Playing the game of sports sponsorships

Sports sponsorships are historically difficult to measure against return on investment. Does their impact go beyond brand visibility?

Financial marketers say they are under more pressure than ever to quantify return on investment, but sports sponsorships – despite their recognised difficulty to measure return – continue to thrive at a rapid pace.

$2.5 billion (￡2.05 billion) is spent annually on sports sponsorships within the payments sector alone, according to the GlobalData Sport Intelligence Centre’s June 2023 data, with Mastercard spending an estimate of over $100 million.

In a mainstream setting such as a sporting stadium, where a company’s target audience is only a small percentage of the attendees, marketers must measure the hard, quantifiable data they collect with a cautious approach.

According to Braze’s annual Global Customer Engagement Review, 80% of marketers agree they are collecting more data than they can spend time analysing, but sports sponsorships are the exception.

In interviews for Financial Promoter, financial services marketers noted how they are more accepting that sports sponsorships generate comparatively little data, citing that “brand visibility” can be intangible in terms of transaction value or spend.

What is also clear is that the love of sports – and thus sponsorship – often comes from “the top,” leaving marketers to fashion innovative ideas when it comes to justifying the spend of their sports strategies.

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