Your Logo is the least interesting part of your partnership.

“You know, a very large portion of what we get from these partnerships is logo presence.”

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard this sentence over the years. It usually comes early in the conversation - sometimes cautiously, sometimes firmly, and sometimes as a clear non-negotiable. But regardless of how it’s delivered, it almost always reveals the same thing: a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes partnerships valuable in the first place.

Let’s start with a simple question.

Can you genuinely remember which brand logos were on the poster of the last festival you attended?

Not the headliner. Not the experience. Not the moment itself.

The logos.

Most people can’t. And the reason is simple - consumers don’t attend posters. They attend experiences. Posters exist to announce what’s going to happen, but the value of a partnership is created in what people feel, what they remember, and what they talk about afterwards. Experiences don’t live in the corner of a visual asset. They live in memory.

And memory is where brands actually win or lose.

Logo placement is comforting because it’s tangible. It’s visible. It’s something you can point to in a meeting, circle in a presentation, and include in a post-event report as proof of delivery. It creates the reassuring illusion that value has been secured because something concrete exists.

But logo presence, in isolation, rarely creates emotional impact. Consumers don’t build relationships with brands because they saw a logo on a poster. They build relationships because of how a brand showed up when they were there. Because it created something unexpected, something thoughtful, or something that genuinely added to the experience instead of interrupting it. The partnerships that work are the ones that feel intentional - where the brand’s presence makes sense within the environment, and where its contribution enhances the cultural fabric of the event rather than simply occupying space within it.

This is where the global shift in partnerships has already happened. If you look at the world’s most influential festivals - whether it’s Primavera Sound, Glastonbury, or Coachella - you’ll still see brand logos. But they rarely dominate the conversation, and more importantly, they aren’t treated as the primary outcome of the partnership. Globally, the most sophisticated brands understand that the poster isn’t the product. The experience is.

Their focus isn’t on how large their logo appears, but on how deeply they integrate into the event itself. They create environments people want to enter, moments people want to document, and experiences people want to talk about long after the festival ends. Their goal isn’t simply to be seen - it’s to become part of the memory of the event.

Because ultimately, the real currency of partnerships isn’t visibility. It’s conversation.

It’s the group chats the next morning. The Instagram stories that weren’t prompted or incentivised. The photographs where the brand appears naturally because it was genuinely part of the moment. It’s the stories that begin with, “You should have seen what they did there.”

The brands that win aren’t the ones that appeared the biggest. They’re the ones that became part of the experience itself. When consumers talk about you voluntarily, you stop being a sponsor. You become part of culture.

And that distinction matters more than most brands realise.

A poster is simply the beginning of a partnership. It signals that something exists, but it doesn’t determine whether it worked. The real outcome is shaped entirely by how the brand shows up in the physical and cultural environment of the event - how it designs its presence, how it creates moments worth engaging with, and how naturally it aligns with the identity of the experience itself.

The most effective partnerships don’t feel forced or negotiated into existence. They feel inevitable, as though the brand belongs there.

In India, however, there is still an over-emphasis on visibility as the primary indicator of value. The size and placement of a logo often become disproportionately important, not because consumers care, but because it provides a clear and immediate signal of participation.

There’s a phrase that gets repeated often: “India is a different market.” And while there are certainly structural differences, Indian consumers are no less emotionally driven, culturally aware, or expressive than audiences anywhere else in the world. If anything, they are among the most socially connected and culturally participative audiences globally. They share more, talk more, and engage more deeply with the experiences they care about.

The limitation isn’t the audience. It’s the mindset.

India doesn’t have a creativity gap. It has a prioritisation gap. The opportunity in front of brands isn’t to make logos bigger. It’s to make their presence more meaningful. To contribute something that enhances the experience rather than simply attaching themselves to it.

Because the partnerships that will define the next decade won’t be remembered because of where a logo appeared on a poster. They’ll be remembered because of what the brand did when it got there.

Because it built something intentional. Because it added value. Because it understood that while presence can be bought, belonging has to be earned.

And that ultimately is the question every brand should be asking - not “How big is our logo?” but “How deeply are we part of this?”

Because consumers don’t remember who was present. They remember who mattered.