Marathons: For runners or for brands?
By Selena Pellegrini
I have run marathons and have also been involved in organising them. Today, I work in sports event marketing in London and around the world. In cities like London and Rome, marathons are no longer just races.
What was once a pure test of endurance has transformed into a complex experience involving the entire city: urban festivals where sport, entertainment, and brand activations blend into an immersive narrative.
When did marathons become “cool” for brands?
There was a time when brand presence simply meant banners along the route — static, predictable, easily ignored. Ask any athlete which sponsor they remembered: almost universally, the water supplier. Nothing else cut through. Today, marathons have become culturally relevant, shareable on social media, and emotionally engaging. They sit at the intersection of wellness, community, lifestyle, and performance. And this is where brands stepped in. Not just as sponsors, but as experience creators before the race with pop-ups, training communities, and gamified concept stores, during it with on-route activations and premium viewing areas, and after it with recovery zones and shareable celebrations. The marathon is no longer a moment. It is a timeframe that brands can own.
Picture: Selena Pellegrini taking part in a marathon
What is the impact on the event’s awareness?
Brand partnerships amplify visibility: more content, more touchpoints, a broader media ecosystem. But they also transform perception. The identity of the event may end up with a name and multiple surnames: one for each sponsoring brand. The event name remains well known among sports enthusiasts and professionals; it becomes a medal for anyone who participated, a t-shirt to share and say: I was there, and I ran.
The surnames, like in Ancient Rome, represent the extended Gens - the family that was part of the event without stepping onto the field, but becoming the best audience for all the sponsors. This is where a significant strategic game is played. Traditionally, the relationship was between the event and the participant. Today, it is increasingly between the brand and the individual.
Through apps, training community subscriptions, digital activations, and data collection. During the event, brands build direct, continuous, personalised relationships. This leads to a key question: who really owns the audience and the relationship with it? The event that convenes it, or the brands that activate and profile it? In my view, whoever owns the data owns the relationship. And whoever owns the relationship owns future economic value.
Is communication shifting from sport to show?
The marathon narrative used to be about who won, who broke the record, and who achieved something extraordinary. Today, it is also about which sponsor or partner created the best activation, which brand dominated the scene, and what people experienced outside the race. So the communication axis is shifting from sporting performance to mass experience: not replacing the marathon itself, but competing with it for attention.
This may be the most strategically significant outcome: people who will never run 42.195 km can still be part of the event. The marathon becomes a mass cultural platform, not just a sporting one. The most shareable moments are often outside the race, and that’s where brands design: the “Instagram factor” is now a core element of any sponsor’s plan: everything built not only to be experienced, but to be shared. Routes are now designed as urban scenography: iconic landmarks, branded corners built for photos and videos, “highlight” moments engineered to become content.
The city becomes a set. This is where brand and territory collaborate, producing global visibility that organisers alone could not achieve. The question is whether the runner remains the true target of these organizational choices or is sacrificed in favour of the aesthetics of the route? Marathons are also tools for urban positioning and location branding. Through the race, a city communicates its lifestyle, its openness, its organisational capability. The route becomes storytelling: landmarks are no longer simply a backdrop but content, and different parts of the route become “satellite districts” of the event itself. For cities, this is a lever for tourism, reputation, and economic attractiveness that no organizer could achieve alone.
Do brands also sponsor athletes?
Some do, especially technical brands in apparel and footwear. They operate on two levels: earning athletic or sport credibility through athlete sponsorship, plus experiential visibility and relevance through activations to a wider broader audience. The athlete remains a protagonist. But not the only one. The critical point is not the presence of brands: it is proportion. When the audience perceives the event as “built to sell” rather than to celebrate sport, something breaks. The challenge is maintaining sporting credibility and experiential value without one cannibalizing the other.
In the end, what are we – as sports communicators and marketers - building with this model? Sport builds legacy: records, stories, achievements, identity. Experience builds moments: immediate emotions, shareable content, memories linked to a brand or activation. The risk is that the moment overtakes the sporting legacy. True value exists and lies in finding the correct balance: building the moments that attract the audience, plus enhancing the legacy that builds meaning and strengthens the event's reputation and in turn enhances the experiential value.
In short, the strategic question is not whether brands belong in marathons. It is whether we are designing events that last over time, or merely events that perform well in the present. For those who run, the answer is clear. For everyone else, it is changing.
