can answer it, and build from there.

Side note: apologies to those of you reading this on mobile, it’ll read better on desktop. But it’s probably best viewed in full screen here.

The effectiveness measurement toolkit

Observations by business size

Micro businesses (under c. £1m revenue)

Micro businesses often think that measurement isn’t for them. But it is. It’s just not the same measurement.

If you want to track market share, Share of Search via Google Trends costs nothing and moves in the right direction with category demand. GA4 revenue tracking is free. POS data from Xero or QuickBooks is already sitting there. For brand awareness, a DIY survey through Google Forms or Typeform takes an afternoon to build and costs next to nothing to run. For sales, the built-in reporting in Shopify tells you acquisition by source, returning customer rate, revenue by channel, all without a single line of custom code. For behavioural effects, UTM parameters via Google’s Campaign URL Builder are free, take ten minutes to implement properly, and immediately tell you which channels are actually driving traffic.

None of this is sophisticated. But it is measurement. And if you’re currently doing none of it, doing some of it changes the quality of every decision you make.

Small businesses (c. £1m-£50m)

Small businesses have more options and, honestly, fewer excuses for not using them.

This is the tier where self-serve brand trackers become genuinely affordable. Appinio, Attest and Bounce all offer access to nationally representative samples for a few hundred pounds a run. That’s a quarterly brand health check (awareness, consideration, preference, image) for less than the cost of a decent video shoot. If you’re running paid social, platform-led brand lift studies are often available at no additional cost. Meta and YouTube will run them for you if you ask.

On the sales side, HubSpot Starter gives you CRM-level acquisition and retention tracking for around £45 a month. GA4 enhanced ecommerce is free. For attribution, Shopify Analytics is more capable than most small businesses ever use. Klaviyo’s starter tier (around £20 a month) gives you email retention analytics that would have cost multiples of that a decade ago.

For media effectiveness specifically, lightweight MMM through open-source tools like Google’s Meridian or Meta’s Robyn is now genuinely accessible to businesses at this tier, particularly through media agencies that are starting to offer it as a managed service. It’s not Analytic Partners. But it tells you directional truths about what’s working, and directional truths are enormously valuable when you have none.

Medium businesses (£50m-£500m)

Medium-sized businesses are an interesting case, because they often underinvest in measurement relative to their size. Not because they can’t afford it, but because it falls between the cracks. Too big for ad hoc surveys, too small (or too siloed) to have a proper measurement infrastructure.

This is the tier where quarterly brand tracking should really be non-negotiable. Savanta, Tracksuit and Attest all operate in this space at reasonable cost. CEP research (understanding the Category Entry Points that Byron Sharp’s work has shown to be central to brand salience) is available through platforms like Appinio or Bounce for a fraction of what bespoke research would have cost five years ago.

On the business effects side, syndicated category data from Mintel or Euromonitor gives you market context. CRM cohort analysis (who bought, when, and whether they came back) is available in any well-set-up HubSpot or Salesforce implementation. Mid-market multi-touch attribution through Northbeam or Triple Whale gives you a revenue view across paid channels that’s more robust than last-click GA4 defaults.

The honest challenge at this tier isn’t access to tools. It’s having someone who knows how to connect them into a coherent picture.

Large businesses (c. £0.5bn+)

Large business are, to be fair, reasonably well-served by the existing conversation. Continuous brand tracking through Kantar or Ipsos. Bespoke MMM. CDP-based LTV modelling. Enterprise social listening. The tools exist, the case for them is established, and the debate tends to be about execution rather than principle.

If I have a note for this tier, it’s that sophisticated measurement infrastructure doesn’t automatically produce better decisions. I’ve seen businesses with world-class MMM still optimising short-term because the incentive structures reward it. The tool isn’t the answer. What you decide to do with it is.

On sponsorship specifically

The reason evaluating sponsorship effectiveness is tricky is that sponsorship sits in an awkward place in the measurement conversation. It’s often sold on reach and association (here’s your logo, here’s the audience, here’s what we think that’s worth) and bought on gut feel and relationship. The rigour that brand teams would demand of a media plan sometimes evaporates the moment a rights-holder puts a stadium on the table.

The tools above don’t fix that entirely. But they do give you a before-and-after.

If you have a quarterly brand tracker running before a sponsorship activates, you have a baseline. Run the same tracker six months in, and you can ask whether awareness moved, whether the image attributes you were trying to shift actually shifted, and whether consideration among the target audience changed. That’s not econometrics, but it is evidence. And evidence is what separates an informed renewal conversation from a finger-in-the-air guess.

The same logic applies to activation channels layered on top of the property. Say you added a social series in month three, or an experiential element at the event itself, or a co-branded campaign with the athlete. Each of those is a moment in time. If your UTM parameters are in order and your GA4 is configured properly, you can see whether web behaviour changed when the social series launched. If your CRM is tracking source attribution, you can see whether new customer acquisition ticked up during the event window. None of it is causal in the strict sense. But directional evidence, triangulated across multiple data points, is a lot better than the absence of any evidence.

The real problem in sponsorship isn’t that measurement is impossible. It’s that most businesses start measuring after they’ve signed, which means they have no baseline to measure against. The first practical implication of this framework is simple: if you’re considering a sponsorship, start your measurement now. Whatever tier you’re at, run the survey, pull the GA4 benchmark, and note the Share of Search. Give yourself something to compare to.

Did the sponsorship do something? You should be able to answer that question. At the moment, most businesses can’t.

Tests and experiments at every level

There’s a view of measurement that treats data collection as the end goal. Track everything, report on everything, optimise everything. I don’t think that’s right. Data collection is only useful if it’s answering a question, and the most reliable way to answer a question is to design an experiment around it.

At the micro level, an experiment might be as simple as: for six weeks, we’ll run our social content with the sponsorship creative. For the following six weeks, we won’t. Does our branded search volume (tracked via Google Trends) move differently in the first period than the second? Is there a difference in new sessions from social in GA4? You won’t achieve statistical significance. But you’ll have a directional answer that’s more useful than no answer.

At the small business level, a promotional code tied exclusively to a sponsorship activation (say, a 20% discount announced only at the event or through the rights-holder’s channels) tells you something concrete about whether that touchpoint is driving behaviour. How many codes were redeemed? What was the average order value? Did those customers come back? Three numbers, none of them hard to collect, all of them better than nothing.

At the medium tier, holdout testing becomes genuinely accessible. Run a sponsorship activation in two comparable regions (one with activation, one without) and compare sales uplift from your retailer EPOS data or CRM acquisition rates. This is the closest thing to a controlled experiment available without an MMM, and it’s underused at this tier largely because it requires someone to care enough to design it properly before the campaign launches, not after.

At the large tier, tools are available for proper geo-split testing, matched-market analysis, and incrementality testing across paid channels. The question isn’t whether it’s possible, but whether the organisation can act on the findings, which is a different problem entirely.

The broader point is that measurement without a question is just data hoarding. The discipline that makes measurement valuable isn’t the sophistication of the tool. It’s the habit of asking, before any activation, what would have to be true for this to have worked, and how would I know? At every budget level, that question is free to ask and, at a basic level, there’s often a free answer.

What this is and isn’t

I want to be clear about what this framework is and isn’t.

It isn’t a substitute for proper effectiveness practice. It doesn’t replace the thinking in Binet & Field, or the evidence base from the IPA Databank, or the rigour of a well-constructed MMM. What it tries to do is meet businesses where they are rather than where the industry wishes they were. The measurement described here is imperfect, incomplete, and sometimes, frankly, a proxy for the real thing.

But if a micro business starts using a Google Forms brand awareness survey running quarterly, UTM parameters on every campaign link, and GA4 cohort reporting switched on, that’s not nothing. It’s the beginning of a measurement culture that didn’t exist before. The business that starts with GA4 and Typeform is better positioned, five years from now, to know what questions to ask of a proper brand tracker or a lightweight MMM.

That’s the theory, anyway. I’m not certain it’s right. But it’s what I believe.

So treat it as a starting point, not a definitive list. There will be tools I’ve missed, approaches that work better in specific categories, and businesses that don’t fit neatly into any of the size bands. If you’ve got something that belongs on here, I’d genuinely like to know.

Thanks to Neil for the conversation that started this.