Sky Sports

The Challenge

As one of the UK’s leading sports broadcasters, Sky Sports invests heavily in advertising and sponsorship campaigns to attract viewers and deliver value to commercial partners. With a wide portfolio of channels and rights — from Premier League football to Formula 1, cricket, and golf — Sky Sports needed to ensure that its campaigns were not only building brand equity but also delivering strong channel-level impact for advertisers.

The objectives were to:

Establish a robust and consistent framework for evaluating campaign effectiveness.
Benchmark new campaigns against historical performance to define what ‘good’ looks like for Sky Sports advertising.
Identify the creative and media elements that most strongly drive cut-through, engagement, and recall.
Provide commercial teams with viewer feedback evidence to strengthen the ad sales proposition and demonstrate ROI to sponsors.

The Solution

Skopos designed a structured pre- and post-campaign testing programme, delivered digitally via online surveys:

Quantitative approach: Large, representative online samples provided statistically robust measures of awareness, recall, and campaign resonance.
Central Sky Sports KPIs: Each study tracked the same key measures of brand impact and channel effectiveness, enabling comparability across campaigns.
Normative database: Results were benchmarked against a database of historic Sky Sports campaign scores, providing clear context on whether a campaign over- or under-performed.
Viewer feedback loop: Studies served as the primary channel for audience feedback on ad campaigns, ensuring insights fed directly into the commercial sales cycle.
Scalable design: The programme was set up to evaluate campaigns across a variety of sports, media formats, and audience groups.

The Outcome

The programme gave Sky Sports a clear evidence base to optimise campaign development and strengthen commercial outcomes:

Established a benchmark definition of success, showing what a strong-performing Sky Sports campaign looks like in measurable terms.
Identified the campaign elements (creative, placement, messaging) that drove the highest levels of brand cut-through and viewer engagement.
Enabled Sky Sports to refine future campaigns, focusing investment on the approaches proven to work best.
Strengthened the ad sales package, providing hard viewer feedback to reassure sponsors and demonstrate the impact of their media spend.
Created a continuous learning cycle, with each new evaluation adding to the normative database and raising standards for future campaigns.

As a result, Sky Sports was able to both optimise its own marketing effectiveness and enhance the commercial value of partnerships, reinforcing its position as the UK’s premier destination for live sport.

Sky Sports

The Challenge

The Solution

The Outcome

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