Regulation, shifting fan behaviour, challenger formats and new market entrants. 2026 is shaping up to be a year of opportunity for brands and rights holders that understand how the marketplace is changing, where budgets are moving and how value is created. The result is a more active but competitive environment. One defined not by fewer […]

Two young entrepreneurs believe their audience-driven data approach might finally provide the clarity needed to build a working sponsorship marketplace.

New sponsors often fall into the trap of believing that bigger automatically means better. The instinct is to partner with the most recognisable team or event the budget allows, to buy into scale, prestige, and visibility. But in sponsorship, size does not equal success. Big-name rights holders deliver reach and enhanced stature, but they rarely […]

Audi’s future F1 team has added Perk as its second sponsor, agreeing a multi-year partnership that will see the intelligent travel and spend management platform take a prominent place across the car, team kit and driver helmets once Audi joins the grid. Perk, formerly TravelPerk, recently rebranded to reflect its evolution from a business travel […]

Temporal's Chief Marketing Officer, Clair Byrd, shares how the AI tech company assessed marketing options before deciding on sponsorship of Crystal Palace

When shoppers stand in the battery aisle deciding between Duracell and a cheaper supermarket own-brand alternative, awareness is rarely the deciding factor. Almost everyone already knows the Duracell brand. The commercial challenge is convincing consumers that Duracell batteries last longer and are worth paying a premium for. According to Javier Hernandez Reta, Global Chief Marketing […]

I received a press release this week announcing Blueberry as the latest sponsor of the Australia SailGP Team. On its own, it’s a perfectly solid partnership: a growth-minded financial trading platform aligning with a fast-rising global sports property. But it landed at an interesting moment. In recent weeks, two separate sponsors have told me that […]

There are very few moments in sponsorship where fans give brands instant, unfiltered feedback, in real time, in front of a global audience. At this year’s Australian Open men’s final, that feedback arrived in a single word, shouted from the stands. “BORING.” It landed midway through the sponsor address, cut through the ceremony, and triggered […]

Coca-Cola’s Elodie Peribere on adapting to a new era of football fandom and meeting fans where they are.

What happens when you put 50 experienced sponsors in a room? The conversation quickly moves beyond theory and into what really drives sponsorship value. That was exactly the case at Sponsorship Masters in London on 11th June, where more than 50 brand and marketing leaders gathered to debate the strategies that break through an increasingly […]

For the past few years, sponsorship conversations have been dominated by one phrase: first-party data. Rights-holders talk about it in sales decks. Sponsors ask about it in procurement processes. Agencies build capability statements around it. Data capture, CRM integration, clean rooms, dashboards. The implicit promise is that if we can just collect enough of the […]

For Continental Tyres, sponsorship is not just about visibility. In a category where consumers rarely think about tyres until they urgently need them, the brand believes community investment and long-term emotional connection can have a greater impact on purchasing decisions than logo exposure alone. Peter Robb, Marketing Director at Continental Tyres, explained to The Sponsor […]

The Sponsor has today published the fair market sponsorship value of every major European stadium. Covering 75 stadiums, it represents the most comprehensive valuation and pricing analysis of European stadium naming rights conducted to date. The findings reveal a defined yet underutilised market, in which some stadium owners and sponsors are securing exceptional value while […]

Discover how the DP World sponsorship portfolio is measured through its Attention, Attitude, Action framework, linking brand impact to business growth.

On 27th November, The Sponsor hosted a Leaders Roundtable debate at the St James’s Club in Mayfair, where senior brand and marketing leaders gathered to tackle one of the industry’s most persistent measurement questions: how do you credibly demonstrate sponsorship returns? The ambition was straightforward. The reality, as anyone in the room will attest, was […]

Sponsors have accepted partnerships need to be supported by significant investment in activation yet for most, measurement remains an afterthought.

For decades, media value has been the go-to measurement for the sponsorship industry. The rise of AI-driven logo capture technology has only reinforced this reliance, delivering increasingly precise counts of how long and how often a brand is visible. Within its own boundaries, media value remains an excellent tool for benchmarking one sponsorship against another […]

Tottenham and Chelsea suffer major sponsorship value declines as the Premier League market takes shape in the post-gambling era