Five Ways to Score Big on Your Sports Sponsorship
Learn five proven ways to maximize the value of your sports sponsorship, beyond just visibility, and turn it into a winning play for your brand.
Sports sponsorships are about more than putting your logo on a jersey. When done strategically, they can deliver measurable ROI, deeper fan engagement, and long-term brand growth. Yet too often, companies invest heavily in sponsorships only to find they’re not maximizing the value of their deal. The problem isn’t the sponsorship itself, it’s failing to leverage it beyond visibility. At Adcetera, our sports marketing services draw on decades of experience connecting brands with the right sports opportunities to ensure you get the most out of every relationship.
While these partnerships can be costly, they can also be among the most lucrative marketing investments. Just ask Spotify, which paid over $70 million to sponsor FC Barcelona — and turned their sponsorship into a global brand-building platform. Here are five proven ways to get real results from your sports sponsorship.
Know What You’re Trying to Achieve
The first step to a successful sports sponsorship is knowing what success looks like for your brand. For some brands, it’s increased visibility and stronger associations with teams or athletes. For others, it may include employee engagement, business development opportunities, or exclusive client entertainment. Whatever the objective, having a clear vision from the start ensures your sponsorship is built to deliver real value.
The Adcetera Advantage: We help brands clarify sponsorship goals from day one, aligning your investment with measurable outcomes. Whether you’re after visibility, customer engagement, or business development opportunities, Adcetera develops the roadmap to make sure your sponsorship supports your broader marketing strategy.
Think Beyond the Deal
We often see brands pour tons of cash into a sponsorship deal hoping to launch their brand onto the big stage, and while there’s plenty of excitement and visibility shortly after the contract gets signed, momentum quickly fizzles out after the initial hype. Fast forward one or two seasons into the deal and marketing teams have little to show for their investment. This is largely because they don’t think beyond the deal. The deal itself becomes the whole plan, instead of step one of a larger strategic initiative.
Spotify’s sponsorship of FC Barcelona is a great example of thinking beyond the deal. Three years into their partnership with one of the world’s biggest soccer clubs, they’ve turned the initiative into a highly lucrative music-meets-fashion-meets-football venture. Why? Because they didn’t settle for simply slapping the logo on the jersey. In fact, they even opted not to use their logo at all during some of the team’s biggest games of the season.
Last May, during a match against their archrivals Real Madrid, FC Barcelona took the field in new jerseys for the first time that season. They still wore their iconic red and blue home kit, but instead of the Spotify logo, the jersey featured rapper Travis Scott’s Cactus Jack emblem. It wasn’t long before the limited-edition jersey sold out and went up for thousands of dollars on resale websites.
The Travis Scott collab was a win-win-win for the brand, the club, and the artist. And it was only one of a larger series of collabs with the likes of Drake, The Rolling Stones, Rosalia, Karol G, and Coldplay. Every time they’ve played Real Madrid (a match that averages more than 650 million viewers), they’ve taken the field in a new limited-edition kit.
Choosing not to use your logo during one of the world’s most-watched sporting events is a bold move, but it’s one that has paid off by keeping Spotify in the ongoing conversation — in the soccer world, in the music world, in the fashion world, and beyond. It’s all part of the plan beyond the deal, and it’s working.
The Adcetera Advantage: We specialize in building multi-channel campaigns that keep the sponsorship alive long after the press release. From content creation to social activations and event experiences, we ensure your sponsorship is part of an ongoing story that keeps fans — and new audiences — talking.
Make the Contract Work for You
Bold sponsorship activations start with understanding exactly what your agreement entitles you to. Too often, brands overlook key rights, such as player images, stadium access, or game footage, simply because the team doesn’t highlight them. That’s why we begin every sports partnership campaign with a deep dive into the contract, ensuring nothing gets left on the table. Sometimes, that means holding organizations accountable: “The contract guarantees we get X number of players for X amount of time for X number of activations and partnership videos — let’s make it happen.”
At Adcetera, our sports marketing team has worked on all sides of the table — with leagues, teams, and sponsors. That experience gives us the leverage to maximize every benefit, negotiate ongoing value, and design activations that work for the sponsor, the team, and the fans.
The Adcetera Advantage: We analyze your contract line by line to identify hidden opportunities and push for full value delivery. From player access to in-stadium activations, we make sure you’re leveraging every benefit your agreement provides.
Understand and Embrace the Culture of the Sport
When it comes to planning sponsorship activations, understanding the culture of the sport is vital. It may seem like a no-brainer, but without a deep understanding of the culture, brands might upset fans with inaccurate depictions of the sport or miss opportunities to make deeper connections with their audiences.
Last year, during the Euro 2024 tournament, Geico ran a commercial that sparked major backlash from soccer fans online, with many accusing the company of disrespecting American soccer fans. While this is not a team sponsorship campaign, it is an example of how brands can upset and alienate fans when they don’t respect the culture of the sport.
The ad features two fans in a stadium using walkie talkies to communicate with the referee. One of the two fans tells the referee to call a penalty, which he does while the ball is at midfield (penalties are only called for fouls within the marked penalty area around each goal). The ad also shows one of the fans asking for a timeout (there are no timeouts in soccer) and asking the ref to call halftime as the game clock shows three and a half minutes. This Geico ad likely wasn’t meant to be a real-life depiction of the game, and perhaps the errors were even deliberate. Nonetheless, it didn’t land well among fans, with Reddit users calling it “lame and low effort,” “dreadfully insulting,” and “annoying from start to finish.”
The Adcetera Advantage: Our team brings deep expertise across leagues, from MLS to the NFL, NBA, NHL, and NWSL. We help ensure your brand activations speak authentically to the sport and its fans — avoiding missteps and maximizing emotional impact.
Find the Right Agency Partner
The right agency partner can make the difference between a sponsorship that falls flat and one that builds lasting loyalty with fans. When we partnered with Fracht Group to activate their sponsorship of Inter Miami, we guided them through every step — from launching a partnership website to producing campaign videos, creating social media content, and executing gameday activations. Our experience across leagues including the MLS, NFL, NBA, NHL, and NWSL ensures brands get the expertise needed to turn sponsorships into memorable fan experiences.
The Adcetera Advantage: As a full-service agency, we help brands define clear goals, plan strategic activations that keep momentum alive, understand and maximize contract benefits, and ensure the brand speaks authentically to the culture of the sport. The result? Campaigns that fans remember long after the final whistle.
Ready to Make Your Sports Sponsorship Work Harder?
Sports sponsorships represent one of the most powerful opportunities for brands to connect with fans on an emotional level, but only if they’re approached strategically. At Adcetera, we combine decades of sports marketing expertise with full-service creative capabilities to help you unlock the true value of your sponsorship.
Contact us today to turn your next sports sponsorship into a win your fans — and your business — will never forget.