The Reality of ROI: How Sponsors Actually Measure Return

Every sponsorship is an investment. Companies aren't expensing your racing; they're investing in it, and they expect a return. But ask brands how they measure that return and you'll hear everything imaginable. I've had brand managers tell me they need 3x, 4x, five dollars back for every dollar in. I've had others admit they calculate ROI "by licking a finger and sticking it in the wind."

Both answers are real, and at my Sponsorship Summits I've learned the difference usually comes down to company size. Small companies know when marketing works because the founder watches sales daily. Big companies, with thousands of employees and hundreds of departments, genuinely struggle to isolate what moved the needle. If racers understood how their sponsors actually count, they'd report their value very differently.

The CFO who doesn't measure it

You'd expect the chief financial officer of Monster Energy — one of the best-performing stocks of its generation — to have ROI down to a decimal. Tom Kelly, Monster's CFO and one of the company's earliest employees, is refreshingly candid that he doesn't.

"Alex came to me a couple of times and said, 'Well, what's the ROI?' It's a very hard indicator. It's hard to measure what that is when you're out there spending millions of dollars," Kelly told our Summit. He points to the Super Bowl as the extreme case: "Everybody likes the cute ad, but how they get feedback on how many impressions were taken during those ads, I don't know." ▶ Watch the session

His conclusion, from a finance chair, not a marketing one: "Return on investment — we don't measure it. We just know what it is. You know the results when something's popular." ▶ Watch the clip

Kelly's favorite example is the time Monster sponsored a racehorse. Days before American Pharoah's 2015 Triple Crown run, Monster negotiated a deal. "Did it have a return on investment? Well, it's hard to measure. But if you looked at the film clips — the winner's circle, the family crowded around the horse — they had Monster hats on. It got a lot of attention." Eyeballs, in other words. Sometimes that's the whole scoreboard.

The lesson isn't that ROI doesn't matter to big brands — it's that attention is their currency. If your sponsor is a lifestyle giant, your job is to be undeniably visible and undeniably on-brand.

The bank that tracks every introduction

At the other end of the spectrum sits David Morton, senior vice president at Fifth Third Bank — a non-endemic sponsor that can tell you precisely why its NASCAR program survives budget season.

"That's one of the reasons we focus on B2B — because we can measure it," Morton explained. "On the business side, we track it in our customer relationship management system, and we flag it when we know an opportunity came through a discussion that was related to the team. Even if the team didn't directly introduce us — if we were in the garage because of that sponsorship and we got introduced to somebody, and that led to business we wouldn't have had — we directly attribute it."

That discipline pays off for everyone: "It helps us generate a business case that allows us to keep investing. For our NASCAR partnership, we're going into our 12th season, and we've been able to do that because we're getting that return. We even increased our investment." ▶ Watch the session

Read that again if you race with a non-endemic sponsor: introductions are attributable revenue. A racer who walks a banker through the garage and makes five business introductions may create more measurable ROI than a racer who wins the race.

The marketing manager counting on your content

Between those poles sit the endemic parts brands, where ROI blends sales, content, and credibility. Jackie Donahue, marketing manager at NGK Spark Plugs, told our Summit that NGK's best-performing sponsorships are the ones that reach heavy product users — which is why drift, with its 18-to-24-year-old builders, out-delivers even much bigger series for the brand: "A lot of the folks that come to those events are consumers of product. They're building their own car... and they use a ton more of our product."

And because NGK runs a small marketing team, sponsored racers are the content department. "We don't go to a lot of the events, so I am relying on teams to share content — filming themselves racing, talking about our product, all those testimonial things. That's stuff I can't get on my own," Donahue said. Authenticity is the multiplier: "All of our sponsorships are folks that use the product. It's not that we gave them $10,000 to say it — they actually use it, and they feel comfortable recommending it to other teams." ▶ Watch the clip

The five-to-one rule

Some brands do put a number on it. JR Twedt, president of K1 RaceGear, gives racers his math without being asked: "My ratio is five to one, man. I'm going to give you a suit — I want five back."

Whether or not your sponsor states a ratio, one exists in their head. The racers who get renewed are the ones who treat it as a quota: five pieces of value — content, introductions, product feedback, activations, visibility — for every one piece of support.

The takeaway

ROI isn't one thing. For Monster it's cultural attention. For Fifth Third it's CRM entries. For NGK it's content and credible recommendation. For K1 it's a 5:1 exchange. Before your next pitch — and especially before your next renewal — find out which scoreboard your sponsor watches. Then put points on that board, document them, and hand the marketing director the evidence they need to defend you when budget season comes. Because somewhere above every marketing director sits a Tom Kelly, and your renewal depends on what he "just knows."