A new survey has found that spending on sponsorship in Canada reached the highest it has ever been.
The Canadian Sponsorship Landscape Study estimates that a total of $4.68 billion was spent on sponsorship in Canada last year, with professional sports, grassroots sports and non-profit organizations among the biggest beneficiaries. The study was officially unveiled at SponsorshipX, a branding and sponsorship conference in Toronto, on Tuesday.
"Inflation is definitely part of the discussion since the pandemic, it wasn't really before, but it's part of the discussion and needs to be certainly thought about from that perspective," said Dr. Norm O'Reilly, the survey's lead author and a professor and director of The Sponsorship Lab at the University of Florida. He noted that inflation was about four per cent year over year since the COVID-19 pandemic but brands committed 17 per cent more to rights fees than in 2024.
"We've kind of been calling this the age of optimization of sponsorship, but it's common across marketing, there's still live events and product sampling, experiential things, but the real way to reach people, particularly younger Canadians, anyone under 40, is through digital channels and the cost of these assets that actually track continue to go up."
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CSLS interviewed 114 brands, 50 properties and 24 agencies for its data in this year's survey. It's the 20th year the survey has been conducted.
It found that the typical brand spent $10.2 million on sponsorship in 2025, with five respondents spending over $100 million. The average brand invested in 20.1 sponsorships that year.
O'Reilly said that the emergence of new leagues like the Northern Super League and Professional Women's Hockey League as well as the debut of the WNBA's Toronto Tempo has fed into the sponsorship boom because sponsors have been waiting for women's professional sports to gain traction and, with it, permanence.
"It's finally there," said O'Reilly, who is also a partner at the T1 Agency. "The audiences aren't as big as we'd like online, on streaming, but in person, they're good. The NSL looks like it's going to survive. We finally have the PWHL, it looks like it's going to make it. All these kind of things are really good. The so that's the first piece: women's sport is real.
"The second piece is there's significant positive interest from Canadian brands to support it. So what does that mean? It's amazing, but it also means prices are higher than their market value."
The survey did uncover one troubling fact: while rights fees have climbed, activation spending has remained relatively flat. “Activating” or “leveraging” a sponsorship refers to additional investment beyond what is put toward rights fees that is used to further promote the sponsorship investment that was made.
"The surprising or a little bit concerning thing is that the activation spend is flat and the rights fees have gone up massively, which means by definition in sponsorship that it won't be as effective," said O'Reilly. "My hope would have been a growth, because we finally hit a one-to-one sponsorship activation ratio a couple of years ago (in 2023), which is the ideal, what you want to be the industry standard, but it's dropped."
