US and Britain – World Athletics Championships – Are fans likely to have noticed sponsors?

With the 2022 World Athletics Championship having just wrapped up, we look at the types of sponsorships noticed by British and American athletics fans.

Event partnerships (44%), TV programmes sponsorship (42%), and product placement (41%) promotions top the list of sponsorship types noticed among American athletics fans, according to data from YouGov Global Profiles. One-third of these Americans are also likely to have noticed user-generated content and sports team sponsorship (33%) as compared to partners of a venue (26%), social media post (25%), or co-branding partnership (24%).

Britain is a different story. Three out of five people who follow athletics are likely to have noticed the sponsors of a TV programme, making it the most likely place to get a brand noticed Close to half of Britons (48%) are also likely to have noticed sponsors of an event.

More than two in five say they have noticed sports team sponsors as opposed to product placement (36%), user-generated content (21%), and venue sponsorship (21%).

Social media posts (13%) are among the least possible places to get a brand noticed. Only co-branding partnerships (11%) score lower among the British population.

Despite the fact that at least one in 10 Americans and Britons who follow athletics have not noticed any sponsorships in the last six months, it’s likely that sponsors are already seeing some returns for their World Athletics Championships deals. ASICS, for example, saw an immediate 3.4-point bump in Impression among Americans in the few days following the event’s launch.

Methodology

YouGov Global Profiles is a globally consistent audience dataset with 1000+ questions across 43 markets. The data is based on continuously collected data from adults aged 18+ in US and Great Britain. The sample sizes for YouGov Global Profiles will fluctuate over time, however the minimum sample size is always c.1000. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample. Learn more about Global Profiles.

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