Industry · May 2026 · Los Angeles
What I learned designing for sponsorship sales at OVG. Observations from inside a category almost no one writes about.
Most people have never seen a sponsorship pitch deck. The ones that get shown in design school aren't pitch decks; they're case studies, which is the inverse of a pitch.
A sponsorship pitch is the document a venue or rights-holder shows to a brand asking them to spend seven or eight figures on a partnership. It says: here's what you'd get, here's why it matters, here's what we'd build together. It is a sales tool. It is also, when made well, a piece of brand storytelling about three brands at once: yours, theirs, and the audience you're both serving.
I spent three years at Crown Properties Collection making these decks for the New York Rangers, Knicks, Rockettes, and the Las Vegas Sphere. I designed the system the design team used to build them. Some observations:
Stock photo overlays. Transparent gradients on every panel. Generic "premium" sans-serifs. "EXPERIENCE" in 200-point all caps. The work is reaching for the feeling instead of earning it. You can tell which agencies and properties have been at it longest because their pitches are quieter.
When a brand team opens a pitch, that PDF is the only impression they have of what working with you looks like. If the deck is sloppy, they assume the partnership will be sloppy. If the deck is clear, they trust the rest will be too. The deck is craft evidence, usually the only craft evidence the brand team will see before they sign.
Naming the actual brand twelve different ways across the deck, using their colors, their voice, their photography, their products in mockups, which reads as "we did the work" far more than any rendered finish. Brand teams want to see themselves in the partnership before they buy it.
Most decks are PowerPoint thinking with prettier slides. The good ones are campaign thinking that happens to use a slide format. There's a difference, and it shows up in how the deck moves: tempo, contrast, white space, surprise. A great pitch has rhythm.
I always design assuming someone is going to print the deck and walk it into a room. Most won't. But the constraint of "this has to look right on paper too" forces choices that screen-only design lets you skip.
If you're a designer working in this space, the work is more interesting than its reputation. If you're a brand team receiving these decks, you can tell which property is taking it seriously by the second page.