Coreweave’s sponsorship: how monitoring the news agenda helped us identify the brand as a target 10 months ahead of their first significant deal

The Holy Grail among many organisations selling sponsorship is to identify target brands that are big enough to do a major sponsorship deal but aren’t yet on everyone else’s radar.

Partnership sales people or the insights teams supporting them have variously referred to these types of brands as ‘on their way up’, ‘new kids on the block’, ‘hidden gems’ or ‘breakthrough brands’.

A signature example of this was remote computer access software firm TeamViewer who weren’t really on anyone’s radar but then did major deals with Manchester United and the Mercedes F1 team in quick succession.

The same could be said of the American AI cloud-computing firm CoreWeave who’ve just done their first sponsorship deal (outside small industry events), choosing the Aston Martin F1 team.

So, how did we flag CoreWeave 10 months ago?

Our platform monitors over 230,000 publications around the world every day to identify news stories (aka signals, triggers or hooks) that mean now is a good time to approach different companies based on something relevant going on in their world.

After all, timing is everything in sales.

In CoreWeave’s case we’d identified a cluster of signals within a five-week period showing it was very much a company on the move with big plans:

1. 13 May: CoreWeave plows £1B into UK HQ and datacenters as it eyes European expansion
2. 6 June: CoreWeave commits $2.2bn to European expansion
3. 15 June: CoreWeave hires Director of Market Expansion, EMEA

Even at that time it was enough to flag it to a major client that it was a great time to approach the firm about sponsorship.

This proved to be correct, as in the following months CoreWeave displayed more buying signals (see timeline graphic above) including various senior hires, funding rounds and a couple of small industry event sponsorships.

Then, 10 months after it was flagged to our client, CoreWeave jumped into the major sponsorship with the F1 team.

It’s not just CoreWeave. Look at how the sponsorship timelines of serial sponsors such as Crypto.com, Cazoo and cinch played out in terms of the various news signals emitted by the brands in the lead up to their first big sponsorships.

CoreWeave’s sponsorship is an example of what we call news-based lead generation. Monitoring news publications large and small around the world to find stories (or signals) that gives anyone selling sponsorship a relevant hook to approach that company.

This relevance and timeliness of this method is why our clients have such high response rates to their sales outreach. But don’t take our word for it. See for yourself by taking a test drive of the platform.