Before You Say “I Do” to a Sponsorship, Ask This Question

Brands spend enormous energy negotiating sponsorship rights. Too often, they haven't answered the more important question: What will it take to make those rights actually perform?

Imagine you have $1 million to invest in a sponsorship.

You find the right property. The audience makes sense. The association fits the brand. The assets look strong. The rights fee is $1 million.

Can you afford it?

Maybe not.

That's the question I think too many brands ask incorrectly. We spend enormous amounts of time determining whether we can afford to acquire a sponsorship without first determining whether we can afford to actually do something meaningful with it.

Before you say "I do" to a sponsorship, there's another question worth asking:

Can we afford to activate it?

Because signing the agreement isn't the end of the deal. In many ways, that's when the work begins.

The rights fee isn't the investment

When I say activation, I'm not just talking about setting up a tent outside a stadium or creating a promotion on game day.

Activation is everything a brand does to leverage the rights it purchased.

It might mean buying media to tell people about the partnership. It could mean producing social and digital content using team IP or talent. It could be an on-site experience, retail promotion, gifting program, community initiative or PR campaign.

It might mean building a hospitality program around customers and prospects, creating an employee engagement initiative, integrating the partnership into CRM, or developing a B2B program for the sales organization.

And all of those things cost money beyond the rights fee. They require people, creative, production, media, technology and, in many cases, outside partners to bring them to life.

That's why simply asking whether you can afford the sponsorship misses the point.

You need to understand what you're going to do with the sponsorship before you can understand what the sponsorship actually costs.

There has been a rule of thumb in the sponsorship business for years that brands should spend roughly another dollar activating a sponsorship for every dollar spent acquiring the rights.

I don't think 1:1 is a rule, and the research doesn't support treating it like one.

What does get my attention is how many brands don't know the number at all.

Research from the World Federation of Advertisers and Lumency found that a significant percentage of sponsors weren't tracking or didn't know their activation spending. Among those that did, activation investment remained below the traditional 1:1 benchmark on average.

That's the more interesting issue.

The answer isn't that every sponsor needs to spend another dollar for every dollar of rights. A regional B2B sponsorship shouldn't necessarily require the same activation ratio as a global World Cup partnership. Objectives, audience, geography, property and strategy all matter.

But the ratio is a useful alarm bell.

If you've spent your entire budget acquiring the sponsorship and left nothing to leverage it, you probably haven't finished budgeting.

I think about the investment more simply:

RIGHTS + ACTIVATION + MEASUREMENT = SPONSORSHIP INVESTMENT

So maybe that brand with $1 million shouldn't buy $1 million worth of rights.

Maybe it should buy $600,000 or $700,000 worth of rights and preserve the rest to make those rights work. Maybe it's $800,000 and $200,000. Maybe the brand needs $1 million in activation against $1 million in rights.

The point isn't the ratio.

The process should work in the other direction.

What are we trying to accomplish? What will we need to do to accomplish it? What will that cost? And therefore, how much can we afford to spend on the rights?

Design the entire investment before you buy the sponsorship.

What you're really buying is access

Having spent years working on the team side of this business and now advising brands and properties, I've come to think we sometimes talk about sponsorship assets the wrong way.

A sign isn't inherently valuable or worthless. Neither is a suite, a social post, a content right or access to intellectual property.

Their value depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

If the objective is awareness, signage might be exactly the right tool. If it's business development, hospitality might be far more valuable. If it's consideration or engagement, access to content, talent or experiences could matter more.

The question isn't simply, "What assets are we getting?"

It's:

What are we trying to achieve, and what does this relationship give us access to that can help us achieve it?

One of my favorite examples comes from my time with the San Diego Padres.

We had negotiated a partnership with Ballast Point as the team's official craft beer. Then Joe Musgrove threw the first no-hitter in Padres history.

Nobody had negotiated "free beer for life if a Padres pitcher throws the first no-hitter in franchise history" into the sponsorship agreement.

We created it.

Ballast Point gave Musgrove free beer for life, and suddenly the partnership was connected to a historic moment for the franchise and its fans.

That's what I mean by access.

The agreement created the relationship and the association. The moment created an opportunity. The activation came from recognizing it and doing something with it.

The contract defines what you're entitled to. It doesn't define what's possible.

You can see the same principle at a much larger scale with Coca-Cola's FIFA relationship. Coca-Cola doesn't simply put its logo next to the World Cup. Its FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour takes access to something FIFA uniquely controls, the actual World Cup Trophy, and turns it into an experience for fans around the world.

The sponsorship gives Coca-Cola the right to be there.

The activation gives fans a reason to care that Coca-Cola is there.

The organizational gap nobody talks about

I've also sat on the property side of these relationships, and there's an assumption I think both sides sometimes make.

Properties sometimes assume sponsors know how to be sponsors. Sponsors sometimes assume properties are set up to activate the sponsorship for them.

Neither is necessarily true.

Some sophisticated brands have entire sponsorship organizations. They have people who wake up every day thinking about their portfolio, their rights, activation, hospitality and measurement.

Others hand the partnership to someone in marketing who may already have 15 other things on their plate.

That doesn't mean they're not a great marketer. It means they may never have had to work extensively with this particular medium.

Sponsorship has its own mechanics. You're dealing with intellectual property, live events, talent, hospitality, content rights, fan passion, community programs, physical assets and moments that can emerge unexpectedly.

On the other side is the property partnership team.

I want to be very clear here because I've worked alongside some exceptional partnership people: They can work incredibly hard for their partners. They understand the property. They navigate the organization. They advocate internally. They identify opportunities and make sure contractual assets are delivered.

But they also have a lot of partners.

I was reminded of this recently during a venue tour. We walked the property and noticed some signage that wasn't looking its best anymore. Some had weathered. Other branding had been moved or partially covered as things around the venue evolved.

There was no scandal. Nobody wasn't doing their job.

Things simply change.

And if the brand isn't actively paying attention to its investment, small things become bigger things.

A great property partnership team can be deeply invested in your success. But nobody at the property will ever be as singularly focused on your investment as you should be.

The property owns fulfillment. The brand has to own performance.

Delivered doesn't mean successful

This is where I think we need to make an important distinction in how sponsorships are evaluated.

There are actually four separate questions:

• FULFILLMENT Did the property give us everything we purchased?
• UTILIZATION Did we actually use what we purchased?
• ACTIVATION Did we turn those rights into something meaningful?
• EFFECTIVENESS Did it accomplish the business objective?

Those are not the same thing.

A property could achieve 100% contractual fulfillment while the sponsorship itself performs terribly.

You received every ticket. Every sign went up. Every social post was published. Every contractual appearance happened.

Great.

Did anybody use the tickets strategically? Did the signage reach the audience you wanted? Did the content communicate anything meaningful? Did the appearances create something valuable?

Did any of it move the business?

That's why I think one of the most important questions after a sponsorship is signed is deceptively simple:

Who owns it?

Not who negotiated it. Not who manages the invoice. Not who gets the weekly email from the team.

Who owns the outcome?

Depending on the size of the organization, that might ultimately be a CMO, sponsorship leader or another senior marketer. But someone also needs to own the partnership day to day. Someone needs to know the contract, understand the objectives, watch the KPIs, challenge stale assets, find new opportunities and constantly ask whether the investment is doing the job it was hired to do.

Because sponsorships aren't set-it-and-forget-it assets.

They require attention, creativity and continuous ideation.

A feature that worked three years ago may have run its course. A player may suddenly become a star. A business priority may change. A cultural moment may emerge. An opportunity that didn't exist when the contract was signed may suddenly be sitting directly in front of you.

The best activation opportunity might not even be written into the contract yet.

Hospitality is a perfect example

A company might say, "We have a suite and 20 tickets."

That's inventory.

The activation question is different.

Who are we inviting and why? What does the invitation look like? What happens when they arrive? What should the food and beverage experience say about our brand? Is there a gift? Are we capturing a photograph? Does someone from our leadership team need to be there? What's the follow-up the next morning?

There should be a journey around that hospitality experience.

Now the suite isn't just a suite.

You've created a customer experience around access that the sponsorship made possible.

That's especially important in B2B partnerships. Hospitality itself isn't a strategy.

Access is the asset. The strategy determines what you're going to accomplish with that access.

And the same thinking applies across sponsorship activation.

Content rights aren't a content strategy. A logo isn't a strategy. Tickets aren't a strategy. A sponsored feature isn't a strategy.

They're tools.

Sponsorship can work. That's why this matters.

None of this is an argument against sponsorship.

Quite the opposite.

Sports have something most traditional marketing channels would love to have: an audience that actively chooses to care.

Research has shown that sponsorship can influence purchase intent and consumer behavior. That's important because it reminds us that this isn't inherently a vanity investment. Properly designed and activated, sponsorship can create real business and brand value.

But that potential is exactly why I think brands should demand more rigor from the investment.

The best sponsorships I've seen have connective tissue between the property, the sponsor and the brand's larger story.

The association makes sense. The activation reinforces it. The experience feels intentional. Everyone understands what the partnership is there to accomplish.

It doesn't feel like a collection of assets.

It feels like a platform.

Sometimes the right answer is a smaller deal

If a CMO told me they had $2 million available and were about to spend $1.8 million acquiring sponsorship rights, my first question wouldn't be about the remaining $200,000.

I'd ask:

What are we trying to achieve?

What's the long-term goal of the brand? How specifically does this partnership help us get there? What story does it allow us to tell? What audience or market does it give us meaningful access to? What do we need to do beyond the contractual assets to deliver the result? And how are we going to know whether it worked?

I've advised brands with limited budgets to scale down rather than stretch themselves into the biggest possible sponsorship.

Test it. Learn. Build the muscle. Crawl, walk, run.

Because sometimes the answer is more activation.

Sometimes it's fewer rights.

Sometimes it's a smaller partnership.

Sometimes it's moving money away from contractual assets that no longer serve the objective.

Sometimes it's taking a feature that worked three years ago and rebuilding it together with the property.

And sometimes the smartest decision is not doing the deal at all.

That's what frustrates me about seeing brands spend everything on the rights. At the beginning of these relationships, the expectations are incredibly high. Everyone sees the possibilities.

Then the contract gets signed.

But the deal isn't done.

The work is just beginning.

So before the next sponsorship agreement gets signed, don't just ask:

Can we afford the rights?

Ask the question that matters more:

Can we afford to make the rights matter?