of mega events such as the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup and the Olympicsincreasingly link their sponsorship activities to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives surrounding these events. Forexample, former FIFA sponsor Sony announced an educational football project for over 14,000 children in Latin America toleverage its sponsorship of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil (Sony, 2014). CSR-linked sponsorship (i.e., the linkage ofsponsorship with CSR activities) enables sponsors to demonstrate corporate goodwill and enhance their brand image(Uhrich, Koenigstorfer, & Groeppel-Klein, 2014).

To obtain positive brand effects, relevant stakeholders (e.g., customers) have to be aware of the company’s CSR-linkedsponsorship activities. Information about such activities can be passed on through a variety of channels. These includechannels controlled by the company, such as corporate advertisements, and channels controlled by third-party sources, such as media reports. While a growing body of academic research addresses several issues of CSR in sport management (e.g.,Godfrey, 2009; Walker & Parent, 2010), little effort has been made to examine how different message sources affect thesuccess of CSR communications (for an exception see Inoue, Mahan, & Kent, 2013). This is particularly true for previous workon CSR-linked sponsorship communication, which ignores message source effects and only examines CSR-linkedsponsorship effects per se (Uhrich et al., 2014). This is an important shortcoming because research shows that differentmessage sources have specific characteristics, which are important determinants of message acceptance (e.g., Priester &Petty, 2003). Importantly, CSR communications via company-controlled message sources (vs. message sources beyond thecompany’s control) can lead to less favorable brand perceptions (e.g., Simmons & Becker-Olsen, 2006). This effect is due tothe fact that information from the company is usually regarded as more biased than information from independent messagesources. However, the differentiation of unbiased third-party sources and biased company-controlled message sources doesnot fully cover the specific circumstances of linking sponsorship to CSR. In CSR-linked sponsorship, another potentialmessage source has to be considered (i.e., the sponsored property). The FIFA website, for instance, includes several reportsabout social initiatives of its major sponsors (FIFA, 2014). The sponsored property as a message source has an ambiguous rolebecause it is neither entirely independent of nor entirely dependent on the sponsor. Extant knowledge on the effects ofindependent vs. dependent message sources is therefore insufficient to explain the role of the sponsored property as amessage source.

Against this background, the goal of this study is to examine the effects of three different types of message sources (i.e.,sponsor, sponsored property, news media) on the efficacy of CSR-linked sponsorship. This extends previous research both ingeneral business (e.g., Simmons & Becker-Olsen, 2006) and sport management (Inoue et al., 2013) that has primarily focusedon the dichotomy between clearly unbiased and clearly biased message sources. Following a persuasion knowledgeperspective (Friestad & Wright, 1994), we show that message source indirectly affects customers’ attitude toward thesponsoring brand via two serial mediators: persuasion knowledge activation and CSR perception of the sponsoring brand.