This article draws on a recent SponsorCX webinar conversation between two people who have spent their careers at the intersection of data and partnership revenue.
Jim Andrews is one of the most recognized voices in the sponsorship industry. He spent more than 30 years at IEG, the firm widely credited with professionalizing the sponsorship space, where he served as chairman of the annual IEG Sponsorship Conference and authored its annual report and forecast of overall sponsorship spending. He has worked with properties and brands of every size on sponsorship strategy, valuation, and ROI measurement, and has been a featured speaker at hundreds of sports, entertainment, and marketing conferences around the world. He currently serves as Senior Vice President at SponsorCX.
Wahaj Tariq brings a different kind of expertise, built from the inside of some of the most data-forward organizations in professional sports. He has served as Senior Director of Integrated Marketing and Insights for the New York Islanders since June 2022, providing data-driven support across key business areas including ticketing and corporate partnerships. Before joining the Islanders, he served as Director of Digital and Partnerships Strategy for the Detroit Pistons, focused on revenue growth and fan engagement across multiple platforms, and prior to that as Director of Revenue Planning and Analytics for the Las Vegas Raiders, a role that put him at the center of opening Allegiant Stadium in 2021. He holds an MBA from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Their conversation covered a topic that most properties say they care about but few have fully figured out: how to turn fan data into a genuine competitive advantage in the partnership sales process. What follows is practical, specific, and built on what works.
Brands Don’t Buy Audiences. They Buy Behavior
Most partnership decks lead with reach. Total impressions. Attendance numbers. Social followers. These are the metrics properties feel comfortable sharing, and they're often the least persuasive thing in the room.
Brands aren't buying your audience size. They're buying an opportunity to change behavior. They want to move products, grow loyalty programs, and prove ROI to their leadership team. If your pitch can't speak to that, a bigger number won't save it.
The properties winning sponsorship deals today aren't necessarily the largest. They're the ones that know their audience well enough to make a brand say yes.
The Data You Already Have Is Worth More Than You Think
Before a property can sell audience insights, it has to understand what it owns. Most properties have more than they realize. They're just not organizing it in a way that's useful for sales conversations.
Start with your first-party data. That means your ticketing database, your email list, your app users, your loyalty members. Each of these is a distinct, marketable segment. The question isn’t just how large these segments are. It’s what you can tell a brand about their behavior.
Do they visit certain retail categories? Do they show a high propensity to enroll in loyalty programs? Are they heavy video consumers? These behavioral signals, pulled from your own data, are worth far more than demographic averages from syndicated research. Syndicated data tells a brand what sports fans look like nationally. Your first-party data tells them exactly who will see their message, and what those people are likely to do next.
One example of this in practice: when the Islanders competed for an oil-and-gas brand's RFP against several other NHL teams, they didn't lead with reach. They segmented their database and surfaced fans who had visited fuel retail locations, showed an affinity for loyalty programs, and were reachable via both email and paid media. As Tariq put it, they handed the brand what they were looking for on a silver platter, specific segments, measurable behaviors, and a clear activation plan. They won the deal. Months later, the brand reported a year-over-year increase in loyalty program enrollment in the Long Island market.
That's what first-party data can do when it's put to work.
Audience Data Should Influence What You Charge
Most properties set their rate cards and hold to them. Audience data lets you price with precision and confidence.
If your fans over-index for a specific behavior that matters to a prospective brand, that's a pricing conversation. A property with an audience that ranks at the top of a league in video engagement has legitimate grounds to charge more for video assets than a comparable property that doesn't have that proof.
This doesn't mean inconsistency with partners. It means using your data to validate your value, and to ensure you're not underselling a package that would perform exceptionally well for one category of brand.
The same asset bundle can produce very different results for two different buyers. Data makes that clear and gives your sales team the confidence to have that conversation.
Measurement Is Your Strongest Retention Tool
Closing a deal is one thing. Renewing it is another. And measurement is where the relationship either deepens or stalls.
Properties often treat measurement as the brand's job. But when you leave it entirely to the sponsor to track ROI, you lose the ability to shape the narrative. If the partnership is working, you want to be the one showing it.
Effective measurement means leaving no stone unturned. That includes tracking what's happening internally, on your website, your app, your arena's digital touchpoints, and externally, across social, TV, radio, and digital mentions. For naming rights partners especially, every mention across the web is earned media value. If your analytics team isn't capturing it, you're reporting less value than you're actually delivering.
Beyond earned media tracking, survey-based impact studies add a layer that raw numbers can't. Testing asset recall, brand lift, and benefit utility at two points in a season gives your team something actionable. If the first wave shows low recall on a specific asset, you can work with the partner to adjust, then prove in the second wave that the adjustment moved the needle.
The Islanders used this approach with one partner and saw exactly that outcome: enhanced visibility around a key asset led to measurable improvement in the consumer behavior the brand was trying to drive. That kind of proof goes straight to a brand's leadership team. It changes the renewal conversation from a negotiation into a formality.
A note on objectivity: when budget allows, consider using a third-party vendor to run impact studies rather than conducting them in-house. A neutral source adds credibility, and vendors working across multiple teams can often provide league-level benchmarks. Showing a brand how their partnership performs relative to peers is a powerful tool in a renewal meeting.
Partnerships Don't Win Alone
Sponsorship revenue is shaped by conversations across your organization, and most of that coordination happens too late.
Marketing knows what activations are available. Ticketing knows what inventory exists. Digital knows what's performing on the app. When partnerships are selling without that context, proposals come back with questions no one can answer quickly. Brands notice.
The fix isn't a structural overhaul. It's a standing meeting. A weekly sync across partnerships, marketing, and strategy creates a shared view of what's in the pipeline, what assets are available, and what partners are asking about. It takes the scramble out of the process and puts everyone on the same page before a prospect is in the room.
Some organizations have formalized this further with a dedicated partnership solutions function: a team that bridges creative, data, and sales into a single workflow. The Islanders built one. Whether that's feasible for your organization depends on your size, but the goal is the same regardless: when a brand asks what you can do for them, everyone in your building should already know the answer.
"If you can convey to the brand that you have your ducks in a row," Tariq noted, "that automatically sets you apart."
Where to Start If You're Not There Yet
You don't need a full analytics department to begin. You need your database and a plan to understand it.
Gather what you have including email subscribers, ticket buyers, app users, and document the basics: size, demographics, engagement history. Then add behavioral context where you can. Even a simple survey asking what brands fans use or what they're shopping for gives you something to bring to a partnership conversation.
From there, embed yourself in the sales process. Attend partnership team meetings. Understand what prospects are asking for. Build the habit of translating data into stories that serve the sale.
The properties that grow their sponsorship revenue aren't always the ones with the biggest audiences. They're the ones that know exactly who showed up, what those people care about, and how to put that in front of a brand in a way that's hard to dismiss.
The Takeaways
- First-party data beats syndicated research. Your ticket buyers, email subscribers, and app users tell a more persuasive story than national fan demographics, especially when you can speak to what those people do.
- Behavioral data closes deals. What your fans buy, what programs they join, and what content they consume is what brands need to justify a partnership investment to their leadership team.
- Audience insights should shape your pricing. If your fans over-index for behaviors that matter to a specific brand category, you have legitimate grounds to charge more for the relevant assets.
- Measurement is a retention strategy. Properties that track and report on partner performance, rather than leaving it to the brand, hold more control over the renewal conversation.
- Silos kill partnership revenue. A weekly cross-functional sync between partnerships, marketing, and analytics removes friction from the sales process and produces stronger, more integrated proposals.
- You don't need big numbers to compete. Smaller properties can level the playing field by proving their audience will take action — which is ultimately what every brand is trying to buy.
You already have an audience. You have data. What you may be missing is a clear system to organize it, act on it, and report on it in a way that keeps partners coming back. SponsorCX gives your team the tools to do exactly that, managing every detail of the partnership lifecycle so you can stay focused on the relationships that drive revenue.
You make partnerships happen. SponsorCX makes it simple. See how to turn your database into measurable partner revenue. Reach out for a demo today.