Menu
Opinion

Next-gen sponsorships, technology and the cult of athlete personality

Athletes have never been perfect. But throughout sports history, up until about the last decade, the athlete’s image has been carefully crafted by agents serving as a gateway between athletes and fans via sponsorships. Colin Kaepernick and Serena Williams are models of how technology is changing the concept of an athlete’s “image” to something far more human, polarizing and capable of driving national discourse. The world of sports sponsorships will never be the same.

I would know, because I’m an athlete myself, whose career rose just as social media was starting to take off. As a four-time Olympic medalist in ice hockey in the late 1990s and 2000s, I had an opportunity to be among the first to build a Twitter following and use a blog to connect to fans directly. The experience broke down my career and personal boundaries in ways that changed my life for the better.

I was an early adopter on social media, and exposed my training methodology to my fans via my blog and Twitter. Even early on, I knew there was going to be a huge impact for future athletes who could provide unfettered access to fans — which typically only happened face-to-face — in a more scalable, global and unbiased way. I saw my sponsorships with Coca-Cola, Visa or Nike pivot from appearances to posts and impressions, and loved when I was able to use social media to connect causes that I cared about (such as the Olympics or the Women’s Sports Foundation, and their associated values) to the brands that cared about me as an athlete.

A new generation of fans growing up on social media and with direct access to athletes would expect nothing less than radical transparency.getty images (4)

Now, watching people like Williams use her platform to drive a deeper dialogue about women in sports — from her honesty on postpartum working motherhood to her thoughts on the role of gender in a recent dispute with an official — feels natural to me, and a new generation of fans growing up on social media would expect nothing less than radical transparency. Next-gen athletes, after all, understand that they’re much more than athletes alone: They’re entertainers, role models, global citizens and data labs. They have always been these things — technology is simply giving them a global platform.

Brands that choose to sponsor athletes today are connected not only to their performance, but also to a passionate and often polarized fan base swarming around their interests and causes. Look no further than the recent Nike campaign featuring Kaepernick for evidence. The ad became a part of national discourse. Nike’s stock plunged, and then quickly rebounded in the wake of the heated social media debate. For as many people who threatened to #BoycottNike, there were new fans who embraced the brand’s bold choice to stand with Kaepernick’s pursuit of racial justice.

Technology has made today’s sports sponsorships more immersive, emotional and directly connected to the fan, which makes them inherently more risky than ever before. At the same time, technology can help brands intelligently weigh risks versus rewards. The new rules of engagement turn an ad into a dynamic conversation at the grassroots level, from a fan’s hometown all the way up to a technology-enabled smart venue experience at the game itself. In other words, technology changed the medium, the message and the measurements for the $140 billion global sports sponsorship market.

A whole landscape of new technology companies has cropped up to help sponsors with the selection of the right athletes (who have meaningful connections to their brand), ideation of sponsorship concepts, creation of activations, and measurement after a campaign is complete. The next-generation sponsor will have to have a deeper understanding of the causes its customers care about, and quantify the risk associated with the potential loss of customers who disagree with those positions.

For example, a brand could use a technology like Captiv8 to identify athletes and influencers with the highest brand affinity, a company like Zoomph to profile, monitor and engage key customer segments with targeted influencer campaigns, and/or a technology like MVPindex to measure the value of the influence.

On the athletes side, having a deep, technology-enabled relationship with fans could mean becoming a more attractive sponsorship target for brands. Or, if an athlete wants to switch sponsors, a deep and direct tie to fans (like LeBron James has regardless of his team affiliations) can make or break a career.

In the past, showing vulnerability would be considered a weakness. Now it’s an athlete’s biggest strength. Fans want to feel that athletes are human and relatable, not invincible. This fundamental shift in the cultural idealization of athletes has made it OK to be a real person on social media (warts and all). The athletes who are best at mastering the balance between peak performance and peak relatability (and accessibility) will win at next-generation sponsorships.

In what can seem like a minefield of opinions on social media, relatability is ultimately a good thing for both brands and athletes alike. For fans who have grown up with social media, they wouldn’t want it any other way. For athletes and brands that choose not to keep up, it’s their audience to lose.

Angela Ruggiero is CEO of Sports Innovation Lab and a four-time Olympic medalist in ice hockey.

SBJ Morning Buzzcast: March 25, 2024

NFL meeting preview; MLB's opening week ad effort and remembering Peter Angelos.

Big Get Jay Wright, March Madness is upon us and ESPN locks up CFP

On this week’s pod, our Big Get is CBS Sports college basketball analyst Jay Wright. The NCAA Championship-winning coach shares his insight with SBJ’s Austin Karp on key hoops issues and why being well dressed is an important part of his success. Also on the show, Poynter Institute senior writer Tom Jones shares who he has up and who is down in sports media. Later, SBJ’s Ben Portnoy talks the latest on ESPN’s CFP extension and who CBS, TNT Sports and ESPN need to make deep runs in the men’s and women's NCAA basketball tournaments.

SBJ I Factor: Nana-Yaw Asamoah

SBJ I Factor features an interview with AMB Sports and Entertainment Chief Commercial Office Nana-Yaw Asamoah. Asamoah, who moved over to AMBSE last year after 14 years at the NFL, talks with SBJ’s Ben Fischer about how his role model parents and older sisters pushed him to shrive, how the power of lifelong learning fuels successful people, and why AMBSE was an opportunity he could not pass up. Asamoah is 2021 SBJ Forty Under 40 honoree. SBJ I Factor is a monthly podcast offering interviews with sports executives who have been recipients of one of the magazine’s awards.

Shareable URL copied to clipboard!

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2018/10/29/Opinion/Ruggiero.aspx

Sorry, something went wrong with the copy but here is the link for you.

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2018/10/29/Opinion/Ruggiero.aspx

CLOSE