A few months ago, when Airlink was announced as the official airline partner of Rugby's Greatest Rivalry, it caught my attention. Not just because of the deal, but because of the obvious question: what does this mean for FlySafair, a longstanding Springbok partner?

Beyond who owns which rights and what each brand can or can't do, I found myself asking a more fundamental question: What does this actually mean to the fan?

Will they notice? Will they care? Will the sponsorship change anything about their experience?

I put the thought aside until "that" flyover moment at the second Test in Cape Town. The conversation that followed brought me back to that original question.

From the outside, what struck me was how quickly Airlink went from a relatively quiet sponsorship presence to being part of a huge conversation. The flyover generated enormous attention and debate, whatever your view of what happened.

But it highlighted something important about sponsorship: being noticed isn't the same as being valuable. And that distinction matters far beyond these two airlines.

Sponsorship needs to contribute

Sport already has the passion. Fans don't need a brand to create it. They already care.

So when a brand enters that space, the strategic question shouldn't simply be, "How can we leverage these rights?"

It should be: "What can our brand genuinely add to this experience?"

That could mean making something easier, creating access, solving a frustration, creating a memorable moment or giving fans something they couldn't otherwise have.

This is where sponsorship strategy needs to move beyond rights utilisation and towards finding the role that belongs to your brand.

Tickets, player content, competitions, branding and social posts are available to almost every sponsor. They are tools, not strategy.

If you gave the same sponsorship opportunity to five different brands, the work shouldn't look the same five times.

The sweet spot sits between a genuine fan need, a truth about the property and something the brand can uniquely contribute.

The disappearance test

There's a simple question I keep coming back to: If this brand disappeared from the sponsorship tomorrow, would the fan actually feel like they'd lost something?

Not, "Would they notice the logo was gone?"

Would they feel a gap?

I think this separates sponsorship presence from sponsorship value. A sponsor can have huge visibility and still leave very little behind.

The same applies to creativity. Take away the logo from the work. Can you still tell who it's for? If not, the sponsorship may be doing more of the branding work than the brand itself.

The strongest sponsorships should pass both tests: Is it distinctly ours? And would the fan miss it if it disappeared?

Where strategy meets creativity

This is where I believe creativity becomes critical.

Strategy shouldn't make the work safer or less interesting. It should give creativity a sharper problem to solve.

The creative opportunity comes from finding the intersection between what the fan needs, what the property represents and what the brand can uniquely contribute.

One example I keep coming back to is Consul's "Clean Sponsorship" campaign in Brazilian football. Rather than adding its logo to an already crowded football jersey, the washing machine brand bought the available sponsorship space on Clube Atlético Juventus' shirt and left it completely blank.

The result was a clean jersey that restored the club's traditional identity and gave fans back something they valued. The strategy identified the opportunity. The creativity turned it into an idea people could experience.

And that's the combination I think great sponsorship needs.

Add to the passion

The creative brief shouldn't start with, "What cool thing can we do with these rights?"

It should start with: "What can our brand add that will make this better for the fan?"

From there, strategy and creativity can work together to find the answer. It might be an activation, a service, a product, content, access, or even something as counterintuitive as giving something up. The format matters less than the role it plays.

Because ultimately, sponsorship isn't valuable simply because a brand is present in a passionate space. It's valuable when the brand has a role that is useful, distinctive and meaningful to the people who care about that space.

So before asking what your sponsorship can give the brand, perhaps the better question is: What can the brand give the fan that nobody else can?

Because the sponsorship worth remembering isn't necessarily the one with the biggest presence. It's the one where, if you took the brand away, something meaningful would disappear with it.

Don't just sponsor the passion. Add to it.