As athletes embrace owned media properties, they’re pushing for more involved brand deals

“Athletes have become incredibly sophisticated about the value of their own IP,” said Loulou Dundas, svp of growth, EMEA at United Entertainment Group. “More athletes are fundamentally thinking like founders.”

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In practice that translates to longer-term contracts, influence over campaign strategy or product design, and the ability to refuse an activation that contradicts the public image they’ve carefully constructed on court — in short, as Dundas put it, “a seat at the table.”

“They want to be part of something that they believe in, that’s authentic to them, [and] that has lasting business and brand potential,” explained Sarah Bro, an intellectual property lawyer and partner at McDermott Will & Schulte.

While that might surface in a veto option or more flexible contracts with bigger advertisers, Bro said some athletes were also pushing for equity deals with smaller brands, following in the footsteps of deals like Roger Federer and On Running’s 2019 arrangement, which made the tennis star the brand ambassador while granting him a 3% stake in the company.

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The NBPA, the labor union for NBA players, has been pushing a similar agenda of late. The organization launched a consumer-facing campaign in June intended to appeal to basketball fans that want to see their favorite stars get their share of the game’s riches. The film, shot by Kendrick Lamar’s creative agency Project 3, featured Steph Curry and Knicks star Jalen Brunson.

Behind the scenes, executive director of the NBPA David Kelly told Digiday it’s been working to promote “deeper” relationships between individual players and advertisers, as well as for brands to go direct to players rather than arrange a deal through their team or franchise.

“We envision a world in which we’re trying to get rid of certain gatekeepers and allow the players and brands to really have a deeper relationship,” said Kelly. “The main thing we’re pushing for is a deeper engagement with the player from the ground up.”

Where a brand wants to bring on several NBA players for a campaign or as ambassadors, he said the NBPA would step in to negotiate on their behalf, via its Players United organization. “There are advertisers, partners, [and] marketing companies that want to do deals with the players as a collective, not just individually. And to date, when they had that desire, there was a void,” said Kelly. “Every void is an opportunity.”

Sports personalities asking for the moon from advertisers isn’t necessarily new. But the laws governing sporting celebrity are shifting. While superstars like Messi remain enigmatic, laconic individuals to the world’s sports fans, the next generation is more talkative — and more interested in taking control of their media profile. Soccer players Erling Haaland and Jude Bellingham run their own YouTube channels while Brunson, for example, co-hosts a podcast. Such endeavors increase their value to brands, but also grant them more influence in negotiations.

Athletes have learned a lot from the creator economy in the five years since a Supreme Court decision yanked open the NIL market to brands and younger players alike. Deals between advertisers and athletes increasingly resemble those designed for influencers, while brands now use moments like March Madness as auditions for brand ambassador roles aided by scouting services offered by big agency groups.

At the same time, companies like Unilever and L’Oréal now boast creator armies that number in the tens of thousands just for a single sports event. They’re built around fixed deliverables, content calendars and outcome-based fees. They’re necessarily transactional and, in some cases, fleeting relationships.

On the whole, such programs are an opportunity for marketers looking to prove it’s possible to scale the impacts of creator marketing. It’s also bad news for the athletes hoping for something more than a one-off fee for a paid Instagram post.

“They’ve got to think about longevity. And you’re going to get longevity if you build partnerships with brands, and build your specialism, out of a narrow field,” said Becky Owen, CMO at Billion Dollar Boy.

“Our talent clients want to be at the table rather than just being a face for a limited term,” added Bro.

Industry experts told Digiday that this doesn’t have to come at the expense of brands, however. Dundas pointed to the emergence of a different model of ambassador or creator usage by brands, in which marketers discard “campaign” thinking hinged on a commercial pinchpoint like a product launch, and instead embrace a “timeline” strategy that entwines brand and creator closer together.

“Let’s say they’re the face of a running club. Instead of [launching] a new trainer by this brand, you are putting it into the creator and/or athlete’s world, so that there’s more of a story around it versus just a product drop,” she explained.

Such an approach offers brands higher engagement with a creator’s or athlete’s audience, argued Dundas, because it presents as an authentic chapter in that personality’s storyline, rather than a brand paying to preach to an audience.

Brands that adjust their offer to athlete/creators with flexibility and participation in mind might find more willing — and effective — partners than those that resort to adding another zero to their bid.