Why the Bulls had to modernize their pitch
The Chicago Bulls enter sponsorship meetings with one advantage most teams would happily take: instant name recognition. As for the logo, it is everywhere. The jersey colors are burned into the memory of more than one generation. Even people who haven’t watched an NBA game in years still know exactly what a Bulls cap looks like (and yes, that matters).
That said, fame doesn’t close deals by itself.
Moving on, the franchise’s last NBA title came in the late 1990s, which means there’s no recent championship run to wave in front of a brand team and call it a day. The Michael Jordan era still hangs over the organization in a way few sports properties can probably match, but nostalgia has a shelf life. A sponsor can admire the legacy and still ask the awkward question: what, exactly, do we get for the money?
A famous logo can open the meeting, but proof is what gets the budget signed.
That question has gotten louder because the market has changed. U.S. sports sponsorship spending’s climbed sharply over the last decade and now sits in the low-$30-billion range. That’s a lot of brand dollars chasing a lot of inventory. It also means a team can’t coast on reputation the way it might have a generation ago. The competition for each slice gets more pointed, when the pie gets bigger.
Also worth noting: the bigger shift, though, is inside marketing departments themselves. Sponsorship is no longer treated like a soft add-on that lives in the “brand awareness” folder forever. CMOs and finance teams want it discussed the same way they discuss paid media, search, social, and streaming buys. They want numbers they can put in a deck, justify to a CFO, and revisit after the campaign runs. That puts teams under pressure to explain sports sponsorship ROI in plain terms rather than with hand-wavy talk about exposure.
For a club like the Bulls, that pressure cuts both ways. The brand is powerful enough to draw attention, but also old enough that buyers expect more than history lessons. “ It has to show who shows up, how they spend, and what changes after they buy into the partnership.
That’s the real problem the Bulls needed to solve. The old pitch relied on prestige and reach. Because that’s what sponsors are being asked to defend inside their own companies, given the newer one has to prove commercial behavior. The next step, then, is obvious: if the front office wants to sell with confidence, it needs a better way to measure what Bulls fans actually do once they leave the building.
Inside the Bulls’ new measurement system
the work moved from sales talk to measurement, once the Bulls decided that prestige alone wouldn’t close the gap. “ The answer had to show what fans did after the game, where they went, and whether a sponsorship changed anything in the real world.
The new standard for sponsorship isn’t visibility by itself. It’s proof that a fan’s behavior changed after the brand showed up.
That shift matters because the old playbook was mostly about exposure. Jumbotron impressions, arena signage, and in-game mentions can still help, but they don’t tell a sponsor whether Bulls fans went out for dinner, bought a product, or spent more over time. The Bulls’ model tries to connect those dots. It blends credit-card transaction data with mobile location signals so the team can compare attendance patterns with off-site spending. In plain English, it looks at what happens once the final buzzer sounds and the crowd leaves the building.
The structure is more layered than a simple fan count. Average spend per fan, and total spend from the Bulls fan base across a window that runs for roughly a year, given the system tracks transaction volume. Makes sense. That matters because a single game or a single promotion can be noisy. One night a fan might grab a sandwich and head home (believe it or not). Another time, that same fan could leave the arena and spend across a cluster of businesses. Over a longer period, patterns start to show up, and sponsors get a clearer read on whether a partnership is producing movement in consumer activity.
The model also sorts fans into loyalty tiers, sometimes described as avidity segments. That part is easy to miss, but it’s where the sales pitch gets sharper. A brand doesn’t only want to know that Bulls fans spend money. It wants to know which fans spend the most, which ones show up often, and which ones might be more likely to respond to a specific offer. A courtside regular, a weekend ticket buyer, and someone who comes once a month may all wear the same jersey, but they don’t behave the same way. Sports marketing data gets a lot more useful when those differences are visible.
This kind of segmentation also gives the Bulls a way to talk about brand partnerships in a less vague, more defensible way. A sponsor can look past broad reach and ask a more practical question: did this deal connect with the part of the audience that actually buys? That’s a cleaner conversation for both sides, especially when a company needs to justify a deal inside its own finance or marketing team.
The Bulls have already been building out the kind of experiential inventory that feeds this approach. Partnerships like AT&T’s 5G experiences for Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks fans at United Center and the team’s multi-year experiential partnership with Klarna fit neatly into a world where activation isn’t just about putting a logo in the building. It’s about creating an event that can be measured after people go home.
The larger aim is pretty simple. Arena attendance is nice, but attendance alone doesn’t tell the full story. The Bulls want to show what their audience does beyond the seats, beyond the concourse, and beyond the broadcast. That’s where the real commercial case starts to take shape, and where sponsorship stops looking like a hunch.
Turning fan behavior into a stronger sales story
Once the Bulls had a cleaner read on what their fans actually do after leaving the arena, the pitch changed in a pretty practical way. Instead of asking sponsors to take a leap on brand warmth alone, the team could walk into meetings with evidence of where Bulls fans go, what they buy, and how they spend after a game night. That matters because plenty of brands already know the Bulls are visible. What they want to know now is whether that visibility connects to real commercial activity.
Numbers don’t replace fan passion. They give it a language a finance team can sign off on.
That shift is especially useful in Chicago. It’s one of the biggest media markets in the country, which means sponsors have plenty of places to put their money and a lot of ways to compare one opportunity against another. Fair enough. A legacy team can’t simply point to the logo, the arena, or the history and expect a deal to close itself. The Bulls can now tell a more specific story about how their audience behaves outside the building, which gives brands a clearer reason to care about Illinois shoppers, not just basketball fans sitting in the lower bowl.
Still, the practical effect shows up in sales conversations. A brand looking to reach consumers in Chicago can ask for the usual things, like exposure and reach. But it can also get a read on postgame behavior, spending patterns, and the segments of the fan base that look most active. That makes sponsorship measurement less abstract. It stops being a promise about impressions and becomes a discussion about people who attended a game, went out afterward, bought more, or kept showing up as customers over time.
For a franchise like the Bulls, that’s a better story to tell across the full state, not just downtown. A retailer, consumer brand, or service company based in Illinois can look at the data and decide whether the Bulls fit its customer profile. National and international brands can do the same thing, only with a broader lens. That kind of specificity tends to make internal approvals less painful. Nobody enjoys taking a sponsorship package into a budget meeting and having to explain it with optimism alone. The cleaner the evidence, the less hand-waving required.
That’s why the Bulls’ recent commercial activity suggests that the new approach has helped. Since 2024, the franchise has added roughly 18 partners, and six of them have been international brands. Kind of, that mix says something about how the pitch is landing. It’s Local companies buying into Chicago visibility. Brands with no hometown sentiment to lean on are still making the call, which usually means the business case is doing some of the work.
A few of the newer names are easy to spot. MatchWornShirt joined as the Bulls’ official digital auction partner for jerseys, which gives the team a direct way to connect memorabilia with fan demand. Babybel and Linglong Tire also came on board, each bringing a different kind of consumer audience into the mix.
That’s where stronger data does its best work. It doesn’t magically make every deal easier, and it certainly doesn’t remove the need for fit, timing, or a decent creative idea. But it does make the package feel more credible on first glance. The conversation changes, when a sponsorship deck can point to actual fan behavior instead of just drawing circles around an arena map. The Bulls are selling more than logo placement. They’re selling a clearer path from game night to real-world spending, and that’s a much easier story to take upstairs.
What today’s sponsors expect from sports media
For brands buying into sports, “we like the team” is no longer enough to get a budget approved. A large share of U.S. consumer marketers who invested in sports sponsorships in 2024 still said they had trouble calculating return on investment, which tells you a lot about where the market is headed. The emotional appeal is arguably still there, of course. Nobody’s canceled fan loyalty. But the people signing the checks want something sturdier than a good feeling and a nice suite view.
Sponsorship used to be sold like a story; now it has to survive a spreadsheet.
Next up, that pressure shows up in how CMOs treat sponsorship spend. Gartner has put sponsorships at close to one-fifth of non-digital marketing budgets, yet many marketing leaders still can’t easily explain what those dollars produced. That gap creates real friction. If a brand can defend search, paid social, or retail media with neat dashboards and immediate response metrics, sponsorship gets compared against those channels whether it likes it or not. A logo on a jersey or a courtside panel has to justify itself in the same budget meeting as a performance campaign.
Some brands have responded by becoming much pickier about who they partner with. Factor, the meal delivery company, is one example. Before choosing athlete partnerships, it’s used focus groups and quantitative testing to compare options, including Serena Williams. That sounds almost clinical, and in a way it is. The brand said the partnership has helped improve conversion, kept visitors on the site longer, and roughly doubled click-through rates on social creative. In other words, the deal wasn’t sold as celebrity glitter. It was sold as a measurable commercial bet.
And that’s one reason teams now compete with media owners and broadcasters, not just with other franchises. For the most part, augmented sports inventory can produce measurable lift, which makes it attractive to marketers who want their impressions to do more than sit there politely. Branded game graphics, replay overlays, and sponsored stat boxes are getting more attention because they can move both attitude and intent. A study of 3,600 NBA fans found that those formats improved favorability and search intent faster than standard video ads. When a later ad followed the placement, the effect got stronger. That sequence matters. The audience sees the brand in a live sports context, then encounters it again later with a little more familiarity already baked in.
For teams, that changes the shape of the sell. A sponsor isn’t only buying access to fans in the building or viewers on a broadcast. It’s buying a set of formats, each with different proof points, and each competing with a dizzying amount of other media for attention. That’s why deals across the league now come bundled in more specific ways, from the Bulls’ official soft drink title agreement with PepsiCo to the team’s partnership with Sportfive to grow its presence in France. Even when the category is still “sponsorship,” the buyer is usually asking a much sharper question: what will this actually do for my business, and how can I tell?
The lesson for teams and marketers
At the same time, the Bulls’ overhaul says something fairly simple, even if the plumbing behind it’s complicated: teams need numbers that can survive a budget meeting, and marketers need proof that can survive their own internal review. A sponsorship deck built on brand glow alone can still get attention, but attention isn’t approval. When a CMO asks what the deal actually does, “people love the Bulls” only gets you so far.
So that’s where the new measurement approach earns its keep. If a team can point to fan spending, visit patterns, and the way different audience segments behave after a game, the price tag becomes easier to explain. It gives sales staff something sturdier than vibes. It also gives the brand side a cleaner story to take back upstairs: here’s why this package belongs in the plan, here’s what it reaches, and here’s what changed after the money went in.
Still, sponsorship is not the same as buying paid media. You can’t treat it like a switch you flip for instant clicks and tidy attribution. A game-night signboard, a jersey patch, or a partner activation may influence awareness first, then preference, then purchase much later. Sometimes the effect is immediate. Sometimes it shows up when a fan walks into a store three weeks later, or when a buyer remembers a brand name that kept appearing around the arena. Worth noting. The delay can be annoying for people who want a neat dashboard. It can also be the whole point.
The smartest sponsorship deals make finance comfortable without turning the partnership into a spreadsheet with a mascot.
That balance matters because the strongest partnerships rarely live on measurement alone. Awareness still counts. So does affinity, because people buy from brands they notice and trust. Renewal potential matters too. A deal that looks average in month one can become a much better business if the audience keeps showing up, the brand keeps showing up, and both sides give the relationship time to settle in. Patience is not the most glamorous line item, but it tends to show up in the better contracts.
The Bulls’ approach is useful because it combines something sports brands have always had with something modern sponsors now demand. As for the emotion, it is already there. All of that arrives in the room before anyone opens a spreadsheet, given the fan base, the history, the Chicago gravity. What changed is that the team can now back up that emotional pull with commercial proof. That makes the pitch harder to dismiss and easier to renew.
So the lesson for both sides is pretty clean. Data can help teams defend pricing and help marketers defend spending, but sponsorship still has to feel worth it on day one and prove itself over time. The deal should make sense at signing. Then it has to keep paying off, one season, one audience segment, and one repeat partnership at a time.
