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Sports Marketing

Alyssa Meyers

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 of himself taking a seat across from an interviewer with the caption, “the decision of all decisions.”

It was a callback to 2010, when the current Los Angeles Lakers star told the world he was joining the Miami Heat, and the post sparked widespread speculation that James could be retiring or making another career move. The following day, LeBron made the reveal: “I’m going to be taking my talents to Hennessy VSOP,” he said in an 

Naturally, some fans were less than pleased by the bait and switch. But for Hennessy, which had already seen strong visibility from the partnership it started with James last year, the campaign boosted engagement rates on its socials and other owned channels to an “all-time high,” according to CMO Vincent Montalescot.

“Sometimes, greatness is divisive,” Amar Babbar, comms planning director for Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, the agency behind the campaign, told Marketing Brew. “It’s about creating the conversation.”

From the jump, the “The Second Decision” campaign was meant to drive conversation around the brand and the new Hennessy VSOP, a product created in collaboration with James, Montalescot said in an email.

“Our focus was on deepening Hennessy’s cultural relevance,” he told us. “Success is measured on our ability to resonate through the massive pool of Lebron James’ fans.”

Montalescot’s team tracked reach and engagement across paid, owned, and earned channels, and media coverage in sports and lifestyle publications, as well as brand metrics including sentiment, perception, and consideration. He didn’t share specific numerical results from the campaign, but said it resulted in record engagement for the brand.

The sentiment wasn’t all positive. After resale ticket prices 

 amid speculation that James was about to play his last game, one fan 

 in the hopes of recouping the hundreds of dollars he spent. “Early reactions were highly charged,” Montalescot acknowledged, but that wasn’t necessarily a surprise for brand and agency execs.

“We knew this was going to happen,” Zeynep Orbay, creative director at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, said.

, nor is it the first to hint at the eventual end of James’s playing career. Over the summer, Amazon 

 for Prime Day that opened with James at a press conference fielding a question about retirement. “We promise it’s not us again,” Amazon’s account commented on James’s Instagram post teasing the campaign.

The creative team at Wieden+Kennedy wanted to “make a splash within basketball culture” during the offseason, which led to the idea of leaning into trade rumors, Babbar said.

“When we talk about trade rumors and we talk about LeBron, there was only really one place to start,” Babbar said. “How do we take that iconic moment and use that, subvert it, [and] allow LeBron and Hennessey to play with that moment to revitalize it for a new generation?”

The target audience for Hennessy is younger consumers of legal drinking age, according to Babbar, and to stand out among that crowd, the Wieden+Kennedy team aimed to break the traditional celebrity-backed alcohol ad mold featuring stars showing off bottles, Orbay said. Luckily for the creatives, James was “very open” to the cheeky tone and “one of the best actors we have seen,” she said.

A month after it went live, the campaign is still seeing “unprecedented traction,” which Montalescot said he hopes will continue into the holidays.

“Cultural risk often leads to cultural reward,” he said.

a close up of LeBron James' hands as he gestures toward a bottle of Hennessy VSOP X LeBron James product, a still from an advertisement

Hennessy’s LeBron James ad sparked controversy—and record engagement

A campaign hinting at a major career decision riled up some fans, but it led to “all-time high” engagement rates for the brand, its CMO said.

This story is the latest in our series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profiles 

Growing up on a farm in Surrey, a county in southeast England, Ellie Norman spent a lot of time around tractors. They’re about as different from a racecar as a vehicle can get (not to mention much slower), but from a young age, Norman knew she wanted to get behind the wheel of something.

“I always had this sense of wanting to be able to drive anything that had an engine,” Norman, who would later go on to market for Formula 1 and Formula E, told Marketing Brew.

Norman started working in the agency world when she was 18, using her early savings to buy a Porsche 968 Clubsport. In 2007, she got her race license, which allowed her to compete in some “low-level national racing,” she said. In 2017, she became the director of marketing for Formula 1, where she’d remain for four and a half years.

When Norman joined the organization in its pre-

 days, her goal was to “revitalize Formula 1 for a new generation.” Almost a decade later, Formula 1 has seen a 

 that seems to be the envy of the sports world—and Norman is now CMO of Formula E, the motorsport championship for electric cars. Her goals for Formula E, which she joined just over a year ago, are arguably bigger than the ones she had at F1.

“One of the things I’ve spoken about inside the organization is, ‘How do we become the defining motorsport for youth culture?’” Norman said. “That’s a very deliberate set of words, but for me, youth culture isn’t about age. It literally is an attitude.”

Norman’s focus on youth is rooted in the existing demographics of Formula E fans, 57% of whom are under the age of 40, she said. Psychographically, the sport’s core audience is “very values-driven,” especially when it comes to sustainability, as well as “open-minded and progressive,” Norman said.

Formula E has a 50/50 gender split in fandom, which, she noted, is “unusual for motorsport;” Formula 1 has around a 

For Norman growing up, she said, Formula 1 was on TV in her home every Sunday, but she’s aware that not everyone will have the same connection to motorsports that she does.

“We need to take Formula E out of the echo chamber that we exist in today and really show up in culture where our audience is,” she said.

Earlier this year, Norman’s team developed a social series called Evo Sessions, in which creators were paired up with each of the 11 Formula E teams to learn to drive championship cars. The creators came from different backgrounds, including tech and fashion, which was meant to promote awareness for Formula E in communities that might not be familiar with the sport, Norman said.

Sure enough, content from the Evo Sessions racked up 282 million views and reached 21 million Instagram accounts, 94% of which were new audiences for the brand, she said. Formula E’s social video views in the 2024–25 season increased by 47% year over year, with Evo Sessions making up 42% of total views for the season, according to the organization. Total social impressions, meanwhile, increased by 14% to almost 1.4 billion, while follower count rose by 10%.

Norman doesn’t just want audiences to see a Formula E video on social and move on—she wants them to stick around. One way of doing that is through the power of athlete-driven content or other storytelling putting the sport front and center.

It’s a strategy she saw work up close, as she served as the global director of marketing and communications for F1 from 2018 to 2022, when the Netflix docuseries 

 was reaching peak popularity during the pandemic, and later as the chief communications officer of Manchester United from 2022 to 2024, when 

 was breaking records on Apple TV, helping to popularize the sport with US audiences.

Formula E could stand to see the same halo effect, with a docuseries of its own—

—which landed on Amazon Prime Video this summer, and is coming back for a second season, Norman said.

Plenty of league CMOs would love to replicate the success of 

, but Norman acknowledged that “there’s no single silver bullet” to supercharging fandom. Instead, she and her team are employing a number of other tactics, including striking up creator partnerships, marketing the docuseries, releasing quick-turnaround highlights on social, and embracing a free-to-air broadcast strategy to try to raise the profile of Formula E. The TV audience for the sport grew by 14% to 561 million this season, with an average of 33 million cumulative viewers per race, according to Formula E.

“She is, I would say, exhaustive with her ability to receive new information and strategy, and [she’s] always looking at what’s next,” Alex Aidan, Formula E’s VP of marketing, told us. “We’ve completely flipped our marketing mix over here. We used to create brand content…and then buy our way into your feed, and we’re relying so much more now on talent and creators and people to be authentic voices for us, and it’s felt a little bit like we’ve caught up to the rest of the world.”

Even as her peers consider her to be exhaustive, Norman still carves out time to hit the track. In 2020, Norman upgraded her car, swapping her first Porsche for a Porsche 997 second-generation GT3 RS, which is “pretty much like a stripped-out track car,” loud engine and all. Norman also has a BMW M2 Competition that she uses for track days, during which racing venues like Silverstone Circuit open their tracks for racing enthusiasts.

Ellie Norman in race helmet with BMW M2 Competition 

Her driving experience gives Norman a bit of a peek into the heads of professional racecar drivers, and she’s also happy to suggest those Formula E drivers new fans should look into—like Dan Ticktum, who, she said, has got 

. Ticktum is just one driver of many whose personality and story Norman is prepared to share to help increase fan investment in the sport.

“As I think about the opportunity in Formula E, one of the biggest opportunities is to really be able to work with our drivers and to allow them to share their personalities,” she said. “For their personalities to come through is, for me, the most important thing that we can do as a team to build our fame, because they’re such an important element.”

A portrait of race car driver and CMO of Formula E, Ellie Norman

How a former F1 marketer is building fandom for Formula E

As CMO, Ellie Norman—who is a racecar driver herself—has a plan to spark love for the electric-car championship.

Paralympic snowboarder Mike Schultz, Olympic speed skater Erin Jackson, and Olympic freestyle skier Colby Stevenson are all among the best athletes in the country. They are also star examples of how athleticism and engineering and technology meet.

With less than 100 days to go until the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, Autodesk, a Team USA sponsor, is running a campaign starring Schultz, Jackson, and Stevenson that highlights the overlap between elite athletes and professionals like engineers, architects, and designers who use the platform.

“There’s such a parallel with the Olympians,” Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder told Marketing Brew. “Think about the process and the journey and all that goes into making these athletes ready to win…This campaign is really about the makers behind the medals, whether it’s the athletes, the engineers, the builders, everybody who helps to turn this imagination into reality.”

The campaign marks Autodesk’s first foray into Olympic-related marketing, and it rolled out Oct. 29, exactly 100 days until the Winter Games. Created by Autodesk’s creative and media agency of record, Giant Spoon, the 30-second spot, part of the brand’s “Let There Be Anything” content series, shows Schultz, Jackson, and Stevenson training and competing, with Autodesk tools overlaid on some of the shots.

The ad is meant to feel “optimistic” and “inspiring,” Ian Grody, chief creative officer at Giant Spoon, told us, and is ultimately meant to encourage more people to use Autodesk, Treseder said. The idea started with a Venn diagram of Olympians and Autodesk users, according to Grody, and the team landed on the idea that for both groups, “every millimeter counts.”

“We realized that there is a lot they have in common,” he said. “They are two groups of people where precision means everything.”

Treseder said she wanted athletes that authentically connected to the brand, and all three fit the bill. After Schultz lost his leg in a biking accident in 2008, he designed and built his own prosthetic leg and went on to start a company, BioDapt, that manufactures lower-limb prosthetics. Jackson, meanwhile, has an engineering degree and “plans to pursue a career in biomechanics,” according to Autodesk. And Stevenson’s doctors used design technology to reconstruct his skull following a nearly fatal car crash in 2016.

“You simply couldn’t cast just another Olympic athlete” for this campaign, Grody said.

The ad uses a combination of archival competition footage and close-up shots of the athletes in action on a studio set that the Autodesk team built in Canada, complete with an artificial ski slope and ice rink, where Grody’s team used a special camera with an “extremely high frame rate” to capture details like individual particles of snow falling through the air, he said.

The campaign is set to run through the Winter Games across TV and online platforms, including YouTube, Meta, and LinkedIn.

While Autodesk isn’t an official sponsor of Milan Cortina, the company is deeply involved with LA28, where it is the “official design and make platform” of the Games; Treseder said the brand is already strategizing how to show up during the Summer Games. As part of its LA28 partnership, Autodesk is leveraging its tech to help organizers realize their goal of putting on the games without building any new permanent venues, ideally making the event “the most sustainable games ever,” Treseder said.

With headquarters in California, that mission is quite literally close to home for the brand, and Treseder said she also hopes to find ways to “contribute to the community” as the Games approach. Athlete partnerships will serve as another throughline for Autodesk from Milan Cortina through to LA, she added.

“This is the beginning of what is going to be a long tail of telling the stories of how the Games are being designed and made, and there’s so much interest in that, from what’s happening with the stadiums to the fan experiences,” Treseder said.

Olympic speed skater Erin Jackson in Autodesk Winter Olympics campaign

Autodesk kicks off its first-ever Olympics marketing effort ahead of Winter Games

The software company tapped three athletes with close ties to tech for its first activation as a Team USA sponsor and official partner of LA28.

Ahead of the Winter Games, Autodesk kicks off its first-ever Olympics marketing effort

After an exciting World Series, sports fans are hyped about baseball, and with a World Cup coming up this summer, soccer is also a hot topic.

But neither holds a candle to basketball or football when it comes to player stardom, according to a new 

Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry topped the company’s Sports Monitor Athlete Reputation Tracker, a report meant to help “gauge athlete popularity and marketability” by ranking them based on familiarity, likability, and negative perceptions. Curry tied the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark for No. 3 on the list 

. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes came in second this year and last year after topping the 2023 list.

Including Curry and Mahomes, 18 of the top 25 athletes on the tracker play football or basketball, while just three MLB players and two soccer players made Kantar’s list.

 The highest-ranking baseball player was New York Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge, who came in at No. 13 with a score of 54. To arrive at the scores, the Kantar team polled more than 2,600 sports fans in August and September, then rewarded athletes for high familiarity and strong positive perceptions and penalized them for negative perceptions.

Shohei Ohtani, a designated hitter and pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers whose stand-out performances were on display during the 

, and Inter Miami CF and Argentina national team forward Leo Messi tied for No. 16, each scoring 51.

Another soccer superstar, Cristiano Ronaldo of the Saudi Pro League and the Portugal national team, came in at No. 19 with a score of 49.

Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout followed, tying Baltimore Ravens running back Derrick Henry at No. 20.

 this year, only one golfer, Rory McIlroy, made the top 25.

“As competition increases, these leagues are going to need to create stars,” Ryan McConnell, EVP at Kantar, told Marketing Brew. “You’ve got to give people a reason to tune in. I think the leagues are understanding this a lot more than they used to.”

McConnell said he’s optimistic more soccer players will see their fame rise as the World Cup gets closer and “takes over the culture.” For marketers 

 to activate soccer sponsorships, he suggested they could “borrow equity from higher-profile celebrities” in their campaigns for the time being.

 Gymnast Simone Biles was the only athlete from outside football and basketball to make the top 10 this year, falling to No. 3 after ranking first last year, when Kantar ran the survey just before the Paris Olympics. In general, “summer Olympians experienced a lowered profile as media coverage subsided” this year, according to Kantar. Swimmer Katie Ledecky and gymnast Suni Lee, for instance, both dropped off the top 25 in this year’s report.

 There are fewer women in the top 25 this year compared to last, and Biles and Clark, who came in fourth with a score of 75, were the only two to make the list. WNBA Rookie of the Year Paige Bueckers, however, made a notable climb, McConnell said, rising from No. 77 last year to No. 54 this year.

“The gap between Caitlin Clark and the next most likeable or popular women’s athlete is still very, very wide, but it does show promise that maybe Bueckers will be able to jump a little bit higher next year,” he said.

 There’s also a group of athletes who have regularly proved divisive on the tracker, and boxer and YouTuber 

 “leads that list,” according to Kantar. About three-quarters (71%) of sports fans said they’re familiar with him, and 30% expressed negative perceptions, leaving him with a score of eight. He’s been last in the rankings for three years straight.

Brittney Griner, a three-time Olympic gold medalist and WNBA champ, has clocked relatively high negative perceptions for the past couple of years. Fellow WNBA star Angel Reese joined her on the list of athletes with more than 20% negative perceptions, “reflecting how gender, race, and identity can shape reactions to outspoken female and LGBTQ+ athletes,” according to the report.

Marketers shouldn’t necessarily shy away from polarizing athletes, McConnell said.

“You obviously don’t want to associate too much with negativity, although…some brands might want to embrace that if it really aligns with their brand,” he said. “You will get attention, and attention is the coin of the realm right now. Breaking through is harder than ever.”

Steph Curry shoots a basket during Golden State Warriors game v. Minnesota Timberwolves

Baseball, soccer, golf produce fewer marketable stars: report

Football and basketball players dominated Kantar’s athlete reputation tracker for the second year in a row.

MLB is having a record postseason, and not just because Game 3 of the World Series went on for 18 innings.

Game 1 between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers averaged 32.6 million viewers in the US, Canada, and Japan, the largest combined audience from those countries since the 2016 World Series, according to MLB. Games 1 and 2 combined for an average of 19.8 million viewers in the US and Canada, up 27% from last year.

“Baseball is having a moment,” MLB CMO Uzma Rawn Dowler told Marketing Brew. “We are on fire right now, and it’s not just around the postseason, which has been incredibly electric.”

The energy around baseball—evident on social media, and probably in several of your group chats—comes in the wake of a push from the league to connect with younger and more diverse audiences through player and fan passions outside of the game itself, Rawn Dowler said.

With Dodgers phenom pitcher and designated hitter Shohei Ohtani taking MLB by storm since joining in 2018, the league has been upping its presence in Japan, where baseball is incredibly popular. In 2023, the quarterfinals of the international World Baseball Classic tournament took place at the Tokyo Dome, and MLB started the 2025 season with a series there. Last season opened with games in nearby Seoul, South Korea, where the sport’s popularity is also on the rise.

The 2025 World Series just so happens to include 13 internationally born players—including Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki—which has contributed to viewership increases and helped to make the sport more “elevated on the global stage,” Rawn Dowler said.

Game 4 of the National League Championship Series (NLCS), during which Ohtani hit three home runs and struck out 10 batters, was the second most viewed LCS game of all time in Japan, according to MLB, and the following day was MLB’s third most-viewed single day on Instagram, bringing in 119.6 million views on Oct. 18.

The series was also the most-watched NLCS ever in Japan, with 7.34 million average viewers. Game 1 of the World Series, which began at 9am in Japan, is now the third most watched World Series game ever in the country, with an average of 11.8 million viewers.

With Ohtani and the Dodgers taking on the Blue Jays, Canadians also have a reason to engage with America’s national pastime. Games 1 and 2 were the two most-watched Blue Jays games ever on Sportsnet in Canada, reaching a combined 15.9 million viewers, per MLB; Game 1 alone was watched by “more than one-sixth of the entire population of Canada,” per 

The increased international fandom has had big implications for league sponsorships, Rawn Dowler told us. Japan Airlines, for instance, started out as an MLB partner in Japan only, but has since expanded that relationship to include a US partnership, she said.

MLB team sponsorship revenue crossed the $2 billion mark this year, according to 

, and TV advertisers are seeing boosted results in the MLB postseason: Postseason ads resulted in 24% more web traffic for brands than ads during the regular season, per data from TV ad-tech platform Tatari.

In addition to reaching an international audience, MLB has been taking steps to connect with younger fans by tying the sport to other passions like music, food, and fashion, Rawn Dowler said, something some 

 have also highlighted in their social strategies.

Music in particular is “synonymous with baseball” thanks to player walk-up songs, she said, “and we found that our younger, more diverse fans are really interested in music.” As a result, the league has focused on creating more musical moments, like performances at the All-Star Game and a Tim McGraw pregame concert this summer. Most recently, Pharrell and the Jonas Brothers performed at Games 1 and 2 of the World Series, respectively.

While MLB is taking a swing at attracting new demographics, the league also has a core group of fans who are deeply entrenched in the history of the sport, and 

To grow baseball’s fandom while also respecting its roots, Rawn Dowler said her team is trying to find cultural moments to engage with “in the right way that feel organic to baseball.” One way they’ve done so is by letting player passion points lead the way, she said: New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor is known for his fashion sense, and he recently appeared in a 

 discussing his style on MLB’s YouTube channel.

That kind of player storytelling can ideally translate to growth for MLB’s brand as a whole, and it provides more natural ways for baseball to work itself into cultural conversations, whether that’s on the public stage or just between friends.

“You can really tell when you’re infused in culture, in a moment, when you’re showing up in group chats,” she said. “MLB, the Dodgers, the Blue Jays, the World Series, the postseason, [are] all over group chats right now.”

The Toronto Blue Jays celebrating winning Game 7 of the American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners.

MLB swings at international, young baseball fans during record World Series

The World Series and league championship series have reached massive audiences worldwide, and MLB is looking to capitalize.

The tunnels of major sports venues have come to be known as 

. For its latest campaign, United Airlines is turning tarmacs into very literal runways for athletes.

United, which serves as the official airline for eight NFL teams, caught wind of the growing crossover between fashion and football, including the trend of players posting their in-flight outfits when they touch down for away games, and saw an opportunity to get involved, Maggie Schmerin, United’s chief advertising officer, said.

“It has become such a priority, in a lot of cases, for these players to focus on their fits and their fashion,” Schmerin told Marketing Brew. “These players look like these superhero characters [with] beautiful aircraft behind them…That was happening organically, and we said, ‘Let’s actually turn this into something a bit more formal.’”

The resulting athlete-studded campaign, which will have a large out-of-home component as well as a presence in national print publications, is meant to bolster relevance and reputation for a brand in an industry that most people don’t engage with nearly as often as they watch football, Schmerin said.

United’s campaign, called “Football Flies United,” features Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, Chicago Bears wide receiver Rome Odunze, San Francisco 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk, and Cleveland Browns wide receiver Jerry Jeudy showing off their personal style as they disembark United planes.

United sponsors each of the teams featured in the ads; some, like the Bears, have been partners for decades, and others, like the Chiefs, are newer relationships. Schmerin said that While other brands have sought league-level partnerships, United has focused on team partnerships as a way to target its seven US hub cities.

As for the athletes themselves, while many football players put serious thought into their outfits, this group was chosen for their particular “care and attention” to fashion, Schmerin said. Juszczyk, for instance, has deep ties with the fashion world in part because his wife, Kristin Juszczyk, is a designer who has a licensing deal with the league. Odunze, meanwhile, has worked with United multiple times, including on a 

“Football Flies United” is primarily a local, out-of-home campaign running in San Francisco, Cleveland, Chicago, and Kansas City, Schmerin said. But there’s also a print component with ads in national publications including Vogue, GQ, and the New York Times, a rare buy for the brand that’s meant to reach a broader audience.

“We don’t do a lot of print advertising,” Schmerin said. “But we felt that this campaign and these photos warranted that placement, because they did feel high fashion…When we were building this campaign, we kept saying, ‘You could see this in GQ.’ And then we looked at ourselves and said, ‘Well, let’s actually go put it in GQ.’”

San Francisco 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk on billboard for United Airlines

Like many brand marketers and sports sponsors in particular, Schmerin and her team are interested in making the United brand feel culturally relevant, which can be especially difficult in a space like the airline industry.

“A coffee company or a CPG brand, people are thinking much more often about those products,” she said. “They’re buying coffee every single day, or they’re buying toothpaste more regularly. We’re fortunate if people think about us three, four, or five times a year.”

Connecting United to football and fashion is part of an effort to help the brand “stay top-of-mind and relevant,” Schmerin told us. The campaign is also meant to demonstrate the relationship that United has with the teams it sponsors, she added, showing its role flying them to and from away games, which is not always easy to convey.

Though the campaign only went live a couple of weeks ago, Schmerin said she’s already thinking about potentially expanding it to other teams and players.

“We feel we’re onto something…and [plan to] keep our eye on this intersection of fashion, travel, and the league,” she said.

A wide shot of a busy street in Cleveland with a NFL x United billboard overlooking the street.

United is capitalizing on the growing link between fashion and football

The airline’s latest campaign, “Football Flies United,” is meant to evoke a high-fashion magazine, an exec said.

With the New York City Marathon on Sunday, pavement-pounding is set to reach a high throughout the city. But during weekend mornings in major cities around the country, you’d be hard-pressed to avoid crowds of runners getting their steps in together.

“If I’m in San Francisco any weekend morning, I cannot believe the number of running clubs that I’m seeing,” said Brooke Donberg, director of partnerships and activation at Clif Bar, which has 

The rising popularity of run clubs has helped transform the sport, once seen as a solitary act, into a social and social-media-ready activity. There are 

, run clubs hosted by DJs like Diplo and John Summit, and run clubs specifically for marathons; Carey Pinkowski, executive race director of the Chicago Marathon, said he saw “hundreds of runners” out and about on weekend mornings in the lead-up to the race earlier this month.

As online and IRL communities continue to crop up around running, marketers are taking note, looking for ways to lace up their own metaphorical sneakers and hit the ground, well, running.

“I think a lot of brands are seeing the opportunity, certainly the bigger ones, of ways that they can tap into quite a diverse group of people in terms of both runners and spectators,” Charlie Wade, chief client officer at VML Live and a runner himself who’s done work for clients around several races, told Marketing Brew.

Running gained significant steam during the pandemic. The sport “has always been popular, but niche,” and when gyms closed, many people looking to stay active found they had few other options, Christine Burke, the chief commercial officer for New York Road Runners (NYRR), the nonprofit behind the NYC Marathon, said.

That has led to surges in race sign-ups. While most NYRR races sold out about a month in advance in 2019, new races now typically fill up in a few hours, Burke said. The Boston 5K, which is held on Boston Marathon weekend, was at capacity in 21 minutes this year, according to Scott Stover, CMO of the Boston Athletic Association (BAA), the nonprofit that hosts the Boston Marathon.

“We’re seeing demand that we just can’t meet because of the restriction in terms of the size of our field,” he said.

That surge in participation is translating to sponsor interest, Burke said. A few weeks ahead of the New York City Marathon, floor space at the marathon expo was “essentially sold out,” she said, and this year, the marathon has six new official partners, including three non-endemic brands.

“We’re seeing more and more interest in the non-endemic space, with brands seeing the running community as a trend in overall health and wellness, and wanting to find meaningful and authentic ways to engage,” Burke said.

Some in the running space give run clubs partial credit for increasing interest in racing among participants and sponsors alike. Many running sponsors are drawn to the sport because of the extended timelines for connecting with athletes, but marathon sponsorships in particular typically hinge on one race day; run clubs can offer a “timeline extension” to “complement the type of big, tentpole investment” marketers make in official partnerships, said Zack Sugarman, SVP at Two Circles, which counts Ironman as a client and works with brands on endurance and marathon partnerships.

Sports brands including Clif Bar and Nike are already involved with run clubs, but many marketers are still trying to figure out how to best get a foot in the door, according to Stephanie Arpaia, VP of brand marketing at Excel Sports Management, which has worked on running activations for clients including the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) and Clif Bar.

Bank of America, the presenting sponsor of the Boston Marathon and title sponsor of the Chicago Marathon, is “still working through” ideas to supplement those activations, according to Brad Ross, who leads global marketing partnerships for the bank. The marketing team at Citizens, which became the official bank of NYRR in 2023, has also “started to think about” run clubs, Head of Marketing Lori Dillon said.

One surefire way that marathon sponsors are engaging with runners and race spectators is through branded cheer zones and other signage lining the courses on race days. Nike, which hosts its own races and has official partnerships with marathons like Portland and Chicago, places cheer zones and “cheeky” billboards where runners might need a boost the most, Seema Simmons, VP and general manager of Nike Running for North America, told us. At the Chicago Marathon, one bright red billboard along the course read “Shut up, brain”; at last year’s New York City Marathon, signage at the Staten Island Ferry, which runners used to get to the start line, read “Running is awful. I love it.”

Nike billboard at 2025 Chicago Marathon that says "Shut up, brain."

HSS, which has been a partner of NYRR since 2009, has shown up at races with cheer zones, hydration zones, and billboards, according to Jess Lefkowitz, an assistant VP who works on the hospital’s sports partnerships. The activations are meant to increase brand awareness and trust, and HSS is seeing those results, she said.

“I don’t see us going anywhere anytime soon,” Lefkowitz said. “It’s continued to help us build equity in the wellness and performance spaces.”

Awareness is also the goal for Citizens, Dillon said, and the brand clocked a 14% increase in consideration among New York-area runners from before the marathon in 2023 to after the marathon in 2024.

“It blew me away, quite frankly, how [much] that moved,” Dillon said. “What that meant was you couldn’t miss us.”

For many brands, charities are also a key component of marathon sponsorships: HSS and Citizens both work with NYRR to honor runners who race on behalf of charities and community members making an impact, and for Bank of America, being associated with fundraising is a significant benefit of its marathon sponsorship, Ross said.

“It goes beyond just the activation on the ground, which we do, which is table stakes,” Ross said. “It goes beyond just showing up with our logo…The ability to drive and raise revenue and some money for the charities is a big piece of the pie.”

Foot races give marketers access to captive audiences who are actually participating in the sport, as well as millions of spectators, making racing sponsorships fairly unique in the sports sponsorship space. But marathons may still lag behind some other sports when it comes to reaching TV audiences

“We’re still not quite there yet,” Arpaia said. “We’re starting to see some growth there as far as running events picking up more cultural mindshare or just being more relevant in culture…I’m looking out for, in the next five, 10, years, do we now start to open up an even a bigger lens as far as reaching more consumers that way?”

Reach isn’t always the biggest KPI for running sponsors, making TV viewership less of an issue for some brands. Simmons said her team at Nike is more concerned with creating products and experiences designed for runners, given the brand’s 

 in the sport. For Bank of America, running is about the “ability to go very deep” with a community, Ross said; the brand can get big reach elsewhere, like with its FIFA World Cup sponsorship, he added.

Even without the level of TV reach traditionally associated with major sports, demand for in-person participation seems to be enough to fuel growing interest in running sponsorships, and the need for speed (or just endurance) is showing no signs of slowing down.

“I would carry bibs in my pocket [on] race morning and hand them out,” Pinkowski said. “Now I get stopped in the grocery store and asked about access to the race.”

Update 10/30/25: This story has been updated with additional details about brands honoring runners.

an overhead shot of runners on the 2024 NYC marathon course, surrounding by buildings and with the NYC skyline behind them