Adrian Staiti has spent the last five years watching brands navigate the gap between cultural excitement and commercial discipline with varying degrees of success.
Based in Singapore, Staiti oversees the Apac sports division of global talent behemoth Creative Artists Agency. While CAA’s name may not be much discussed in retail boardrooms, its clients most certainly are.
The Weeknd filling stadiums across Southeast Asia. Shohei Ohtani’s face on half the billboards in Tokyo. Cristiano Ronaldo’s social channels reaching more people in a single post than most brands touch in a quarter. Formula One rolling into a city and commandeering its cultural imagination for a weekend. CAA sits behind all of it, representing the talent, brokering the commercial deals, and increasingly advising the brands on what any of it is actually worth.
What CAA has observed at the intersection of entertainment, sport and retail is instructive for any brand operating in Asia Pacific. The core argument is that if you can attach your brand to something a consumer genuinely loves, and do it with authenticity, the commercial return will outpace almost any conventional media spend.
From badging to storytelling
The retail industry’s relationship with sponsorship and endorsement has historically been transactional. You paid for the logo placement, you collected the tickets, and you measured success by whether anyone noticed. Staiti calls this badging, and it has not disappeared; at the right price and with the right property, it still works.
“When we were advising Snapdragon, we asked, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ and the answer from the CMO was: ‘Listen, I could spend three years buying media around the world and pay triple the amount, but with one press announcement of this deal, the entire world knows who Snapdragon is. They might not know the deeper product detail, but they will absolutely know the brand immediately.’ And that’s very much the old way of doing it,” Staiti shared at NRF’s Big Show Asia Pacific in Singapore.
But the industry has moved. The shift is best observed through what happened to Formula One after Liberty Media acquired the sport from Bernie Ecclestone in 2017.
“If you rewind 15 years to Bernie Ecclestone’s era, it was very much: Logo on the track, tickets, champagne, done, and people were paying a lot of money for that,” he said.
“Then Liberty Media takes over and says, ‘We’re going to change this sport completely. We’re going to have the racing, of course, but we’re also going to change access, allow cameras into the paddock and make the drivers stars in their own right. We’re going to create a spectacle around the entire weekend. We’re going to add world-class food, a lifestyle element and fashion.’ And all of a sudden, this whole Formula One circus is indeed a circus that rolls into a city and touches on all facets of culture. It captures the cultural imagination of a city or region when it appears. Then you’ve got Drive to Survive, and now there’s the movie F1, with plans for a second film in development.”
The sport has transformed, and now brands are figuring out which assets in that world they can leverage to their benefit. Consumer brands such as Kit Kat, Disney and Lego now sit alongside the technology and luxury names that long populated the grid.
The six reasons to be in this game
Before getting to the how, Staiti laid out six commercial objectives that a well-structured entertainment or sports partnership can deliver for a retail brand.
The first is straightforward: brand awareness at scale.
“This is the top of the funnel, all of you know about it, but how do you use a talent just to drive top-line awareness? It’s actually proven that if you attach a celebrity to a brand, it will get a lot more eyeballs,” he said.
“The second is brand repositioning, which I think is interesting, and there’s an anecdote happening in real time right now. How does a brand that has maybe gone through a difficult time, or lost some marketing credibility, reposition itself using a platform in sport or entertainment?”
Gucci last week announced its partnership with the Alpine Formula One team as title sponsor, renaming the team Alpine F1 Team to Gucci Racing.
“It’s a massive deal, a huge investment, but they’re leveraging the hottest sport in the world with a presence around the world and 24 races to really change the perception of the brand, talk to a different audience differently, and try to become a bit cooler, if you will,” Staiti said. “It will play out over the next couple of years as they activate it, but it’s an interesting brand repositioning.”
Then he identified influencing purchase decisions with talent as the third element, supported by studies that consistently show that consumers follow the behaviour and choices of people they admire. This dynamic predates social media by centuries and has only been amplified by it.
“The fourth is social media amplification, and this is a no-brainer,” he said. “Cristiano Ronaldo has 700 million Instagram followers. He puts out a post for a brand off the back of a partnership, and it gets immediate attention at a massive scale. These stars have enormous reach on their social channels, and what you do with that reach depends on the brand. Hopefully, it’s authentic storytelling; sometimes it is, sometimes it’s literally ‘I just need the impressions.’”
The fifth is cultural relevance, the harder and more valuable prize: not just appearing in culture, but being embedded within the stories that talent and sport are already telling. The sixth is credibility, the institutional weight that comes from association with properties like the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, or Formula One.
Asia’s distinct commercial logic
Asia Pacific has its own distinct logic when it comes to talent and sponsorship. The dominant pattern is domestic: Japanese brands rally behind Japanese athletes, Korean brands invest in Korean stars, and Chinese brands follow Chinese success on the world stage. This makes commercial sense. The emotional intensity of a domestic audience’s relationship with their own sporting heroes is not easily replicated by imported talent, and brands have been right to leverage it.
“Shohei Ohtani is arguably the greatest baseball player ever, and we’re incredibly fortunate to represent him,” Staiti said. “In Japan, you see a lot of Japanese brands get behind Ohtani. You see Korean brands get behind their own athletes. Same in China. There is very much, across Asia, a ‘support the talent rising from our marketplace’ mentality, and I think that’s great.”
But the more interesting story is the exception.
“When we did the Bibigo deal, they got on the jersey of the LA Lakers. You would think a Korean food brand might sponsor a Korean or Asian sports property, but they put their logo right on the shirt worn by LeBron James and one of the biggest sports organisations in the world,” he said.
“And everyone said, ‘Are they trying to sell a lot of dumplings?’ and they do sell dumplings! But this was about Bibigo entering a new market in a big way. In America, Southern California, the Korean demographic is there, and they decided to go big with it. Five years later, I think it has paid real dividends. To see a brand from Asia step outside the usual and do something different, rather than a Japanese brand sponsoring Ohtani or a Korean brand sponsoring their own star, I thought that was really interesting and exciting to see.”
According to him, Japanese and Korean conglomerates that spent heavily on Olympics and World Cup sponsorship through the 1990s and 2000s have largely pulled back. Toyota does not need its logo on the IOC to build brand awareness. Chinese brands, by contrast, are investing heavily in international sport right now for exactly the reasons Japanese and Korean brands did three decades ago.
“So every market is a little different in terms of who’s doing what. But the general trend is supporting domestic athletes, with the bolder ones going beyond that and making a real change,” he continued.
Where retailers are getting it wrong
The most common error Staiti observes is the entry point. Brands arrive at the question of entertainment and sports partnerships by asking what is available and what it costs, and then working out whether they can justify the number.
“We could spend hours explaining how much this talent costs, what this property costs. But are they using that information to figure out what they want to achieve and how they’re going to get there? That requires proper marketing and agency work to figure out. Otherwise, you’ll end up with the wrong asset at the wrong price, and that’s not good for anyone in the long run,” he said.
The correct starting point is the brand strategy. Who is the consumer?
“Not everyone is going to work with Brad Pitt and George Clooney, and Tom Cruise isn’t going to work with everyone. They’re going to be quite selective, and their time is incredibly valuable. So I wouldn’t necessarily start at that level,” he explained.
“The whole approach should be bottom-up. A brand should sit down and ask: What’s my strategy? What’s my market? Who are my consumers? What story do I want to tell? And then work backwards from there – work up the value chain, and that process will land you at an answer: I should be doing something in K-pop, or I should be doing something in Western music, or I should be doing something with a big mega sports property, or I just need a brand ambassador, or actually I don’t need any of that and I just need a speaker series and some events tied to that. If you work backwards, I think you’ll get to the right answer.”
Staiti’s keynote closing was as direct as anything else he said that morning.
“As a brand, if you can leverage that passion authentically and find the right assets to reach the right demographics, you’re talking to people through something they genuinely love. They believe in it, they wear the jerseys. Talking to them through that channel will be far more powerful than a 30-second TV commercial. If you can attribute that passion and connection to your brand, think that through and see if it works for you. Of course, we’re here to support. We’ve got the talent, we’ve got the access and the information, and our whole goal is to create great partnerships where a brand meets an IP, they work together, and create something amazing and authentic. That’s my best advice.”
Further reading: Maxim’s Carmen Chiu on why legacy brands know exactly what not to change.
