The Sponsored Content That Changed Sports Marketing

👋 Welcome back to Sponcon Sports, a weekly newsletter dedicated to sponsored content strategy in the sports industry! 

Timed challenges work because they’re simple, repeatable, and built for tension. That’s exactly why I’ve been bullish on time-trial content with players for nearly two years—especially as a scalable opportunity for product placement.

We’ve previously featured a few strong examples of the format in action:

• Indiana Pacers: Locker Room Time Trials

• Barstool Yak x BODYARMOR: The Gauntlet

• Portland Trailblazers: Time Trials

Recently, the format has driven massive view counts, and notably, the biggest performers shared a nearly identical mechanic: players racing to knock down cups using a ping-pong ball and paddle.

• Brooklyn Nets Rookies Royale: 3.9M views

• San Francisco 49ers Controlled Chaos: 1.2M views

Here’s the opportunity: almost all of these videos feature no intentional brand integration at all. Slapping a logo on the table or into the set could deliver strong exposure (especially in the legal or watch categories if you call it Time Trials), but the real upside is embedding the product into the challenge.

If you want proof this works, look at @thesmilyfam on TikTok. Their timed challenges rotate products naturally, whether competitors go solo, compete in teams, or face off head-to-head. Same format. Endless variations.

This format is best suited for CPG brands with deep product portfolios. Think Unilever, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and similar where each episode can spotlight a individual or multiple SKUs without forcing a new concept.

Bottom line: if you’re not testing timed formats as product-forward inventory, you’re leaving one of the easiest, most repeatable sponsorship plays on the table.

In Today’s Edition:

• 2025’s Top 5 Sponcon 🏆️

• Wellness Wins In LA 🌩️ 

• Iconic Follower Voyage 🚢

🏊️ DEEP DIVE
Top 10 Sports Sponcon Of 2025 (Part 2)

Part one (6-10) of this series highlighted sponsored content that worked in 2025. Part two (1-5) is about sponsored content that moved the industry forward.

Each example below didn’t just perform, it introduced a new way of thinking about format, distribution, or monetization that others can now build on. New lanes were opened. New rules were written. And in several cases, the gap between content and media business got meaningfully smaller.

This is where things get more directional.

5. MLB and Booking.com’s Winning Road Trip

The MLB Postseason is when the stakes rise, and in 2025, MLB found a smart way to bring fans along for the journey.

To spotlight Division Series presenting sponsor Booking.com, the league partnered with creators Shelby and Dylan Reese and challenged them to visit all eight Division Series markets in a single week. The result wasn’t a series of sponsored posts, it was a five-episode (Ep 1 | Ep 2 | Ep 3 | Ep 4 | Ep 5) story built around travel, uncertainty, and real-time baseball moments.

The creator choice was intentional. Rather than lean on diehard baseball accounts, MLB picked Shelby and Dylan, fans of the game, but better known for relatable, humor-driven content. That decision expanded the audience beyond core baseball fans, letting the postseason serve as a backdrop rather than the entire point.

What made the concept work was the built-in tension. If a Division Series ended early, the Reeses might miss a city entirely. That uncertainty gave the content real stakes, turning travel logistics into part of the narrative instead of a production detail.

Across five episodes on Instagram Reels and TikTok, the couple bounced from ballpark to ballpark, booking hotels, navigating schedule changes, and reacting to iconic moments as they happened. Booking.com’s role was consistent but never forced, surfacing naturally when plans changed or decisions had to be made. Real product use replaced talking points.

Because this was a campaign—not a one-off—the creators also produced unscripted, in-between moments that fans loved. Those posts didn’t always push the product directly, but they strengthened the authenticity of the series and made the branded moments feel earned.

This travel challenge delivered 5.9M views, 338K engagements, and a 5.7% engagement rate, but the bigger win was structural. MLB and Booking.com treated creator content as one cohesive story, not a checklist of deliverables, giving the brand room to breathe across an entire Postseason moment.

The best sponsored content doesn’t try to control every frame. It creates the conditions for real moments to happen, and lets the brand show up as part of the experience.

If you want to dive deeper, you can read the full case study here.

4. Visa Launches Sports-Driven Social Shows

Episodic social shows became one of the most effective brand formats of 2025.

From Bilt Rewards’ Roomies to CAVA’s Bowlmates, brands proved that recurring, personality-driven content can outperform one-off posts by giving audiences a reason to come back.

Visa leaned into that trend through its partnership with the Visa Cash App RB F1 Team, launching Take Your Driver to Work Day, a mockumentary-style series starring drivers Liam Lawson, Isack Hadjar, and Rafaela Ferreira.

The opportunity here is one brands often leave on the table. Sports partnerships provide rare access to athletes and rightsholder IP, yet too often that access is barely, if ever, utilized effectively on their own channels. Visa flipped that model, using its access to build a repeatable format rather than a fleeting moment.

The series produced roughly 20 short-form episodes (30–60 seconds each) distributed across TikTok and Instagram, generating more than 11.5 million views.

That success helped validate the format across Visa’s broader sports portfolio. In late October, the brand launched its second social show, Fandamentals, with the San Francisco 49ers, again using a mockumentary approach, but this time centered on training fans to be better, more knowledgeable supporters.

Visa has built a scalable content format that works across teams, leagues, and sports. With a huge 2026 ahead, I’ll be watching to see whether the brand expands its social shows around moments like the World Cup and the Olympics — and if it takes the leap to give those shows their own handles, as several industry peers have done.

3. Drama Meets Competition at The Internet Invitational

Creator Golf’s explosion was one of the six defining trends of 2025, but The Internet Invitational showed where the category is actually headed.

The evolution has been clear. First, pro golf started taking creators seriously. Then came creator events like the PGA Tour’s Creator Cup and LIV Golf’s The Duels. The difference? Where the PGA produced the event like traditional golf broadcasts, The Duels pushed things forward with a creator-native look and feel. The Internet Invitational completed the shift.

Hosted by Barstool Sports and Bob Does Sports, the Invitational was built as a recurring content franchise, where competition existed to serve the story, not the other way around. It was filmed in August and released later as a six-episode YouTube series, shared using the newly-added collab tool to connect three channels.

The stakes supplied the drama. A $1 million grand prize and a larger total purse injected professional sport level pressure rarely seen in the creator space, producing conflicts, controversy, and emotional moments that kept fans engaged across more than 16 hours of content.

What truly separated the Invitational was distribution. This wasn’t just 48 creators playing in a tournament. It was 48 creators acting as a broadcast network. Each brought their own audience into the story, while Barstool amplified the drama across its media ecosystem, reacting to episodes, fueling discourse, and extending the narrative well beyond golf-native fans.

Sponsors benefited from all of it. Brands like Dunkin’, DraftKings, BODYARMOR, and Big Cedar Lodge weren’t limited to one-day exposure. They showed up repeatedly and seamlessly across episodes, challenges, lifestyle moments, and commentary, earning durable, context-driven integration instead of fleeting impressions.

The Internet Invitational didn’t invent creator golf or reality tv-like sports storytelling. It proved what happens when creator-native production, real stakes, and a powerful media network converge.

2. Bryson DeChambeau’s Hole In One Strategy

In November of last year, Bryson DeChambeau made waves with his hole-in-one challenge. The goal was simple: chip a ball over his house each day, earning an extra swing each day, until he scored a hole in one.

It took 16 days, and racked up a staggering 102.1M Instagram views.

That initial series was unsponsored, but its proven format made it an obvious candidate for brands. This is a great example of a Built To Sell approach: prove the content resonates with your audience, then use the data to monetize it later. By contrast, a Built If Sold concept only comes to life once a brand is attached, which can limit creativity, scale, and measurability.

For the complete strategy breakdown of built to sell vs built if sold, click here.

In January, Bryson brought the challenge to YouTube with Hershey’s ONE Bars. Golfers—from creators to everyday players—competed for increasingly larger cash prizes. A $100K prize was on the line for Jimmy Elliott if he could hit the same hole in one over Bryson’s house in eight hours. Jimmy nailed it in just five shots. The branded moment became the most replayed highlight of the 1.8M YouTube views the video earned.

By August, the short-form hole-in-one challenge returned, this time from inside his house, with Underdog Fantasy as the sponsor. Bryson expanded the format with a luxury car prize (given away via IG Live), and $100 Underdog credits for anyone who signed up using the code “BRYSON”. Every element—from the challenge mechanics to the reward system—was built for engagement and conversion, allowing the sponsor to plug in seamlessly. This iteration ran 12 days and generated 61.4M Instagram views.

The concept’s repeatable nature made it easy to extend. Underdog ran a spin-off with Good Good Golf’s Tom “Bubbie” Broders (@bubbiegolf). While there was no Bentley on the line, real incentives remained: five winners earned $1,000 in Underdog credits plus a 40% site-wide Good Good discount. The eight-day challenge drew 2.9M Instagram views.

Most recently, Bryson squared off against four top YouTube golfers, and Jimmy from the original challenge, in the inaugural Reebok Invitational, a winner-take-all $100K match. The video also served as a launchpad for, what seems to be, a new Bryson-focused documentary dropping in February. In three days, the tournament video surpassed 1.5M views.

By creating the series first and building sponsorship opportunities on top, Bryson’s hole-in-one challenge demonstrates the power of a Built To Sell approach. Sponsors could step in without slowing down the content or limiting creativity, and the series could scale across platforms, formats, and incentives, something that would have been much harder if it were only built once a partner agreed to fund it.

1. Aston Martin Let Fans Drive The Story

Aston Martin flipped the script at the British Grand Prix, handing creative control to their fans and building an entire race week around their ideas.

In partnership with TikTok, the FanMade campaign turned comment sections into creative briefs and fans into co-creators, both online and in real life.

This wasn’t symbolic participation. Fan ideas shaped what actually happened during race week at Silverstone and across London. From their official British Grand Prix poster—designed by a fan—to TikToks featuring Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso reacting to fan-created content, Aston Martin collapsed the distance between audience and team.

Activations came straight from fan behavior. A TikTok comment about matcha inspired a real-world Aston Matcha pop-up café in Covent Garden. A trend-driven #NailTok conversation led to the launch of the AMR25 “Exact Match” nail gel, followed by a limited-edition drop through the team’s I / AM loyalty platform. Fans moved from spectators to participants, earning access, products, and experiences along the way.

Comments weren’t only content fodder, they carried real-world rewards. One fan won paddock passes to the British Grand Prix simply by engaging. Others saw their ideas transformed into on-site moments or featured content. Digital participation translated directly into physical value.

Across race week, Aston Martin published 20 TikToks generating 30.7M views, 1.3M engagements, and a 4.2% engagement rate. But performance wasn’t the only point. The real breakthrough was structural: FanMade didn’t outsource creativity, it restructured it. Aston Martin let fans influence what happened, while the team retained control over how those ideas were selected, produced, and scaled.

The result was a system where participation created real-world outcomes without turning the brand into an open mic. That balance — openness without chaos — is why this stands apart.

If you want to go deeper, I broke down the full FanMade case study here.

🔍️ SPONCONSPIRATION
Steal These Ideas

The Los Angeles Chargers continue to set the bar for healthcare partnerships content done right. In collaboration with UCLA Health, the team has driven nearly 1M YouTube views this season. It started with a look at everything an NFL dietitian does on gameday (600K+ views), followed by a deep dive inside The Bolt, spotlighting the UCLA Health Recharge Room (130K+ views). Earlier this month, they capped it off with a recovery-focused episode breaking down what it takes to bounce back after an NFL game, bringing in another 200K+ views. The winning formula? Producing the content for YouTube rather than a more cinematic production.

This was a smart extension of a season-long activation. Royal Caribbean sponsors Inter Miami CF’s Icon of the Match, a player-of-the-game feature rebranded to mirror the cruise line’s flagship ship, Icon of the Seas. Each match, the winning player receives an Icon of the Match trophy. With the championship season wrapped, Royal Caribbean had every recipient sign the trophy, and is now giving it away on Instagram to drive follower growth.

’Tis the season for player gifting. This year’s surprise MVP is Denago golf carts. Dallas Mavericks guard Kyrie Irving and Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff both gifted carts to their teammates, delivering massive organic exposure for the brand.
Consider this your annual reminder (see intro linked here): plan for this moment. One bonus tip, loop in veteran players and their agents before the season to help set these moments up, unlocking revenue for both the athlete and the club.

Manchester United and DHL are fully leaning into pun-driven sponcon this year. We’ve already seen 5 Times United Delivered, and now comes All in the Delivery, where pairs of players tell each other jokes, trying to crack the other up. Simple format. Strong brand tie. Highly repeatable.

Finally, some excellent inspiration for phone brands dropped this week. TNT Sports Football launched Voice Notes. In episode one, Manchester United’s Mason Mount reacts to questions from some of the biggest names in football—and one a little closer to home. Meanwhile, the San Francisco 49ers and Verizon challenged players to stop a phone timer at exactly 6.7 seconds, pulling in 1.3M Instagram views.

🚨 ICYMI
What To Watch For

Ideas For Days: Brian Gainor dropped a free 2025 Sports Industry Inspirations Playbook, packed with 2,000+ sponsorship and fan engagement ideas from teams and events around the world.

Best Of the Best: Sticking with the best-of lists, Ricardo Fort shared his top 10 sports sponsorships of the year.

Brands That Stick: Zoomph and Gray Wolf, released The Amplified 25, a definitive ranking of the stickiest sponsors in sports.

Level Up Leads: WIT rolled out a 10-day playbook designed to help brands generate 50K leads, complete with a step-by-step gamification guide tailored to different verticals.

Tagged For Data: Speaking of data capture, St Kilda Football Club and Tradable Bits teamed up on a clever sweepstakes activation that puts an entry form directly on merchandise tags. It’s a smart way to connect the physical and digital worlds—turning merch into a data touchpoint [h/t Jacob Colangelo].

Seasonal Standout: Former NBA player Kevin Love partnered with Disney+ and CLEAR to celebrate Home Alone’s 35th anniversary with a campaign called “No Kevin Left Behind.” Select Kevins traveling through CLEAR+ lanes had the chance to win a free booking of CLEAR Concierge—proof that a good pun, timed right, still goes a long way.