Once a prime sponsor of major sporting events, MassMutual is turning to the NBA to build out a cause-marketing platform, using a series of team deals to promote the company’s youth financial education program.
The financial services company now has sponsorships in place with five NBA teams for 2015 to feature the FutureSmart Challenge initiative. The program aims to teach money management and financial planning skills to children in middle school.
Four of the participating NBA teams — Boston, Chicago, Houston and Utah — have one-year deals with MassMutual. The fifth club, Phoenix, previously had been signed to a multiyear deal that continues into 2015. MassMutual has a regional office in Phoenix.
The Suns have been joined by Atlanta, Dallas and the Los Angeles Clippers in having deals with MassMutual that had them featuring the program this year.
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Mass Mutual CEO Roger Crandall and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca
Photo by: BOSTON CELTICS
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Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed, but all the deals give the company in-arena branding, courtside signage and digital advertising on the team websites. The teams also, through the deals, agree to hold FutureSmart Challenge events in their respective markets. Each event typically draws between 1,500 and 3,000 students to the team’s home arena, with MassMutual and the teams using those forums for the financial education opportunities.
“We’ve got five teams next year, and in terms of expanding the program, we are open to looking at additional markets,” said Nick Fyntrilakis, vice president of community responsibility for Springfield, Mass.-based MassMutual. “We want to take the program more broadly around financial empowerment and reach more young people.”
The company selected its new set of NBA team deals in order to broaden the national exposure of the initiative.
The activation around the FutureSmart program also marks a return to major pro sports sponsorships for MassMutual, which in the mid-2000s was a sponsor of the U.S. Open tennis tournament, the U.S. Open golf tournament and the Ryder Cup. The company’s current roster of sports sponsorships is largely locally based, including deals with the D-League Springfield Armor, University of Massachusetts basketball, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the AHL’s Springfield Falcons, and naming rights for the MassMutual Center in Springfield, Mass.
“They had retreated a bit but now they are starting to dip their toes through some NBA relationships,” said Ted Dalton, senior vice president of corporate partnerships and business development for the Celtics. “We had not done anything with them. It is a lot about the community for them and it helps support a lot of initiatives we want to do.”
The deal also gives the Celtics another sponsor in the broad financial services category. The team already has deals with Sun Life Financial, TD Bank and USI Insurance Services.
“It’s a category that is becoming more significant,” Dalton said. “It is a question of how you slice up the category in a way that you are not creating overlap with companies and giving companies their own space.”
