How can AI help sports properties attract big sponsorship $

tl;dr: Forward-thinking sports properties have a significant opportunity to leverage AI, to help them better connect with brands and stand out from competitors, increasing their share of the sponsorship market.

2023 has seen many challenger sports properties come to the fore; who would have predicted Pickleball becoming a pop culture phenomenon or the recent rise in media coverage of women's sports epitomized by mainstream interest in the FIFA Women's World Cup?

The outlook is bright for many fast-growth sports properties when looking through the lens of eyeballs and engagement; however, to get to the next level and guarantee continued growth, sponsorship needs to catch up with the industry leaders.

At the same time, investing in a top-tier sports partnership is a massive expense often only for brands with the deepest pockets.

These have arguably become stale due to the strict rules that leagues and agents impose around activations and player access. Fans and consumers demand more and won’t hold back their criticism when a partnership lacks value and integrity.

The opportunity to gain market share

Forward-thinking sports properties can attract a new breed of sponsors with the promise of highly engaged fanbases, greater talent access, and minimized red tape, resulting in more significant ROI through novel, impactful partnership strategies that drive organic engagement.

The problem is a lack of bandwidth to execute, with many teams under-resourced and lacking in specialist skills needed to generate unique, brand-specific ideas at scale to drive action from the target brand.

Demo: AI finding sponsorship opportunities

Sports properties increasingly compete for attention with alternative cultural formats, notably music and gaming.

Collaborations across formats and fandoms are becoming more commonplace and are key to cutting through; however, keeping up with the speed of culture is the biggest challenge we hear amongst sports marketers.

With resources stretched and quality output more important than ever, we're training AI on supercharging specific team workflows.

Here's just one example focussed on a sponsorship use case:

This is where AI can assist your teams, in finding hidden opportunities, unusual brand partnerships, and more. It does this by ingesting all the relevant signals and recognizing unique patterns and crossovers between different cultural touchpoints. This is a crucial element for how teams and leagues can attract new fans and sponsors by also reaching non-sports fans and Gen-Z.

At Rehab, we call this a personalized AI Creative Partner, able to join the dots between real-time cultural signals, key audience personas, and a target brand's growth strategy to propose creative territories and unique IP potential a partnership may deliver.

The commercial upside

Developing an impactful package that stands out from competitors is a labor-intensive task.

We know partnership teams often cite both a lack of resources and lead times to create truly unique propositions for each brand they speak to, resulting in lower volumes and overall quality of sponsorship proposals.

Let’s now imagine with AI; we can increase both productivity and quality and eventually 3x the output of the partnerships team.

Instead of each sponsorship rep sending out two high-quality, $500k proposals per week, we automate insights and creative ideation, and the same rep starts to send out 5-6 high-quality proposals per week. Compounded over time, this becomes a huge revenue unlock for commercial teams.

This is the kind of ROI equation a successful deployment of AI may bring to an organization. It’s a transformational journey Rehab is embarking on with our sports clients, and we’re just getting started.

Join the Conversation

We are keen to speak to other sponsorship teams about your challenges as we develop these tools and services. What would be your team’s big unlock to dramatically change your revenue projections?

Contact our team to discover more about Rehab’s market-leading AI practice.