Most sponsors decide whether to renew long before you ask them

What's really behind a lost sponsor?

When a partner walks away, the reason they give is usually budget. The real reason is often simpler: they couldn't prove the deal worked. Forrester found 76% of US B2C marketing executives who invested in sports sponsorships in 2024 struggle to calculate the ROI. The WFA found nearly three-quarters of sponsorship practitioners cite measurement and demonstrating ROI as a top challenge, yet less than 1% of sponsorship budgets is typically spent on measurement. Little wonder so many can't make the case internally.

That gap lands on you, the rights holder. If the brand's marketing team can't show value to its finance team, the renewal is in trouble long before the contract ends. Most measurement also stops at the top of the funnel, with brands mainly tracking awareness (84%) and consideration (65%) rather than commercial attribution or sales impact. A deal judged only on awareness is easy to cut when budgets tighten.

What are brands actually asking for?

Brands are telling rights holders what they want. KORE found 62% of brands say improved data measurement is the primary way to partner better. Yet 81% of rights holders say data analysis plays only a moderate or minimal part in their sponsorship and activation decisions. I can't think of a clearer mismatch. Two Circles found 63% of brands feel their property partners don't fully understand their objectives. A partner who feels misunderstood and can't measure results is already halfway out the door.

Sponsorship also competes for budget with channels that report every day. Two Circles found digital now makes up 44% of brand spend aimed at sports audiences, praised for its personalisation and measurement. If a brand gets live results from digital and a once-a-year recap from you, that comparison won't go your way. Regular, simple reporting in the brand's own language is how sponsorship holds its place in the plan. That means showing a partner exactly what their deal gives them: brand visibility, the benefits they've used and the metrics their team cares about, all backed by real knowledge of who they're reaching.

Think of the renewal meeting as the last page of a report you've been writing since the day you signed.

Long partnerships keep paying back

The payoff for keeping partners is big. Gemba's A Question of Impact report draws on more than 15 years of research covering 348 sponsors. Among fans of the property, unprompted awareness for partnerships lasting more than 10 years indexed at 314, against 100 for deals under two years, and top-box consideration for partnerships of five to 10 years indexed at 365. They're index figures, but the direction is clear: the longer a partnership runs, the harder it works.

Channel 4's 15-year study of 240 broadcast sponsorships points the same way. Sponsorships running for more than two years delivered a 20% higher boost in consideration than those running for one to two years, and the study concluded that sponsorships improve with age rather than wear out. Every early exit throws that compounding value away, for the brand and for you.