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 Hi Marketing Bestie, I went to get my daily steps at approximately 7:03pm. The weather app didn't say rain. I thought I was just going to listen to a podcast and relax. But no.... Im half way on my walk and suddenly unreal thunderstorm. I started sprinting home while lighting filled the sky. I'm happy to mark myself safe and traumatized and in need of new shoes. Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by SponsorUnited Ready for football season? SAME. For more than 1 reason: SPARKNOTES FROM THE POD 5 WAYS TO ACTUALLY WIN AT SPONSORSHIP MARKETINGThis was a panel I moderated on sponsorship marketing. 4 people who've seen the deal from every possible angle. Sam Kilgore is SVP of Brand Solutions at Sponsor United, tracking over 3.2 million sponsorship deals and 25 million data points. Marquise Watts has been on the brand side at Under Armour and Adidas, the agency side at Clutch Sports Group, and now runs C-suite for the Minnesota Timberwolves. He's the only exec who's sat at the executive level on all three sides: team, agency, and brand. Chris Labono spent 20 years at CBS Sports before co-founding Athlete Driven Worldwide, an agency working with brands on athlete storytelling. Elliot Christensen is SVP at Cleveland Construction, currently signing his company's first sports sponsorship. Sponsorship used to be a logo on a jersey and a hope it worked. That era is ending. Listen to the full panel here where the group breaks down how AI-flagged culture moments are reshaping sponsorship speed, why the first question in any deal should never be about budget, and how a construction company is using an NFL partnership for employee retention. 1️⃣. Never Start A Sponsorship Conversation By Talking About Budget.Marquise's Take: "You don't start a conversation and say, well, what's the budget or what's the fee. Because you can't get the full breadth of it. It doesn't matter what their fee is or what the budget is, you've got to look at the overall picture. What are you going to do as far as activation. If I go sign somebody and pay them 5 million dollars a year but I have no media, no spend, no storytelling, then I'm not getting anything out of it. I just cut a check, and that's the end." Marquise has been on the brand side, the agency side, and the team side. He's watched brands walk into deals asking only one question: what's the fee. That question skips the part that actually determines whether the sponsorship works. You can pay a huge fee for a logo placement and get nothing back if there's no activation plan behind it. Or you can pay a modest fee and generate real value because the partnership includes storytelling, media, and genuine buy-in from both sides. Chris echoed this from the agency side. His team asks a completely different opening question: how do you define success. What keeps you up at night. Then they stay quiet and let the client talk. Takeaway: Before your next sponsorship conversation, write down what success looks like beyond the logo. What story are you trying to tell. What activation will bring the partnership to life. What's your plan for the deal beyond the initial signing. Walk into the conversation leading with that, not with your budget number. The budget question comes after you know what you're actually trying to build. 2️⃣. Cost vs Valuation Is Replacing Impressions As The Sponsorship Metric.Sam's Take: "There's a lot more driving CMO, CFO relationship on the bottom line. How are we moving the needle now in sponsorship? The other thing I think is starting to shift a little bit is actual cost versus valuation. What are we spending and getting an ROI on versus what are we expecting to see in return. Because those numbers have been, for lack of a better term, like throwing darts at a wall." For years, sponsorship got measured by brand awareness and impressions. Leadership liked seeing the brand at the big event. That was often the whole pitch. Sam's data across millions of deals shows that measurement standard is fading. CFOs now want to see actual cost against actual return, not just visibility metrics that are hard to tie back to revenue. That means brands are being asked to justify sponsorship spend the same way they'd justify any other marketing channel. What did we spend. What did we get. Was it worth it. Takeaway: Before signing your next sponsorship, define what you'll measure beyond impressions. Set a real cost-to-value framework: total investment (fee plus activation spend) against a specific outcome (leads, brand recall lift, local revenue uplift, whatever's relevant to your goals). If you can't articulate what you're measuring beyond "we'll be seen there," you're not ready to sign. 3️⃣. You Need To Move At The Speed Of CultureMarquise's Take: "You saw as soon as the Knicks won, Nike already had the commercial, and the fact that they did it using authentic players, fans, celebrities on the run of the playoffs. That storytelling in real time is something that's like brand marketing, because it's an emotion." Sam added a historical contrast: "Ten years ago, you printed signage, you may have had a flat digital rotation. There wasn't a lot of adjustment even five years ago. So post-COVID, you're seeing a lot more need to be able to change quickly, and I think that's now becoming a table stakes conversation." Five years ago, reacting to a big cultural moment took weeks. Shoot the commercial, edit it, get approvals, launch it. By the time it was live, the moment had passed. Now the brands winning are the 1's who can react within a day or 2. Nike had a commercial ready the moment the Knicks won. Levi's turned a stadium logo restriction into a viral moment by creatively cutting out their own branding, then building a follow-up campaign around it. That kind of speed requires the partnership itself to be built for flexibility. Digital signage that updates in 24 to 36 hours. Creative teams on standby. Pre-approved brand guidelines that don't require a week of sign-off during a live cultural moment. Takeaway: Before your next sponsorship, ask the partner directly: what's our turnaround time to react to something that happens during the event or season. If the answer is weeks, you'll miss every real cultural moment. Build flexibility into the contract itself. Pre-approve creative guardrails ahead of time so your team can move fast without new sign-off every time something happens. 4️⃣. Local And Small-Scale Sponsorships Are The Best Way To Test Before You Scale.Sam's Take: "Localization testing is the best, because you can see uplift in localization. You can see deals come from local deals. National is really hard to track because it's like, did it come from our meta spend in Texas or was it the national campaign we did. But if you do a single town, you could see uplift from those spots." Marquise added: "You know, colleges and local events can actually be a great place to go in that position if you know what you're trying to achieve, and you want to test the waters. There's not as many fish in that sea, and they're not spending the same amount of dollars." A brand with $10,000 to $20,000 to test can't play in the World Cup or the Olympics. But that same budget can fund a local watch party, a college sponsorship, or a single-market activation. The advantage isn't just cost. It's attribution. National campaigns make it nearly impossible to isolate what drove results. A single-market or single-event sponsorship gives you a clean test: did this specific investment move the needle in this specific place. Sam described watch parties timed around events like the NFL Draft or World Cup matches as a way to be genuinely part of the moment without needing the budget of an official sponsor. Takeaway: If you have a limited test budget, don't try to compete at the national or global level. Pick one local market or one smaller event. Run the activation. Measure uplift in that specific area against your baseline. Use that clean, attributable data to build the case for a bigger investment later. 5️⃣. Sponsorship ROI Isn't Just Awareness or Sales. It Can Be Recruiting And Retention Too.Elliot's Take: "We think that with this partnership, we can do things like work on employee retention, work on recruiting. Our name will be out there within a circle of people that, in the construction industry, football's a pretty big topic on a job site come Monday morning. There's hard hats that are branded for football teams that you see on every job, and we think that there's a really good opportunity to pull good talent for us as an organization." Elliot's company is signing its first sports sponsorship, and growing brand awareness wasn't the only goal driving it. Cleveland Construction operates in an industry where recruiting and retention are constant challenges. Elliot's team noticed that construction workers are already deeply engaged with football culture, branded hard hats and all. A team partnership becomes a recruiting and retention tool, not just a visibility play. Elliot also emphasized wanting an authentic partnership, not a paper one. If they're going to be a team's general contractor, they want to actually build things for that team, not just put a logo on a truck. Takeaway: Before assuming your sponsorship goal is pure brand awareness, look at your other business challenges. Could a partnership help with recruiting. Could it help with employee retention or morale. Could it open doors with other companies in your industry who share the same audience. Sponsorship ROI isn't limited to marketing metrics. Map it against your actual business problems first.able data to build the case for a bigger investment later. EVENT OF THE WEEK Mid-Black Friday, find out whether your offer blows up...or falls flat. Mid-September is for improving your odds. 9/23, I'm walking through 6 holiday tactics to start right now. With friends. You should come. IN A MEME  Positive, out of this. I bought new shoes. Your friend, Daniel | |||||||||
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