Exposure Is Not a Value: What Sponsors Are Actually Paying For

Almost every proposal I review leans on one word: exposure. Impressions, eyeballs, TV time, followers. Exposure is easy to count and it sounds big. The trouble is that the people who sign sponsorship checks have been hearing it for decades, and most of them stopped paying for exposure by itself a long time ago.

This is how I opened the valuations session at one of my Sponsorship Summits: "Value is what a sponsor wants from any type of marketing activity, and sponsorship is obviously marketing. They're not doing it for exposure, they're doing it for other reasons, and different companies have different ways that they value things. What one company may perceive as a ton of value, another company won't care about." ▶ Watch the clip

So what are those other reasons? The people who manage the budgets gave some very direct answers.

Even the people who report exposure don't trust it

A sponsorship executive at Stanley Black & Decker, with 27 years running sponsorships for tool brands like Mac Tools, Craftsman and DeWalt, remembers when exposure was the whole report. "Back when I first took over, many, many years ago, it was all about exposure, exposure, exposure, exposure, and these exposure numbers was huge," he said. And the people presenting them had doubts: "When you presented those, you would always fear, I don't know that I believe those numbers, but I know that it's important to the company."

His quarterly dashboards still include exposure, impressions and social engagement. Now they sit next to harder numbers, like how many fasteners the company sells to the car manufacturers it races alongside. The target is specific: "Our goal is to see a three to one return on anything that we do." And his question for every racer who pitches him is about sales, not reach: "Visibility is great, impressions great, content's great, but how can we sell more? How do we move them from awareness to consideration?" ▶ Watch the full session

That last line is the whole article in one sentence. Visibility only starts the job. A sponsor pays for what comes after it.

The biggest brands don't have an exposure problem

Scott Tilton, co-founder and CEO of Hookit, built a business putting dollar values on sponsorship exposure in social and digital media. You might expect him to defend the media-value number. Instead he said it matters less the bigger the brand gets.

"Even our media exposure, it's helpful for probably eighty percent of the brands out there, but then you get into the world of the Coca-Colas and the Pepsis and Budweisers. They don't have an exposure problem. Media values are kind of an afterthought," Tilton said. "They don't need to worry about, did we get 10 million or 12 million dollars in value. It's like, it's how many cans did we sell at a stadium."

What those brands want instead, he explained, is better brand perception and goodwill with their customers, because that turns into sales. "It's less about the total exposure and more about what's the value of that exposure, and is it aligned with really important core values to the brand." ▶ Watch Scott Tilton explain this

Most motorsports sponsors are in Tilton's 80 percent, so exposure still counts with them. But think of it as the minimum they expect, not the reason they pay. And the bigger the company you're pitching, the less your impression count will do for you.

Find out which of three jobs you're being hired for

Matt Burroughs, deputy CFO of Monster Energy and a UTV racer, admitted that even one of the most successful companies in the world has trouble linking marketing to sales. "If you look at just marketing in general, whether it's billboards or whether it's sponsorships... which ones are selling the most product? That's a little tougher to prove out," he said at the Off-Road Sponsorship Summit.

Monster's answer is to decide up front what each deal is supposed to deliver. Some athletes are signed to win: "We might be looking at team A, we want you to win races. That's all we want you to do. We don't care about content. We don't care about social media." Others are signed for their social numbers: followers, reach, impressions. And a third group is signed for something else entirely: "We don't really care if you win. We don't really care what your social media reaches. We're looking for content."

That clarity is what lets Monster measure a return. "I think Monster does a very good job of upfront communicating and understanding with that property or that team or that individual, what we expect from them," Burroughs said. ▶ Watch the Valuations & ROI session

For a racer, the lesson is to ask the question before you price anything. If a brand is paying you to win, a big social following won't make up for poor results. If it's paying for content, your finishing position barely matters. In each case you're being valued on something different.

Endemic brands pay for proof, and startups can't pay at all

For years Tony Yorkman decided which racers K&N Filters sponsored, and he didn't measure exposure either. "Our main goal was product validity," he said, "showing the masses about how our product performed in the different categories." That's why he likes off-road racing so much: "What better validation for your product is to put it out in the sea of dirt."

K&N's measure of a partner was how much that partner actually backed the product: "We would value a partner based off of how much he actually supported our brand and product." And you can't measure that in a single season. "It's not year one, it's year two, it might be year three before you really get a true understanding of how you're going to work together," Yorkman said. ▶ Watch Tony Yorkman on product validity

The only sponsors who really do want exposure are usually the ones who can't pay for it. As I told one Summit audience: "A small company and a startup, some company that no one's ever heard of, they do value exposure. The problem with those guys is they never have money. So you can get a lot of free product perhaps, but you're not going to get cash." ▶ See the full answer

That's the pattern. The brands with real budgets aren't short of visibility. What they want from you is sales, product credibility, content they can use, customers walking into stores, or a reason for a buyer to place a bigger order. Exposure is how you deliver those things. It isn't the thing they're paying for.

The takeaway

• Rewrite every "exposure" line in your proposal as the result the brand gets from it: sell-through, leads, store visits, product proof, usable content.
• Ask early which job you're being hired for (winning, social reach or content), and get it written into the agreement.
• Keep reporting impressions, but put them next to something the brand already counts, such as coupon redemptions, dealer orders or sales in a market.
• If a company mainly wants exposure from you, expect to be paid in product, and judge the deal on that basis.