Behind closed doors: What sponsors really think about measurement
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 anything but. Once the group began comparing experiences, challenges and internal politics, the conversation quickly moved from the theoretical to the brutally practical.
Measuring sponsorship returns, it turns out, is far less about metrics and far more about people, process and organisational structure.
Measurement starts long before the partnership commences
One of the clearest points of consensus was that sponsorship reporting doesn’t begin at the end of a campaign; it begins before it starts.
Success depends on knowing which departments to involve, what to measure, and crucially, who actually owns sponsorship internally. This is the part most organisations get wrong. Without clear ownership, reporting becomes fragmented, objectives drift, and the end-of-year “impact report” becomes a political exercise rather than a useful one.
The internal battle for revenue credit
A theme that surfaced repeatedly, and with some exasperation, was the internal struggle over who gets to claim revenue.
Many leaders highlighted tension with sales teams, who understandably want to attribute every pound of income to their own efforts. Meanwhile, sponsorship often plays a direct role in warming prospects, re-engaging dormant clients, or nudging contracts over the line, but it rarely gets formal recognition for it.
This challenge lies at the heart of organisational question: should sponsorship sit within sales, or within brand?
- Within sales: sponsorship becomes a tool, part of the funnel, helping move customers from conversation to conversion. Less pressure to justify existence, more alignment with revenue generation.
- Within brand: sponsorship is treated as a long-term growth driver, responsible for building reputation, relevance and loyalty. But it is also expected to “pay for itself”, often through sales it doesn’t directly control.
The truth, as several attendees noted, is that sponsorship is both. It builds the brand over time, filling the top of the funnel with future advocates. And it accelerates deals in the short term by giving sales teams something genuinely valuable to work with. The problem is not the dual role; it’s the lack of internal clarity around it.
The holy grail of a single ROI and why it rarely exists
When it came to demonstrating a single financial ROI, the room reached a familiar consensus: it’s incredibly hard to do.
Not impossible, several shared compelling examples:
- Tracking purchasing behaviour of exposed vs unexposed audiences
- Measuring uplifts in sales in specific regions following the announcement of a local partnership
- Analysing pipeline movement when sponsorship is used to engage prospects
These examples matter because they provide tangible, defensible evidence.
But without a universally accepted formula, most brand leaders rely on gathering multiple strands of hard evidence rather than pretending a single magic number exists.
What the board will accept and what it absolutely won’t
Several leaders admitted that large portions of data provided by rights holders never reach the boardroom.
While measures provided by rights holders, most notably media value, have their uses, their flaws were well understood. There was general agreement that metrics like media value and social impressions, when presented at the board level, are typically met with the same response: so what?
The uncomfortable truth is that, however sophisticated, much of this data is not considered credible evidence of financial impact. A few attendees had success integrating econometrics into their reporting frameworks, but most acknowledged that boards have a very small, very conservative set of evidence they consider legitimate.
An interesting alternative was to focus not on revenue generated but on costs saved in the typical customer acquisition cycle. If sponsorship shortens the sales cycle, warms prospects, or reduces the need for expensive lead-generation campaigns, these cost savings are quantifiable and meaningful.
Ultimately, if it doesn’t tie directly to money made or money saved, it struggles to achieve credibility.
Return on objectives: a credible alternative
In the absence of a single financial ROI, Sponsorium CEO Paul Pednault presented a compelling alternative: measuring return on objectives using a structured, points-based system.
Sponsorium’s Performind tool tracks how each partnership performs against clearly defined objectives, sales, brand, community, or otherwise and compares impact relative to cost. This approach allows brands to assess an entire portfolio on a like-for-like basis against specific objectives, without needing to force every sponsorship into a single financial metric.
In the end
The real issue isn’t the framework. It’s deciding what sponsorship is actually supposed to do. Until a business agrees on that, no dashboard, tool or ROI model will save you.
But once everyone is aligned, the job becomes much simpler: measure what matters, ignore what doesn’t, and be honest about where sponsorship genuinely moves the needle. Not everything will be financial, and not everything will be fluffy brand nonsense. The truth sits somewhere in the middle.
Join the next roundtable
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