Data sharing is transforming sports sponsorship, as brands and rights holders combine first-party customer and fan insights to create highly targeted campaigns with measurable ROI. Privacy-safe data clean rooms are a powerful tool, enabling partners to unlock data for granular analysis without exposing any personal information.
Forward-thinking CMOs are now prioritising first-party data and embracing clean rooms for data collaboration with their partners; 90% of respondents to Forrester’s Marketing Pulse Survey 2024 are using these secure environments for marketing purposes. This empowers sponsors to set precise KPIs against their business objectives for each partnership, and gives sports clubs greater confidence in setting and owning their rights value.
Cognizant and sports consultancy BAZBALLERS recently hosted a briefing for sports marketing agencies, representing both brands and rights holders, to highlight clean rooms’ cost-effective role in data-powered sports partnerships.
The value of secure data collaboration
Clean rooms support partners to share, compare and overlap their data, identifying audience segments based on behaviour and preferences. Partners then launch laser-targeted marketing activations and match these to sales, loyalty sign-ups and other conversions for meaningful ROI measurement.
Multiple sectors are leveraging clean rooms. Retailers and suppliers are sharing data to target and understand the impact of in-store promotions, whilst broadcasters and ad agencies are shaping and evaluating campaigns for specific audience segments. There’s even cross-sector collaboration, for example between e-commerce giants and streaming services whose valuable insights into shopping and viewing behaviours can inform each other’s campaigns.
Sports clubs and brands are also adopting clean rooms to enhance their partnerships. Three particularly high-value use cases are: measuring the overall effectiveness of sponsorship, quantifying the value of multiple sponsorships and optimising performance-based partnerships.
Multiple sponsorships and fan overlaps
Some brands have sponsorship portfolios across different sports to attract a wider fanbase, but what about the fans that happen to follow each of these sports? Are there database overlaps and if so, are these advantageous (attracting greater loyalty to a brand because of increased exposure) or a financial drain (the sponsor is effectively paying again for the same data)?
Leveraging clean room data analysis, Cognizant has supported an agency to identify a clear overlap between two sets of fans aligned to one brand’s double sponsorship. This established a robust baseline for close monitoring over the lifetime of the partnerships. By testing various campaigns against this benchmark, the brand can compare sign-ups and conversions to measure effectiveness inside and outside the overlap and across sports. Rich data such as this empowers sponsors to drive maximum value from multiple deals.
How effective is our sponsorship?
Sports marketing attribution has previously relied on broad fan profiling, imprecise modelling and unrealistic metrics such as assumed purchasing based on brand metric monitoring. However, sponsors are now demanding forensic, data-led evidence of brand building, engagement and sales.
One example is shirt sponsorship; this is big business in the Premier League and the combined payout for the 11 football clubs who feature gambling companies on their shirts is estimated at £100 million. By analysing fan databases and conversions, sponsors can directly attribute net new acquisitions from shirt branding and multiply this by their customer lifetime value to generate a much more accurate ROI. Through clean room data collaboration with Cognizant, one brand has attributed millions of pounds of new business over a number of years to shirt sponsorship. High-quality data analysis elevates sports sponsorship strategy by replacing “best guess” modelling with clear evidence of what really works.
Performance-based partnerships
Sponsorship arrangements are not always fixed fee; they can be performance-based with rights holders rewarded for specific results. Both sides can find variable sponsorship difficult to measure without precise data sharing, and the old model of offering rights holders’ assets based on a set of assumptions about driving awareness and sales, is ineffective.
Partners are now reverse engineering the process. Sports clubs are setting the value of ownership of their assets, based on informed, data-led calculations about the business these will generate for the sponsor. Brands should respond by setting KPIs aligned to their business objectives upfront, ensuring that the assets deliver the results they want.
Clean room analysis supports this process by enabling both sides to make direct attributions for conversions and sign-ups and demonstrate that deals are meeting performance targets. What’s more, they can overlay open source third-party data from sales platforms onto fan data for wider measurement of the sponsorship impact.
An affordable part of the marketing toolbox
The data clean room is a key tool for rights holders and brands as they work together to maximise partnership performance. Privacy-safe data collaboration strengthens sports sponsorship by informing and demonstrating the effectiveness of various campaigns, without compromising fans’ and customers’ trust.
Although clean rooms do not provide a complete picture, as a sports club’s audience is wider than its database, they effectively leverage joint data to measure asset value for rights holders and ROI for sponsors. Sports marketing agencies can also harness clean rooms to provide strategic sponsorship advice to their clients, on both sides of the fence.
By accurately measuring sports sponsorship returns, clean rooms demonstrate their own ROI time and again. The quality, power and precision of the data-led insights that they help to unlock makes them a cost-effective solution for successful sports partnerships.
By partnering with experts like Cognizant, you can embrace this technology and transform your sports sponsorship.
To find out more, contact us.
