Sports Sponsorship is considered to provide a highly valuable communication environment for companies to leverage brand equity. However, effectiveness evaluations of sponsorship activities mainly focus on explicit self-reports or focus interviews. Such communication evaluations do not take into account research from psychology demonstrating that associations and judgments are often activated and strongly influenced by implicit (automatic) processes, with no (or only little) conscious awareness of such information processing. Against that background, the goal of the current work is to shed further light on the impact of in-game advertising as innovative sponsor-linked marketing tactic on the dual brand knowledge–incorporating both implicit and explicit information processing–as key success indicator of sport sponsorship.

• Steffen Schmidt(Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany)
• Matthias Limbach(Dr. Buhmann Schule gGmbH, Germany)
• Sascha Langner(Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany)
• Klaus-Peter Wiedmann(Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany)