Welcome back to The Activation, where we breakdown branded worlds across sports and entertainment.

Our aim, to make you the smartest person in the room when it comes to sports and entertainment sponsorship activation.

Rich Johnson

Beauty brands are flooding into sports sponsorship and they're doing it in wildly different ways.

Over the past 18-24 months, prestige beauty has gone from a fringe category in sport to one of the fastest-growing sponsor sectors.

We’ve seen a ton of brands enter individual partnerships with WNBA teams including Fenty, Glossier and CoverGirl.

F1 Academy has Charlotte Tilbury and Aston Martin F1 signed Elemis (which we already wrote about here).

Mecca Beauty signed with Australian Open (and expanded the deal for 2026).

Unrivaled Basketball has Sephora. Clinique teams up with the Red Roses.

I love studying this category as so many of the brands are activating heavily, and in novel ways.

And there is still so much room for growth.

I've broken down 4 partnerships that represent distinct models for how beauty brands are showing up in sport.

Each one takes a completely different approach. Each one offers something for rights-holders and brands to learn from.

Lets get into it…

Disclaimer: All analysis and assumptions are opinions from an external perspective only.

This is Charlotte Tilbury’s first ever global sports sponsorship and they became the first beauty brand to sponsor F1 Academy in February 2024.

And it’s a great fit.

A female founder championing female drivers, and the flagship activation is about as subtle as the intent - the brand's mantra, "Makeup Your Destiny", is emblazoned across the side of their now iconic "Hot Lips" race car.

I love the specificity of this partnership. They sponsor an individual driver currently Chloe Chong (previously Lola Lovinfosse), which makes the whole thing personal and story-driven.

Charlotte Tilbury and Chloe are in on the journey together.

📌 Key Activations:

Perhaps the most ambitious and integrated partnership on this list. Sephora became the exclusive beauty partner of Unrivaled, the player-founded 3v3 women's basketball league, in January 2025.

They started with some really unique venue integrations, and within 12 months they had arena naming rights.

For me, this is an interesting partnership to study due to the creativity and unique ways in which the brand provides true utility to the league, it’s players and their fans.

📌 Key Activations:

What’s interesting here is that Unrivaled offered Sephora something established leagues couldn't, the chance to shape a league's identity from day one. And Sephora reciprocated with some really unique and integrated activations.

For new properties, beauty brands represent a category of partner willing to invest heavily in exchange for deep integration.

CeraVe became the first official skincare partner of the NBA. The approach here is fundamentally different from the other examples. CeraVe is a dermatologist-backed brand. Their strategy is built on education and credibility.

And yet, their approach is very reflective of their brand, where they are happy to blend science and routine with humour and at times parody - all using the authority of professional athletes to make skincare education feel relevant to a mass audience.

📌 Key Activations:

CeraVe is a superb example of a strong brand = strong partnership.

They have hit the ground running in their world of sports sponsorship as they know who they are as a brand, and how to lean in to culture to connect with fans toeing the line between real product messaging and having fun.

Australian beauty retailer Mecca has turned its Australian Open partnership into one of the most ambitious on-site beauty activations in sport.

Mecca is the Official Beauty Partner of the AO, with Mecca Cosmetica signing as the Official SPF for the 2026 AO.

I’ve been impressed with the scale Mecca have executed at around AO, both on the ground but also through content, player, fan and creator experiences./

📌 Key Activations:

I’ve been so impressed with Mecca’s commitment to get behind the partnership.

Not just through the investment on the ground, but online too. On Instagram alone they made 51 posts during the Australian Open - thats more in one event window one one channel than many partners will make in a whole contract.

They see the AO as a retail and content channel. The partnership drives real revenue, measurable in product sales.

For events with large, captive audiences and environmental conditions that create product need, sun, heat, humidity - beauty retail activations are a genuine commercial opportunity.

▶ Nike x Winter Olympics: I think Nike might be back - everyone has been talking about their ACG campaign but I want to cast a light on something a little more simple. Their IG graphics to celebrate medal winners have been a return to form of the curated imagery and sharp headlines we’ve come to know and expect from them.

▶ Manors Golf x Luke Kwon: Manors are fast becoming one of the most loved brands in golf, not only down to product but also on point aesthetic content - If you aren’t in the internet golf algorithm this one may not make sense to you, but the announcement video was a perfect demonstration of using moments and controversy to your strength.

▶ Airbnb x Jamaican Bobsled team: Airbnb did some nice stuff around the Winter Olympics but this was certainly the highlight, and with 2.8m views fans agreed. Great example of culture beats pure performance everytime.

▶ Barclays x Frances Tiafoe: Ok this one is an unofficial entry from me. Last week saw the tennis world stunned as an umpire scribble out the Barclays logo from Frances Tiafoe uniform during a match - it made headlines - but Barclays didn’t react - below is a fun concept for how they could have reacted - I also wrote about it here.

My friends over at Arcade, the Sidemen’s management company, reached out to say they have some partnership opps for the Sidemen Charity Match 2026.

The Sidemen Charity Match is one of the biggest UK cultural moments of the year.

Last year, it sold out Wembley in under three hours, the fastest-selling football match in the stadium’s history and drove 1bn views across Sidemen O&O channels, with 2.8M concurrent livestream viewers. Most importantly, it raised a record £4.73M for charity.

This year it sold out Wembley again, half an hour faster.

For 2026, they are going bigger than ever with the goal of raising more than ever before.

It’s a global event design to connect with GenZ/Millennial audiences, and there are multiple opportunities for brands to integrate and become part of the biggest YouTube event in history.

Reach out on LinkedIN or [email protected] if you’re interested (*no agencies please)

For the past few months, I've been working on something to solve a problem I've had for years. How do you create custom, brand-specific proposals when you're in a lean team? Or even working solo.

Understanding a brand's language, their challenges, their tone, it's all necessary to get their attention. But the time it takes to do that research properly is often impossible when you're stretched thin.

And I’ve seen a ton of commercial teams across sports and entertainment struggle with the same tension.

Lean teams, big demands.

So I built a tool to solve this problem.

It's called Sharmidon, and it's a partnership research and intelligence platform built specifically for lean commercial teams at sports teams, leagues, federations, and agencies to conduct research and create the foundation for an strong pitch in minutes.

In our testing, teams have time savings of around 80% to research brands and create proposals.

I'm launching it on March 10th, I think it’s great and I think it could be really relevant for you.

If you'd like to be the first to see it, join the waitlist here - you’ll get an exclusive sign up offer on launch.

Have a great week everyone.

See you next time,

Rich