IMG College has picked up the rights to sell sponsorships for Ivy League member Cornell University.
The consulting arrangement will enable IMG’s regional and national sellers to have access to Cornell’s sponsorship inventory. IMG will not embed sales executives at the school like it does with most of its multimedia rights deals.
IMG has a similar agreement with Yale, in which IMG provides consulting services and sponsorship sales for the school to augment its local sales. In addition to sponsorship sales at Cornell and Yale, IMG has full-fledged multimedia rights at Harvard and Princeton in the Ivy League to go with more than 80 school properties nationally.
Cornell Athletic Director Andy Noel said the school hopes IMG will expose the Big Red’s brand on a national scale in ways its one-person, in-house sales effort could not. Cornell’s athletic sponsorships have been sold by Jeff Hall, a 16-year veteran at the school who carries the title of senior associate AD in charge of sports marketing. Hall will continue in that role, focusing largely on local sales. IMG’s focus will be more regional and national.
“We’ve got a good local base of sponsors,” Hall said of the Ithaca, N.Y., school.
Cornell “talked to a number of agencies over the years,” Hall said, before deciding to partner with IMG.
