For Automotive Marketing Leaders
Automotive Sponsorship That Works in Every Market You Sell In
Parts retailers, service chains, accessories brands, and the manufacturers behind them sponsor teams, tracks, venues, and community properties to drive traffic and hold position at retail. CHARGE is the independent advisor automotive marketing leaders rely on for that work: valuing a single deal, negotiating terms, recommending the right property, or evaluating the entire portfolio, including the deals funded through local market and co-op budgets. Sponsorship is all we do. We do not sell creative, media, or activation, so we never compete with the agencies you already trust.
Built for automotive brands and dealer groups with more than $500,000 in annual sponsorship commitments across national, local market, and co-op budgets.
More than 20 years in automotive and motorsports sponsorship, with four category practitioners on the CHARGE team.
The Standard
What a High-Performing Sponsorship Portfolio Looks Like
Automotive marketing leaders are pushing sponsorship past relationship-driven decision-making. The portfolios that hold up to scrutiny answer three questions consistently.
Does every renewal earn its place?
Automotive portfolios accumulate through long-running motorsports relationships, category loyalty, and deals that predate the current marketing team by a decade or more. The strongest portfolios renew with the same rigor they bring to new deals: scored, weighed against alternatives, and measured against current strategy.
Do national and local dollars follow the same standard?
Sponsorship spend rarely sits in one place. National brand budgets fund some of it, and local market, franchise, and co-op budgets fund the rest, often evaluated on entirely different terms. Strong portfolios apply one standard across every market and every funding source, which is what makes performance comparable at all.
Does the portfolio answer leadership's questions before they are asked?
CMOs, CFOs, and boards expect sponsorship to be measured the way other investments are. Strong portfolios produce the answer before the question.
Our Role
How CHARGE Works with Automotive Brands
CHARGE is an automotive sponsorship consulting firm. We work exclusively on sponsorship: evaluating portfolios, valuing assets, managing programs, and shaping strategy. We do not do creative, media, or activation, so we never compete with the agencies and partners automotive marketers already trust.
Most engagements begin with the Sponsorship Diagnostic for Automotive Brands, the structured evaluation that sets the foundation for everything that follows. See the full range of CHARGE sponsorship services.
Sponsorship Diagnostic
for Automotive Brands
Structured evaluation of the portfolio you have today, across every market.
Strategy
Advisory for building or rebuilding the portfolio.
Valuation
Fair pricing on individual partnerships before renewal.
Management
Ongoing optimization across the full year.
The Entry Point
The Sponsorship Diagnostic for Automotive Brands
Most automotive brands commit significant money to sponsorship without a structured way to know where each partnership stands, particularly when spend is spread across markets and funding sources. The Diagnostic is a structured evaluation of your existing portfolio. It tells you exactly where every partnership lands and what the portfolio looks like as a whole.
A scored portfolio
Every partnership evaluated and placed in a performance tier with a clear recommendation on direction: keep and expand, maintain, evaluate, or reduce and exit.
An activation assessment
Shows which partnerships your team fully uses and which sit as passive investments, including where a deal is working at the property but never reaches the shelf, the service bay, or the store.
A decision-making map
Documents how your organization actually makes sponsorship decisions today, who weighs in across national, regional, and local operators, and where approvals stall.
A governance process and decision tool
A repeatable internal process for evaluating any new sponsorship request, usable at national and local market level, with the working tool your team uses to run it. Included in the engagement.
Three strategic pathways
Optimize, realign, or rebuild. Each presented with projected outcomes and the level of investment the path requires.
An executive presentation
A complete findings report with priorities for the next 90 days, ready to share with your CMO, CFO, or board.
The Diagnostic closes with a recommended path: optimize what is working, realign what is not, or rebuild the portfolio. Choosing the path is your decision, and you keep the governance process to run it. Executing the path is a separate engagement.
Why Us
Why Automotive Brands Choose an Independent Sponsorship Consultant
The firm is built around three structural decisions that shape every engagement.
We do not compete with your agency roster
CHARGE focuses exclusively on portfolio strategy, valuation, and evaluation. We do not do creative, media, or activation, so we never compete with the agencies and partners you already use. Our work makes their work better.
We see what your properties see
CHARGE works with brands and with the properties they sponsor. We see what proposals look like before they reach you, what tracks, teams, and venues charge, and where they have flexibility. That visibility informs every valuation, every negotiation, and every recommendation.
Paid by you. Never the property.
CHARGE is fee-for-service. We do not take commissions, referral fees, or property kickbacks. Every recommendation is paid for by the organization we serve, not the deal under review. You can act on our work knowing it answers what is right for the portfolio.
Brands We Have Worked With
Questions
Common Questions from Automotive Marketing Leaders
What is the Sponsorship Diagnostic for Automotive Brands?
It is a fixed-scope evaluation of your sponsorship portfolio that tells you which partnerships to keep, fix, or exit. You receive a complete findings report with 90-day priorities, a governance process for future decisions, and a recommended strategic path, in four to five weeks.
We already have a sense of which sponsorships are working. Why do we need this?
Most organizations do, until a third party looks at the evidence. Institutional knowledge is valuable, and it is also where long-protected deals survive past their usefulness. The Diagnostic confirms what is working and surfaces what is not, with evidence you can share upward.
How much time will this take from our team?
Six to eight hours over four to five weeks. CHARGE does the heavy lifting. Your team reviews, reacts, and decides. Our other engagements, Strategy, Valuation, and Management, are scoped around what you need rather than a fixed-length project.
We work with agencies already. Will this conflict?
No. CHARGE focuses exclusively on portfolio strategy, valuation, and evaluation, not creative, media, or activation. We complement your existing agency relationships by answering the questions they typically do not: Is this the right deal? Are we paying the right price? Is it actually working?
What makes this specific to automotive?
Automotive brands run sponsorship under conditions other industries do not: national budgets and local, franchise, or co-op budgets funding the same portfolio, motorsports deals that have run for decades and carry real internal history, category exclusivity that has to be defended across a distribution chain, and the challenge of tying a sponsorship to store traffic and service volume rather than impressions. Our framework evaluates every partnership on one standard regardless of which budget funded it.
Automotive engagements draw on a team with direct category experience across motorsports, the automotive aftermarket, and the industry's largest trade organizations.
Where should we start?
Most automotive brands start with the Sponsorship Diagnostic for Automotive Brands. It tells you and CHARGE what the portfolio looks like, and it makes any later Strategy, Valuation, or Management engagement materially sharper. If you already know which engagement you want, we are happy to start there.
Sponsorship Strategy That Earns Its Place. Start Here.
Whether you are evaluating an inherited portfolio, bringing national and local spend under one standard, or rebuilding the program from the ground up, the place to start is a conversation.
Every Sponsorship Diagnostic comes with our 30-day money-back guarantee. If you do not walk away with a clear path forward, get your investment back.
