Opinion: Rory Natkiel on why creativity is the real bottleneck in sponsorship effectiveness

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 right data, cash will follow.