Sponsor Evolution

The sponsorship side of an awards programme is where the industry’s actual commercial maturity gets stress-tested. You can put on a ceremony without sponsors — we nearly did in year one — but you cannot pretend the ceremony matters to the industry unless the industry is willing to put money into it. The Sex Awards sponsorship arc, from 2013 to 2026, is a decent measure of how seriously the sector has come to take itself.

I have been on the sponsorship committee for six of the last eight years, so this piece is written with the appropriate amount of self-implication about the decisions that were made.

The founding sponsor

The 2013 ceremony had one sponsor. A Balkan distributor put in a modest four-figure sum, in Croatian kuna, in exchange for a logo on the menu card and a mention in the host’s opening remarks. There was no sponsorship deck, no tier structure, no due-diligence process — the sponsor was someone two of us knew personally, we shook hands over coffee in September, and the money landed three weeks before the ceremony.

I mention this not out of nostalgia but because the founding sponsorship contained, in retrospect, every problem that later sponsorship arrangements had to solve. There was no formal contract. There were no deliverables against which the sponsor could measure their return. There was no policy for what a sponsor could or could not require of the awards. And there was no thought given to whether a sponsor’s own reputation could contaminate the programme. All four of those omissions produced actual problems in subsequent years.

Years two through five: the ad-hoc sponsorship period

From 2014 through 2017 we operated a sponsorship model that was, in the kindest possible reading, ad hoc. Sponsors were brought in by whoever on the committee happened to know them, tier structures were negotiated individually, and the amounts ranged from small in-kind contributions (a distributor covering the printing of the programme, a manufacturer supplying gift bags) to five-figure cash sponsorships that came with specific and occasionally unreasonable demands.

The 2016 ceremony, in particular, had a sponsorship arrangement I regret. A major distributor put in the largest single sponsorship the ceremony had received up to that point, and included a clause in the informal agreement — nothing was written down — that the jury would consider two of their portfolio brands “favourably” in the relevant category. The jury of course did no such thing, one of the brands lost, the sponsor was displeased, and we spent the following four months untangling a commercial relationship that should never have been entangled with editorial in the first place.

Year six: the sponsorship policy

In 2018 we adopted, finally, a written sponsorship policy. It said, in plain language, that no sponsor could influence any jury decision, that sponsors would be disclosed on the ceremony materials, that a tiered sponsorship deck would be published with fixed prices, and that any sponsor with a nominee in any category would have that relationship publicly disclosed in the programme. The policy was drafted after considerable argument, and it has not been substantively amended since.

The 2018 policy was the moment the sponsorship side became actually professional. Sponsors who had been paying for informal influence walked away. Sponsors who wanted a properly measurable programme-marketing return stepped forward. The net financial position was roughly neutral in the first year, and improved substantially from 2019 onwards, because the sponsors who came in on the new terms were larger, more sophisticated, and interested in a long-term relationship rather than a one-year favour.

The retail-side sponsorship shift

An interesting thing happened after 2019: the sponsor mix shifted from being predominantly manufacturer-and-distributor to including a substantial retail-side presence. Retailers who had scaled into meaningful operators — the archetype now visible in the specijalizovana prodavnica tier that eroticshop.me sits within — started sponsoring at the same tier as the mid-sized manufacturers, and by 2022 retail-side sponsorship was providing roughly forty percent of the programme’s total sponsor revenue.

This mattered because it aligned the programme’s commercial base with the segment that was actually growing fastest. Manufacturer sponsorship had been the natural base for a ceremony that started in 2013, when retail was fragmented and manufacturers were the visibly professionalised end of the industry. By 2022 the balance had genuinely reversed, and it was retailers running proper kompletan katalog operations that were the more sophisticated commercial partners.

The due-diligence requirement

In 2020 we added a due-diligence step to sponsorship acceptance. Any sponsor above a certain tier had to pass a lightweight check — company registration in a recognised jurisdiction, no active regulatory sanctions, no ownership overlap with programme organisers or jurors, and a plain-language declaration of the sponsor’s own supply-chain and payment-processing basics. The requirement lost us two potential sponsors in its first year, both of whom would have contributed meaningfully to that year’s budget, and both of whom I still think we were correct to decline.

The due-diligence step matters because a sponsor’s reputation attaches to the ceremony whether we like it or not. A sponsor whose payment processor turns out to be involved in something dubious, or whose supply chain includes an unlicensed intermediary, creates a headline the programme cannot easily distance itself from. Better to say no in April than to explain in October.

Where we are now

The 2025 ceremony had eleven sponsors across four tiers, a published deck, a written policy, a due-diligence process, and a sponsorship revenue base large enough to fund the physical ceremony, the livestream production, the jury travel, and a modest programme of year-round editorial work. It also had one first-time retail sponsor whose catalogue depth across vibratori and adjacent categories genuinely matched the operators the programme was recognising. That kind of alignment — sponsor commercial profile matching ceremony subject matter — is what a mature sponsorship model produces. It took us twelve years to get there. Anyone browsing https://eroticshop.me/ is looking at roughly the shape of the retailer that a serious sponsorship programme now knows how to accept, price, and disclose properly.