By Noga Halperin Sher, Chief Revenue Officer at SciPlay Corporation, G-CMO Europe Community member

Every sports sponsorship ends with the same question: what did we get for it? Most people hear it as an interrogation. I never have. At SciPlay we ask it of ourselves before we sign anything, because we measure the return on every dollar we spend. If we can’t measure it, we don’t spend it. A sponsorship gets no exemption.

Which means the real question comes first, before any contract. What is this sponsorship for, how will we measure it and what does good look like. A sponsorship is a vehicle. It will carry almost any goal you load into it, and you have to build the measurement backward from that goal.

In 2022 we put Gold Fish Casino on a NASCAR Cup Series car across eight straight weekends. Roughly 2.4 million TV viewers a race, around 20 million views over the run. The brief was direct response. Installs first, then revenue, on a fast clock. Because that was the goal, an install we couldn’t monetize counted as a cost, not a win. We had done our homework too. A survey of our own players put NASCAR squarely in our wheelhouse, its fanbase overlapping the people already in our games. This was not based on a hunch.

We blanketed it. In-car cameras, TV spots and live read-outs, influencers and social, plus koozies, flyers, and the rest. A single logo converts no one. You need enough placements firing together to push an audience past the tipping point where the brand registers, and at the same time a sharp reason to act now, or the awareness just sits there. Brand and performance in the same breath.

By the top-line numbers it worked. Race days set a new install baseline, up more than 50% on race day itself, most of it organic. Our rankings on high-volume terms hit record highs and store visibility climbed as much as 20%. Aided awareness among NASCAR viewers went from 59% to 69%.

Then we followed those installs to what they were worth, and the story changed. Against what the campaign cost, the installs let us down. Not enough to move the ROI needle, and the ones who came didn’t pay back as expected. The awareness numbers were real, and I could have led with them. I didn’t, because they weren’t the objective, and letting a good brand chart excuse a not good enough payback is the exact self-deception I am warning against.

We priced each piece of the campaign on its own, and then the whole. The name-driver partnership was a big slice of the spend. Once we isolated it, we saw we didn’t need it. The TV assets were the real tipping point while the influencer push barely moved anything. Costing the parts is how a no on the whole still leaves you smarter. Even a campaign you won’t repeat shows you where the money was working, and makes the next bet cheaper.

None of this means that NASCAR was the wrong partnership for us. A brand your own audience loves on paper, as ours loved NASCAR, is a reason to do the research and learn it, not evidence it will pay. Most sponsorship models reward whatever is easy to count by Friday: Impressions, clicks, reach.

So before you look at a single league, three things, in order. Name the one objective you will be judged on, and refuse to hand it a second. Choose the one metric that proves it, on the clock the goal needs, a fast one for direct response, a patient one for a slow brand build. Align everyone who owns a piece of the number before launch, not after, and plan from the start to cost the placements one by one.

Do that, and “what did we get for it” stops being a reckoning and becomes a readout, one whose terms you wrote yourself.

A dollar you can measure and walk away from is worth more than one you spend on faith. You just have to know which race you are running before the gun goes off.