Alex Reese
Commercial and Brand Strategy Director
In brief, what does Oak View Group (OVG) do and what is your approach to sponsorship and partnerships?
OVG is transforming how live entertainment venues operate.
Our founders, Tim Leiweke and Irving Azoff, bring decades of industry experience to the table. Their vision wasn’t just to compete – it was to create venues that deliver experiences that go beyond anything currently in the market. They understand that the future of live entertainment needed something different.
We own, operate and commercialise venues across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, focusing on creating unparalleled experiences for the fans, bands and brands.
In London, OVG International, our commercial division, serves two distinct purposes.
First, we are responsible for driving contractually obligated income (COI) for our venues beyond North America, through enhanced sponsorship and premium offerings.
Second, we’ve grown at such speed that we now apply these services for other likeminded third-party clients across cycling, theatre, football, and rugby, providing specialised sponsorship and strategy services. Our rapid growth shows there’s real demand for fresh thinking in this space, but it’s also testament to our team here.
At our core, we are rights holders, so we have a unique approach to sponsorship strategy for our owned and operated venues as well as for our third-party clients. At Co-op Live, for instance, our partners actively shape the venue experience, in a number of instances, getting in early enough to inform the design process.
Amongst our third-party clients, we’re particularly proud of partnerships we’ve brokered for brands who are very new to sponsorship, such as bringing Oatly to EF Pro Cycling and connecting Cathay Pacific with LW Theatres. These partnerships demonstrate what’s possible when you think creatively about brand collaboration.
What makes OVG’s sponsorship strategy unique?
In our venues, music is our anchor tenant. We don’t have a sports team with a consistent fan base coming through our venue week on week, we have more than 100 events in our buildings each year, each event bringing with it a very unique audience.
Understanding these audiences and resulting consumer behaviour is vital – in order to create meaningful engagement opportunities between brand and fan. We integrate partners into our venues and rights holders’ DNA. Every element of the partnership needs to positively impact the venue’s operations and the fan experience.
We can’t achieve this without a robust ‘engine room’ behind the scenes. Over the past two years we’ve built out our strategy and insights team to ensure data is at the heart of all decision making. We leverage data from our global venue portfolio to create a truly ‘proprietary’ data platform used to benchmark global venues, and their respective sponsorship and premium metrics to maximise the commercial revenue of our own venues, as well as our clients and partner venues. This breadth of insight sets us apart – we’re not just theorising, we’re working with real-world data from multiple markets.
What current trends do you see in sponsorship, and how do they affect your strategy?
The sponsorship landscape is evolving rapidly, but the fundamentals of sponsorship, in reality, haven’t changed hugely. Sponsorship still remains an integral part of a brand’s marketing mix, creating targeted ways for brands to fulfil their objectives throughout each phase of the consumer funnel.
What has changed, however, is the funnel phase in which sponsorship can, and needs to, drive value for brands. Lower-funnel objectives such as consideration, conversion and loyalty are becoming much more important for brands than upper-funnel metrics such as awareness.
As a result, we’re seeing fascinating shifts in how brands want to show up and engage with their audiences. Today’s brands demand more than single touchpoints. They want to connect with fans across every possible channel – digital, social, and in-person – in a way that is relevant and authentic.
At Co-op Live, we design partnerships that cover the entire fan journey, from ticket purchase through to post-event engagement and beyond.
For us, it’s about deepening our understanding of audience demands and expectations; what do people want out of their respective experiences? Then, using those learnings to create tailored offerings for our brand partners.
Data drives everything we do now. We’ve invested heavily in analytics tools and custom research to serve both our venues and the rights holders we represent. This allows us to put real-world audience insight into the heart of our strategy.
How has sponsorship changed for OVG, and what changes do you expect in the next five years?
The success of our venue business comes down to our ability to drive and maximise contractually obligated income – through sponsorship and premium. Naming rights is a significant aspect of our COI efforts.
The evolution of naming rights has been particularly interesting. Brands these days want more than their name on a building. They’re looking for genuine alignment with a venue’s purpose and audience – Climate Pledge Arena and Co-op Live are perfect examples of these purpose-led partnerships.
With sponsorship competing against other marketing initiatives such as performance marketing and media for internal budgets, there is as great a need as ever to have clear ROI and measurement processes established. We’ve responded by commissioning regular custom research and building on our primary data capabilities, to ensure the increased transparency helps justify fees and builds trust with brands.
Looking ahead, we see several transformative changes coming. AI will revolutionise sponsor messaging, enabling real-time personalisation at scale. Traditional sponsorship metrics will evolve to measure actual brand impact more accurately. Sustainability commitments will become non-negotiable in every deal – they’ll be as fundamental as brand visibility is today.
It’s clear the industry is evolving, and we’re positioning ourselves to lead that evolution. We’re investing in technology, developing new measurement tools, and constantly refining our approach to ensure we stay ahead of these trends.
