Rory Natkiel, the former chief strategy officer at the Sid Lee Sport agency, recently launched Box Count, a specialist sponsorship consultancy based in the UK.
The company is designed to bring marketing science and rigorous effectiveness to the sponsorship industry, tackling what Natkiel describes as a "structural gap" in how partnerships are valued.
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Box Count offers four core service areas: sponsorship strategy, activation planning, measurement and evaluation, and effectiveness transformation. Central to Box Count's approach are proprietary maturity frameworks for both sponsors and rights holders – diagnostic tools that establish where an organization is on its effectiveness journey, and what it would take to progress.
Natkiel previously spent two decades leading global strategy for the likes of UEFA, Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger, and Pizza Hut.
Box Count believes it can bridge a gap in the market that sees millions being left on the table in unrealised commercial value.
Natkiel argues that while traditional advertising has spent decades refining effectiveness, sponsorship remains 10 to 15 years behind – "stuck in a cycle of evaluating success through vanity metrics like impressions and social engagement, while the evidence base for what drives tangible business impact is limited."
The consultancy is already in conversation with rights holders "looking to articulate value beyond eyeballs and brands seeking to understand the true ROI of their portfolios."
Natkiel spoke to Sportcal (GlobalData Sport) about the launch of the consultancy and how it can impact the sponsorship industry.
Why have you launched Box Count, and how will it differ from other agencies?
Natkiel: “I've launched Box Count to help brands, rights holders, and agencies make more confident sponsorship decisions by applying the same evidence-based thinking that transformed marketing effectiveness 15 to 20 years ago through the work of Ehrenberg-Bass, Binet and Field, the IPA, and Orlando Wood.
“That approach isn't being applied consistently across sponsorship. I think that's because too much of the sector is still organised around a problem from a decade ago: how do you use social media to make sponsorship more engaging than a logo on a perimeter board? That was a real question.
“It's just the wrong one for now because the creator economy has fundamentally changed social media, and live sport has evolved into the last great monocultural activity. The question now is: how can you use sponsorship to create the same business effects that a TV campaign could have achieved 15 years ago?
“Another thing that makes Box Count different is that I've deliberately created a sponsorship effectiveness consultancy, not a sports marketing agency. After 15+ years as a strategist inside agencies, I know what that environment does to strategic advice. Creative production is the profit centre, and strategy exists to serve it. I wanted to remove myself from that dynamic, so I can give any client the best answer the evidence supports, independent of what any one agency or stakeholder wants the output to be.
You said you want to tackle a "structural gap" in how partnerships are valued. What does that mean?
“The structural gap runs in both directions. The sponsorship sector evolved around a rights sales model built by talent agents like Wasserman, CAA, and IMG in the 1970s and 80s. They weren't marketers, and the media environment was simpler, so they had no particular incentive or brief to understand the commercial impact of the deals they were doing.
“An entire industry was structured around the deal rather than the marketing outcome, and you still see that in the press today – the fee is the headline. In advertising, the size of the deal isn't news; the campaign is what matters. You'd never see publishers leading with “McDonald's buys £50 million of airtime from ITV.”
“But the problem runs the other way, too. The effectiveness-focused advertising world still categorizes sports sponsorship as a subcategory of out-of-home. They don't understand that sponsorship isn't a channel; it's a multichannel platform through which a brand can shift awareness, drive sales, and change brand perception.
“Bridging that gap – between a sector that focuses on deals and one that doesn't understand the full complexity of the medium – is what Box Count is built to do.”
How do you view the current sponsorship market?
“Undeniably buoyant. While legacy channels are seeing spend decline, the sports sponsorship market is growing at a CAGR of around 8% and is projected in some reports to reach $150 billion before the end of the decade. But that doesn't mean every deal is good value, and my view is that in a significant number of cases, sponsors aren't getting their money's worth because deals aren't constructed with outcomes in mind.
“A sponsor says they want brand awareness and gets sold a season of player appearances, which my research in The Sponsorship Effect suggests is probably not the optimal approach for that objective. So it's growing and full of opportunity, but still compromised by a lack of evidence-led decision making at the point where sponsorship is designed, sold, and activated.”
What changes need to happen in the market?
“Two things, primarily. First, a fundamental shift in how sponsorship is bought and sold: away from inventory and exposure, towards outcomes. The question shouldn't be “how much exposure can we get for £10 million?” It should be – “how much can we move our brand awareness by?” Exposure is not an effect. Awareness is. And they are not the same thing – you can expose a brand and see no movement in awareness if the execution isn't distinctive or memorable enough to be retained.
“Second, training – a genuine commitment to equipping practitioners with marketing effectiveness thinking. Not everybody needs to become an econometrician, but everybody should understand what role econometrics can play in understanding what their marketing is actually doing.
“But I'd also push back on the idea that this is purely a data exercise. There's a huge body of evidence showing that creativity is a significant profit multiplier, and I don't want that to get lost. When you invest in creativity, plan channels with intention and design sponsorships with outcomes in mind, the ROI shows up in the econometric models. Not because you had the right data infrastructure, but because you were deliberate in how you built the work and made a commitment to invest in stand-out creativity.”
Why is it important to apply marketing science to sponsorship?
“Because people don't behave differently the moment they walk into a stadium or watch highlights on social. The psychology, the behavioural science, and the laws of marketing apply across every touchpoint. Ehrenberg-Bass's core principles – mental availability, continuously reaching all potential buyers, building distinctive assets – are, if anything, more naturally addressed by sponsorship than by many other parts of the media mix.
“Byron Sharp’s whole argument is that brands grow by building associations over time and reinforcing memory structures through repeated, broad reach of a brand’s distinctive assets to the whole category. It's not just theory; it's been shown to work time and again in practice. In a media environment where mass simultaneous audiences are becoming genuinely scarce, a well-executed sponsorship is one of the most powerful mechanisms available to do exactly that.”
Which sports are you targeting, and have you partnered with any rights holders yet?
We're not targeting specific sports because the approach is essentially sport-agnostic. The principles apply whether you're in golf, cycling, football, or cricket, and whether your budget is large or small. I'm currently working with a couple of rights holders, in both cases, the work is about embedding a culture of effectiveness within their organizations' partnerships teams, which face remarkably similar challenges to agency teams managing a portfolio of clients with different goals and expectations.
“Beyond that, I'm working with agencies on pitches where effectiveness is an increasingly explicit client requirement, and with a brand on evaluating its sponsorship portfolio to help internal stakeholders understand its commercial value. It's early stages, but the breadth is exciting.”
