EXCLUSIVE: Temporal’s CMO on why Premier League sponsorship beat traditional marketing

For many B2B technology companies, international expansion follows a familiar playbook. Digital advertising, industry events and content marketing campaigns gradually building awareness in new markets. Temporal chose a different route.

Earlier this month, the open-source software company was unveiled as Crystal Palace’s new front-of-shirt sponsor in one of the Premier League’s highest-profile commercial partnerships of the summer.

While shirt sponsorships are often viewed as expensive branding exercises, Temporal reached a very different conclusion. After evaluating the alternatives, the company determined that Premier League sponsorship represented the fastest and most cost-effective way to build awareness beyond North America.

For Temporal, awareness itself is not the end goal. The company has established a clear commercial measure of success: increasing the number of new organisations adopting its open-source software, creating a pipeline of future enterprise customers. That clarity of objective shaped every decision that followed.

Starting with the business problem

Temporal's software sits behind many of the digital services people use every day, yet most users have never heard of the brand.

"We have been working on growing brand awareness for what we do, what the value of the software is and why you might decide to use Temporal in North America for the last two years," explains Clair Byrd, Chief Marketing Officer at Temporal.

Those campaigns had proven successful in North America, but the company faced a new challenge as it expanded internationally.

"The strategies that we used in North America to reach that audience don't export well. As we're thinking about how we might start driving similar awareness for what we're doing and why it's important in the rest of the world, we needed to find an asset that delivered the same, or ideally more, brand awareness."

What followed was a detailed strategic review of marketing and advertising opportunities.

Why sponsorship won

Before entering discussions with Crystal Palace, the company modelled alternative approaches, comparing sponsorship with the more traditional awareness channels it already used.

"We went out and tried to model if we were just using the traditional channels that we already have, how much money would it cost to get the penetration into these markets that we want."

Premier League sponsorship is rarely described as inexpensive. Yet when Temporal compared it against international advertising campaigns, outdoor media and other awareness channels, it became the more efficient option.

"As far as efficiency, it's not even close," Byrd explains. "We would have to spend five, six, seven times as much money to do an out-of-home campaign of similar size and magnitude than what we will get every weekend through the digital reach of this partnership."

For a business whose primary challenge was rapidly building international awareness, sponsorship became the most commercially efficient solution.

Beyond reach: The value of trust

For Temporal, the decision wasn't simply about reaching more people. It was also about how those audiences would receive the brand.

According to Dan Lipman, Co-Managing Director at Playfly Sports, the agency supporting Temporal's sponsorship strategy, sport offers something that traditional advertising channels struggle to replicate.

"The number one benefit is trust. Sports sponsorship is consistently the most trusted advertising channel, which is particularly important in technology. You're showing up somewhere where you're leveraging the association of Crystal Palace and the Premier League, and that's incredibly valuable."

For a business asking organisations to trust mission-critical software, that credibility formed an important part of the investment case alongside the efficiency and scale of the Premier League's global audience.

Choosing the right partner

Only once Temporal had decided that Premier League sponsorship best addressed its business objectives did attention turn to selecting the right club.

Rather than focusing purely on audience size, the company assessed geographical reach, audience overlap, community values and long-term strategic fit.

"There is a lot of very strong overlap between the audiences we care about being the engineers who are actually building the software on a day-to-day basis, their leadership, executive leadership of those companies and their interest in football," says Byrd.

The analysis extended beyond demographics.

"The Palace community was another piece of the diligence that we were doing. We were looking for signals from the local community, and then we were also looking for values alignment. Do the values of this club match the values that Temporal have that we want to be sharing more broadly with the business community too?"

That combination of audience overlap, international reach and shared values ultimately made Crystal Palace the preferred partner.

"I did a lot of 'secret shopping' and defining our point of view about how we might actually measure the effectiveness of this partnership before we even got into any material conversations about doing the deal," says Byrd.

Measuring what matters

Despite investing in one of football's most visible sponsorship assets, Temporal will not judge success by shirt exposure alone.

Traditional brand metrics such as awareness, sentiment and media value remain important, but they are only part of the picture.

"The one that matters most to us is net new corporate domains coming online in the open-source community," says Byrd.

In other words, the partnership will ultimately be judged not by how many people see the logo, but by whether more organisations begin exploring and adopting Temporal's software.

"We are viewing it more as integrated marketing success. The success metrics are more about the integration of all of these things we're talking about as opposed to just pure media reach."

A lesson for brands entering new markets

Temporal's approach offers a simple lesson for brands considering sponsorship for the first time: start with the business objective, not the sponsorship. Rather than searching for a rights holder and then building a justification, the company first defined the problem it was trying to solve before evaluating all available marketing channels.

As Byrd puts it: "You need a clarity of vision about what you're trying to achieve from first principles and don't go from the outside in. Understand what you're trying to do first, then go and find the asset that matches that best."

Temporal didn't choose Crystal Palace because it wanted a football sponsorship. It chose Crystal Palace because, after analysing the alternatives, Premier League sponsorship proved to be the most effective solution to a clearly defined business problem.