What’s Your Brand Sponsorship Really Worth? The First-Fast Response Approach

By: Peter Dewey , Raakhi Agrawal , Leonardo Fascione , Austin Davis

We find that marketing sponsorships are often measured incorrectly. As such, they are under-optimized and undervalued—and can even be two to four times more valuable than common approaches calculate. Enter First-Fast Response, a cutting-edge metric designed to measure mindshare, the likelihood of a consumer choosing your brand in a specific context. This approach to evaluating sponsorships will allow you to appropriately value and optimize this key piece of your marketing portfolio.

In the ever-evolving landscape of marketing, sponsorships have continued to be an attractive yet challenging asset for chief marketing officers (CMOs). The value is obvious—strengthening brand and product associations for business growth. A CMO must decide what to sponsor amongst a myriad of (often hierarchical) choices—be it sports leagues, teams, players, or adjacent influencers—and must then determine how to maximize the impact of these high-level assets, often worth several $100M.

Sponsorships, as they are not directly tied to conventional conversion activities, are inherently challenging to measure. This makes it imperative to consider which metrics truly capture the impact of sponsorship investments and, critically, how we translate these to business impacts to persuade CFOs and other business partners. In our experience, traditional measurement approaches fall short (see Exhibit 1 below)—vastly undervaluing marketing sponsorships, which can be double or quadruple the value calculated. Media equivalency is a good measure to determine a fair price for the asset(s), but connecting outcomes is difficult. Brand studies can be helpful, but traditional methods on awareness, which struggle to showcase variation for large, developed brands and equity, are generally poor predictors of future outcomes. Integration with marketing mix models can be promising, but this approach will undervalue the long-term impact of a sponsorship as it only detects behavior from those currently in market—and we have found nearly 95% of customers are not in market at any particular time. These points underscore a fundamental challenge for CMOs: ensuring that sponsorship dollars are not just spent but spent wisely and effectively for a CFO.

Exhibit 1: Challenges seen in today’s sponsorship measurement toolkit 

Issue: Typical sponsorship measurement fails to tell the full picture in both short- and long-term impact …

First-Fast Response (FFR) is a cutting-edge metric designed to measure mindshare, a consumer’s likelihood of choosing a brand in specific needs-based contexts. FFR is significantly fast(er) moving and more predictive of purchasing outcomes compared to other brand metrics. According to BCG research, FFR is 3–15 times more predictive of purchase/consumption and nearly three times more responsive (quicker to measure) than unaided and aided brand awareness. This rapid feedback is invaluable in today's fast-paced marketing environment, where waiting months for ROI data is not feasible, especially for long purchase cycle industries. FFR is particularly relevant for sponsorships because it captures immediate and unconscious brand associations sponsorships often aim to create. For instance, a software company might focus on contexts such as "improving team collaboration" or "enhancing cybersecurity." An insurance company might target "family financial protection" or "health coverage benefits." Or, most classically, a sports drink brand targeting “athletic performance and hydration.”

So, how does FFR work, and why is it so effective for measuring sponsorship impact? At its core, FFR measures the speed with which consumers associate your brand in specific need-based scenarios, which BCG refers to as "demand spaces." By targeting these specific demand spaces, FFR can provide a nuanced understanding of how well your sponsorship is resonating with the target audience based on total exposure to the asset. Whether it be a league, a team, a player, or something else, it does not matter. The two questions to investigate are: (1) How exposed to the asset was an individual within a certain demand space? and (2) How much did that exposure change their FFR? From there, it is a relatively straightforward translation from exposure to response, to first brand consideration, to brand purchases. Our research highlights that a 1 percentage point increase in FFR can drive a 1-3% lift in conversion. In measuring these areas, we find that this lift often translates to a 2–4x higher value of sponsorships than calculated by other metrics such as media equivalency or marketing mix models.

The trick to understanding the value of sponsorships using this technique is assessing total exposure and perceived share of voice gained from the sponsorship. Consider the sponsorship of a professional sports team. The team will be part of a broader league and will be localized to a region/market. There will be players with varying levels of fame. FFR can measure response to sponsorship in the general population, people who follow the sport, those who follow the team, and avid fans. You can also analyze these metrics within the geographic location of the sports team to assess regional impact. This multi-layered approach provides a detailed view of how different segments respond to your sponsorship.

Exhibit 2: FFR can help de-average audience response to sponsorship across different segments

We have deployed this methodology numerous times and have four key learnings:

1. Demand space level measurement needed: FFR is designed to measure association of a specific need with a specific product; a “demand space” view contextualizes the impact.

2. FFR informs the broader activation strategy: the asset itself is one part of a larger marketing activation plan surrounding it, e.g., social heavy-ups or connected TV buys on top of a sports game.

3. Optimize sponsorships in real-time like never before:  given the speed and responsiveness to measure, you can more continually optimize the broader activation due to the availability of new, fast data on performance and ROI. 

4. FFR can help you assess sponsorship potential—both before buying and after placing resources behind it: assess customer response to the asset to base your pricing prior to signing a lengthy and expensive contract. Post-contract, with a full view of the measured ROI, you can confidently tailor media investment boosting.  More often than not, the sponsorship justifies a meaningfully larger budget given the delivery of confident, profitable growth. 

The First-Fast Response, a cutting-edge new approach, can appropriately evaluate mindshare and help effectively optimize sponsorships, a key piece of your marketing portfolio that traditional metrics have consistently undervalued.