Most brand owners don’t actually know.
Sponsorship portfolios are often built over time: legacy renewals, opportunistic buys, and deals shaped more by momentum than strategy. The real risk isn’t overspending. The bigger risk is not knowing whether the portfolio is aligned, efficient, and fit for purpose.
A Lumency/WFA global study shows sponsorship now accounts for, on average, 12% of a brand’s marketing budget. Despite this significance, only 5% of brand owners feel very confident that their portfolio delivers the right audience, the right assets, and the right spend. More than half are neutral to not confident.
An essential action a brand owner can take to unlock sponsorship value is a portfolio review. It’s about stepping back to ask whether you hold the right properties, with the right assets, at the right spend, supported by the right activation and measurement.
That’s exactly what our Sponsorship Portfolio Health Check™ is built to deliver. A structured, independent review that stress-tests the health of your portfolio against today’s demands.
What a Sponsorship Portfolio Health Check™ Looks At
1. The Right Properties
Do the properties in your portfolio still align with brand and consumer strategy? Are they relevant today, not just at the time of signing? The data shows 58% of brands have a sponsorship strategy, but many admit it’s inadequate and shaped by bias or internal politics. A health check challenges whether your properties still earn their place.
2. The Right Spend
A healthy portfolio balances rights fees with activation. Yet 43% of sponsors don’t know how much they spend on activation, and 39% spend less than a 1:1 ratio compared to rights fees. Without enough activation, even the right property won’t deliver value.
3. The Right Assets
Are you buying entitlements that actually map to your objectives, or are you accepting bundled rights that look good on paper but don’t perform? Only 31% of brands have an evaluation framework to properly assess assets. That means most portfolios are being managed without clear evidence of fit or value.
4. The Right Activation
Activation needs to be omnichannel and integrated, not siloed by function or channel. A sponsorship only delivers return when it’s activated — otherwise it’s just a cost. The Lumency/WFA study found under-activation remains the single biggest destroyer of sponsorship value, with billions in potential impact left unrealized.
5. The Right Measurement
Despite sponsorship being one of the top two marketing line items, second only to media, brands spend on average just 1% of sponsorship budgets on measurement, and a quarter spend nothing at all. Without consistent evaluation tied to business outcomes, sponsorship remains vulnerable when budgets tighten.
Cadence and Scope
A Sponsorship Portfolio Health Check™ isn’t a one-off exercise. It’s part of good governance. Best practice is to run one every three years, with five years as the absolute maximum. We focus the review on the top 80% of sponsorship spend, where the majority of value and risk reside.
Why It Matters Now
The sponsorship landscape has only grown more complex and more scrutinized. Marketing and procurement leaders are expected to show evidence of fit, value, and return on investment.
The Lumency/WFA study is clear: portfolios are under-activated, under-measured, and too often unmanaged by a consistent framework. Sponsorships are a major line of marketing spend, but without governance and discipline, they don’t deliver their potential.
A Call to Review
A Sponsorship Portfolio Health Check™ isn’t about catching mistakes. It’s about ensuring that sponsorship investment continues to deliver measurable outcomes for the business.
If you haven’t audited your portfolio against these five dimensions in the past three to five years, you don’t know if it’s healthy. Now is the right time to take a closer look.
