The increasingly important role that sponsorship is playing in the sports industry has been reinforced through a sponsorship intelligence platform (and long-time ESA member) being voted the Best Business Serving Football (under 100 employees) at the Football Business Awards.
caytoo, who provide buying signal and deal intelligence data to help rights holders and agencies be more effective at generating sponsorship sales leads, beat companies from sectors including ticketing, legal, marketing, memorabilia and refereeing to the accolade.
The judges cited the fact that: “In a very challenging economic climate, this service provides commercial teams with crucial, difficult to find data on commercial prospects, saving time and money. With evidence of positive customer feedback, caytoo has shown how a deep understanding of the market and of clubs’ needs can be brought together in an innovative platform to provide a critical, revenue generating service. This is a unique and stand-out entry serving the industry to deliver results, invaluable and affordable to clubs/leagues at all levels.”
Jeremy Thompson caytoo’s CEO said: “It’s great validation for the ESA community that the football industry is recognising how much more sophisticated the sponsorship industry is becoming at a time when the subject is more of an agenda item at the very top table.
caytoo’s platform is built upon a news-based approach to lead generation, that is monitoring hundreds of thousands of publications around the world to identify companies exhibiting buying signals. This is combined with sponsorship deals data, company and decision-maker information so that rights holders or agencies can find out who to pitch and with what message extremely quickly – at scale. This addresses the eternal sponsorship sales dilemma: ‘spray and pray’ vs ‘learn and earn’.
He added: “On a more personal level for us as a company, it’s also highly satisfying that ours was deemed the most innovative entry and that’s before we start deploying our API which allows our signal and deal data to be fused with Agentic AI models to enable any organisations selling sponsorship to create highly customised and engaging end-to-end pitch workflows in minutes. We’ll certainly be looking to retain the title in 2027.”
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