While looking at sponsors, Bing is not listing them when Google is in some cases, but both are consistently placing the affiliates above sponsors in most instances.

I don't want to sound like I'm really marketing my business, but I'm really surprised sponsors are not working on rewriting their content and pushing the original content idea with their affiliates.

If this update does do what Google hopes, sponsors could see a dramatic slump in sales when this kicks in. If 80% of their affiliates are just using the supplied copy, what will happen to their duplicate blogs?
And if sponsors are consistently being seen as the duplicate because some affiliates are copying their text from the site and being crawled before them, what will that mean for the positions of the sponsors themselves?

The only winners here are the bloggers who have been the first to be notified of a sponsor update, and then been crawled early for their copy/paste sponsor text, and those who write their own. But with so few of them, that could mean sales dropping for sponsors across the board.

I truly believe we're all missing a trick here. Affiliates need to rewrite their duplicate posts and add a new post more frequently (every other day), sponsors need to check they are 1st place in Google for a line of text from every shoot and rewrite those that are not, and sponsors also need to be pushing their affiliates to write original text and not use theirs!
If people don't do this, affiliates could see a massive drop in traffic, and the sponsors could see a massive slump in sales as a result.

I'm currently talking to a sponsor about their scene descriptions not showing up in Google. This is through UK search.
Their affiliates and some tubes are showing for it though, but in some instances they are not even listed. That means that either Google is not crawling those pages, or they have been removed. How does this damage their site on the whole? They could be throwing money away on SEO and link building for nothing if 30 - 40% of their pages are seen as duplicate content.
And when the farmer/panda update goes global, it could damage them even further.

I have a feeling I'm going to be back in a month or two trying to explain all this again to sponsors who have seen their conversion rates plummet. That's not good for any of us!