Summary

• Inside Sport’s Biggest Sponsorship Analysis: The Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum coded 92 case studies to IPA standards. It’s the largest analysis of sponsorship effectiveness ever done, and Tier 1 sponsorships delivered sales effects nearly three times more often than the rest. Sponsorship works. Most of the industry just isn’t set up to make it work.
• The 3 to 1 Rule: Top 30% Outperform the Rest: Tier 1 sponsorships don’t just edge out the rest. They deliver 5.7 measurable effects per case vs 3.4, and 44% produced at least one “very large” effect vs just 6% elsewhere. The lesson isn’t that sponsorship is risky. It’s that the discipline behind it has been missing.
• Why Most Sponsorship Activation Falls Flat: Negotiation gets the spotlight. Activation gets the leftovers. Rory traces this back to the LA 84 Olympics, when sponsorship professionalised around talent agents not marketers. The deal became the news, the campaign became an afterthought, and the best creative talent went to advertising instead.
• The Measurement Trap. Reach Isn’t Return: Only 3% of Tier 1 cases used reach or engagement as their primary metric. The best sponsorships measure brand salience, behaviour and profit, not impressions. Rory’s bête noire: ROI is a specific financial calculation, not a catch-all for “anything that happened.”
• Why Live Sport Is the Last Mass Moment: Meta is moving toward fully automated, AI-generated advertising by 2026. Live sport is the opposite: a shared audience, all watching the same thing, all seeing the same brands at the same time. Under-35 viewing of live sport is rising, not falling. That’s the irreplaceable moment sponsorship buys.
• Sponsorship’s Creativity Problem: After the brand size, creative is the single biggest lever on effectiveness. But most sponsorship content gets default treatment: the heart-to-heart interview, the surprise fan moment, the rebadged TV ad. The best sponsorships build a brand narrative over decades. The rest leave value on the table.

Show Notes

• Rory’s substack
• Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum

Transcription

Ed (00:01.496)
Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of the Attention Shift. This week we’ve got a really interesting interview with Rory Nackill from the Sponsor Effectiveness Forum. The Sponsor Effectiveness Forum launched in September 2025. Brands, agencies, rights holders and researchers all in the room together. And the mission is simple, do for Sponsor what the IPA has done for advertising and build a proper evidence base. Their first report, the Sponsor Effect, dropped in November.

There were 92 case studies and they’re all IPA code and we’ll come into that and dig into what that means a little bit later. It’s the largest analysis of sponsorship effectiveness that’s ever been done. And the headline was the top 30 % delivered sales effectively nearly three times more than the rest. So sponsorship works, right? That’s the whole point of this. Most of the industry isn’t set up however to make this work and that’s where Rory comes in. So Rory, welcome to the podcast.

Rory (00:56.32)
Hi, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Ed (00:59.074)
Thank you. So as we were saying off camera, rather than me embarrass myself and do a really bad job of introducing you, could you give us a bit of a potted history of your 20 plus years service, I’d say, to the media marketing, sports, and entertainment industry?

Rory (01:16.802)
Yeah, well, I mean, I came by actually with a touring DJ in my 20s. So I didn’t have a car. I’ve got a pretty good conventional path. And I think that’s probably played a part in where I’ve ended up. But I decided to get a proper job. I initially started as a digital marketing manager because of my social media skills with my transferable skill from music into marketing. I hung around in the charity sector for a little while and went to a startup and then decided that I wanted to go agency side.

and got the opportunity. First, at a digital agency, working on of large-scale web builds, doing sort of, I was more coming from the SEO, analytics side, UX, done some web builds there. Then moved to more of a performance marketing agency and worked, again, sort of as a content, within a content team, but within an SEO department and working alongside some very good programmatic media buyers and data specialists there.

I got approached to go and be deputy MD of a PR agency that had a content function. Did that for about a year. So got some work doing PR. Then I kind of really over that time I’d wanted to get towards brand planning and brand strategy. I’d become aware of Byron Sharp and Bennett and Field and I knew I wanted to move towards that and got the chance at Iris, which is a fully integrated agency.

And on day one, I was given the KFC brief. was working on this KFC CRM program, which was huge, but also had a brief for Adidas. And that was where I got the chance to kind of move out of the digital sort of sphere and into doing bigger, more integrated global campaigns and did that for four years. Really enjoyed it. And then moved in 2023 to Sidley Sport. What became Sidley Sport, was Sidley London at the time.

And that was when I kind of focused, ended up focusing purely on sponsorship 100 % of the time. And then really enjoyed that. And then I had a bit of time off due to health actually at the end of last year and had to think about what I really wanted to do. And after 15 years in agencies, 15 years or so, I realized that as a strategist, you’re really, you’re there to kind of…

Rory (03:35.586)
advise the client, but advise the client why what your agency can do is the right solution for them. So, well, yeah, and then it’s often, mean, is like, often they’ll come and go, we want an ad and you go, well, we make ads, here’s the right kind of to make. But in an agency when anything’s possible, it could be a website, could be an experience or whatever, you’re often kind of there to justify the kind of output that that agency can do.

Ed (03:42.478)
don’t think they’re the only agency that can do that job for them.

Rory (04:04.906)
Or if the process doesn’t work perfectly, you hand the creatives a brief, they ignore it, and you then have to explain why what they’ve come up with is a very good idea. And that, and then being on leadership teams, which I did enjoy. But as I started to of rest on or get to this idea of sponsorship effectiveness, I started to realize that actually if I could focus on that fully, I would have, you know,

I would have, my thinking would be able to progress faster. And I would be able to do that little bit more of an independent sort of strategic advice, which is kind of, this is just literally the best advice that I can give you. It’s not dependent on what kind of output the group of people that I’m working with are very good at. And so, and also I wanted to, when I started then thinking about doing my own thing, I kind of, I don’t really want to get into the production of stuff.

I’ve got opinions on creative and I think it’s very, very important. But yeah, so I want to kind of extricate myself from that a little bit now and just be able to kind of work at a very strategic level, but also then have the mental bandwidth to just really go deep into the research and to advancing my thinking and effectiveness, which you can’t do if you’re popping out for leadership team meetings every week or getting involved in everything across an agency.

Ed (05:27.053)
Yeah.

And I guess that partly answers what was going to be my next question as well, like obviously your reasons for going doing this. guess when you’re working within one agency, I’m not sure if people also understand that generally if you’re in an agency, you can only work with one brand and set a category and there’s lots of rules and regs. guess doing what you’re doing right now allows you to have more impact across a category in theory and understand what’s working, what’s not working in different categories as well for different brands.

Rory (05:56.618)
Yeah, and also if you’re in a smallish agency, which I had been for most of my time, the point at which you get to work on an effectiveness case is not that often, it’s not day in, day out what you’re doing. A lot of the time you are briefing in a creative campaign, sitting in creative reviews, helping to tweak ideas as they come through. And what’s been interesting about this venture as I set up on my own from January is just that

I’m just talking about effectiveness, measurement and evaluation all day, every day. so my understanding and experience is growing exponentially. And even in four or five months I’ve been doing it now, I really think my thinking has advanced in a way that it wouldn’t have been if I’d been doing my traditional agency strategist job. So that ability to just focus on one area has been really game changing for me.

Ed (06:52.51)
So I guess as well what that’s, I guess what you identified there is a structural gap, right? A lot of the things are going on within an agency world in terms of all the different elements you talked around, but was effectiveness really a watchword as part of all of that process? Like clearly people obviously care that these things work, right? Because they’re being judged on that. But was it the primary focus as I guess you’ve identified it needs to be?

Rory (07:20.768)
Yeah, when I moved into the world of sponsorship, it was where I first started to realize that if I mentioned Byron Sharp or Binet and Field, or I showed the sort of famous graph with brand building and sales effects operating over different timescales, I just got blank stares. that’s whether that’s going to be the rights holders, people at agencies, people at brands. It wasn’t that they hadn’t, they’d seen it and decided it didn’t apply. It’s just that they just really hadn’t understood.

didn’t aware of it at all. didn’t know it existed. Well, no, but they didn’t, they didn’t, they’d never seen it. I mean, you could still, still today go into a, go into a room with a rights holder and show that chart. And a lot of the partnership team might not know what it is. And then, so, you know, that’s nobody’s fault because the, because people in those roles are trained in a certain way to do a certain thing. And it’s just never been part of it. And then what I, but I also,

Ed (07:51.832)
didn’t connect the dots between the things.

right,

Rory (08:16.896)
I don’t want it to sound like, it’s the sponsorship industry getting it all wrong. Because on the other side, I think there’s a massive gap of understanding of what sponsorship is, what it can do, how it should be used as part of a media mix. And it was always looked down upon by, media agencies and brands, particularly when TV was really incredibly effective. Sponsorship was the thing you did if you’d had a bit of money left over. And so, yeah, all the Germans win, right?

Ed (08:20.003)
Yeah, yeah.

Ed (08:37.688)
Yeah.

Ed (08:41.644)
or if you knew someone.

Yeah, yeah.

Rory (08:46.114)
And when the perimeter boards were static and you didn’t have social media, it probably was a less effective option. But now, sponsorship’s just evolved into being something completely different. I didn’t even understand how different it was when I went into a sponsorship-focused agency. And I think that’s the gap on the other side. So on the one hand, you’ve got a lot of people who aren’t very effectiveness-focused at all. And on the other hand, you’ve got a group of people who are, but they don’t understand how effective sponsorship can be.

So that was the kind of why I felt that the sponsorship effectiveness forum was needed was to educate the sponsorship sector on that and how to do it, but also to raise the profile of a sponsorship as a marketing tool to the rest of the industry.

Ed (09:32.655)
So you founded the Sponsor Effect News Forum with obviously with three other people who were, know, big hitters right across the industry. Charlie Dundas, Sarah Kendall and Rebecca Martin and I’ve known Charlie on offer for good 20 years. As I saying to you earlier, I failed to sell sponsorship multiple times to him back in the day, but still remain friends. But so obviously I’m very much aware of Charlie’s work and what Charlie’s done over that period of time, less so Sarah and Rebecca.

How did you bring this group of people together and how do you see their individual expertise all fitting together as the four of you?

Rory (10:06.24)
Yeah, I mean I met Charlie and Bex through my work at Sidley Sport. And Charlie and I, we’d already started talking about using his GS IQs data into econometric models. So we were talking about measurement and evaluation and then I came up with the idea for Seth. And then Bex, there was a clear need. Also.

To be honest, I didn’t just want it to be a couple of middle-aged blokes launching an industry initiative in 2025. was like, we need some female voices on here, we need people with brand experience, we need rights holders. is an in-aught, know, she’s been there, done it, got the T-shirt from her work at Barclays overseeing a big portfolio. But she was also previously at Fuse, which is also Sarah’s background as well. So I think both Bex and Sarah.

are interesting in that they’ve come from the agency space, but Bex has gone on to brand side. She’s now a media owner side, she’s at Global. And Sarah has gone agency side and she’s now commercial director at the FA. And so everybody, all of us have worked at agencies at one point or another, but everybody’s got their own understanding of rights holder brand side and kind of measurement tech data.

Ed (11:26.294)
And fair to say all live in it right now in the moment too, right? So it’s not like… I think as often you see these things happen and it tends to be people at the back end of the career that create these kind of things, there’s one final throw before they retire. And obviously you guys are miles away from that, right? In the midst of your career and you’ve got a number of years left ultimately, you’re doing this. And I guess it’s easy for people to look at what you’re doing and say, well, what are you doing in your day-to-day work to make sure this is a reality too?

Rory (11:29.772)
have to do.

Rory (11:48.748)
Yeah.

Ed (11:56.269)
So, you know, put yourselves out there. It’s easy to be shot down, I guess, right? And clearly you’re not afraid.

Rory (12:02.496)
Yeah, and I think the, I mean, it definitely isn’t coming along and saying everybody’s getting this wrong. There are, you know, one of the really satisfying things about this whole journey that I’ve been on is the number of people, some people have been in it for decades, people have been in it for a couple of years, who proactively got in touch with me and said, can we have a chat? I really want to speak to you about this. I’ve known, I’ve noticed this as well, or, you know, and I’ve had conversations with a wide range of people who all want to do it better.

And I think it is that thing of saying, it’s not that everybody’s getting it wrong. It’s that there is a better way to do this and that can create value for everybody. And it’s really interesting that the IPA’s research, a lot of that was actually initially funded by ThinkBox. And I think while sponsorship has ESSA, which I would kind of equate to the IPA, kind of like looks after everybody.

It’s also partnered by the sort of trade body for the promotion of TV advertising. And sponsorship doesn’t quite have that sort of equivalent of a box. And so I think, you know, I think the the need for that to come along to kind of go, look, there is a way of demonstrating that this can do stuff that maybe everybody has missed because everybody’s just so busily focused on day to day delivery. But think you’re right in that.

It’s much, it has more credibility from people who are doing it right now and who understand all the reasons why it doesn’t happen more often. Because those are the kind of problems we’re trying to solve. Like how do you sort of overcome those barriers basically?

Ed (13:40.911)
Yeah, I mean, look, this is part of the reason that when our producers were arranging this, I was so interested in speaking to you as well, because I think there’s probably lots of people who will watch and listen to this who, you know, will probably wonder why so much effort goes into negotiation, but very little thought goes into the creative platform and the actual activation thereafter. And there’s a question that’s always sort of, you’ll have heard this a million times, well, if I’m spending X amount of money, let’s say if I’m spending 10 million on the sponsorship, how much should I put into?

activation and I’ve had various answers never consistent whenever I’ve asked that question and look I’ve been on the brand side too when I worked for Nike and United a number of years ago and I ran Man United soccer schools there and Man United soccer schools worked in two ways. One it was a pay to play, know parents could send their kids to learn the Man United way. The other way was we went around the world and we sent Man United coaching ambassadors around the world to effectively educate people about what Man United was as a brand.

Yes, we were doing it through coaching kids and educating parents, but at the time we were doing it, before Man United started doing their one United tours around the world, they did their activations. We were really the only thing that went around the world and actually went in territory. And I had coaches going to like the foot of the Andes for Contra del Toro and like some of these guys got unbelievable trips around the world, places that they would never normally go and…

Rory (15:02.881)
Yeah.

Ed (15:05.806)
And often it was for a very small group of people. Other times, it for much larger organisation. you know, look, again, still on a relatively small scale, but we felt like that was really affecting what we do because we were really getting into the grassroots. But again, a very, very small part of everything that goes on. So I’m just really interested in, from that negotiation point, the real thing is what comes after, right, and how people think about it and the effort that needs to go into it.

Rory (15:20.726)
Mm-hmm.

Ed (15:33.516)
Why do you think that it seems to be almost front-loaded?

Rory (15:36.835)
Well, I got an answer to this because I’ve dumped around so much and I haven’t been in a conch for that long. I’ve got massive imposter syndrome, which I’ve always back skilled by reading and kind of researching as much I can. And also, I mean, I love like oral history podcasts. I don’t know if you’ve heard of a podcast called Origin Story, is about politics really. But I love that idea of going back to the beginning of something. You can learn so much about it. And what I’ve found is that

After the LA 84 Olympics, when the IOC first made a serious chunk of money off sponsorship by reducing the number of sponsors, introducing category exclusivity, a lot of the stuff that we take for granted now, it was the first time that think anybody really realized you could make hundreds of millions of dollars off this thing. And so…

What happened is that the rights holders then, think, the people that they appointed to help them on that journey were talent agents. And so Wasserman, CAA, IMG, they all come from that talent agent. Probably because some of them had had athletes on the books, so they were more sport adjacent. But what they

Ed (16:53.036)
Yeah, and guess the question was started to be asked by athletes that there must be something more to this than just this.

Rory (16:55.626)
Yeah. Yeah. But what they weren’t at the time was marketers. And it’s interesting that just at the point of that was happening in the UK, you had the emergence of account planning agencies like J. Walter Thompson, Stanley Pollitt, Stephen King, people like that who were starting to bring in market research and marketing effect, what would become known as marketing effectiveness into ad agencies, which is don’t always just do what the client wants.

and pass it straight through to the creatives, have somebody whose job it is to work out what’s the most effective way to achieve what the client’s business needs. And that sort of discipline sort of started to grow exactly the same point at which sponsorship was professionalizing around sales really and deals and getting the deal over the line. And whatever happens next really is not that much of their concern, you know, because they are representing the talent and they’re there to extract the most value they can for the talent.

And I think that for me was the moment where it divided and you had two sectors that were related and that they were sort of growing around different organizing principles. One is around the deal and you still see that now. So press coverage will be, I don’t know, front of shirt deal goes for 50 million euros, yeah? And that’s the news. But you never see McDonald’s buys 50 million euros worth of TV advertising.

which is essentially the same news. The news regarding the campaign and is the creative, and you’re exactly right, because it is the creative that is effective. is the deal in and of itself does nothing. It is the exposure for the brand and all of the other stuff that goes on around it that will ultimately generate an effect for the business. But I do think that kind of, and also,

Ed (18:25.656)
So yeah, yeah.

Rory (18:49.142)
You know, there’s massive incentives in the deals. know how they’re structured. Once you’ve struck a deal, if it’s 10 years, that’s, I don’t know, 10 % dropping through to your bottom line.

Ed (18:57.422)
I think Man United qualify for Champions League next season. There’s an uplift of tens of millions by Adidas now because that was baked into the proper deal. which, look all the big clubs now, they will be coming onto the ZXL. I guess they’re a tier one in football terms, right? They’ll have these poor performance related triggers in there because they matter at that level.

Rory (19:00.299)
Yeah.

Rory (19:13.984)
Yeah, but the salespeople were incentivized to then move on to the next deal and the next deal because, you know, it’s about the convention on the deal rather than worrying too much about the campaign. And I guess, again, when it was just a logo on a static perimeter board or a logo on a shirt and there wasn’t much else to be done, there wasn’t much opportunity for creativity. And so all of the best creative talent went off to advertising agencies to go make TV ads. And so there you get the culture of the can lions.

Ed (19:19.886)
Of

Rory (19:43.241)
effectiveness awards. So either you get awarded for groundbreaking creativity or you get awarded for delivering massive commercial results. And on the sponsorship side, it’s more actually you get rewarded and celebrated for signing lots of deals, maximizing commercial value, but it’s not that sort of outcome oriented. So yeah, I guess that’s the source of the divide, I think.

Ed (20:06.424)
Yeah, so I suppose that brings us nicely onto, obviously, the sponsor perfecting itself and like you did this report and we’ll, in the show notes, we released the pod as well, we’ll it in there as well so people can download it as well. we will do more detail on that further in the pod, but people won’t remember it, so we’ll make sure it’s in the show notes. So you coded 92 case studies, right? And tier one, the top 30%, they shared…

for what you’ve identified, distinct hallmarks in planning, activation and measurement. Can you break that down a little bit, what some of those things are, so we can have a better understanding?

Rory (20:46.914)
I think it’s, yeah, and I think if I was to go back and do it again, I might do another view, which is just the top third. And the IPA, have, I am now working with the IPA on some more research and when they’re researching and poke their noses around, like, and how did you choose tier ones? I like, I just kind of decided. But no, it was really about the credibility and robustness of the results that they were.

Ed (20:55.63)
There’s always next year to do the next iteration.

Rory (21:16.29)
So it’s more like they’ve used multiple data sources. You can see that a kind of related set of metrics and measures have moved and they’ve shown that it was the sponsorship that did that. So a tier two case might sort of show movement, but it’s less credible that they haven’t ruled out the other factors. It could have been other things.

or actually the…

Ed (21:47.52)
It wasn’t distinctive enough to hang your hat on. That was the thing that really moved the needle, I guess. Yeah.

Rory (21:51.683)
Or it might be that they’ve just reported that they’ve mainly focused on a big awareness gain, but they haven’t really shown how that’s then translated into behavior and buying patterns or, and then tier three is mostly they’ve shown what we call the bottom sort of section. They’ve shown a good, it’s a good, they’re good activations, but really it’s sort of exposure and likes and engagement and.

they don’t really go very far to sort of demonstrating actual effects. They’re reporting a result, but that tends to rely on those that…

Ed (22:26.094)
Yeah, they’ve not really, yeah, it’s advertising really. They’ve not managed to develop an emotional connection with the target audience, I guess.

Rory (22:33.41)
Well, I mean, it’s more like we did this great thing and 10 million people saw it. And you kind of go, great. And so what? You know, the best cases don’t even feature a reach number. So if you look at the Guinness is made of more case with their IPA winning paper, there is no reach number in there. don’t like it’s just the given that it reached lots of people. And what they’re interested in is how did brand salience change? Did people

Ed (22:54.85)
Yeah.

Rory (23:00.46)
come out on top thinking that Guinness was the most recognized rugby sponsor and what was the profit ROI of that advertising campaign versus all the other ones and they showed it was the highest out of any that they’d done in the previous eight years. So the exposure was neither here nor there really, it’s not part of that story and that’s the difference I think between the least kind of effective cases where you’re just basically describing the level of exposure that you got versus.

the other ones where they ignore that and they go on to say exactly what they achieved because of that explosion.

Ed (23:33.526)
Yeah, some of that that could often be described as vanity metric, also vanity metrics means something to some people too.

Rory (23:39.797)
It does and I think, yeah, and often, at least at the rights holder side, it’s all that they can get access to. There’s often a reticence later with rights holders from brands. But, you know, I know now from having spoken to quite a lot of brands about this, that the measurement is being done in quite a lot of brands, particularly FMCG, but in others as well from B2B and across different sectors to be able to isolate the impact.

Ed (23:47.426)
Yeah.

Rory (24:07.554)
There’s a really good case study from Brand Finance where they showed that T-Mobile, their sponsorship of Bayern Munich, had an effect on all Bundesliga fans. And that they were able to show a link, kind of uplifting consideration to a market value of 1.9 billion euros. And so there they can get to a good enough ROI calculation. So it is being done. But…

Ed (24:17.432)
Yeah.

Rory (24:35.466)
I think a lot of the sector still relies on likes and exposure and meat evaluation.

Ed (24:41.07)
Yeah, it is interesting. I’ve read as well, only 3 % of tier one cases used intermediate metrics like engagement as a primary source. So the ROI is still, I guess, relatively inconsistent. I guess everyone has different ROI metrics they want to apply depending on what their goals are, right? So think, is it difficult to have any consistency around that anyway?

Rory (24:48.439)
Hmm.

Rory (25:05.132)
Well, ROI is one of my, this is one of my bet noirs is that I could like, yeah, well, the thing is ROI is a very, very specific financial measure that’s important. And I’m not saying don’t talk about ROI, but it means a very specific thing. It’s kind of how much did I profit? Did I generate from a thing divided by the amount of investment that I put into it? think that’s right. My maths isn’t so strong. Investment profit calculation.

Ed (25:10.67)
I’ve opened up a can of worms now.

Ed (25:17.347)
Yeah.

Ed (25:32.088)
Yeah, yeah.

Rory (25:34.807)
That’s what ROI is, and it’s very important because it helps you work out whether you’ve got value for money. Your reach and stuff, that is not return on investment. It is reach. And I think all of these things are different. So the reach in exposure is inputs, but brand awareness is brand awareness. But what I kind of also push back against is that you’ve got sort of ROI, and then you’ve got ROO.

Ed (25:46.552)
Yes.

Rory (26:03.936)
which is what you hear some people talk about return on objectives, to sort of talk about things other than the financial calculation. But for me, that’s not right either because I know why people are doing it, but it implies that, for example, brand awareness has no financial value, and it really does. And actually, you can do some modeling to work out what it’s worth. So I would rather just talk about business effects, brand effects, brand objectives or brand measures.

and profit. And if you’ve got to a profit number, you can work at ROI because you know how much you spent on it. So I think it’s all part of the same thing. But ROI is often used to just describe anything that happens as a result of a sponsorship. And it’s up to you how you define it. When it’s that’s just not that’s just isn’t why this is slightly

Ed (26:52.866)
No, and to your point as well, people like Guinness or Coca-Cola would argue that awareness is massively important and a lot of what they do, not everything, but a of what they do year after year is topping up that awareness, making sure that they just remain in the mindset of their biting public, that still there, they still exist and they still hold to the same values.

Rory (27:15.732)
Absolutely, and that’s where Buying Sharp comes in. It’s mental availability, which is not quite, it’s a bit beyond awareness. It’s kind of what do I think of in a buying situation? I need a new car, what am gonna buy? Not have you heard of which car brands can you think of? If you’re gonna go and buy a car tomorrow, what would you buy? You’ll probably name two or three, and being one of those two or three is hugely valuable. And actually, the number of times that you’ve seen a logo, the number of times you’ve seen some content that’s created an emotional connection.

the more likely you are, you’re slightly more likely to name one of that brand. And similarly, I would have thought if you’re go and buy an heirloom watch, that question, the weekend after the master’s Rolex is gonna come to mind for a lot of people because they’ve just had that big refreshment of their memory structure for that brand and that’s the role that it plays. But yeah, you can’t sell anything people have never heard of you, it’s a lot harder to.

Ed (28:13.304)
Absolutely.

Rory (28:14.156)
So this is the first part of any funnel.

Ed (28:16.878)
So that brings us actually nicely into sports. I guess fandom, and I was literally having this conversation with Joe, my co-podco host about the word fandom, because there was a period where if you use fandom as a word, people sort of look at you like, are you using that? And now it seems to get used quite consistently and the cool buzzword to be able to use. But it’s not always something that you can be measured tangibly from a financial return perspective.

you’d probably argue that it’s one of the most important metrics. If you could measure it, it’s the thing that you’d really, want.

Rory (28:52.546)
Yeah, well, absolutely. It’s interesting as well in the world of politics now, isn’t it? Your fans, politicians need fans. That’s kind of why they’re, because they become the people that spread their message. similarly, I used to work on brand.

Ed (29:00.802)
Yeah.

Ed (29:11.982)
The idea of a fan is not what it used to be, guess, right?

Rory (29:14.794)
Yeah, it’s changed. I think also, I I’ve worked on brands like Nando’s and KFC, are two brands that do genuinely have funds. You know, they would form their own communities outside of the brands prompting to talk and discuss these things. And that’s incredibly powerful. This actually aligns to fame.

as one of the most effective things that you can achieve for a brand because that’s social proof. The sense that you are a brand that is doing things that people are talking about is hugely powerful. Like that is one of the most valuable things that you can get out of marketing. And yeah, and I think the depth of fandom, any kind of measures that you can start to put on that to prove that you have a more avid…

you know, engaged for one of a better word, fan-based than another rights holder is going to be very, very valuable. And I think that sort of, but I think the other thing is not just to think about your fans, because like I say, if you are, you know, you’re not just reaching our fans by being on our front of shirt. You know, if I go front of shirt in the Premier League, that means that every single Premier League watcher in the world probably will have seen my logo at some point this year.

That is massive. That is far bigger than even just the Liverpool fan base. And to be one of those 20 brands is hugely valuable. So yeah, think fandom invariably it’s kind of more how people are organizing themselves in terms of their cultural signifiers. It’s less when I was growing up, it was what kind of music you’re into. It’s more like who do you follow now and who are you a fan of? And that’ll be in a number of things. It’ll be some in sports, some outside of it.

Ed (30:29.656)
Yeah.

Ed (30:49.41)
Yeah, yeah, true.

Rory (30:55.65)
But it is becoming how people form their tribes, and think incredibly valuable nowadays.

Ed (31:01.176)
Yeah, think what’s interesting that has that look, mean, we, God, I’ve had a panel for every town, someone said, we live in incredibly fragmented media world now, but the reality is we do, right? And I think what, certainly what we’ve seen at display is how, whether we call it fandom, how live sporting experiences, and I’m not necessarily just talking about the games, but the things that even creators do in and around a sporting experience to themselves, where…

Rory (31:08.098)
Thank

Ed (31:26.186)
a group of people come together in a community to watch someone stream something around the team or the sport or the league that they love and stay for a period of time and come together in that group and stay there for, you know, we’re told all the time that younger people got on attention spans, but then I see it time and time again now where these types of live experiences do bring these fan groups together into a community.

How are you finding that to manifest itself now from a sponsor effectiveness? Because I think often it’s been seen as content production, but I always look at it as content marketing. It’s actually, for me, it’s an incredible opportunity for sponsors in the right way to really resonate with the audience and be part of that experience.

Rory (32:04.631)
Yeah.

Rory (32:16.226)
One of the most powerful things that advertising of any kind can do is be the thing that somebody is talking about. It’s why the Super Bowl ads are powerful. But it’s why, and again, show me age, but somebody would drop the Tango ad, right? Do remember the Tango ad where it’s, everybody, I mean, I got in trouble for doing that, and somebody did it to me, smack me around.

Ed (32:33.231)
Absolutely,

Ed (32:37.571)
You remember when everyone used to get expelled from school for it, I remember that.

Rory (32:41.442)
Everybody but also you’d all seen it because you’re all watching bullseye the night before on a Sunday. Whatever. Yeah. And so that is enormously powerful and you can still remember them. And I think the that’s the power of the collective experience that is that is unique to sort of live feeds. But I think it’s particularly amplified with live sport because

Ed (32:46.295)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve been tangled.

Ed (32:58.767)
Yes.

Rory (33:08.802)
Even if I’m just thinking back to big moments like Glastonbury every year, I can still go back and watch the Pyramid Headline performance stage. But sport, there’s something about sport and it being live. And the minute that match is over, you’re going to see something on social or you’re going to see the results. So it matters watching it right there. And I think it’s…

Ed (33:16.195)
Yeah.

Ed (33:30.511)
I always think about it as an extended moment because look, yeah, the game might, let’s say it’s football, it might last two hours, but actually for a football fan, the window is 48, 72 hours almost because it’s the build up to it. Look, the thing itself is happening, but then it’s almost like, it’s like, look, with F1, right, I’d love F1 in general. I actually spend more time often watching the pre and the post of it and the race, depending on what’s happening, I’ll dip in and out of it, but they get me for a longer period of time because I’m interested in the whole experience.

Rory (34:00.789)
Absolutely, and I think so there’s definitely something about the live event being the thing where everybody’s watching at same time. There’s a very big power in that and the brands there being seen by all the same people at all the same time. And if you can do something interesting within that live environment, that’s very valuable. But you’re absolutely right. There is the before, the during, and the after. And I think when it comes to fandom, the more that you can understand how particular fandoms…

what exists operate the media ecosystem around them. And you can find ways within that for the brand to take a meaningful role that is maybe a couple of days before. Or it’s like in the post-match conversation. there’s a, like you’re exactly right, an extended window for you to sort of take a role and it isn’t just about making sure that your logo is visible during those two hours.

Ed (34:51.023)
And I think, I guess this comes to sort of the next sort of second one to talk about really, which is the creativity problem. think often so much of the creative thought goes into the game window, the time in and around the game itself or the match itself or what it is often gets forgotten. And that’s often, think, where the biggest opportunity lies. And I think it’s…

Often I see that’s where content fails. it’s the same problem that Peter Field flagged for advertising short-termism, you know, as good to this creative edge, because I everyone’s thinking about the scroll and the short-term stuff. Yeah, but people are coming together in that moment. Their interests starting to build into that thing. And the in and around is almost cheaper to access than the actual game or match itself, and often more impactful. And you have longer to make your point, however you’re going to do that from a sponsorship perspective.

Rory (35:45.047)
Yeah, think the creativity is a massive, massive part of effectiveness. After the size of your brand, it’s the single biggest thing that’s under your control as to how effective it will be. I think the problem is that a lot, because a lot of the agencies that do the deals pick up the activation, but they’ve got huge sales teams and not very big and well-developed creative teams. There’s no disrespect to some of the good people within those agencies, but.

The best creative talent is they’re still going to the art agencies if they can. And so what you get is lot of big organizations that are primarily focused on getting the deal and then it goes into quite a sort of small little creative team that does what it can, but doesn’t maybe have that sort of top tier creativity. then I think there’s just a bit of a lack of imagination about what this kind

content could be and it relies, it falls back into some pretty tried and tested formats. You know, the heart to heart interview, the, you know, the surprising a fan. And actually when I was at Sid Lee’s board, we did a thing talking about sponsorship, some of the tumbleweed, I think it’s still on the Sid Lee’s board website, actually, sponsorship tumbleweed where…

Ed (36:51.129)
Yeah.

Rory (37:07.266)
we talked about some of the very kind of cliche things you see. Foosball tables at fan zone activations, You’re doing nothing to stand out. You’re doing nothing that looks different. you imagine what the average on the Birmingham fan, imagine what the average Birmingham City fan’s feed looks like. There’s loads of blues content from the club, from the players, from the creators. How is your branded sponsor content standing out within that? You’ve got to do something really funny, interesting, exciting.

Ed (37:12.227)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rory (37:35.587)
creative to actually even just get that attention. And I just think most a lot of it falls down because everybody’s very concerned about getting their product messages across or they’re thinking very rationally about what is essentially an emotional space. And I think when Peter Field was talking about short and long term, wasn’t sort of much talking about the durations of the format. It’s more, is this…

trying to get me to buy right now, in which case I need some very rational information about the product and why it’s good, or is this making me feel something, an emotional connection to the brand that in the long term will turn into a propensity to buy or to go and, and there’s been a, because of digital media and all its conversion metrics, loads of focus on the short, basically, I’ve five pounds and I’ve got 10 pounds back tomorrow.

and not enough focus on the fact that if I can generate these warm fuzzy feelings and make people smile and remember me, then at some point in the future, they are more likely to buy my brand. That’s the harder bit to measure, but it is ultimately the sort of more valuable bit. Not that the other bit isn’t important, but it’s that you need a balance. And so I think the more that you can start to think, how do we do something distinctive, exciting, entertaining, different, the thing that makes people go, did you see what that brand just did?

That’s where you’re getting into the right kind of space and obviously that often involves taking creative leaps.

Ed (39:02.531)
Yeah. No, I think it’s, I guess it’s trying to think about the sponsor pin itself as.

unique element of what you’re trying to do rather than take for instance you’ve got a TV ad campaign and then trying to cut that down and force it into that sponsorship mechanic which doesn’t necessarily suit it which can often happen as well.

Rory (39:23.926)
Yeah. Yeah, I think and I would almost say like sponsorship is being the additive layer that can really amplify all sort of a… Yeah, I think that all the most effective sponsorships are generally decades long, completely integrated into the brand narrative and the brand would be meaningfully different without it. So if think about Red Bull and Extreme Sport and I guess F1 as well, Guinness and rugby.

Ed (39:34.563)
Yeah, bring it alive, really allow me to explain that in long form.

Rory (39:52.811)
Rolex and Wimbledon. You take those sponsorships out and those brands are different. But what you don’t get in Guinness or in Red Bull, or particularly in Guinness, as an example, you don’t have the brand campaign just advertising the beer and then, and here’s the sponsorship campaign over here, and they don’t, then they’re completely different from each other. The sponsorship becomes the brand campaign and it is part of the brand and it’s just another way in which Guinness shows up.

And actually, you when you see the results, it just genuinely gives an uplift on the kind of return that you would get from that campaign anyway. So I guess the more it’s sort of integrated into it, it’s another additional layer. It adds relevancy and it adds that opportunity to connect emotionally. The more valuable it is and the more…

Ed (40:30.402)
Yeah.

Rory (40:45.506)
And that means not treating it like a silo thing where you do a standalone campaign over here that nobody ever really sees because what you’re really focusing on is your brand campaign that you run the rest of the time.

Ed (40:55.15)
Yeah, I’ve in a lot of ways, I suppose you’ll have things that you, long-term partnerships that you’ve seen that you really, really love and always keep an eye on as well. I’ve always kept an eye on what Nike have done with PSG and the way they’ve gone with the Jordan brand. Every year, they’ll find a way to do something cool with PSG. And it feels like they always open themselves up to the Nike marketing machine and are very much like, well, we trust your judgment about how you’re going to elevate us globally.

Rory (41:06.54)
Yeah.

Rory (41:23.136)
Yeah.

Ed (41:23.15)
I know that they’re seen by Nike or always was, don’t think they use this term anymore, but they see Paris as a dragon city, which was part of the reason they went and got Roma back in the day and they had obviously Man United back in the day as well. There were certain cities around the world, but I’ve always felt like the one thing they have to be PSG is they’ve always stayed true and consistent to that and every year they find a way to do something a little bit different with them. Because I think until you saw the Jordan brand on…

on the PSG kit, kind of like, well Jordan’s basketball, what’s he doing on a football kit? And then everything that came off the back of it, like the fact that they, you can see that they work together and they trust each other that however they’re going to do things is going to work for both of them. And then it’s like one plus one equals however many, right?

Rory (42:04.608)
Yeah, that’s again going back to this sort of application in marketing science to sponsorship. That is like classic Bryon Sharp. He basically says, you’ve got to build these associations over time, so stick with it, don’t chop and change. But the trick is to keep it fresh. so John Lewis, Specsavers, York City, and Nike and all these things, they basically, it’s the same idea.

Ed (42:24.376)
Yeah.

Ed (42:29.838)
Just keep chopping it up,

Rory (42:31.586)
The new iteration, a new iteration and then lo and behold 10-15 years down the line

everybody can recognize you for it. Everybody knows that you do that. That is part of what you are. And it’s become much more valuable and effective for you as a brand than if it was just a simple kind of visibility by for a couple of years. You know, that’s where the effectiveness really starts to, it compounds. And you know, you can’t see that in a quarterly sales report. know, take time, but look, you know, the evidence is all around you that it does work.

Ed (42:58.979)
Yeah.

Ed (43:04.59)
So obviously from things that do work, looking at things that don’t work as well, because we need to be even handed on the two sides of the coin, right? So obviously there’s so many different changes in platform habits. how does sponsorships keep pace with all of this? guess sponsors and brands now are expecting more, I guess, of the properties that they sponsor. The properties…

that get sponsored are probably expecting more of those sponsors too. And at the same time, the world around them is constantly changing and there’s a million ways you can distribute content, there’s a million ways you can now communicate with audiences. I guess, what are they not doing to keep pace with everything that’s going on around them?

Rory (43:49.971)
I always kind of look for what’s not changing rather than what is. Yes, of course, there’s a million new ways. I mean, in terms of big change, I do think the creator economy is different. And we really are getting to that point, you know, I mean, it’s maturing and they genuinely have their own.

Ed (43:54.018)
Yeah.

Ed (44:07.03)
It’s maturing now as well.

Rory (44:11.104)
channels that are equal in reach to some broadcasters. So that is, I mean, I guess there are a lot more broadcasters out there. I think that’s a genuine change that you need to think about how you engage with that. They are a way to get to audiences in a way that brands in and of themselves can’t do. But I think the other thing, the thing I would look at is how you, you know, is to sort of think about how you’re gonna measure what, you gotta get to grips with how you’re gonna measure what this does.

If you do something, anything, either changes people, how people think about your brand, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you’ve got a problem, you need to do something else. Change your creative, you’ve not got enough media, it needs to get seen more, or whatever. But as soon as your brand metrics start changing, and you know that it’s because of the sponsorship, that means people’s attitudes towards your brand are changing, and so something, their behavior should start to change. They should go to your stores more. They should go to your website more. They should search for you more.

if their behavior will start to change and if that starts to happen, you should see some that they’ll buy differently. And if you’ve got a little, if you can set up a test to against people who’ve not been exposed and look at you can start to understand what the uplift is and you can start to put a value on that. And that’s the, you’ve got to close that loop. That really hasn’t changed very much. The tools that we’ve got to do it.

have changed, it’s cheaper. We don’t need to market researchers out into the field for a year. Share of search is a very good predictor of share of market. That is free. So the tools have changed, but that sort of simple thing of like, work out what’s going on. Work out what the problem is. Apply a fix and measure whether it’s worth. That has never changed. And so I think…

What I think because sponsorship is big and multi-channel, it can be a bit daunting. And particularly if you’ve never been trained in it, you go, I don’t know. So I’ll grab for the easy thing, which is the social metrics in the AVE. But actually, think for sponsorship to keep up with the rest of the sector, it’s kind of, you’ve got to get to grips with that. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. And it’s not actually probably as expensive as you think. And I think…

Ed (46:13.379)
Yes.

Rory (46:28.32)
Brands, some brands are doing it. think rights holders should be helping brands to do it. And I think agencies should be sort of helping everybody understand that that’s really what you want to do. Because ultimately, you can go back to CFO and make the case for more money next year. And the renewal conversation gets easier. And you’ve got a better understanding of how to do it better. So and your career gets better as well. So it’s in everybody’s interests.

Ed (46:43.342)
I’m gonna some more.

Ed (46:50.926)
Yeah, and I think what’s coming across what you’re saying there is that a sponsorship is different beast than advertising. Things aren’t going to play out as you expect them to play out, so be willing and ready to pivot and have different plans and different ways to activate that sponsorship. So if the primary thing doesn’t work, expect to have to change things as you go and actually measure as you’re doing as well so you know you need to.

Rory (47:13.961)
Thank you.

Yeah, that’s such an important point. It’s not a sponsorship is not a machine. You know, where you put two things in and one thing comes out because if it was like that, you could just tweak that bit there and make it a bit more efficient and you get more of it. You go in, you need to go in knowing what you’d like to happen. Using that a bit as a bit of a hypothesis, but other things will happen because all of these things are interacting with each other and in ways that you can’t predict and sort of be open to the fact that

other things might emerge and other signals will emerge that might be more valuable to you. But if you know that you’re in this for the next five, ten years, that’s not a problem. You can spend two years just kind of figuring out what’s happening here and then pivot and adjust. And I saw a lady from Bing X who just renewed with Chelsea. She was posting on LinkedIn really recently. She said exactly the same thing. know, years one and two, you’re just figuring out what’s going on.

And then from there you take the call on, what’s this really delivering for us? And you go from there.

Ed (48:18.83)
Great Rory, I’ve really enjoyed this. So before we finish then, where can people find the Sponsored Effectiveness Report?

Rory (48:28.62)
So that’s at sponsorshipeffect.org, the sponsorship, the Seth website. I also, I’m gonna plug my Substack if that’s all right, which is also the sponsorshipeffectsubstack.com. So I post each week on everything from how to talk to a CFO about sponsorship to why Gary Lineker was a good move for Walkers. And yeah, please come and find me on LinkedIn, say hi, and if anybody wants to chat effectiveness, I’m always here.

Ed (48:36.942)
Go for it.

Ed (48:56.846)
Cool. And if anyone can’t remember all of that, if you email us at aloattentionshift.media, we will make sure those emails get to Rory too. I’ve been Ed Abis. This has been Rory Nackheel. This has been the Attentionshift Podcast. Thank you so much, Rory, for your time and hope to catch you soon.