By Natalie Johnson
A property selling sponsorships and a brand buying them can complete a transaction without either one understanding the other’s business. The property knows its inventory while the brand knows its objectives, and they meet at a price without either crossing into the other’s territory.
Kevin Kersey builds relationships that make that arrangement impossible. “The biggest difference is intent,” he says. A sponsorship is treated as a transaction, while a strategic partnership starts with shared business objectives and requires the property to learn how its partner really makes money.
Design Around the Objective, Not the Asset
Kersey does not open with a package. The first step is listening. This helps him understand what success looks like for a partner before recommending anything. A brand fitted into a standard sponsorship menu receives whatever the property already had, whereas a program designed around a business challenge can draw on whatever solves it. Increasing brand awareness, driving sales, creating content, reaching a new audience, and strengthening customer relationships each point toward different work, and the partnership stops resembling a purchase to become an extension of the company’s marketing strategy.
The obligation runs both directions once it starts. “When both organizations are invested in each other’s success,” Kersey says, “that’s when it stops feeling like sponsorship and starts becoming a long-term business relationship.” A property that has taken on responsibility for a partner’s outcomes needs to understand those outcomes, and that understanding becomes what the relationship is built on.
Story Multiplies the Activation
People do not connect with advertising the way they connect with stories, and Kersey treats narrative as the working mechanism. Every brand has a reason for wanting involvement, and his job is finding the intersection. Locating that intersection requires knowing both sides well. A property that understands only its own audience can offer exposure, while one that also knows why a particular brand wants that audience can build something viewers will recognize as real.
Authenticity then produces outcomes a finance team can count. Consumers notice when a partnership feels real, and they engage with the content, attend the event, purchase the product, and stay loyal to the brand. The story also opens far more surface area than a single asset ever could, turning one sponsorship placement into content, social campaigns, behind-the-scenes experiences, broadcast integrations, community initiatives, and hospitality, all reinforcing the same message. “When the story is genuine, it doesn’t just create engagement,” Kersey says. “It creates business results.”
Fulfillment Is the Starting Point
Most organizations deliver what they sold and consider the work complete. Kersey inverts that. “The biggest mistake organizations make is treating fulfillment as the finish line,” he says. “I see fulfillment as the starting point.” Delivery is when the useful information arrives. A property watching a program run learns which elements moved the partner’s business and which ones looked good while doing nothing, none of which was knowable at the proposal stage. Kersey stays connected throughout the year, measures performance, adjusts as necessary, and keeps bringing new ideas forward, so each cycle adds to his understanding of how that particular company operates.
Opportunities widen as the trust accumulates, and the partnership expands into digital media, hospitality, licensing, retail promotions, content creation, community outreach, and additional events. Eventually, a property is no longer renewing one sponsorship but growing an integrated marketing platform that delivers value year after year.
The competitive position that produces is unusual. A rival property can match assets and offer comparable reach at a lower price on any given day, but five years of understanding how a specific brand’s business works cannot be matched at any price, since acquiring it would take five years.
Where the Next Wave Comes From
Brands are moving toward deeper engagement, and Kersey expects the organizations that connect live events, digital content, streaming, social media, hospitality, and community impact into one platform to capture it. “Audiences don’t consume media in one place anymore, so partnerships can’t live in one place either,” he says.
He also sees substantial opportunity in categories that have not traditionally invested in Western sports or niche properties, including financial services, technology, healthcare, outdoor recreation, home improvement, and business services, all of which are looking for authentic ways to reach highly loyal audiences.
Those categories have remained underdeveloped because nobody has done the work to understand what a bank or a health system needs from a values-driven audience, and an asset list gives them no way to answer that question. The Western lifestyle audience ranks among the most engaged and values-driven consumer groups in the country, and Kersey considers the opportunity to reach it authentically still largely open.
“The future belongs to organizations that stop selling sponsorships and start building marketing platforms,” he states. Selling assets means competing on price against everyone holding comparable inventory, while solving business problems makes a property difficult to replace.
To learn more about building strategic partnerships, connect with Kevin Kersey on LinkedIn.
