DefinitionSponsorship impact is the change in brand demand, awareness or perception that a partnership caused, as distinct from the change that happened while the partnership was running.
The control is the method
- Geographic control: compare regions with heavy exposure against comparable regions with little or none. Often the most practical control in sponsorship, because exposure is uneven across a country.
- Temporal control: compare the period after the start with a matched period before it, with seasonality removed. Weaker on its own, because other activity moves in the same window.
- Audience control: compare the property’s audience with a similar audience that has no connection to it.
A strong practical design combines two: exposed regions against control regions, each measured before and after.
Signals that move before sales
- Branded search demand in exposed versus control regions: an early observable response to exposure.
- Share of search within the category, which controls for movement of the whole category.
- Audience composition: whether the brand’s audience starts to resemble the property’s by age, region or interest.
- Affinity between the brand and the property’s audience over the term.
What impact cannot settle
Impact shows that something changed and by how much. It does not show that the change was worth the fee. That is the ROI or ROO question, and it needs a value attached to the change. Keeping the two apart makes both defensible.
Common mistakes
- No control. Without one, an impact report describes a coincidence.
- Seasonality left in. A summer sport sponsor will see summer demand whatever the deal did.
- Exposure reported as impact. Seconds on screen are an input, not a response. See media value and AVE.
How Rascasse uses it
Rascasse measures interest in the sponsor among the property’s audience and in the regions where it is concentrated, before and after, against competitors and comparable regions. With up to ten years of history, the pre-period is already there when a deal starts.
Related use cases: Sponsorship Impact, Sponsorship Activation, Benchmarking & Head-to-Head.
Related terms
Sponsorship ROISponsorship ROI is the financial return generated by a partnership relative to what it cost in total.Share of searchShare of search is the proportion of all search demand in a category that goes to one brand.Regional affinityRegional affinity shows where inside a country an audience is concentrated, measured against each region’s share of the population.