Why Nobody Can Agree on Sponsorship Pricing (And Why That's Not Actually the Problem)
A post I wrote last week about sponsorship pricing turned into one of the more interesting comment threads I've had in a while. Not because everyone agreed with me but because almost nobody agreed with each other.
Within a few days I'd heard from a sponsorship research editor telling me the only honest valuation method is comparable market deals. An event director telling me pricing comes down to hard costs and demand, full stop. A former, very experienced brand side buyer describing how his media team ran the numbers on every partnership before money changed hands. A sustainability strategist making the case that media value is already outdated and the real currency now is ESG and purpose alignment. A commercial partnerships director arguing that cost has to come before valuation, not after and that whatever a model says, the market always has the final word. A sponsorship agency founder going further still, arguing that most valuations aren't worth the paper they're written on, because it's the brand, not the rights holder who actually determines value. Someone else compared the whole industry to unqualified estate agents, adjusting a valuation upward from whatever the house down the street sold for and hoping nobody asks too many questions.
Seven genuinely knowledgeable, experienced people. Seven different starting points and underneath all of it, a pattern worth paying attention to: almost every disagreement was really about which question they were answering, not who was right.
The debate is real. It's just not the same debate.
Ask “what does this sponsorship cost to deliver,” and you'll land on tickets, hospitality, branding, production, activation, staff time, that's a real number. It tells a rights holder the floor they can't price below without losing money on the deal. Some experienced operators go further and treat this as the actual starting point rather than a check performed afterward: map every asset and touchpoint, work out what's owned outright versus what has to be bought in from a third party and build a yield on top, often somewhere around 15 to 20 percent, before valuation enters the conversation at all. The ordering matters as much as the number. It turns “what should this cost” from an afterthought into the first question asked.
Ask “what has the market actually paid for something comparable,” and you're in fair market value territory, the same logic used to price a house, a car or a business. It's the most commercially grounded answer available, in theory. The problem sponsorship has that real estate doesn't is data. Comparable sponsorship deals aren't public, most of them aren't even written down anywhere a rights holder could find them.
Ask “what would this exposure cost if a brand bought it as media instead,” and you get media equivalency, the anchor most valuation calculators (including mine) are built around. It's not a perfect answer either. Push it far enough and you get the objection that came up more than once last week: a logo on an F1 car doing 200mph technically “earns” a billion impressions, and nobody actually believes that translates to a billion dollars of value.
There's a sharper version of that objection worth taking seriously too: valuing an asset at its full published rate card isn't the same as valuing it at what the market actually pays. Brands routinely buy comparable media at a real discount to rate card, so a valuation built on 100 percent of list price can produce a number that looks impressive on paper and bears little resemblance to what anyone would actually pay for it. That's a fair challenge, not a reason to abandon the anchor. It's a reason to build it from realistic, adjustable market benchmarks and treat the result as a range to be tested against the specific market and asset quality, not a figure taken at face value.
And ask “what does this partnership do for the brand beyond the numbers,” and you're in value story territory, audience fit, engagement, purpose, proof points, the softer case that actually gets a sponsor to say yes once the number is on the table. Two things inside this lens are easy to underweight. One is incumbency: replacing a partner who has held naming rights on something for years isn't simply a media value swap, there's accumulated trust and association a new partner may need real activation spend just to approach, let alone match. The other is audience quality over audience size: a smaller, known, engaged audience a rights holder can actually reach and measure is worth more than a theoretical audience of a million nobody can meaningfully contact. Third-party demographic data helps. It's not a substitute for knowing your own audience first.
None of these are wrong. They're four different, legitimate lenses and most experienced people in this industry are quietly using some blend of all four without ever writing down which one they're leaning on at a given moment. The argument in the comments wasn't really cost versus media value versus market rate versus value story. It was people each defending the lens they lean on most, as if the others didn't exist.
The Number Isn't the Value
There's an even sharper challenge worth sitting with, one that goes further than any of the four lenses above: that a standardised valuation, whether it comes from a rights holder or a third-party agency, mostly isn't worth the paper it's written on, because it quietly serves whoever produced it. That argument deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved off, because it rests on a real distinction. A rights holder sets the price and the brand determines the value. Treating those as the same thing is where a lot of valuation work goes wrong.
The same sponsorship property means something different depending on who's buying it and why. A challenger brand wants repositioning and attribution. A high-frequency product, a drinks brand at a festival, wants volume and sampling at scale. Another sponsor is there purely to play defence, to stop a competitor owning the space. A brand with a long buying cycle, cars or home loans, is playing a different game again, credibility built over years rather than a single activation. One property, four different reasons to buy it, four different answers to what it's actually worth. A single number can't honestly represent all four at once.
That's also, in practice, why five agencies can value the same property and land on five different numbers, not because four of them got it wrong, but because value was never a fixed property of the asset to begin with. It's a function of who's asking and what they're trying to achieve with it. What a rights holder can reasonably produce is a defensible price, built from cost, market comparables and media benchmarks. What actually determines value is the conversation that happens after that number is on the table, with a specific brand, about a specific objective. Confusing the two is exactly how a rights holder ends up defending a number that's carefully built and still doesn't land with the sponsor sitting across from them.
The uncomfortable part isn't the debate. It's who's missing from it.
Here's what nobody in that thread disagreed on, even while disagreeing about everything else: most rights holders aren't using any of these methods at all. Not the sophisticated one, not the flawed one, not even the simple one.
They're pricing off the event down the road or a competitor in the same league. Whatever a similar festival, conference or club charged last year, adjusted up or down by feel. No cost basis, no market comparable, no media benchmark and no value story. Just a number that sounds about right, defended, if it's ever challenged, with some version of “that's what everyone charges.”
That's not a methodology problem, it's the absence of one. And it's the actual pain point sitting underneath a debate that, on the surface, looks like it's about which expert is correct. The people arguing in the comments all have a framework. The rights holder trying to price their first headline sponsorship package has nothing and no obvious place to start.
That gap matters more than the theoretical argument on top of it, for a simple reason: a rights holder with no starting point doesn't accidentally discover fair market value or a defensible cost basis on their own. They guess, price low out of fear of losing the deal, or price high with nothing to back it up when a sponsor pushes back. Either way, they're negotiating from a position they can't actually defend, in a room with a buyer who prices things for a living.
A starting point, not the final word
This is the gap Orbit was built to close, and it's worth being precise about what that does and doesn't mean.
Orbit's price anchor is media equivalency, the same benchmark sponsorship has leaned on for years, because it's the one starting point that doesn't require access to private deal data a rights holder will never have. But the number it produces isn't the end of the exercise. Every rights holder using it also builds a value story around it, audience insight, proof points, the case for why this specific sponsor, in this specific category, gets more than the benchmark number alone would suggest. The anchor gives you a floor you can defend, the value story is what actually gets a package sold above it.
That split matters even more once you accept that value was never something a rights holder could calculate alone. It's whatever a specific brand decides this property is worth against a specific objective, which is exactly why Orbit's anchor was never built to answer that question. It's built to give a rights holder a defensible price to open with. The value story is what does the actual work of making that price mean something to the specific buyer in the room, which is the only place value ever really gets decided.
It's also worth being honest about what any valuation number actually is, however carefully it's built: evidence, not a verdict. It tells a right sholder what they can defend, not what a specific sponsor will definitely pay. The figure still needs to be tested against current market conditions and how that sponsor actually responds, the same way a building survey tells you what's true about a house without setting its final sale price. Orbit's anchor is meant to survive that test, not replace it.
Orbit isn't trying to settle the debate that played out in those comments, and it shouldn't. Cost basis, market comparables, media equivalency and value story are all going to keep coexisting, because they're each answering a real question a rights holder eventually has to think about. What Orbit is trying to fix is much narrower and much more common: give the rights holder who currently has nothing a defensible place to start, instead of a guess borrowed from the event down the road.
The experts can keep arguing about which lens is most correct, and testing each other's numbers against commercial reality. That conversation is healthy, and it's not going away. But it's worth remembering who isn't in the room while it happens and building for them first.
