Patrick Campion and Lynne Robertson | FAME SPORT
We hold nearly every channel in the marketing mix to full-funnel accountability — except sports. Multimillion-dollar partnerships still get graded on impressions and brand lift. Those are proxies, not proof. In media, we obsess over incrementality, audience quality, conversion lift, and ROAS. Yet when the conversation turns to sports, otherwise disciplined marketers relax the standard and declare victory on visibility alone.
Why do we accept this double standard? Because sports partnerships carry legacy and prestige? A logo on the kit or signage behind home plate feels like brand power? That feeling often becomes the KPI. We tell ourselves stories about association and cultural relevance. “Validation by association” is not the same as “growth driver.” If we wouldn’t tolerate vanity metrics from our other marketing, why tolerate them from the platform with the biggest audience?
Here’s the irony: no audience is more passionate—or more primed for action—than sports fans. They are highly engaged, build rituals, and advocate in public. But the infrastructure around sports partnerships is still wired for 2010: broadcast-centric valuation models, siloed activation strategies, and thin post-mortems that stop at exposure rather than tracing behavior. We know how to run a modern funnel everywhere else but in sports we still act like the job ends at “we hope people saw a logo somewhere behind the action.”
Expecting more means starting with the audience and the funnel, not the team and the assets. Before we negotiate where the logo goes, we should articulate how the partnership will move specific audiences through awareness, consideration, and conversion. What will we track? What decisions will those signals enable – not just on game day, but 365 days a year?
Measurement must evolve from exposure to impact. If “X million impressions” is the recap, no one cares. If “X% incremental lift in engagement, leads, trials, or sales” is the recap, we’ve learned something we can scale.
We founded Fame Sport to raise the expectations. We launched our measurement tool Velocity to drive this revolution.
The next era of sports marketing won’t ask, “How many people saw it?” It will ask, “How many people acted because of it—and what will we do differently next week?” It satisfies the CFO and helps marketers move the needle in ways that truly matter.