Category: In the News

Sponsorships are considered one the most reliable ways for a brand to get in good with sports fans. But most marketers are in the dark about the real commercial impact of their partnerships with franchises, tournaments and broadcasters. The search for answers could help them justify more spending, or lead them further astray.

According to Forrester, 76% of U.S. consumer marketers who invested in a sports sponsorship in 2024 said they struggle to calculate the return on that investment (ROI). That’s despite 39% of CMOs saying they expect to increase sports sponsorship investments in 2025, while 28% are preparing their brand’s debut sports partnership this year — a reflection of live sports’ increasingly vital ability to connect brands with audiences in a fragmented media environment.

Sports sponsorships provide a “halo effect” for brand-building efforts, noted Forrester analyst Mike Proulx, so techniques like brand-lift studies are common while “hardcore ROI” measures are thinner on the ground. That isn’t stopping marketers looking for workarounds that get them closer to understanding the true impact of a partnership.

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For as quickly as it has been adopted, generative AI is still largely considered the Wild West, especially when it comes to regulatory oversight. Last week, The White House unveiled its AI framework, that some marketers interpret as the administration taking a hands-off approach to AI regulation that could set a precedent for the ad industry.

The White House’s goal is to win the AI race and “usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people,” according to its news release. Key policies in the action plan include exporting American AI around the world, rapidly building out data centers, “removing federal regulations that hinder AI development and deployment,” and awarding government contracts to LLM developers whose systems are objective and free from ideological bias.

It’s only a framework, but signals the federal government’s push to win the AI race by removing bureaucratic red tape. The action plan has drawn mixed reactions from the industry. Where some marketers see more room to prioritize speed and iteration, others see opportunities for serious legal issues around brand intellectual property, data protection and copyright, according to the four marketers Digiday spoke with for this story.

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