5 Famous Effectiveness Principles (and how they apply to sponsorship)

There's a knowledge gap within the sponsorship sector around the core tenets of marketing effectiveness. Here's 5 key concepts and how they apply.

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I’ve made no effort to hide that I’m a recent arrival in the sponsorship sector. I don’t have decades of experience in deal-making and partnership activation. Which is why I find the space so fascinating: it combines two of my lifelong interests, sport and marketing, and offers constant opportunities to learn new things, along with layers of complexity I hadn’t noticed before.

I also think it’s why I’m relatively well-placed to look at how things currently work and identify gaps or problems that someone more entrenched may not see, or may have come to accept as the way things are done.

One of my early observations, and something that really surprised me, was how little knowledge there was of the effectiveness work of Binet & Field, Byron Sharp, Orlando Wood et al in the sponsorship industry compared to advertising. And that some key effectiveness principles have practical applications that could change how we think about sponsorship strategy, planning and activation.

So, by way of a compilation of effectiveness’s greatest hits, here are 5 Famous Effective Principles (and how they apply to sponsorship).

1. Profit growth takes time to realise

Source: The Long and the Short Of It, Binet & Field, IPA 2013

This comes from the classic The Long and the Short Of It. What Binet & Field are showing here is that campaigns of 3+ years are most likely to report ‘very large’ profit growth (in their terminology, the effect is ‘very large’ compared to all the other campaigns within their dataset). In a nutshell, if a sponsor wants to generate profit, running the same campaign for three years is the most effective way to do it.

I started with this one because that three-year timeframe maps neatly to many deals. Sponsors regularly sign up for three years, but how many sponsorship activations use the same core creative idea throughout? What often happens is the sponsor feels the need to create a new campaign each year. A new line will appear, a new product will be prioritised, and the campaign team and agency machine swing into gear to create new ads and posts.

That seasonal mindset is understandable given the annual rhythms of sport. But it means that planning is seasonal, and results are too. This explains why the vast majority of cases in my research on the Sponsorship Effect lasted 12 months.

The more effective approach would be to run a single three-year campaign for the duration of the deal.

2. Creative consistency drives business outcomes

Source: A. Tindall, The Creative Dividend, System 1, effie & IPA

Linked to that is this more recent research from 2024, led by Andrew Tindall at System1, which introduced the idea of ‘compound creativity’ and the demonstrable benefits of creative consistency i.e. using the same core creative idea over the long term.

Andrew’s research found the most consistent brands were almost three times more likely to generate incremental profit and delivered more than four times Average ROI than the least consistent.

This builds on previous System 1 research showing that creative ‘wear-out’ is largely a myth. Ads that were 19 years old tested about the same on average ads from the last year. So, if anything, most campaigns are pulled before they’ve had a chance to ‘wear in’, never mind wear-out.

This means effective sponsorship activation campaigns should be designed like a long-running brand platform, with one central idea that holds for the life of the deal, delivering stable brand cues and creating associations that compound year on year, with creative executions that evolve without resetting the core

When sponsors treat each season as a fresh campaign, they are paying a demonstrable long-term price for short-term novelty. The deal may be three years long, but the brand behaves as if it is starting from scratch every time.

3. The Double Jeopardy Law

Source: Peel Research Partners

This is the first one that may have you scratching your head looking at the graph thinking WTF? But bear with me.

What you’re looking at is a graph showing the Double Jeopardy law, made famous for this generation of marketers by Byron Sharp, author of the book How Brands Grow. He’s now the world’s preeminent exponent of ‘marketing science’, and would argue (endlessly) that it is distinct from marketing effectiveness. But in my opinion the difference is, quite literally, academic.

Either way, the Double Jeopardy law states that small brands suffer twice: they have both a lower market share and buyers who buy slightly less frequently; bigger brands attract more customers who buy slightly more frequently. In other words, loyalty is primarily a result of market share, not the other way around. That means brands can’t grow by focusing on loyalty. And that means brands need to attract new, ‘light’ buyers, who also buy other brands, in order to grow.

What does this all mean for sponsorship? It means the casual viewer matters more than the superfan. Sponsors should prioritise reach to as many fans as possible, not deep engagement with existing fans. Many sponsorship activations are tailored for committed supporters because they’re paying the most attention and so are easier to reach. Creatively, it plays to the idea that what’s important is to get under the skin of the most ardent supporter, when in reality it’s ‘plastic fans’ who’ll drive results for the brand.

Superfans are relatively rare people, and sponsorship strategies that over-index on their experiences may sacrifice growth for the illusion of ‘authenticity’.

4. The 60:40 split

Source: Binet & Field, The Long and the Short Of It, IPA

Going back to The Long and the Short Of It, this was one of the most provocative findings within research and is still widely debated to this day. As a brief primer for anyone who hasn’t read Binet & Field, they asserted there are two principle ways advertising communications works: one is ‘sales activation’ in which rational messages about price, availability, product features or other purchase incentives are delivered to people who are ready to buy.

The other was ‘brand building’, in which the goal isn’t to create a sale there and then, but to create a positive emotional response to the brand, which makes the average person slightly more likely to remember and choose the brand the next time they’re in market.

What they also found was that the optimal media budget split, across all cases, was 60% to brand, and 40% to activation. When this was published, in 2013, many marketers had swallowed the promise of digital attribution hook, line and sinker. They had pivoted overwhelmingly to digital sales activation channels, in some cases investing 100% of their media budget in them. So it’s understandable that this challenge to the digital orthodoxy ruffled some feathers.

It’s wrong to think of this as a 'law’ in the same way as Double Jeopardy (Binet & Field went on to provide additional context showing the optimal split varied by category, brand life stage etc.). Still, it’s a general starting point, and what’s profound is the degree to which it emphasises the need to invest in brand-building far more than the average brand was doing, or still does to this day.

Turning to sponsorship, we showed in The Sponsorship Effect that, although sponsorship is typically used for brand building, when it’s planned well, as in Tier 1 cases, it can deliver both brand and sales effects.

Source: R. Natkiel, The Sponsorship Effective, SEF

The fact that sponsorship can do both, and that it can and should be planned over the long-term, means that we can start to think of splitting rights schedules and activation budgets in the way Binet & Field think about media allocation. Rather than seeing sponsorship as pure logo reach, i.e. 100% brand, if we accept that sponsorship can do both brand and sales, and the optimal split for any marketing campaign is 60:40 brand:sales, then it follows that the optimal split for sponsorship may be the same.

What do I mean by that? Well, after defining brand building and sales activation in The Long and The Short Of It, Binet & Field then showed that different channels are suited to different purposes in Media in Focus.

Source: Binet & Field, Media in Focus, IPA

This shows that media such as Inserts, SMS and Email are well-suited to sales activation, while PR, Online Video, and TV are more likely to create brand effects. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that Sponsorship is shown as the most effective brand-building channel; in this instance, it means TV sponsorship via idents, which makes a case for securing those rights, but doesn’t represent sponsorship as a whole.

Either way, when we are discussing rights and activation, we could use this approach to define which rights we secure and how much we invest in activating them to achieve optimal results. That solus email campaign may start to look much more attractive once its purpose is more clearly defined.

5. Beware the celebrity endorsement

Last but not least (hopefully you’re still with me), this data from System1 shows that ads featuring a Character Fluent Device outperform a Hired Device when it comes to Market Share Gain and Profit Gain.

What the hell does that mean, I hear you ask.

It all relates to the work of another effectiveness legend, Orlando Wood, who identified ‘fluent devices’ in his research. These are the things that come to represent your brand in the minds of customers. It could be a logo (McDonald’s golden arches), a sonic ident (Intel Inside), a tagline (‘should have gone to specsavers’), or a colour (Cadbury’s purple). One of the single most effective devices you can use is a brand character. And what that chart shows is that if you want long-term brand growth, a Character Fluent Device that the brand owns, such as KFC’s Colonel Sanders, will outperform a Hired Device , e.g. a famous athlete.

They’re not mutually exclusive - Harvey Keitel’s Wolf for Direct Line is an example of a hired celebrity becoming a Caracter Fluent Device. Gary Lineker is arguably the same for Walkers.

But what this shows you is that you have to be extremely careful with athlete appearances - they often represent multiple brands, meaning yours is less likely to be remembered. It’s sometimes to better to turn an athlete into a brand character, than to risk misattribution.

Wrapping up

What’s striking about all five principles is how familiar they are in advertising, and how optional they still seem to be in sponsorship. Long-term thinking, consistency, reach, and the disciplined use of fame are not radical ideas. They are table stakes in other parts of marketing.

Sponsorship’s effectiveness problem is not it sport doesn’t work. It’s that sponsorship is too often insulated from the evidence base that governs the rest of the marketing mix. Until those principles are reflected in how deals are structured, how ideas are created, and how success is measured, sponsorship will continue to have an effectiveness gap.

So that’s it for now. Please do use the Substack chat to ask any questions, and I’d be delighted to hear any feedback on what you’d like to see more or less of in future.