A family watching the national cooking show sees the company's products cooked by the contestants — and afterwards, 74% remember who sponsored it. At Pronaca I created and measured that sponsorship: viewership, recall and seven evaluation statements, so the renewal was a decision, taken on evidence.
A food company sponsors the country's biggest cooking programme. Everyone agrees it feels right — and nobody can say what it is worth. The case turns on a choice most organisations never make explicitly: measure the sponsorship inside the instrument that measures everything else, and let it lose if it deserves to.
A cooking programme, a food portfolio, a national audience. The fit is so natural that it removes the pressure to justify it — which is exactly how sponsorships survive for years without evidence.
The category logic is self-evident and the audience is right. Sponsorship budgets are habitually renewed on precisely this reasoning.
Put it inside the annual equity study, competing for credit against every other marketing investment — and accept the answer.
The sponsorship was evaluated in the same annual equity study, on the same panel, as every other investment — an instrument with no reason to be kind.
Sponsorship is the easiest budget line to defend badly. These were tracked in the annual equity study, against the same panel that measured everything else — so the sponsorship had to compete for credit with every other investment.
of the audience had watched the programme
recalled a sponsor — up from 63% the prior year and 52% in 2019
top-two-box on seven evaluation statements
spontaneous top-of-mind for the master brand, up from 18%
| What was asked | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| "I know more Pronaca brands" | Portfolio discovery — the master brand doing work for the individual brands |
| "I am more likely to buy" | Purchase intent, the only statement a CFO cares about |
| "The sponsorship fits the programme" | Fit, which is what separates sponsorship from a logo on a wall |
Selected statements from the seven-item sponsorship evaluation, all scoring 68–82% top-two-box.
A food company sponsoring a cooking programme is not clever, and that is the point: the audience never has to work out why the brand is there. Attention that would be spent on decoding the connection is spent on the product instead.
Integration into the content itself. The brand belongs on the counter, in the middle of the action.
A chef from the programme fronted the pork repositioning — so the sponsorship's credibility travelled into the brand campaign instead of staying inside the show.
If the sponsorship works, it shows up in the same instrument that measures everything else.
Sponsor recall rising 52% → 63% → 74% across three years is a trend, and a trend is what turns a marketing expense into an investment case.
Top-of-mind for the corporate brand rose across the period while new competitors were entering the category — the outcome a master-brand sponsorship is supposed to buy and rarely proves.
The transferable lesson is procedural, not creative. Any investment measured by a study built for it will pass. The same investment measured by the tracker you already run, against every other line, tells you something you did not already believe.
That is the whole discipline: sponsorship is not hard to justify, it is hard to falsify. Design the measurement so it could have failed.
Viewership, recall and evaluation written before the first episode.
Recall from 52% to 74% across editions.
Evidence decides, including when it says stop.