“Sports marketing agency” is one of the broadest labels in our industry. It covers companies that sell sponsorship rights, creative studios that run events, agents who work for a single team, drivers’ managers and agencies that follow a project from start to finish. When a company asks me how to choose a sports marketing agency, my first answer is almost always another question: to do what?

It is not a way of buying time. In my experience, most bad choices do not come from a poor agency. They come from an agency that is good at a different job from the one that was needed.

Five jobs under the same label

The first job is intermediation: finding the right rights holder, whether it is a team, an event or a championship, negotiating the rights and closing the deal. In the most common model among intermediaries, which is also ours, the commission is paid by the rights holder, not by the brand: in our case, usually between 10 and 15% of the deal value.

The second is activation: content, events, hospitality, retail initiatives, digital campaigns. It is the work that turns a contract into results, and it is usually paid for by the brand through a separate fee. The third is representing a property: a team’s commercial department or an agent who sells its inventory exclusively. It does its job well, but that job is selling that team. The fourth is athlete management: the manager works for the driver, not for the sponsor. The fifth is the full cycle, from strategy to negotiation, from activation to measurement.

None of these models is wrong. It becomes wrong when you ask one of them to do another’s job: a creative studio to negotiate a Formula 1 contract, or a team’s agent to tell you whether that team really is the best choice for you.

Choose the job first, then the agency

Before drawing up a list of names, you need three written answers. What is the business objective, in terms your finance director would recognise: new markets, client relationships, awareness in a specific segment. What is the real budget, including the money to activate the sponsorship and not just to buy it. And what is the time horizon, because in my experience hardly any serious sponsorship pays back in a single season.

The budget, in particular, narrows the field more than any other criterion. An example: according to our September 2026 survey, in Formula 1 a presence with meaningful rights and visibility starts at around 2 million dollars a year, and almost all teams ask for a commitment of at least two seasons. If your budget is a tenth of that figure, an agency that works only at the top of Formula 1 is of no use to you, however good it is. We go into detail in our piece on the F1 marketing agency.

The criteria that really matter

Specialisation. An agency that works every year in the championship you are interested in knows its people, its prices and its deadlines. It knows which team is looking for a partner, which space was sold too expensively the year before and which product category is already taken. This knowledge cannot be improvised and cannot be found in a catalogue.

Independence. The rights holder paying the commission is the most common model and, in itself, is not a problem: the risk of conflict is managed through transparency and the absence of exclusive ties. The real conflict arises when the agency is tied exclusively to one team or has preferential agreements with rights holders: in that case it will tend to offer you the same solution every time. Ask openly, and insist on a written answer.

Proof. Documented cases, with names, years and results, and references you can actually call. An agency that has worked well for years has clients willing to talk about it. One that cannot give you a single name is asking you to take its word for it.

Activation and measurement. Ask how the sponsorship will be used after signing and how it will be measured, with which indicators and by whom. The method should be agreed before the contract, not discovered at the end of the season.

The people. The person who pitches is often not the person who will run the project. Ask who your contact will be, how much experience they have in that championship and how many other clients they handle at the same time.

Transparency on fees. You need to know what the rights holder pays and what you pay. If the answer is vague, the problem is not the price. It is trust.

The signs that make me raise an eyebrow

I have seen some patterns repeat often enough to treat them as warning signs. The first is a return on investment guaranteed in figures before the objective is even known: nobody can promise a number without knowing what it has to measure. The second is a proposal built around a single property, presented as the only possible one. The third is the standard package, the same for every client, where only the logo changes. The fourth is vagueness about who pays for what.

None of these signs, on its own, is enough to rule out an agency. All of them together, yes. We have collected the questions to ask before signing, one by one and with the answers to expect, in our guide to the 10 questions to ask a motorsport sponsorship agency.

When you do not need an agency

It is worth saying honestly: a specialist agency is not always the right tool. If the goal is to support your local team with an investment of a few thousand euros, the value at stake is too small for the work of analysis and negotiation to make a difference. The same goes for a company that already has people in-house who have worked in that championship for years. The rest of the reasoning, that is what an agency does and when it is worth it, is in our article on the sports sponsorship agency.

How we work

RTR Sports Marketing has worked in motorsport since 1995, independently of teams and championships. We follow the full cycle: we identify the right property, negotiate the rights, build the activation, from hospitality to licensing, and measure it. We do it above all in MotoGP, Formula 1 and endurance racing, where we know the people, the prices and the deadlines from being there every season.

If you are evaluating a sponsorship, our pages on MotoGP sponsorship and on Formula 1 sponsorship are a good starting point to understand costs and formats. But the first conversation, with us or with anyone else, should start from the job to be done, not from the name of the agency. The job first, then the agency. Always.