It is 3:02 p.m. on Saturday when the scream of the nearly 300hp MotoGP prototypes rises to the sky and the twenty-two bolids hurtle toward the gaping jaws of the first corner. Luca, who has never seen a competition bike up close before, plugs his ears with the palm of his hands as he tries to follow the bikes whizzing past him from the pit wall.

A smile is painted on his face, a mixture of adrenaline, excitement and disbelief. As soon as the riders take the first right turn and disappear into the horizon of the kinks, even the sound of exhausts becomes more distant. It is only then that Luke turns and looks around: the blue sky, the hundreds of thousands of spectators with bated breath, the flags being caressed by the wind, the iridescent colors of the pits and the starched uniforms of the staff now following the action on the screens inside the garages. “All of this is absolutely incredible,” he says.

If Luke’s is a fictitious name, everything else in this little story is not, and it is here to testify to the decisive importance of the experiential aspect of sports sponsorship.

Touching is believing

As has already been mentioned numerous times in these pages, one of the peculiarities of sports sponsorship is the central role of multisensoriality in sports and the sports event. There are numerous studies showing the emotional and cognitive power of the 5 senses to contribute to the communicative power of sports and thus to the effectiveness of sports marketing.

In his“Multisensory impact of sport events” (Schriftenreihe der HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, 2016), Thorsten Tham writes, “The multisensory and holistic senses approach that can be successfully realized [in sport] with the help of live communication tools facilitates the personal, direct and interactive union of the sport property with visitors during an event and enables unique and sustainable experiences to be stored. Based on this fact, experts in theoretical and practical disciplines are convinced that multisensory approaches will continue to gain importance in the area of brand management.”

For fans and enthusiasts everywhere, this is not news; on the contrary: the sports consumer has always known that there is a difference between watching on television and going to the stadium. And the difference, not surprisingly, lies precisely in the involvement of all those senses that the television screen fails to convey. There is the coolness on the skin of an autumn evening, the taste of a beer consumed in the stands with friends, the inexplicable feeling when the audience sings and jumps in unison. But that’s not all: there’s the journey to the stadium or the track, there’s the walk among the stands of merchandise vendors, there’s the ever-present queue at the bar to get something to put under your teeth. All of this, the literature tells us today, helps to cognitively cement the experience, and to make the memory and the emotion generated by it more powerful. Emotional components that add up, in essence, to cognitive ones.

Emotions, sponsorships, engagement

Those involved in marketing know the importance of emotions in building value. It is no coincidence that over the years the concept of Emotional Brand Attachment (EBA), or the emotional relationship that develops toward the brand when it is capable of generating positive feelings and emotions, is becoming increasingly central. Simply put: the more something is capable of making us feel good, the more we are inclined to choose it over time.

Closing the loop on the case at hand, it is easy to see how this approach to multisensoriality is increasingly important in sponsorships: if touching is able to trigger multiple emotions in us, then it is consequently able to have an effect on consumer behavior.

The more the five senses are involved, the higher the engagement, the higher the effectiveness of the sponsorship, the greater the benefit to the brand.

The age of understatement

This reasoning takes on further structure when put into system with another theme often touched upon in these pages, namely the ever waning importance of brand visibility (exposure) within modern sports sponsorship.

On this issue it is well to understand to avoid creating unnecessary confusion. It is not being said here that putting a logo on a Premier League jersey, a Formula 1 car or a MotoGP car is useless: very big brands and very big sponsorships start precisely from positions of prestigious visibility, which, however, are a starting point, and not an end point of a path. What is being said is that if that logo is left alone and devoid of activations underlying its reasons and marketing strategies, then it is all but useless. In an age where every consumer is inundated with hundreds of pieces of communication every day, and where exposure to an incredible amount of brands is constantly growing, visibility without engagement is fruitless.

Again, and to simplify, seeing without touching is ineffective today.

In all this, a small vortex has been created -in the last decade or so- by the thunderous emergence of social media and its immediately central role in the everyday lives of everyone: consumers, brands, and sports properties. The maelstrom -and the resulting vertigo- arise primarily from the hybrid nature of social media and its extremely flexible and iridescent use. Indeed, there is jurisprudence among communication scholars about the placement of social media in Above the Line or Below the Line strategies: while it is certainly true that with an effective post you reach a great many people, it is also true that the interaction these tools allow is highly personalized. Solomonically, some experts propose that social therefore be placed in a new category of communication tools, those Through the Line.

Theoretical speculations aside, the question that marketers are asking today is this: do social media make visibility or do they make engagement? If at the beginning of the social network experiment, in fact, people were convinced that liking, sharing, and commenting were “active” engagement operations, it is now increasingly clear that big brands are banking on the large numbers of influencers-including sports properties and athletes-to generate new exposure. Having disappeared the great enthusiasm of the early days -and overcome the great disamoration of the pandemic period, in which it was realized that very little can be done on Instagram or Facebook if you then don’t run and play for real- it is now glaringly obvious that the effectiveness of social is declining especially as a direct commercial driver.

A 2024 study by Teresa Fernandes and Rodrigo Oliveira titled “Brands as drivers of social media fatigue and its effects on users’ disengagement: the perspective of young consumers” explains just that. The authors write, “The results of Social Media Fatigue can be detrimental to both individuals and brands. For brands, SMF is associated with decreased social media engagement, with users paying less attention to brand messages and becoming more selective in their media exposure, negatively impacting brand performance.”

Again, and to conclude this parenthesis, it is worth pointing out that one is not saying that social media is not a valuable and popular communication tool. It is only saying that here, as in other areas, the overexposure of brands is collapsing the effectiveness of the tool and-in some cases-driving the consumer away from the brand instead of closer to it.

Activations and experientiality

This approach to multisensoriality as a booster of sponsorship performance puts events and participation very powerfully back at the center of the activations system. Often overlooked marketing benefits such as the use of showbikes and showcars, in-person experiences such as hospitality or factory tours, and property contact opportunities such as meet and greet or riders’ appearances again become central to corporate marketing logics.

Major international series such as Formula 1 and MotoGP offer an additional right for sponsor companies as mobile marketing pittaforms. These championships, which touch dozens and dozens of different countries over the course of the season, allow large multinational groups infinitely more on-site activations and live engagement possibilities: think of events in the cities hosting Grand Prix or hospitality opportunities for VIPs and stakeholders from different nations.

The gradual transformation of sporting events that has been taking place for several years now from a mere event to a major content festival is another step in this direction. Competitions and matches are now surrounded for hours-and sometimes days-by concerts, parades and performances of all sorts, as well as a rich and growing supply of merchandising and food and beverage kiosks. Organizers-who are also part of the big world of sports properties-know well that the more users are physically in the event area, the more they touch and participate, the stronger their attachment to the event itself and the higher the consumption and possibility of return the following year.

The future of sponsorship today

For marketers and practitioners, the challenge is first of all to overcome the previous and stale logics related to the old concept of sponsorship and to communicate and promote them clearly. If, as mentioned above, visibility is no longer at the center of the dynamics of sponsorship-or is no more than the famous tip of the iceberg-it is necessary today for new mechanisms to intervene and new models of effective partnership based on renewed theoretical and practical foundations to be built. As seen, the need for a return to tangibility and the importance of the experiential aspect are only some aspects of this new enterprise.

Some questions will be central in the coming years.

How to enable everyone to engage effectively and personally with brand sponsors, sports properties, and events? What actions to assume and how to link aspects of brand exposure, sponsorship activation, and online and offline marketing? How to use digital to enhance the in-person experience and not solely as an alternative to the in-person experience? How to personalize and make even more memorable the last meter of communication from the sponsor or property to the user and consumer?

Numerous experiments and experiences are already underway to answer the above questions, and the results are fascinating and exciting. When the new paradigms succeed in materializing and then translating into widespread practice, we will then have entered a new -likely more fruitful- era of sports sponsorship.