For events
Two days of concentrated attention, sold like a raffle.
Hundreds of people in one venue, all self-selected into a single interest, for a defined window. That is a sampling and activation opportunity most brands would pay properly for. Yet it is usually offered as a programme advert and a banner by the scoreboard.
The problem
Events sell the wrong thing, once, too cheaply.
The inventory that gets sold is the inventory that is easy to describe. It is rarely the inventory a sponsor actually wants.
Signage is the least valuable thing you have. A board by court three is measured in impressions nobody believes. The queue for the door, the players’ lounge, the schools session on the Friday, the live stream and the results email to every entrant are all worth more, and all of them usually go unsold.
Selling in the wrong order costs you the title sponsor. If four suppliers have already taken visibility across the venue, the one buyer who would have paid for the whole event now has nothing distinctive left to buy. Rights have to be tiered before the first approach, not after the third.
A sponsor experience that fails on the day does not renew. Most event sponsorship is lost in delivery rather than in the sale: the stand in the wrong place, the announcement that never happened, the photographs nobody took. Renewal is decided on the Saturday, not in the negotiation.
Nobody reports, so nobody can justify year two. Without a post-event pack, a sponsor’s marketing manager has to defend the spend from memory. Give them evidence and the same budget line gets easier to approve every year.
Rights inventory
What an event actually owns
The checklist we work through before anything is priced. Most organisers are selling two or three of these.
Title & presenting
The naming tier, protected properly so it stays worth paying for.
Category exclusivity
One nutrition brand, one bank, one airline. Scarcity is the product.
Broadcast & streaming
Overlays, bumpers, commentary mentions and clip rights, priced as inventory.
Entrant data
A permissioned list of everyone who registered, with their consent and yours.
Physical footfall
Sampling, demo courts, stringing lounges and retail space with real dwell time.
Hospitality
Finals-day seats, player meet-and-greets and B2B entertaining that sells itself.
Content & photography
The library you generate anyway, licensed rather than given away.
Community programmes
Schools days, para sessions and outreach a sponsor genuinely wants attached to their name.
How we help
From rights structure to renewal
Whole-event mandates, or a single piece of it if that is all you need.
Rights structure
Title, presenting, category and supplier tiers defined before you approach anyone, so you do not accidentally sell the same audience three times over.
EnquireValuation & pricing
Defensible numbers per tier, built from your actual attendance, stream and data figures rather than from what the event down the road charged last year.
EnquireFinding buyers
Targeted approaches to the national and local businesses with a live reason to want your audience, and a proposition built around their objective.
EnquireActivation design
What a sponsor physically does on site. Sampling zones, hospitality, content capture and prize presentations that add to the event instead of interrupting the competition.
EnquireBroadcast & streaming rights
Turning the stream into sellable inventory: overlays, segment sponsorship, clip licensing and the numbers needed to justify a price.
EnquireSupplier & value-in-kind deals
Stringing, catering, transport, physio and kit arrangements that cut your cost base without touching the cash sponsorship budget.
EnquireOn-the-day delivery
One accountable person making sure every sponsor obligation actually happens while you concentrate on running the competition.
EnquirePost-event reporting
The pack that turns a one-off sponsor into a three-year partner, built from what genuinely happened rather than from the proposal.
EnquireTiming
When the work has to happen
The single most common reason event sponsorship underdelivers is starting three months out. Sponsor budgets are set long before that.
Structure & valuation
Rights tiered, inventory priced and the sales story written, while there is still time to change the event to fit what sells.
Approach & negotiate
Targeted conversations aligned to the buyer’s budget cycle. Bigger partners need to plan you into next year, not this quarter.
Deliver
Build, brief, activate and capture. Every promised obligation tracked against the contract as it happens.
Report & renew
Evidence pack out while the event is fresh, and the renewal conversation opened before the sponsor’s next planning round.
Questions
What organisers ask us first
Happy to talk it through with a committee or a board before you commit to anything.
Our event is small and regional. Is this worth doing?
Often yes, because the work has never been done and the upside is proportionally larger. A regional event with a clear catchment and a real entry list is a straightforward sell to the right local businesses; it just has to be structured and priced first.
We already have sponsors. Have we ruined it?
Almost never. We would start by mapping what has already been promised, find the gaps that are still clean, and plan the tiering properly from the next edition.
How late is too late?
For a first-time structure, roughly six months out is where options start narrowing. Inside three months we would usually focus on delivery and reporting for the sponsors you already have, then rebuild the commercial plan for next year.
Do we have to give up control of the event?
No. Sponsorship should be invisible to a competitor playing a match. Anything that changes the sporting experience gets your sign-off first, and we would usually argue against it too.
What about federations and league operators?
Same work at a different scale, with the added question of how rights split between the governing body, the host venue and the clubs. Getting that written down early prevents most of the arguments.
Find out what your event is actually worth.
Bring last year’s numbers. We will walk through the rights list and give you a straight read.