A lot has happened since collegiate athletes and other students gained the right to commercially exploit their own names, images, and likenesses (NIL) nine months ago, on July 1, 2021. For one thing, a variety of services and platforms—marketplaces, group licensing and marketing agencies, educational and back-end resource providers, and the like—have been formed to aid students, and especially student-athletes, in their business affairs.
Several announcements of new initiatives and partnerships involving such companies have come to light since the beginning of this year. For example:
- Earlier this month NIL marketplace platform Opendorse announced it would create school-specific NIL marketplaces for all of its premium university customers, at no additional charge, after debuting the service with Oregon. One of the goals of the move is to make it easier for fans and local organizations to pair with athletes from a given university. Opendorse already works with many of the leading institutions in the world of NCAA football.
- The NIL marketplace platform MOGL and the sports marketing and personal development service Transcend paired with print-on-demand retro apparel company Vintage Brand in February, in separate deals. The agreements will allow Vintage Brand to offer print-on-demand platforms for collegiate athletes and institutions. Student-athletes can opt into the system and select the branded products they want to offer, as well as launch storefronts and receive marketing guidance.
- In the past month, INFLCR, a brand-building firm involved in pro sports, collegiate, and NIL deals, paired with both TikTok and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook. The agreements create educational opportunities for student-athletes on social media best practices and NIL opportunities, as well as support for monetizing their social media accounts. INFLCR also just announced a partnership with WWE to enhance the way student-athletes and potential future pro wrestlers at 200 NCAA Division I institutions engage with the WWE brand. WWE launched its NIL program, called Next in Line, in December 2021.
- Learfield, the collegiate media, sponsorship, fan data, and ticketing company whose CLC division is the biggest player in collegiate licensing, paired with RECUR, which operates the collegiate NFT platform NFTU.com, in February. The pairing will allow collegiate athletes to create digital products and collectibles, as well as receive licensing administration and management support through CLC, taking advantage of the latter’s COMPASS NIL deal management and disclosure platform. RECUR was founded by Trevor George, who also heads Trevco, a print-on-demand provider of licensed apparel and accessories.
- OneTeam Partners, the group licensing organization for pro athletes that has expanded into NIL representation, partnered with Fanatics in February to offer customizable Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour football jerseys featuring collegiate athletes’ names and numbers along with their school colors and branding. The program launches in fall 2022 with co-branded offerings from athletes who play for one of the 150 schools already using Fanatics as their e-commerce platform and have opted in. Collegiate athletes from any sport or school can register individually for potential future deals through CLC’s COMPASS NIL platform, which has an ongoing partnership with OneTeam.
- The Brandr Group, a brand management, marketing, and licensing agency in the collegiate NIL licensing space, added to its roster of university clients by signing Pitt. The deal gives Pitt’s student-athletes opportunities for revenue-generation through deals with regional and national commercial partners and allows Pitt to offer co-branded licensed products combining its own and its athletes’ assets. Brandr offers similar programs with 35 institutions, including recent additions North Carolina and Purdue.
This list gives a sense of the types of independent companies that have emerged to support student-athletes and universities, as both groups navigate the brand-new NIL landscape, as well as illustrating some of the ways they are expanding and partnering to better serve these clients.
Of course these companies are not the only players in the NIL arena. Colleges have set up their own NIL programs in the past nine months (frequently in conjunction with one of the companies mentioned above), and are starting to use these initiatives as a recruiting tool. University boosters have launched NIL collectives to make it easier for collegiate athletes to connect with their fans and make money from local opportunities. And many individual athletes, alone and in groups, have been making direct NIL deals with corporations and local companies. Note, however, that while the market is expanding rapidly, it is still in its very early days.
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