Tweet This
- Over the past 3 years, every deal reviewed by NFL Players Inc. (the marketing and licensing subsidiary of the NFL Players Association) includes a social media component.
- Over the past 3 years, every deal reviewed by NFL Players Inc. (the marketing and licensing subsidiary of the NFL Players Association) includes a social media component.
Over the past 3 years, every deal reviewed by NFL Players Inc. (the marketing and licensing subsidiary of the NFL Players Association) includes a social media component. That is according to Keith Gordon, President, NFL Players Inc., who also told FORBES that he is really trying to focus NFL Players Inc. on social media because it is such a growing component of all the player deals that his corporation has seen. Thus, the announcement of a brand new NFLPA-backed program called Activate -- professional sports’ first online microendorsement marketplace -- makes sense. It will provide brands large and small the opportunity to build robust digital endorsement campaigns with NFL players and give brands access to real-time data including a player's followers, type of followers, whether or not said followers are verified and other targeted information. Gordon says the value in the Activate platform, powered by Nebraska-based opendorse (an official licensee of NFL Players Inc.), is that the information it delivers is quantifiable and qualifiable.
The existence of the Activate platform is vital in a world where off-field contracts for athletes almost always contain a social media-related clause. It is the NFLPA and NFL Players Inc. truly looking out for the interests of the athletes they represent and finding a solution to support valuation of players' social media accounts in negotiations with potential sponsors. The 5 pillars of the Activate program are: Accessibility (businesses can partner with active NFL players in seconds), campaign building (a simple step to selecting a player, scheduling endorsements and estimating impact), automatic fulfillment (automatic delivery of digital deals upon request), measurable impact (real-time analytics on the impact of endorsements) and contract creation (automatic generation of a contract for all endorsements).
Importantly, the Activate program does not seek to filter out football agents' roles in creating value for their clients and therefore receiving their commissions on off-field deals. When brands are sifting through the Activate platform to figure out the right players to fit a campaign, marketers will find the players, along with their listed representatives, so that they can connect directly to those representatives and build targeted digital endorsement campaigns.
"A majority of our business deals with facilitating and procuring players for sponsors and licensees," explained Keith Gordon of NFL Players Inc. "With the Activate platform, it's a very easy way to determine if a player fits a need of a prospective partner. When we first started evaluating opendorse, one of the original proposals was that we would work more as a licensee/licensor relationship. We decided to create a white label product instead. opendorse proved it has the systems and software in place. We felt that opendorse was created in a very forward thinking manner . . . it evolves over time."
Gordon continuously mentioned opendorse in his description of the NFL Players Inc.'s new Activate platform, and that is because behind the clever name attached to the white label product is an engine operated by 24-year-old opendorse CEO Blake Lawrence and the rest of his team. Lawrence, who formerly played football at the University of Nebraska before ending his career early due to concussion issues, started a social media agency in 2010 and within 6 months was being retained by professional athletes. He quickly found that manually managing social media campaigns was tiresome and frustrating.
"We looked at the market and saw some others trying to make it easier for athletes to land endorsements through social media, but saw inefficiencies," said Lawrence to FORBES. "That was the foundation for opendorse. In 2013, we raised a seed round of funding of $300,000 and launched in April. The vision is to help brands, agents and athletes understand and activate influence. An athlete endorsement marketplace. Our software allows brands to browse and compare athletes for digital marketing campaigns."
opendorse was first contacted by NFL Players Inc. in Summer 2013, less than a month before the company launched its Beta testing platform. "It was not part of our plan right away, but we always wanted to work with associations eventually," added Lawrence. "[The NFLPA] said 'as an Association as a whole we want to be able to provide activation to our licensees and sponsors.' Kudos to NFL Players Inc. for being forward thinking, progressive and aggressive."
It would not be surprising if other players' associations soon develop their own versions of the Activate platform. Scott Gaffield, Senior Counsel at sports representation firm Octagon agrees. He added, "[w]hile there are some obvious limitations to this type of platform when it comes to larger partnerships that would require more of a personal relationship between brand and talent, I think these concepts have a lot of potential to help brands connect with lower-tier talent on smaller market-specific deals that might otherwise be too complicated/time-consuming to be worth it. [It] could also open doors for smaller advertisers to get in on the celebrity endorsement craze, since it streamlines the process, making it much more accessible for a less sophisticated marketing team." Gaffield said that the service provided by opendorse is appealing from the agency perspective. "In general, we're likely to support any technology that facilitates sourcing and making deals for our clients."
The Activate platform is in its early stages of development. A Beta test is currently available and partners are encouraged to sign up and engage with athletes to better understand what it will look like when the full suite of services exist. The Beta tag should be shed by mid-to-late June and plans are for Activate to go completely live by end of June to middle of July.
"A lot of significant partner and licensee dollars are spent during summer, which is the same time that many photo shoots take place," explained Gordon. "As we go forward, we plan on reintroducing an ad campaign in August where we will promote the Activate platform."
Brand executives and player representatives have long been searching for a solution to place a value on each player's social media presence. The NFL Players Inc.'s Activate platform will serve as an excellent starting point in negotiations for all parties involved. At the moment, Activate is only providing valuation of player tweets, but the plan is to expand for Facebook and Instagram postings in the coming months.
Want to learn more about the business of sports? Order my book How to Play the Game and follow me on Twitter.
