In a highly competitive market, how can you create a partnership which delivers measurable returns? The Lexus Partnership with Sky Sports Tennis has delivered exceptional results, reaching and engaging with a new audience that previously had not considered Lexus.
Why Sky: the benefit of live sport
The world of telly continues to change as audiences – and delivery platforms – fragment. “But in the middle of all that, one thing that isn’t changing is the power of live sport,” said Karin Seymour, director of client and marketing at Sky Media, during a session at Campaign’s Media360 in Brighton. “Live sport is thriving and it delivers those shared, unmissable moments that bring people together.”
Seymour revealed that Rory McIlroy’s thrilling victory at Augusta in The Masters golf in April delivered a record 7.5m viewers to Sky Sports, whose YouTube channel reached more than 1.5bn views in 2024.
Women’s sport continues to grow in terms of exposure and profile, and now it’s translating to audiences. Seymour said that TNT Sports, a channel that Sky Media represent, has enjoyed 18% growth in female viewership in Q1 of this year, while 30% of Sky Sports’ audiences are women. Seymour added: “We’ve learned that as fans, women want more content, but they want different types of content – they want access to stories and personalities.”
Lexus: the search for salience
Mat Thomas, brand strategy, advertising and media lead at Lexus UK, said that Lexus prompted brand awareness is at 99% but “when consumers come into the market, we’re not as top of mind as we’d like to be, so salience is what we need to focus on.”
Lexus cars tend to be bought by older men but in 2024 Lexus launched the LBX, a hybrid compact SUV aimed at driving wider appeal including female audiences. Lexus’s research revealed that interest in tennis over indexed with premium car market buyers, furthermore analysis into three target audience segments showed that one, predominantly female, also demonstrated a strong above-interest in the game.
Tennis is a sport that can genuinely boast about gender equality with its major tournaments offering equal prize money to male and female players as well as the parity of platform where men’s and women’s tournaments run alongside each other.
“With any brand partnership, credibility is really important,” said Seymour. Lexus has that through partnerships with the Lawn Tennis Association, sponsor of the GB team who compete in theDavis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup, and the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), which runs the global men’s tennis tour.
“Sky gives us the opportunity to reach millions of tennis fans in the UK with a lot of frequency,” said Thomas. “When we signed the deal in 2023 the message was ‘we have to do it properly, we have to invest in creative’.”
Where’s the car? Emotion not product
When Lexus tested the creative for their Sky Sports idents the route that performed best barely featured a car. “If you're going to be in this space then we need to tap into the right brain – you need to demonstrate emotion,” said Thomas. “This is not the place to start talking about very rational product-related messages. You need to demonstrate and understand the sport.”
According to the System1 insights, sports sponsorship, said Thomas, can “if done well, be as effective in brand building as regular product and service advertising”.
The partnership with Sky Sports also generated engaging content such as the Legend in a Lexus, where stars from other sports were pitted against a tennis pro and the latter would have to undergo a forfeit every time they won a point. “Our thought was ‘how can we reach beyond tennis fans and talk to wider sports fans as well’?” said Thomas. Seymour added: “It really taps into that authentic tone of voice.”
Impact: winning returns
“To isolate the impact of the tennis sponsorship,” said Thomas. “We set up a separate tracking study with tennis fans and within a relatively short space of time, we’re growing salience as a sponsor within the sport, and sentiment towards the brand has grown too”.
In 2024, Lexus sold a record 16,678 units, a rise of 4.5% YoY. That success has been fuelled by the LBX, which sold 5,500 units.