There seemed a lull, perhaps expected, in sports sponsorship and marketing activity after the orgy of summer salesmanship surrounding the FIFA World Cup. Now comes word of a number of agency wins for significant brands’ sponsorship/experiential ventures, supporting our conviction that most every domestic experiential marketing agency will do swimmingly through the 2028 L.A. Summer Olympics. After the Games, perhaps I’ll be writing about which ones were overbuilt.
Principal among those “beauty pageants” was the recent RFP for Farmers Insurance. Genesco Sports has triumphed there. The win comes just a few weeks after we noted that the Dallas-headquartered agency also won AOR status for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.
Other finalists for the Farmers review, easily one of the year’s most competitive, were Allied Sports and Horizon Sports & Experiences. We’re told it drew no fewer than a dozen competing agencies. Considering the category dynamics, that’s understandable, since financial services combined represent the largest sponsorship marketing category per se. Even within that bubble, insurance has long been an über-hyperbolic sector, wherein competitive brands for decades have spent well in excess of market share in an attempt to achieve an even greater share of voice.
“Insurance is easily the most competitive category,” said a senior exec at one of the finalist agencies. “Soft drinks and beers, generally there’s a few players. Auto [is] a few more than that. But there’s a dozen insurance brands with monster marketing budgets.”
At the top end, the insurance category’s aggressive ad spending includes Progressive ($3.5 billion), Allstate ($1.87 billion), Geico ($1.4 billion) and State Farm ($1.11 billion). You’d surmise that making even a dent there would require an equivalent, or at least significant, spend. Still, up to now, Farmers hasn’t competed there; its 2025 ad spend was under $100 million.
The heavy category spend also means there are few properties without insurance sponsors. Farmers hasn’t done too much with sports lately outside of golf, where it was title sponsor of the PGA Tour event at Torrey Pines for 17 years (a deal that ended early this year); title sponsor for the 2026 Skins Game next month at Atlantic Fields Club in Hobe Sound, Fla.; and a founding sponsor of the TGL golf league. Those deals were through CAA Sports, which participated in the review.
Farmers experiential/sports agency assignment is the brand’s third review of the year, following earlier awards of creative duties to Dentsu Creative and media buying to Havas Media. Dentsu’s new “Honesty Is Our Policy” campaign, launched in July, has pink as the brand’s new signature color. Could that portend a women’s sports tie-in, or one with pink-uniformed Inter Miami? A platform using referees or officials? Just riffing here.
Leading the charge on the client side for the review was former Cisco and USAA sponsorship exec Brian Eaton, who was named Farmers director of sponsorship marketing last month.
With Farmers and its new agency Genesco working to find a new sports platform (and one that doesn’t have ties to competitors), the poignant irony here is readily apparent to anyone who knows the industry. Farmers’ most famous (infamous?) sports effort is a 16-year-old one that was trumpeted across every form of media but never completed: entitlement to an NFL stadium in Los Angeles that was never built — Farmers Field.
It was a $1.2 billion, 72,000-seat open-air stadium proposed in 2010 for downtown L.A. near L.A. Live. AEG abandoned the project in 2015 after it was unable to secure an NFL team or expansion rights. The naming-rights deal for an NFL stadium that was never built was said to be for 30 years and $700 million. Estimates of the project’s brand exposure value for Farmers Insurance were as high as $6 million over the five years the phantom stadium was in limbo. Sixteen years later, “Farmers Field NFL” still yields 4.58 million hits on Google.
Culled from https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com
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