As sports audiences become more fragmented and brands face greater pressure to prove the value of their partnerships, sponsorships are evolving beyond visibility and association. Today’s most effective partnerships connect multiple channels and capabilities to create measurable business value.
We sat down with Sam Galet, EVP, brand partnerships, at IMG, a leading global sports marketing agency that powers the growth of revenues, fanbases, and IP for more than 250 rights holders. Galet discussed how sports partnerships are changing, what separates effective activation from simple visibility, and how brands can use these partnerships to measure impact and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Sports partnerships have evolved over the past five to 10 years. What’s the biggest shift in what brands expect a partnership to deliver, and what’s driving that change?
Galet: Clear and measurable returns. Go back 10 or 20 years, deals were done on napkins at dinners. Those deals still happen, but it’s less often. The biggest change has been scrutiny on ROI. Companies are looking for full justification when they do a sponsorship and expect reasonable returns.
Sponsorship is now linked across every element of the marketing landscape, including digital, social, and retail. The best sponsorships have a touchpoint with all those areas.
That kind of joined-up thinking is central to how IMG approaches partnerships. By connecting strategy, rights, content, distribution, media, digital engagement and live experiences around a single brief, IMG can help brands build programmes that work across channels and markets from the outset, rather than adding activation after the deal is signed.
What separates an activation that creates visibility from one that creates meaningful business value?
Galet: The old way to create visibility was to put up a sign and provide some tickets. You may run a consumer promotion, but everything was valued on exposure. But the real question is: How do you create meaningful value for a business?
Monster Energy’s partnership with UFC is a great example of how brand synergy can be linked directly to consumer purchases. If you bought a Monster Energy product, you could scan the QR code and upload the receipt. You could accumulate points and win a chance to go to a UFC event, meet athletes, or win merchandise. That was clearly linked to a sale—a connection of the passion of the property to the sale of a product in return for incentives.
Every sponsorship needs to have clear objectives. This is how we work at IMG: set out objectives ahead of time, understand what they are, what you’re trying to achieve, and then have different benchmarks to measure against them. If you don’t have those in the beginning, you’re never going to really demonstrate success.
How are brands using partnerships to demonstrate their capabilities, rather than simply tell audiences about them—and why is this becoming more important?
Galet: Consider IBM and Wimbledon. IBM is a core technology partner of Wimbledon and helped modernize the app and website. Throughout the live tournament, IBM showcased its AI, data, and cloud capabilities, but the differentiator is how the company used watsonx-powered tools like Match Chat, AI-generated match previews, and real-time “Likelihood to Win” insights. The partnership demonstrates IBM’s ability to turn complex live data into engaging content at scale, helping fans understand matches while positioning IBM as the technology powering Wimbledon’s digital ecosystem.
For its partnership with UFC, IBM helped navigate a challenge. There were real-time stats that UFC wanted to integrate into the broadcast to better engage viewers. UFC turned to IBM to develop UFC Insights Engine, which debuted at UFC 322. It’s used to power analytics for 40-plus annual live events and is estimated to reduce the time to generate insights by 40% online.
Companies like IBM do this because they want a real-life use case to show other clients. Sport is obviously one of the biggest passion points in the world, and these organizations are tapping into this—telling the story to consumers—while also taking these stories to the boardroom, helping them close deals.
As brands face greater pressure to demonstrate ROI, what is one of the biggest mistakes they make when measuring the value of a sports partnership—and what should they do instead?
Galet: The biggest issue is focusing on the media value, and that’s only one part of the overall worth of the partnership. What are you trying to achieve from a sponsorship? Growth, acquisition, stock price? Whatever it is, create the assets and the tactics within a sponsorship against each of those, and at the end of the year measure the results.
A lot of companies don’t set that roadmap, and it’s hard to measure something if you don’t know what you’re measuring. Brands need holistic, 360-degree measurement that looks at brand value and sales conversion.
Looking ahead, where will AI have the most meaningful impact on sports partnerships, and what opportunities should brands and rights holders be thinking about right now?
Galet: When you’re talking to brands, you need to understand where the real fit is. AI can help build models. In the past, people would build briefs on companies—who the right people are, how they’ve activated, and information pulled from online or the trades. Now that can be handled within minutes with AI. You’re creating agents, putting in the variables and data sets, and AI is building the reports.
AI can also be a driver to help build bespoke activations. By looking at who is buying tickets and consuming the event, you can use AI to serve up information and programs tailored to specific interests. I think AI is going to be a game changer—in prospecting, valuations, activations, and the way properties interact with fans.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.