Quarterly Newsletter | Q4, 2025 Edition
Keeping You Ahead of the Game in Sport, Media and Entertainment
Industry Intel
When Clicks Aren’t Enough: Why OTAs Are Turning to Sponsorship
Travel is built on emotion. For online travel agencies and operators (OTAs), turning that emotion into something tangible has always been difficult. They operate entirely on screens, while the experience they enable happens elsewhere. That gap has created an ongoing challenge: in a fragmented media landscape, how do digital travel brands build confidence, credibility, and meaningful connection?
More OTAs are now realising that sponsorship provides part of the answer. It places digital-first brands inside the real moments, passions, and communities where trust is built.
The strongest early movers have already shown what’s possible. Expedia’s partnership with Liverpool FC uses its platform to genuinely improve the fan travel experience. Airbnb’s global deal with the IOC takes a values-led approach, aligning with one of the world’s most trusted organisations to reinforce community, sustainability, and reliability. Both examples show how sponsorship can strengthen credibility in a way traditional digital channels can’t.
Using GWI data, our analysis highlights where OTAs should look next. Football still delivers unmatched reach, but it’s a crowded space. Cycling, athletics, and live music events offer high alignment with their target audience and low saturation, giving OTAs space to build relevance. Formula 1 and Formula E, meanwhile, score strongly on engagement and innovation, aligning well with OTAs’ digital, forward-looking identity.
For OTAs, marketing has long been dominated by digital performance channels, but they drive clicks, not connection. Meanwhile, sponsorship has the power to do both, combining the accountability of digital marketing with the emotional reach of culture and sport. The best brands in this space will stop treating sponsorship as a badge and start treating it as a system - one that runs through the funnel of awareness, engagement and conversion.
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What's new at TVX?
It’s been a busy time across our partnership’s portfolio, with two standout activations showing the power of purpose-led brands connecting with communities in meaningful ways.
Mentholatum activated across HYROX Birmingham and HYROX London, welcoming more than 65,000 athletes across two of the UK’s biggest fitness events. Across both weekends, the team delivered hundreds of athlete massages, helping competitors stay loose, recover quickly, and push through the toughest stages of their races. With goodie bags for podium finishers and consistent engagement throughout each venue, Mentholatum placed its Deep Heat, Deep Freeze, and Deep Relief products directly into the hands of the athletes who rely on recovery the most. It was a strong example of how sampling, when delivered at the right moment, can be both genuinely useful and highly memorable.
Meanwhile, Movember’s partnership with the Rugby League Ashes created one of the most powerful moments of the season. At Hill Dickinson Stadium, in front of 50,000 fans, England and Australia joined together in a Moment Against Silence - a reminder of the importance of speaking up about men’s mental health. As the Official Mental Fitness Partner, Movember used the spotlight to deepen awareness of its Ahead of the Game programme, developed with Rugby League Cares, which continues to support young players, coaches, and parents across the UK.
Two very different events, but a shared theme: partnerships that support, educate, and create real connection - exactly what we aim to deliver across every project.
Partnership Spotlight
London City Lionesses x Mastercard: A Major Move
Mastercard’s new partnership with London City Lionesses marks one of the more interesting moves in the women’s football landscape this year, not just because of who’s involved, but because of what it represents for the future of independent clubs.
The Lionesses, founded only in 2019 and recently promoted to the WSL, are the first independent women’s club to reach this level. Their rise has come without the financial safety net of a men’s team, which makes the arrival of a global brand like Mastercard especially notable.
On the surface, the partnership delivers the usual elements you’d expect from a major rights holder: fan experiences, brand presence, and wider promotional support - but the real story sits underneath. Rather than anchoring the deal to top-level visibility, Mastercard is investing directly into the club’s community pathway by taking title rights to the Sister Clubs programme, a key development initiative linking the Lionesses with local youth teams. That’s a strong signal of intent in a landscape where finance brands already play a big role across women’s sport. The likes of Visa, Barclays, Metro Bank and Royal London have spent the last decade building strong visibility in the space, but Mastercard stand out here for putting extra focus on community-level impact.
For the Lionesses, this partnership arrives at exactly the right moment. For the wider market, it’s another reminder that the growth of independent women’s clubs is opening new lanes for brands willing to think beyond the traditional. The hope now is that more global brands follow suit and recognise the competitive, cultural, and community value sitting outside the “big club” model.
