The onset of NIL has already upended the college athletics world and it’s about to do so again.
With the anticipated official approval of the House Settlement on April 7, the ability for schools, the student-athletes, and corporate sponsors to comingle will expand even further, presenting unprecedented opportunity for a new, more rewarding (in more ways than one) student-athlete experience.
For college sports marketing powerhouse Learfield, their conversations with partners are evolving with the onset of ‘student-athlete influencer marketing,’ creating even better activations and enriching the experience for student-athletes. The interest in creators and influencers continues to grow in and out of sports, marked by the universal truth that people connect with people more than brands (or mascots).
“NIL, in a good way, has really opened things up for the storytelling and created an opportunity for my team to think about when we go into a pitch with a brand or another platform or even an athletic director — putting athletes at the center of that storytelling,” said Grant Jones, Senior Vice President and Head of Content for Learfield. “Which in the content world is way more interesting than us pitching a bunch of concepts around — I mean, I love mascots — [concepts] around a bunch of mascots or, you know, a facilities tour. We’ve done a lot of facilities tours. We had to do a bunch of content that really a lot of times didn’t feature or didn’t focus on student-athletes.
“Now that we can pay the athletes to be in this content when the brands are involved in a big way, it opens up storytelling in a big way. So in the last year, even more so, our content is now storytelling with athletes at the center of it.”
As Learfield has kept up with the opportunities that the changing regulations present, schools have been busy finding ways to funnel more money to student-athletes in various ways leading up to the commencement of revenue sharing expected to start with the House Settlement approval. NIL Collectives sprung up around the country along with dubious dealmaking — but in the new world, there will be more ‘true’ NIL, where companies like Learfield, as Jones noted above, can work with sponsors and schools to include student-athletes in sponsor deals.
Every decade or so of college athletics seems to usher in a new sort of ‘arms race,’ marked in recent years by ballooning staffs and increasingly flashy facilities. The next, as Learfield sees it playing out, will be legit NIL opportunities, that allow student-athletes to earn more money on top of the House Settlement revenue sharing (capped at $20.5 million overall).
“It’ll be on top of the student-athlete compensation revenue share piece. So I do think you’re going to see an arms race develop, a new arms race, developing, which was traditionally in coaches salaries and facilities, transition into authentic NIL dealmaking for student-athletes at the universities prioritized. And they’re going to be leaning on us to be a solution for that,” said Solly Fulp, Executive Director for NIL Growth and Development at Learfield, who noted the unique role Learfield can play with their scale of brand and university partners.
“If you think about it, we have the intellectual property rights, so we’re the ones that can connect brand partners with school IP in these campaigns. We’re the only ones that can do that if we’re representing the university. We have over 12,000 brand partners that we’re contracted with both locally and nationally. We have the people power on the ground to activate these campaigns, which is critical when you’re dealing with 18-to-24-year-olds and making sure that this goes well for the brand partner and the student-athlete and it’s good for their experience.”
Arms races in college athletics ultimately come down to fielding the best teams that can attract fans and media and engagement, win championships and drive all the accompanying revenue streams. Jones, who leads Learfield’s content division, noted that while having sponsored content in their social feeds was once met with mild resistance from college athletics staff, brand presence in the feeds is a welcomed addition.
“[It’s pivoted now where a lot of schools want more brands with athletes on their content because it’s great for recruiting,” said Jones. “That is a huge [change]. It’s just funny how much things have changed just in that simple part of the business because of NIL, not only what it means to revenue generation, but to recruiting.
“If you can prove as a school that you’re bringing in, even if it’s a local content deal, that is a positive thing as recruits are scrolling on Instagram.”
Student-athletes will no doubt be enticed by the opportunities to engage in real NIL while they compete in their sport and work toward a degree (in theory at least). There’s a quiet part some are saying out loud, though, because NIL — real NIL (i.e. not paper bags full of cash) takes time. And that’s on top of a demanding schedule of classes and classwork — education is still an essential part of the student-athlete experience for 99% of the — along with practices, travel, and games. So while it’s exciting to envision endless deals and content, Learfield recognizes the best outcomes will try to balance time demands and to lean more in to deals that make sense organically for the student-athletes.
“They have 168 hours in a week,” said Fulp, a former college athlete himself before getting into the business of college sports. “They already don’t have enough time for commercial dealmaking with their athletic and their academic endeavors, so I think we’re getting really strategic on when we engage the student-athletes, when we capture content, when we bring opportunities to the table to make sure that they can be student-athletes, and working with the schools on that.
Fulp continued: “I think we’re getting much better at that, and what campaigns work, and the storytelling behind it, that is really resonating with the corporate partners, and I think as we get to know our student-athletes outside their sport and major — what their likes and interests are and what they represent in values when they take their jersey off…Once we discover [that] and we’re getting better at discovering their likes and interests, we can pair them up with the right brands. And when you do that, it’s like next-level engagement. You can see it in the campaigns and the storytelling content that Grant and his team bring to the table.”
Even the most thoughtful, spot-on partnerships and deals still have to be activated, and these days that often means content — videos or photos or both, often meant for social and digital media. Content is the name of the game for the creator economy, but student-athletes aren’t professional creators. The value of the name, image, and likeness for the vast majority of student-athletes isn’t from the content they produce, but their influence.
While it’s easy to assume that all of Gen Z are native creators, having grown up in a rich content ecosystem with all the hardware and software in their pocket, Jones and the Learfield team appreciate that it’s not that easy. It can be intimidating to produce content for which a brand is paying, so Learfield is there to ensure everything goes smoothly and to put both sides at ease.
“There are not too many athletes that are fully comfortable, and this is professional [athletes] too, that are fully comfortable taking brand dollars, taking a brand brief, creating something on their own with their cell phone and putting it back to a brand, especially if it’s a national brand, and thinking that they’re good to go,” said Learfield’s content lead Jones. “The idea of creating something on their own is, I think, difficult…
Jones continued: “That might mean they’re setting up an entire production and there’s a couple of cameras and the athlete comes in and does something. It might mean they go over to the practice facility with a cell phone and just shoot something with the athlete real quick and they’re not even taking the footage into a post-production software.
“We are really making sure that the athletes are in a position to succeed, the brand is happy with what they get back and that there’s, obviously, the recognizable intellectual property of the school involved…”
While Learfield is there to lend a helping hand, the sheer volume of deals and number of student-athlete influencers means the organization has to be smart about where they allocate resources. It also means they have massive potential to put together far-reaching, national deals that are lucrative for schools and student-athletes, and effective for brand partners.
“When NIL was first starting…[and] there’s a local pizza shop that wants to give five athletes $1,000 each to create some content, does Learfield get involved in that? Is that a thing that we want to play with?” Jones posed rhetorically. “We quickly learned that the work it takes to do that $5,000 deal on the content and student-athlete and influencer side might not be that much less work than the $500,000 deal from the hospital down the street from the pizza shop.
“So our business is about creating the most value for our brand partners, combining those three things — media assets, IP from the school marks and logos and the student athletes’ NIL. Then how that manifests to bigger deals, like the national deals that I mentioned is, that’s where content is a huge driver of that.”
The ‘content’ portion of the revenue pie for Learfield and its partners continues to grow — while making the overall pie even bigger. Driven by the ever-insatiable appetite from fans for content featuring their favorite teams and student-athletes, Learfield recognizes the underlying paradigm of their business is evolving — and that it presents a heck of an opportunity. Fulp spoke enthusiastically about the increase in content demand, flanked by the opportunity to tell richer student-athletes’ stories with their involvement, and what it means for the present and future of the business.
“We’ve been an event-driven business. We’ve been selling football packages and basketball packages, and it’s been really wrapped around the actual athletic event,” explained Fulp. “This opens up the year-round engagement with the student athletes that these university communities want, so the storytelling and the connections can happen in the off-season.
“And what we’re realizing and appreciating is that these university communities can’t get enough of the content with the student athletes associated with it. They want to consume it, and they’re consuming it. So when you connect it with the right brand partners, it is magic. It’s exciting.”
It all IS exciting. For years, many descried the state of the industry, with student-athletes getting remuneration for all their efforts in the form of scholarships only, while millions of dollars flowed from their labor and NIL. The new era is exciting, but it’s about more than just money exchanging hands. The best outcomes for, again, ‘real’ NIL transcends a paycheck; student-athletes are getting valuable experience that’ll serve them well beyond their athletic careers. They’ll make money, but also learn about business, form invaluable relationships, and get more out of their time in collegiate athletics than ever before. Fulp reflected on the dynamic landscape, speaking forcefully about the need to keep the student-athlete at the center of the conversation going forward. Amidst all the change, the money, and the opportunities, it all goes back to what’s best for the student-athlete.
“The challenge now is we’ve got to reconstruct some of the stuff, incorporate NIL the right way, and prepare these young adults to go out and do really awesome things outside their sport,” said Fulp. “And I think we have the opportunity to do that. I think it’s going to be really additive to the university and align with the university’s mission, values, and purpose.
“But university leaders, when they’re thinking about conference realignment and they’re thinking about the $20.5 million distribution to these student athletes and some really big things, making sure that at the end of the day, when these kids leave these universities, they feel like they’ve gotten just as much or more from the university that they gave.”
WATCH OR LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH LEARFIELD’S SOLLY FULP AND GRANT JONES
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