A Comunicano Sports Insight Report – Thursday August 6th 2026.
Twenty campaigns, two years, one pattern: pop-up and participatory formats outnumber static and digital signage combined. Some of them expanded fandom. Most of them didn’t need a ticket, a jersey, or a venue at all.
A review of twenty non-traditional sports marketing activations from August 2024 through August 2026, spanning the Olympics, the World Cup, F1, the NBA, the WNBA and more, turns up a consistent shape. The gate stopped being the boundary of the marketing budget.
Eleven of the twenty ran as pop-up experiential builds. Seven leaned on participatory, user-generated mechanics. Static and digital out-of-home combined account for eleven tags across the same set, real, but no longer the center of gravity.
But the format tally isn’t the interesting number. The interesting question is which of these campaigns actually expanded fandom and built real brand alignment, and which ones just moved a logo from one wall to a different one.
Let’s take it apart.
What Passes the Andy Test
The Andy Test is simple: does the sponsor’s actual product sit inside the fan experience, or does the sponsor’s name just decorate someone else’s moment?
Three campaigns in this set pass it cleanly.
Nike, not an official sponsor of the 2024 Mexico City Marathon, installed more than 90 hyperlocal messages along the full 42-kilometer course, each one written for the exact kilometer a runner would be passing when they read it. That’s not a logo near a race. That’s the product’s message living inside the physical act the fan is performing, in real time, at the moment of maximum relevance. Thirty thousand runners engaged directly. Organic reach topped 13 million.
Heineken turned a Formula 1 partnership renewal, normally a trade-press footnote, into one physical object: a carbon-fiber season pass granting a single fan and a friend access to every race on the calendar. The brand didn’t buy a wall. It built the thing a real fan would actually want, then let that fan’s season become the content. Coverage ran in 122 countries. Eighty-eight percent of surveyed respondents said the campaign made the brand feel like it “gets fans closer,” a 66-point lift over benchmark.
QMS Media, working across six sponsors for the Paris 2024 Olympics, built a national digital out-of-home network in Australia that served more than 81,000 dynamic creative variations tied to live medal results. The ad itself changed as the sport happened. For one sponsor, a meat pie brand whose entire campaign line was “being a fan is hungry work,” the format wasn’t decoration on top of the moment, it was built from the moment. Unit sales rose as much as 30 percent.
What connects those three: the product, the message, or the mechanic is inseparable from the specific fan behavior it’s sitting inside. Take away the marathon, the race calendar, or the live scoreboard, and the campaign stops making sense. That’s the test.
What Fails It
Most of what shows up in this category doesn’t fail loudly. It fails by being generic.
A pop-up product demo, a branded trailer, a step-and-repeat photo wall, these show up repeatedly across the twenty campaigns reviewed, and most of them report no quantitative results at all. Fourteen of the twenty have no published impressions, footfall, or lift numbers, only descriptive language: “constant queues,” “a large footfall,” “immediate global coverage.” That’s not evidence. That’s a press release wearing the outfit of a case study.
The static-versus-dynamic question matters here too. Vistar Media’s controlled study of more than 7,500 respondents found static out-of-home creative already delivers a 38 percent aided-recall lift over no exposure. Full motion adds roughly 3 more points. 3D adds roughly 6. Vendors sell dynamic and real-time capability as transformative. The best independent measurement available says the gap is closer to a rounding error than a category shift, once you’ve already got a static panel in front of the right person.
That matters because “real-time” and “dynamic” have become the two most overused words in this category’s marketing decks, promising the QMS-caliber result while, in practice, describing a static billboard with better copy. A brand’s product being physically present near a fan is necessary. It is not sufficient. If a campaign’s entire pitch is presence, not participation, it’s renting a wall.
Back in the mid-90s, we tested product sampling at concert venues. Concertgoers received A box with samples and coupons good for sizable discounts at the local supermarket chain. We tested the same musical act in the same city two nights in a row. On the first night, we gave away the product at the entry. On the second night, we gave it away to the concert fans on the exit. We learned a few things. Giving something away on the way in resulted in a lot of trash, not a lot of redemption, and very low recall. The fans who attended and received the box on the way out had much higher recall and much higher pull-through and redemption. What did we learn from that? A fan’s attention before a sporting event or a concert is focused on the event. Once it’s over, they’re more open to suggestion.
Who Actually Captures the Value
Here’s the finding that should reorder how brands think about the out-of-home activation category entirely.
Relo Metrics measured $665 million in sponsor media value generated by Formula 1 brands between March and June 2025. Sixty-three percent of it, $417 million, came from social media. Not trackside signage. Not venue branding. Social.
The single highest-value day of that entire period came from a physical stunt, a LEGO-branded car built for the Miami Grand Prix, that generated $14 million in one day almost entirely through the video and photos it produced online. Per post, a piece of F1 sponsor content on TikTok generated roughly three times the value of the same content on Instagram, and five times the value on YouTube.
The structural reframe: physical presence is raw material. It is not the product. What makes a fan-facing activation valuable is whether it produces something worth photographing, sharing, and talking about, not whether the brand paid for square footage. A campaign judged only on impressions or footfall is being measured on the wrong axis.
Brand Alignment Is Not the Same as Brand Presence
There’s a category error running through a lot of this spending: treating “the brand was there” as equivalent to “the brand fits.”
Dobel Tequila’s month-long JFK Airport takeover during the 2025 US Open worked because it intercepted a real, specific fan behavior, travelers arriving for a tennis tournament, with a mechanic (a tennis-ball throwing challenge, athlete-named cocktails) that made sense for the moment and the audience. Hisense’s Dubai activation for the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup worked on the same logic: VR trials and a Laser TV viewing zone gave a display-technology brand a legitimate reason to be in a football-watching space, generating more than 70 million impressions.
Compare that to campaigns in the same dataset that simply bought presence at a cultural moment without a mechanic connecting the brand’s actual product to the fan’s actual behavior. Several of the pop-up and static OOH campaigns reviewed report no engagement mechanism beyond passive viewing. Those are the campaigns most likely to be judged fairly as opportunistic rather than aligned.
The tell is almost always the mechanic. If you can describe what a fan actually does at the activation in one sentence, and that sentence involves the brand’s real product, it’s alignment. If the sentence is just “looked at it,” it’s presence.
The Discipline the Industry Skips
One more thing worth saying plainly, because it’s easy to skip when a deck is full of impressive-looking numbers.
Almost every effectiveness study in this category is funded by a party that sells the format it validates. The trade association behind out-of-home commissioned the marketing-mix modeling arguing brands under-invest in the channel. A programmatic DOOH seller and its research partner, a digital out-of-home inventory owner, ran the two competing studies on how much motion creative actually matters, and they disagree with each other. An experiential marketing agency published the strongest funnel-conversion numbers in this entire review, with no control group and a self-selected sample of people who already showed up to a brand event.
None of that makes the underlying numbers false. It means every claimed lift, recall score, or ROI multiple in this category needs the same question asked of it that gets asked of a commissioned economic impact study: who paid for this, and what were they trying to prove? Sponsorship measurement generally backs up the caution.
Only 19 percent of sponsorship professionals say they’re confident they can measure the actual business-value return of what they’re buying, and roughly a third have any standardized process for trying.
Where This Leaves the Money
Two things can be true at once: fandom genuinely doesn’t end at the gate anymore, and most of the spending chasing that fact isn’t earning it.
The winners in this dataset- the marathon takeover, the season-ticket stunt, the live-data DOOH network- share a structure. They built something a fan would want to participate in or talk about, made the brand’s real product part of that thing, and let the sharing do more of the work than the media buy. The campaigns with no reported results in common tended to share the opposite structure: presence bought at a cultural moment, without a mechanic tying the brand to what the fan was actually doing there.
The open question for any brand or property looking at this category isn’t whether to spend beyond the venue. That decision is already made industry-wide. It’s whether the next dollar buys a wall or buys a reason for someone to point their phone at it.