Sponsorships are considered one the most reliable ways for a brand to get in good with sports fans. But most marketers are in the dark about the real commercial impact of their partnerships with franchises, tournaments and broadcasters. The search for answers could help them justify more spending, or lead them further astray.

According to Forrester, 76% of U.S. consumer marketers who invested in a sports sponsorship in 2024 said they struggle to calculate the return on that investment (ROI). That’s despite 39% of CMOs saying they expect to increase sports sponsorship investments in 2025, while 28% are preparing their brand’s debut sports partnership this year — a reflection of live sports’ increasingly vital ability to connect brands with audiences in a fragmented media environment.

Sports sponsorships provide a “halo effect” for brand-building efforts, noted Forrester analyst Mike Proulx, so techniques like brand-lift studies are common while “hardcore ROI” measures are thinner on the ground. That isn’t stopping marketers looking for workarounds that get them closer to understanding the true impact of a partnership.

Engine oil brand Mobil1 has a long-time presence in NASCAR — it’s been the sport’s official engine oil since 2003, in fact. Ahead of the 2024-25 season, it signed up to become the presenting sponsor of NASCAR on Amazon Prime Video’s “Victory Lane” post-race coverage.

“Consumers can know that if it’s good enough for NASCAR, they can trust that it’s going to be good enough for their summer road trip,” said Austin Johansen, Mobil1’s North America marketing manager.

The move wasn’t just a way of doubling down on the brand’s motorsports associations. Amazon is a key direct sales channel for Mobil1, and the company’s been working with the retail platform to track extra sales generated by its sponsorship.

In particular, the Amazon partnership granted Mobil1 the use of shoppable ad formats, which carried consumers through to a bespoke storefront within the Amazon retail platform. Though Johansen didn’t share exact financials or the size of the company’s media investment, he said the combination had produced a “significant lift in sales,” especially for its premium Extended Performance Advanced Full Synthetic product.

“[Consumers] can immediately go from brand awareness to product discovery,” he said.

The company also used Amazon’s user data to retarget viewers of its NASCAR ads with follow-up material throughout the NASCAR season. The pincer approach, he said, enabled the firm to bridge sales performance and media exposure in a way that wouldn’t be possible through a linear broadcaster.

Amazon’s execs are keen to prove that its Prime Video sports coverage represents a radical departure from the old broadcast world (this season was NASCAR’s first with the streamer). The arrangement allowed Mobil1 “to measure and optimize in-program sponsorships at parity with traditional media for the first time,” claimed Danielle Carney, head of U..S video and live sports sales at Amazon Ads, in an email.

Marketing leaders are receptive to that CTV and commerce pitch. After all, they need to prove the value of their sports partnerships to skeptical CFOs.

It’s not the only way they’re attempting to bring more discipline to their partnerships, though. Non-alcoholic beer brand Bero recently sponsored a padel tournament in London during the same week as Wimbledon, in the hope that associating itself with the challenger racquet sport might help catch the eyes of fans following the more established championship. Backed by actor Tom Holland, the brand launched in the U.K. in January.

Bero worked with Advantage Sports and talent agency IMG to host the event, meaning it was able to appear as the tournament’s headline sponsor and take a cut of other partnership revenue raised.

According to Bero’s marketing vp Jackie Widmann, that meant it was able to cover half of its cash investment in the sponsorship (she didn’t provide exact figures). According to Widmann, the sponsorship netted the brand a 30-40% increase in direct web traffic leading to a 92% week-over-week sales lift; 20,000 new Instagram and TikTok followers; as well as new trade leads on British beer vendors. The tournament was ““insanely useful for the business,” she said.

Malph Minns, managing director of sports marketing agency Strive Sponsorship, explained that impact measurement regimes of one type or another are now being sewn into sponsorship agreements from the word go.

Brands like travel retailer Subweb, shirt sponsor of Belgian soccer team RSC Anderlecht since 2024, provide one example. The company has been targeting the digital ads it runs in conjunction with the sponsorship deal based on a combination of first-party data from their own and their partner club’s datasets, enabled by specialist data clean room partner WeHave. “They’re optimizing their spend. They’re not just trying to slam [messaging] to everybody,” he said. Minns said his company Strive expected to work with WeHave on at least five sponsorship agreements this year.

Where they can be calculated, commercial returns help marketers justify their sponsorship investments. But chasing receipts might end up misleading marketers, too.

Minns warned against abandoning brand-awareness metrics in favor of commercial ones. “People like money measures, and I think ROI has been too narrowly defined as purely commercial income,” he said.

Both audiences and marketers are drawn to sport because of its emotional pull. Holland’s own passion for padel was one of the factors that drove Bero’s investment, Widmann said. That same dynamic can fuel skepticism among CMOs’ boardroom opponents.

“It can’t be simply, ‘Hey, we think this is cool, we want to see our name on a shiny billboard within a stadium.’ That’s not a sound business reason,” said Proulx.

It’s a knotty problem that echoes the broader brand-versus-performance debate playing out across advertising. Just as performance measures can undervalue brand assets and long-term marketing investments in other media, so too might commercial measures eclipse a sponsorship’s ability to generate positive effects for an advertiser.