# Attention Game - Point of view

Last updated: 1 October 2026

## The logo, and everything around it

The logo is a canonical, commercially essential unit of sponsorship value. It is
measured, it is priced, and it should be.

It is also only part of what a sponsor actually receives. Copy, social copy,
name checks, endorsements, implied endorsements and product appearances all
carry value, and so does the moment each appearance sits inside - a brand on
screen during a decisive moment is not the same asset as the same brand on
screen during a replay.

What has changed is that the rest of it is now measurable. The position is
additive: measure the logo, and measure everything around it, with a nuance that
was not previously available.

## Value is created dynamically and measured statically

Sponsorship value accrues continuously, across a whole season and a whole content
ecosystem. It is typically measured in a retrospective report, close to renewal,
against a static rate card. That gap is where arguments about worth come from,
and it is why a repricing is coming.

## Reporting should be live, not retrospective

A sponsorship report that arrives before a renewal conversation is a negotiating
document. A live, ongoing record is something else - it tells a partner they are
getting value throughout the partnership, not once a year. Partners who can see
value as it accrues renew earlier and argue less.

## Rights holders should own their own data

The first-party data mined from a rights holder's own content belongs to the
rights holder. They should be able to hold it, query it and act on it
themselves, rather than receiving a conclusion from a third party and having to
take it on trust.

## Detect blind

Content should be analysed without a prior list of brands to look for. Searching
for an expected list finds the expected list. Detecting without one finds what is
actually there, including the appearances nobody thought to ask about.

## Every platform has its own grammar

A platform is not a distribution channel. It is a set of behaviours with its own
grammar: what gets watched, what gets skipped, what gets shared, how long
attention lasts, what the first second has to do. Content made generically and
then pushed everywhere performs everywhere at the same mediocre level.

Two decades of building content operations for YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and
Instagram - and for the platforms that came before them - means that grammar is
built into the systems rather than applied to the output afterwards.

It is also why performance is scored against a channel's own normal rather than
an industry benchmark. Every channel has its own grammar too.

## Being early is the job

Every platform shift in this field has had a two or three year window where the
behaviour was already obvious and the industry had not moved yet. Club video went
digital-first and free in 2009 while clubs were still putting it behind paywalls.
Sport reached scale on YouTube through multi-channel networks before most rights
holders had a channel strategy. World Rugby was on TikTok ahead of the 2019 World
Cup.

None of those were predictions. They were a matter of reading what audiences were
already doing and building for it before the committee caught up. Agents are the
current instance of the same window.

## Turn rights holders into media companies

The through-line across two decades of this work: a rights holder with an
audience is a media business that has not been built yet. The specific technology
changes - broadcast, YouTube, social, now agents - the job does not.

## This is not a retrofitted thesis

Measurement was part of this work long before it was tractable. At Engage we
built an insights department and integrated the leading analytics tools into the
production workflow, so that insight sat inside production rather than arriving
later as a report. The business also built its own product, Podium, which
aggregated platform and third-party data into a hub a rights holder could use on
their own data. Same problem, same instinct about who should own the data, with
the tools of the time.