The collegiate licensing agency landscape continues to change, as IMG Worldwide announced earlier this week it would lay off 3% of its workforce this month, spread evenly across all its divisions, which include IMG College and the Collegiate Licensing Company. The contraction occurs a year after talent agency William Morris Endeavor acquired IMG.
In July 2014, Fermata Partners, a corporate, lifestyle, and sports licensing agency whose clients include Cabela’s, the Premier League, Little League Baseball, and The Waffle House, launched Fermata College, which represents institutions including the universities of Kentucky, Georgia, and Miami. Just a month earlier, Learfield Sports, which manages multimedia rights to collegiate properties, purchased Licensing Resource Group, a collegiate licensing specialist founded in 1991.
And, as noted, in December of 2013 WME joined Silver Lake, an investment firm, to acquire IMG, the licensing agency whose IMG College collegiate marketing division had acquired CLC in 2007. Founded in 1981, CLC was the first and remains the largest collegiate licensing agency, representing about 200 institutions. The fourth key player in the collegiate agency market is Strategic Marketing Affiliates, which debuted in 1997.
The result of all this upheaval is more agency competition within the collegiate market. The changes also reflect a collegiate marketing business in which licensing is more fully integrated with other branding functions, such as media and marketing.
Comments are closed.