Jarama, 12 May 1968. Graham Hill wins the Spanish Grand Prix at the wheel of a Lotus 49 that is no longer green. It is red, white and gold, the colours of Gold Leaf cigarettes. A few months earlier, at Kyalami, the privateer Gunston team had already put a Brabham and an LDS on track in its sponsor’s colours, and in January and February the same Lotus had won in Gold Leaf livery in New Zealand and Australia; but it is at Jarama, on their World Championship debut, that those colours win their first championship Grand Prix. There is no going back from there.

So what did Gold Leaf get in return? The most immediate answer is visibility: a winning car painted like a packet of cigarettes. The full answer, then as now, is longer. In return for their investment, sponsors get a package of rights: brand visibility, access to a specific audience, the right to use the name and images of the team or event in their own communication, hospitality for clients and partners, opportunities to build relationships with other companies and, increasingly, access to audience data. Visibility is only the part you can see.

What do sponsors get in return: the part you can see

The logo on the bodywork, on the race suit, on the trackside hoarding is the best-known and most recognisable form of return on a sponsorship. It is there to be seen, and above all to be seen next to something the public loves. Not every logo buys the same thing, though: a title sponsor, an official partner and a technical sponsor pay for very different rights, as we explained when we looked at title sponsors, official partners and technical sponsors.

There is also a detail that the Jarama win, on its own, does not tell. A logo by itself only says that a brand was there. For it to say anything more, it needs everything that sits below the surface.

The part you cannot see: the sponsorship iceberg

We call it iceberg sponsorship: the visible part, the logo, is held up by a much larger mass that stays below the waterline. That is where most of the value a sponsor receives in return is found.

Below the surface there is, first of all, hospitality: the paddock, the garages, the private areas where you can bring clients, partners and employees, a place where a business conversation has a different pace and tone from one in a meeting room. There is the relationship with the other sponsors of the same team or event, who are often potential clients or suppliers: we covered this in our article on the B2B visibility of motorsport sponsorships. There is content: interviews, images, access to the drivers, material the brand can use for months. And, increasingly, there is audience data: it stays with the rights holder, but access to segments and usage rights can be negotiated and written into the contract, as we explained when we looked at first-party data in MotoGP.

The right to tell the story

Of everything a sponsor gets, the most underrated right is the right to tell the story of the sponsorship in its own voice: to use the team’s name, the images, the driver, the race, in campaigns, on social media, at the point of sale. Without that story, the logo remains an empty sticker.

And this is where sponsorship shows its most interesting dimension. An image destined to become historic keeps circulating for years, well beyond the length of the contract, every time a newspaper, a documentary or a series brings it back. This is what we call the propeller effect: by setting a moment in motion again, the media generate new visibility for those who were there. The Jarama Lotus is an almost perfect example.

Do sponsors get their money back?

No, not as a refund of the investment, and the question says a lot about how sponsorship is often imagined. It is not a loan and it is not a financial investment: it is a contract, under which a brand pays and receives specific rights in return. The return comes through the use the brand makes of those rights. Some contracts tie part of the fee to results or to the visibility actually achieved, with bonuses or reductions: they adjust how much is paid for the rights, they do not give the investment back. Money can only be returned for the part of the rights not enjoyed, if the contract ends before it expires.

That is also the difference between a sponsorship and a donation. A donor supports a cause without asking for anything in return; a sponsor buys a package of rights and has every interest in putting them to work.

How to measure what you get

If the return comes from using the rights, then it has to be measured against the objectives set before signing: awareness in a market, business contacts generated during hospitality days, content produced, employee engagement, sales in a specific channel. Those who start from those objectives choose the package accordingly; those who start from the price of a logo risk buying the least useful part of the iceberg. For anyone who wants to understand the mechanics better, there is our guide to how sponsorships work, and an analysis of what you really buy in MotoGP and Formula 1.

In 1968, changing the colour of a car was enough for everyone to notice. Today the logo is the easiest part to buy and the hardest to make memorable. What a sponsor gets in return depends, in the end, on how far it is willing to look below the waterline.