A sponsorship renewal meeting in 2015 involved a deck, a relationship and an argument about brand awareness that neither side could settle. The 2026 version involves a brand marketing director with a dashboard asking why the second half exposure figure dropped 18 percent against last season.
That shift has been good for serious rights holders and uncomfortable for everyone selling on reputation alone.
What can now be counted
Computer vision reads logos frame by frame across a broadcast, counting duration, screen share, clarity and position. The same approach runs across social video and photography. What used to be a rough estimate of media value is now a measured number with a methodology attached, and brands increasingly commission their own measurement rather than accept the rights holder’s.
This has had an effect on inventory design. Placements that perform well on camera, the jersey patch, the area immediately behind the plate or the bench, the LED strip at broadcast height, command prices that bear little relation to how many people in the building can see them. A hoarding in an unfilmed corner of the ground is close to worthless, however many fans walk past it.
New inventory is being built with measurement in mind from the start. When MLB’s automated ball-strike reviews began appearing as branded animations on videoboards and in broadcasts, an officiating tool became a sponsorship asset with a countable number of appearances per game.
The measurement gap nobody has closed
Exposure is not effect. A logo on screen for 94 seconds is a fact. Whether it changed anyone’s purchasing is a different question, and the honest answer is that most sponsorship measurement still stops at the first one and quietly implies the second.
The brands getting furthest are the ones treating sponsorship like any other marketing channel: brand lift studies run against exposed and unexposed groups, geographic tests where activation runs in some markets and not others, and tracking of branded search volume in the days around a fixture. None of this is perfect. All of it is better than counting seconds and calling it value.
Attribution gets harder still for multi-market deals where broadcast, in-venue, social and athlete content all run simultaneously. Pulling those into one view requires joining data from four or five vendors who all format things differently, which is why marketing analytics and reporting dashboards tend to be the first thing a serious sponsorship team commissions after signing a major deal.
What rights holders should do about it
Three things change the conversation at renewal.
Measure your own inventory before the brand does, and share the methodology. A rights holder who arrives with independent measurement and acknowledges the weak placements is in a far stronger position than one who sends a deck of impressions.
Price by performance rather than tradition. If the data shows one board outperforming another by a factor of three, the rate card should say so. Many rights holders still price by physical size because that is how it has always been done.
Sell the activation, not just the placement. The deals that renew are the ones where the brand did something with the rights: content, access, fan offers, athlete involvement. A logo alone is a commodity and gets negotiated down every cycle.
In-venue and social need separate measurement
Broadcast exposure is the most measured channel and the least representative of a whole deal. A matchday sponsorship also runs across concourse signage, public address mentions, app placements and whatever the club posts afterwards, and each of those behaves differently.
Social is the one most often double counted. A club post featuring a sponsor and an athlete post featuring the same sponsor reach overlapping audiences, and adding the two together inflates the figure. Deduplicating reach across accounts is tedious work, and it is the difference between a number a brand trusts and one its agency takes apart at renewal.
The category risk worth watching
Betting and crypto money reshaped sponsorship rosters quickly, and both categories carry regulatory and reputational exposure that can change in a single legislative session. Rights holders who let one volatile category grow past a comfortable share of revenue have a concentration
problem, not a commercial success. Reporting that follows these category shifts closely, including sponsorship and sports business coverage, is worth more to a commercial director than any annual industry report, because the changes happen mid-season.
The direction of travel
Measurement will keep improving and the gap between measured exposure and measured outcome will keep closing, slowly. Rights holders who build their own data capability will set the terms of that conversation. Those who wait will have the terms set for them by whichever agency the brand hires.
Either way, the era of selling a logo position on the strength of a relationship and a glossy deck is over. What replaces it is harder work and, for the organisations that do it properly, worth considerably more.
