Measure, Measure: Little Caesars Should Know More about Its NFL ROI

“I can’t quantify it, but it’s a pretty good assumption that we’re definitely getting new guests outside of the venues based on the partnership.”

With all of the data-driven tools available to help brands evaluate the performance of their sports and entertainment alignments, it’s disheartening for sponsorship professionals to read such a quote from a company spending eight figures annually on an official NFL sponsorship, eight team and venue deals, plus activation.

Yet there it is, as said to Sports Business Journal by the vice president of U.S. development for Little Caesars, regarding the chain’s official pizza status with the NFL, which is now in its third season, and deals with the Detroit Lions, Kansas City Chiefs, Miami Dolphins, New Orleans Saints, Philadelphia Eagles, Pittsburgh Steelers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Tennessee Titans.

Immediately upon reading that, many of us certainly thought to ourselves, “You can quantify it. But you are choosing not to invest in the resources needed to do it.” Others probably thought, “I can’t imagine saying to the CEO, ‘I assume our eight-figure investment is paying off, but I can’t say for sure.’”

This has long been sponsorship’s Achilles heel. Companies that are content to go with gut instinct, personal observations and assumptions to determine how a partnership is performing. That “works” until someone up the chain inevitably asks for more definitive proof. Without any, the partnership is usually doomed.

As with any critique of a company’s actions from an outside perspective, there are plenty of caveats here. It’s possible Little Caesars has used sophisticated data collection or lower-tech means to determine how many fans become repeat customers after having a slice at an NFL game, but it doesn’t want that fact publicly known for competitive or other reasons.

It’s also possible that generating new store visits from first-time customers isn’t a top priority for the partnership. Without citing specific data, Cunningham mentioned the positive impact that the NFL association has on potential franchisees for Little Caesars, which ranked third behind Domino’s and Pizza Hut in total U.S. dollar sales last year. Tipping franchise buyers into its camp and away from competitors could be much more important than driving individual pizza sales.

The chain also incorporates the NFL into a rewards promotion that is part of the chain’s mobile app. Here again, rewarding loyalty among heavy users may be a top priority that Little Caesars does measure more specifically than first-time store visits.

I want to give Little Caesars the benefit of the doubt that it is optimizing its NFL relationships and collecting the data necessary to properly evaluate it. But there was one more quote in the SBJ article that raised eyebrows.

This one was from the company’s global communications manager. While acknowledging that venue and other sales were part of the equation, he said, “But it’s about visibility. The recognition the brand gets from this is tremendous.”

If generating visibility is the chief reason for Little Caesars’ NFL partnership—and I’m skeptical that it actually is—that’s a big miss. In the same article, SBJ shares iSpot.tv data showing the chain spent $159.4 million on TV advertising in the year ended October 14, 2023.

Little Caesars doesn’t need to sponsor the NFL for name recognition. It’s a well-known brand and it spends a lot on advertising to maintain awareness.

The NFL partnership can, and likely does, achieve multiple business goals for Little Caesars that advertising can’t. For the sake of the brand and the sponsorship, let’s hope those objectives are clear internally and the company has ways to measure them, even if it doesn’t want to specify them publicly.