Sponsorship is a preference play

Read time: 3 mins 59 secs

For years I've told clients to own their audience, so I wanted to find the numbers on how many B2B brands do.

I loved Clay's Speed to Lead benchmark format, a report where every company gets its own result page. So I scored the content of 134 brands and handed the results to Ploy. Its agent pulled out the findings and built the whole site, including a results page for every brand, with no developer or designer.

I'd never have attempted a benchmark like this without Ploy.

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The 2026 World Cup was the biggest the tournament has ever been, with 48 teams playing 104 matches across the US, Canada and Mexico. Normally, football matches only have one break at halftime. But FIFA stopped every one of these matches twice more, for a mandatory three-minute “hydration break” in each half. The official sponsor of every one of those breaks was Powerade.

As sponsorship goes, it's about as good a spot as you can buy. Play stops in the middle of every half, blue Powerade coolers come onto the sideline, and Powerade ads fill the stadium screens. It’s a moment when everything stops to focus specifically on hydration, so the brand fits naturally.

But then, during a hydration break at the Germany vs Ivory Coast match, the crowd started booing. Fans had decided the breaks were only there to give broadcasters another ad slot, and were negatively impacting the game of football being played. Suddenly, Powerade’s dream sponsorship sat right in the middle of fan backlash.

Tracksuit is a continuous brand tracking platform, and over the months around the tournament, they found only 19% of Americans who knew Powerade thought it was "like no other", the lowest of the competitor brands they tracked.

Powerade had the most visible and organically aligned spot at the biggest World Cup ever, and still only one in five people who knew the brand saw it as different. A sponsorship works by borrowing some of the love people already have for the event, but that works both ways. When fans turned on the hydration breaks, Powerade was still the name attached to them.

Sponsorship tends to get sold on reach. The rights holder brings the audience size and how often your logo will be on screen, and the deal gets judged afterwards on how many more people know your name. That makes sense, since reach is easy to sell and easy to count.

Awareness tells you how many people know your brand. Preference is the share of people buying in a category who would choose you first, so it tells you how many have moved from knowing you to choosing you. Preference can sit still while awareness climbs.

At the World Cup, Coca-Cola, Adidas and McDonald's are the only sponsors that hold a top-three position on awareness, consideration and preference at once. Interestingly, all three have sponsored the tournament for decades.

Adidas also leads on whether people say its World Cup involvement "makes sense to me", with 51% of people who know the brand saying so. Plenty of sportswear brands could make a match ball, but Adidas has made every one since 1970, so 56 years of World Cup memories have its logo on them.

A sponsorship buys a brand a share of how people feel about the event. Adidas has had 56 years of that at the World Cup. Powerade got its share in the year fans were booing the breaks it sponsored, and the bad feeling transfers just as easily as the good.

Clinique, the Estée Lauder skincare brand, launched GameFace in 2022. It’s a grassroots programme giving rugby clubs across the UK funding and equipment for their female players. Then in 2025, a month before the Women's Rugby World Cup, it became the official beauty partner of England's women's team, the Red Roses. That September, England won the World Cup at Twickenham in front of 81,885 people, a record crowd for women's rugby.

Among UK women aged 35 to 54, Clinique's preference grew from 30% to 39% over the next year.

Tequila brand Jose Cuervo became the Official Tequila of NASCAR in 2026, and also the “Official Margarita” (yes, that's the actual title). The multi-year deal puts Cuervo branding at tracks like Daytona and Talladega and Cuervo bars at some of them, so the product ends up in fans' hands at the race itself.

Over the same twelve months, Cuervo's preference grew while its competitors held flat. The deal started partway through that window, so not all of that rise can be put down to NASCAR.

Clinique attached itself to a team the country was proud of, and Cuervo to a day out at the track. Both borrowed a good feeling, and preference for both brands rose over the same year.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has a strong counter to all of this. One of its longest-standing findings is that brands with more users collect more positive associations, simply because more people use them. It was first published in 1970 and has since held up across 45 new data sets. If the same is true for preference, it mostly follows reach and usage, and the feeling a sponsorship transfers is a story we rationalise afterwards.

Cuervo fits that reading. Its usage rose eight points over the same year, so more people drinking Cuervo could explain more people preferring it, with or without NASCAR.

The World Cup leaderboard fits it too. Coca-Cola, Adidas and McDonald's are some of the biggest brands on the planet, and you'd expect them to lead on most measures no matter what they sponsored.

But Clinique is harder to explain that way. Over 70% of people who know about its Red Roses sponsorship say it makes them feel more positive about the brand. That's a feeling people tie to the sponsorship itself, and a bigger user base doesn't account for it.

So reach probably did a lot of work here, and Ehrenberg-Bass explains some of the impact. What a sponsorship really adds is the feeling that comes attached to the reach, and that's the part that backfired on Powerade.

Most of us will never buy a sponsorship slot at the World Cup, but the same thing happens whenever a brand puts its name next to someone else's audience, whether that's sponsoring a creator or a local event. You're borrowing how that audience feels about them.

So before you attach your brand to someone else, look at how their audience feels about them, because you're signing up for that feeling as much as the reach.

Then, judge it on more than reach. Awareness will rise whenever your name is in front of a big enough crowd, so the useful questions are whether people feel better about you afterwards, and whether more of them have moved from knowing you to choosing you.

Powerade got exactly the spot it paid for, including the boos that came with it.

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