About Us

Understanding our client’s needs is our top priority.

Lumency is a brand side sponsorship consultancy with a global reach, working from bases in New York, Toronto and Chicago. Established in 1996, our client-centric business model enables us to deliver bespoke solutions for each client’s unique needs. Understanding our clients’ businesses is our top priority, providing us with an insider’s perspective to ensure that our services align with their goals and objectives.

Our Clients

We pride ourselves on the client relationships we have built with leading brands.

Our Core Values

Inherent behavioral traits that guide our organization.

Our core values are the inherent behavioral traits that guide us in every aspect of our organization. We are unwavering in our commitment to these values, which influence our hiring and retention practices, business strategies, and performance management. Our values are integral to who we are, and we pride ourselves on demonstrating them in everything we do.

Credibility

Our credibility is our greatest asset. We do what we say we will do. Deeds speak.

Transparency

Through transparency comes trust. Trust is the foundation of real teamwork and of true partnership.

Kaizen

Kaizen is a philosophical notion of continuous improvement. Real, meaningful change in business and in life doesn’t come from great leaps forward, but from doing things a little better each day.

Ownership

Radical accountability, we each do what needs to be done because it’s what we expect of ourselves and of each other. Owners take results personally.

What We Do

Experts in sponsorship.

Our expertise lies in sponsorship.

We specialize in aligning brands with passion points, around sports, arts, music, culture, and cause, to find and secure the right properties and build the right platforms that support brand and commercial strategy.

We are passionate about flawless execution, sweating the details, and using storytelling to engage audiences and amplify activations. We deliver industry-leading results, customized to each client’s specific needs.

Consulting

We help clients make smarter, strategic sponsorship decisions.

We offer a full suite of sponsorship consulting capabilities to help brands make smarter, strategic sponsorship decisions and derive additional value from their marketing investments.

Our comprehensive service offering includes building holistic sponsorship strategies, portfolio optimization, valuation/evaluation of new and renewing property opportunities, sponsorship governance, activation design and execution, rights management and measurement.

We understand that clients have different needs, so our approach is always bespoke. To enhance our services, we offer clients a suite of sponsorship-specific software tools.

Capabilities

SPONSORSHIP STRATEGY sets the foundation, always drafting behind your brand and commercial strategies.

We advise brands on where to best invest marketing dollars based on a defined set of sponsorship principles, working to determine the properties, audiences, pillars, and platforms to leverage in terms of sponsorship marketing efforts as a way of connecting with a target audience(s), creating an emotional connection and impacting attitudinal and behavioural change.

PASSION POINT ANALYSIS identifies the most meaningful connection points to create emotional context between your brand and your target audience(s).

A proficiency around consumer data and research enables us to determine where your brand’s target audience(s) over-index within specific passion points (sports, music, cause, arts, culture). This informs sponsorship strategy. Uncovering the areas of greatest passion concentration or overlap allows for the development of more effective and target efficient platforms, where you can earn the most attribution and be most resonant.

PROPERTY VALUATION uses business science to assign a commercial value to an individual sponsorship deal.

Clear understanding of value is crucial for informing investment decisions. Considering the brand, industry, market, audience, objectives, a number of tangible and intangible indices, and more, we can generate a single figure—‘the number’—to represent the market value a property and its assets can deliver for your brand. Our customized Spend Lens produces opening, anticipated close and walk-away spend targets.

TrueValue™ is our robust valuation model, customized to each clients’ unique business needs. For more than 20 years, it’s been an industry-accepted standard for determining the category rights market value of sponsorship assets, and forms the foundation of many of our services.

PROPERTY EVALUATION provides a holistic understanding of a property’s value to your specific brand—beyond what’s on paper—and facilitates a clear path forward.

Using valuation as the foundation, comprehensive evaluation provides recommendations and actionable insights on how to increase deal efficiency, setting the stage for more informed negotiations and a consistent approach for future renewals/acquisitions.

Our evaluation package includes important brand reputation and risk considerations around a property including life safety, data security and sustainability.

PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION directs the most efficient deployment of resources against the target audience.

To move forward, it is important to know what is currently working—and what is not. We audit your brand’s current portfolio for efficiency, validating individual property performance and setting a roadmap to divest, retain, or acquire new properties.

Lumency’s Sponsorship Portfolio Healthcheck

ACTIVATION PLANNING & EXECUTION ensures we ‘sweat the assets’ across as many connection touchpoints as possible—consumers, trade partners, owned channels etc.

Activation is the bridge between value and ROI. Through this process we prioritize sweating key assets to their maximum potential. To better align our activations, we sit down with the property to first understand their goals and audience, then go deep on our activation plans to drive the most value for the brand.

Lumency’s Activation Scorecard

GOVERNANCE builds decision-making processes around sponsorship marketing to better achieve internal alignment.

Sponsorship decisions are complex, often involving multiple stakeholders. We help brands answer many of the ‘how’ questions—such as how to consider new sponsorship opportunities or seek organization alignment—by adding order and accountability to existing internal processes. With more structure comes clarity, consistency, and faster, better decisions.

Lumency’s Sponsorship Accelerate

MEASUREMENT leverages rigorous methodology to prove out whether or not your sponsorships—and assets—are being successful against defined objectives.

A unified approach to measurement lets us know how a sponsorship/partnership is impacting the business and the brand—and thus what levers to pull. We focus on measuring what matters for your brand, drawing a careful distinction between ‘outputs’ and ‘outcomes,’ and anchoring everything back to your brand’s key objectives and KPIs.

Measuring Sponsorship Impact

RIGHTS MANAGEMENT cultivates a partnership mindset and ensures sponsorship deals are upheld by all parties.

All agreements require follow-through. In many cases, brands look to us to manage the day to day with their properties. This means ensuring the brand’s commitments to the property are met, value is delivered to the brand and, as partners, we work together with the property to ensure activations are as effective as they can be.

NEGOTIATION STRATEGY ensures we secure the right assets at the right price.

Optimizing your asset mix is difficult without knowing what to ask for, or how. We pre-plan multiple rounds of negotiation to create and leverage flexibility within the negotiation process. We can act as lead, second chair, or support behind the scenes.

MARKET ANALYTICS identifies the most optimal property mix for your brand in a particular market (urban, country, region).

Every market is different. To better understand the intricacies, Lumency commissions in-depth consumer research that, with the additional analytics, supplies brands with actionable intel. By taking a closer look at fan demographics, cross-property engagement, levels of fandom, consumption trends, and other, deeper fan metrics, we can provide guidance on the most optimal mix of properties in a particular market/country, reducing unintended fan duplication and maximizing incremental reach.

Lumency’s Market Analytics 

Proprietary Software Solutions

TOUCHSTONE™ is an online sponsorship proposal management platform.

Brands are frequently bombarded with sponsorship requests. Touchstone™ helps brands manage this tsunami of sponsorship/partnership/grant/endorsee/community investment proposals that land on their desks. Through our customized-to-your brand online portal that links off of your brand’s website, applicants are asked to input key info which is then compiled in a central database and sorted in an automated review. Based on pre-set criteria, the software can surface certain applications to the brand team, and even auto-generate responses on behalf of the brand. Your brand appears both accessible and responsive.

LOCAL SPONSORSHIP EVALUATION TOOL is an automated software platform that adds rigor, consistency and visibility around local sponsorship opportunity analysis.

This customized, easy-to-use tool is designed to give your local and regional sponsorship decision makers what they need to optimize value from local sponsorship opportunities (under a certain spend threshold, USD ~$40,000). It provides instant analysis of a sponsorship’s value to the brand (based on brand and commercial objectives) and builds in accountability and visibility around local/regional spend. It also helps manage risk and protect business terms by auto-generating a Letter of Agreement between your brand and the local property.

Lumency’s Local Sponsorship Evaluation Tool

MID-CAP EVALUATION TOOL provides semi-automated evaluation of mid-cap spend, ‘non-complex’ sponsorship opportunities.

Similar to the Local Sponsorship Evaluation Tool, Lumency’s new Mid-Cap Evaluation Tool enables brands to ‘self-use’ our evaluation methodology in the form of a customized, semi-automated software platform. The platform is tuned to sponsorship and community investment properties that lack ‘complexity’ — rights fee spend ≤ USD $250,000 and with no to limited broadcast visible assets.

How We Partner

We aim to surround ourselves with the very best people to drive ourselves forward.

Brand-Side Only

We represent and serve brands exclusively. Our commitment to providing unbiased advice is why we do not represent properties or talent.

Marketing & Procurement

As a sponsorship marketing consultancy, we align with professionals overseeing brand marketing, sponsorship marketing.

Our expertise extends to marketing procurement, focusing on value and optimization. We speak the same language, delivering impactful results to support our clients’ brand and commercial objectives.

Agency & Vendor Partners

At Lumency, we value strong collaboration and clear communication with our marketing agency partners. Keeping the brand’s best interests in mind, we adopt a partnership mindset and work seamlessly with others.

To enhance our data and analytics, we collaborate with various research and intel firms, ensuring comprehensive and insightful solutions.

Leaders

We partner with clients who are industry leaders by market significance, commitment to innovation, or both.

Leaders exhibit distinctive traits – they welcome challenges and challenge us in return. Embracing measurement and new ways of doing things, they inspire us to deliver our finest work and be our best selves.