JMI Sports has bought out the final year of IMG College’s multimedia rights contract with the University of Kentucky.
JMI won the Wildcats’ multimedia rights in June with a bid of $210 million over 15 years. That deal originally was scheduled to begin in July 2015.
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JMI Sports will have Kentucky’s multimedia rights for the coming basketball season.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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But instead of waiting for the new contract to kick in, which would have left IMG College in a lame-duck year, JMI paid an undisclosed sum to take over the UK Sports Marketing property during football season.
The contract primarily grants JMI rights to UK sponsorship, signage, radio, some limited TV, and hospitality. JMI also will have some non-athletic inventory from across campus that it can sell.
Tom Stultz, president of JMI Sports, has assembled a staff of eight and eventually will hire 15 to 16. Some of those eight currently in place are holdovers from IMG College, while others are new hires. Two of the new hires, Kimberly Ramsay and Kim Shelton, are former general managers of the UK property when it was run by other agencies.
Ramsay’s new role will be vice president of client services and operations for UK Sports Marketing. She ran the property for Host Communications for nearly 20 years. Once Host was bought by IMG College in 2007, Ramsay moved into other roles before her position eventually was eliminated in 2011.
Stultz, the former CEO of Host Communications, brought Ramsay back to oversee the property’s relationships with clients and the school.
Shelton will be vice president of sponsorship sales. She was general manager of the UK property for IMG College from 2009 to 2013 and previously worked with Ramsay and Stultz at Host.
Kentucky also changed its licensing agent in June, opting to sign with Fermata Partners over Collegiate Licensing Co. Fermata already has taken over as the school’s licensing agent.
