Corporate Sponsorship vs. Traditional Advertising in Sports: An Empirical Comparison

With the growth of corporate sport sponsorship as a widely-used marketing tool allowing brands to reach vast audiences, it has become a threat to traditional advertising practices like television advertising. Sponsorship’s perceived benefits over advertising operate via a transfer of “goodwill” from the favored sports property (e.g., an iconic hockey franchise like the Toronto Maple Leafs) to the sponsoring brand. Numerous streams of sponsorship research have emerged over the years, yet none have directly compared the performance of corporate sponsorship in professional sport with any type of traditional advertising, on the same set of consumer outcomes. Here, we address this gap by manipulating television (TV) and event sponsorship activations across five conditions, in order to explore significant differences in consumer attitudes and purchase intentions arising from exposure to varying degrees of sponsorship. Our ultimate goal was to conclusively identify whether or not sponsorship is superior to traditional TV advertising for brands. While our results were not enough to definitively address this question, we did find numerous benefits of TV and event sponsorship over traditional TV advertising that offer promising prospects for future research; namely we saw marked improvements in attitude towards the target brand, aided recall of the sponsoring brand, and sponsor recognition of consumers exposed to TV sponsorship. Further, we found additional benefits of integrating event sponsorship with both types of TV communications, suggesting a synergy effect between the two methods. Individuals’ sport involvement and team loyalty were found to partially moderate consumer responses to TV and event sponsorship, while self-construal was not