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.

Sports Sponsorship is considered to be one of the most effective tools in marketing. However, in order to assess the effectiveness of sponsoring activities in customer’s mind, science and business practice often refer to explicit measures such as self-reports or focus interviews. Such aligned conventional measurement approach is missing mental processes which run without awareness, so-called implicit processes, taking place and activity hidden in the unconscious mind. Against that background, the goal of the current work is to shed further light on the impact of athlete sponsorship on dual processes underlying customer’s associations toward a brand.