Derek Russell has managed global sponsorship activation for United Airlines for nearly a decade, overseeing some of the company’s largest and most visible partnerships across professional sports, venues, and entertainment properties.
In a recent SponsorCX webinar hosted by Jim Andrews, Derek pulled back the curtain on how United approaches sponsorship strategy, from building emotional connections with fans in hub markets to knowing when an activation isn’t working and making the call to change course.
The webinar covered activation planning, honest partner relationships, long-term portfolio thinking, and how United measures whether sponsorships influence the people they're trying to reach.
You signed the deal. You confirmed the assets.
Now what?
For most brands, that's where the real work begins. It’s also where most sponsorships fall short. The agreement creates access. Activation creates value. And the gap between them is where sponsorship budgets go to die.
United Airlines has been at this for a long time. They're the official airline of the Chicago Blackhawks, the Golden State Warriors, the Denver Broncos, and dozens of other high-profile properties. They've had their name on the United Center since the building opened. They don't just sign deals. They build systems for making those deals matter, season after season, market after market.
What follows aren't tips from a playbook. They're the proven patterns behind how a large, sophisticated sponsor thinks about partnerships, and what those patterns mean for you, whether you're managing the relationship from the brand side or the property side.
The Goal Isn't Awareness. It's Belonging.
Most sponsorship pitches lead with reach, impressions, eyeballs, and audience size. Those metrics matter. But they're not the reason United invests in sports partnerships.
Their real objective is more specific: they want fans of a sponsored team to think of United as their airline. Not the airline with the best schedule. Not the cheapest option. Theirs. That’s the power of creating emotional connection and brand affinity.
That's an emotional outcome, and emotional outcomes require emotional work. United approaches sponsorship as a way to close the gap between a brand fans already love and an airline they could love.
If a Bears fan moves through O'Hare and United is woven into the Bears experience in a way that feels genuine, that fan is more likely to choose United the next time the schedule and the price are close. And in a competitive hub market, close is usually good enough.
For brand teams: The most compelling case for a sponsorship isn't reach. It's your ability to earn a genuine emotional connection, something a media buy can't replicate.
For property teams: Your most valuable pitch isn't audience size. It's the emotional access you give brands to fans who already trust you.
Activation Lives in the Details You Didn't Plan For
When United wanted to celebrate the Blackhawks' 100th season, they didn't run a TV spot. They dressed a dinosaur.
The Field Museum fossil cast that stands in O'Hare's B Concourse got a custom Blackhawks jersey, sized for a dinosaur skeleton. Every gate sign in the B and C concourses was wrapped in a Blackhawks-style font, so each letter read like a jersey number. It was visible, local, and specific to exactly the audience they wanted to reach: Blackhawks fans moving through O'Hare.
That activation happened because United spent months coordinating internally, with the Chicago Department of Aviation, and with the Field Museum. The idea was straightforward. The execution required relationships that took years to build. Great sponsorship activations require planning, coordination, and discipline.
For brand teams: Your best activations will probably feel obvious in hindsight and complicated to pull off. Build the internal relationships now, before you need them.
For property teams: Your willingness to facilitate logistics is part of your value. A sponsor who knows you'll help them navigate complexity is a sponsor who comes back.
Authenticity Is a Strategic Choice, Not a Tone
Authenticity is a word that is used so often that it has come to mean almost nothing.
For United, authenticity means using the endemic truth of being an airline: they fly these teams, their employees live in these cities, they have a real stake in these communities. That's the foundation for earning a place in the fan relationship that an advertiser can't buy.
"Proud to fly X team" is a marketing claim, but it's also a fact. When a Devils player's charter lands in a new city and United highlights the local spots that player visits, they're not manufacturing a story. They're surfacing one that already exists.
For brand teams: Before any activation, ask whether it's something only you could do. If a different brand in a different category could run the same activation, you haven't found your angle yet.
For property teams: The brands that activate most authentically are usually the ones you've helped find their angle. That means knowing your partners' business well enough to spot the story, not just the asset.
Your Property Partners Know More Than You're Asking Them
United includes property partners early in the activation planning process as collaborators.
There's a practical reason for this. A brand can spend weeks developing a concept, only to learn that the timing conflicts with another partner, the IP usage doesn't work, or there's a logistical barrier no one on the brand side would have known about. Getting the property in the room earlier is more than a courtesy. It's efficiency.
But there's a deeper reason too. Properties watch dozens of sponsors activate every season, across every category. They see what works. They know their fans better than any outside brand does. That institutional knowledge is available to you if you ask for it, and most brands don't ask.
For brand teams: Treat your property partners as thinking partners, not just asset fulfillment vendors. The ones who activate well are the ones who loop properties in early.
For property teams: Proactively bringing ideas and flagging what's working for other sponsors makes you harder to replace when renewal conversations come around.
Honest Conversations Are the Actual Competitive Advantage
United runs brand impact studies on their largest partnerships. They survey fans and non-fans, those aware of the sponsorship and those who aren't, and measure the difference across brand preference, perception, and purchase intent. They know, with reasonable precision, whether a given partnership is moving the needle.
But the more important tool isn't the study. It's the conversation. According to Derek Russell:
“I don’t need them to tell us that everything is going great. I really just need them to tell us what’s working, what’s not and how everything is performing.”
That kind of honesty requires trust built before a problem shows up. If the only time you have a candid conversation with your partner is when something is visibly broken, you're already behind. The brands and properties that get the most out of their relationships are the ones who have made honest check-ins a habit.
For brand teams: If your property partner seems reluctant to deliver bad news, that's a relationship problem worth solving before it becomes a results problem.
For property teams: Your sponsors are measuring performance with or without your input. Getting ahead of the conversation, sharing what's working and what isn't, is a sign of professionalism that builds trust.
Know When to Stop
United has a name for one of their most common activation mistakes: not pivoting fast enough.
It's easy to keep running a program that isn't working. You've invested time and budget. The team is comfortable with the process. Changing course feels like admitting something went wrong. But a program that scores well on activity metrics and poorly on actual objectives isn't a success. It's a slow drain.
The fix requires discipline more than creativity. Before any activation launches, define what success looks like in terms that connect to real business objectives, not just impressions or engagement rates. Then check against those objectives mid-program, not just at the end. If it's not heading in the right direction, make the call early.
For brand teams: Define objective-level success criteria before launch, not after. Mid-program check-ins against those criteria are what make pivoting possible.
For property teams: Make it easy for sponsors to make changes without feeling like they're renegotiating the entire agreement. In-season flexibility is one of the most underrated things a property can offer.
Long-Term Partnerships Compound. Short-Term Thinking Doesn't.
United doesn't churn their sponsorship portfolio. They deepen it.
Their strategy over a five-year horizon is less about adding new partnerships and more about shifting resources within existing ones, leaning into certain markets as strategy evolves, and building on equity they've already earned. The United Center has carried that name for over 30 years. That recognition doesn't just sit there. It works every time someone walks through the doors.
There's a financial logic to this, but there's also a brand logic. Fans notice longevity. A brand that has been part of their team's story for a decade feels different from one that just signed a three-year deal. That feeling is real, and it shows up in measurement.
For brand teams: Before adding a new partnership, ask whether you're fully activating the ones you already have. More partnerships don't automatically mean more return.
For property teams: The sponsors who renew longest are usually the ones who feel the relationship is genuinely reciprocal: proactive communication, real flexibility, and consistent effort to help them succeed.
Sponsorship is complicated. You're managing internal stakeholders, property partners, agency relationships, creative execution, performance measurement, and renewal conversations, often all at the same time.
The brands and properties that do this well aren't the ones who have it all figured out. They're the ones with the right systems helping them stay organized, track what's working, and communicate clearly across every relationship.
SponsorCX is built for exactly that. The platform helps you centralize your data, automate your workflows, track performance, and report results, so you can spend less time on administration and more time on the work that actually moves the needle.
You make sponsorships happen. SponsorCX makes it simple.
