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Over the last year, marketers have been shelling out dollars to show up in sports, the supposed last bastion of monocultural moments and opportunity to get ads in front of a massive audience. There’s been an uptick of interest in unconventional sports like pickleball, and women’s sports. Streaming platforms like Netflix bet big on live sports in hopes to bring in more money from advertisers. Finally, since the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) approved its name, image and likeness (NIL) policy back in 2021, the lines between influencers and athletes is becoming more blurred.
That said, it’s getting more difficult for brands to stand out from one another as more advertisers flock to the space. That’s true even for a brand as big as Verizon, according to Nick Kelly, Verizon’s vp of partnerships. “We have to find something that we can own,” Kelly told Digiday.
In this episode of the podcast, Kelly sits down with co-host Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter at Digiday, to talk about its revamped sports marketing strategy, venturing into NIL deals and this year’s Super Bowl plans.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Striking NIL deals
For almost a year and a half now, we were trying to figure out what is our way in that is authentic and can make a difference. We really struggled with the fact that there are a lot of brands who’ve gone and sponsored women’s leagues and teams. They’re all doing the same thing. For us, it became more of we wanted to tell stories and empower athletes to go out there and do whatever it is that they’re passionate about.
Partnering with women’s basketball star Paige Bueckers
We haven’t necessarily been silent, but we’ve been working with her team for six months now. Paige has got some big moments coming up this year. She’s going to be in the NCAA tournament. She’s probably going to be the number one draft pick. How do we show up in a meaningful way together as opposed to what we talked about earlier, “Hey, we’ve got an iPhone campaign. I need you to post a couple of times.”
This is much more of a, “I know what your roadmap looks like.” This is a brand association for us and empowerment, and these are the types of people that we want to partner with. It is a slow process. I will say that Paige is unique in the fact that she has a big support system as one of the top NIL athletes in the country. But we’ve also been working with a lot of local NIL athletes.
Measuring success from international stars to local athletes
Our actual ability to see the value of local NIL activation is far greater than some of these national things because it is typically a very specific call to action. Our ability to track that is so much more real-time and that’s where we’re starting to see, for us in the summer and the fall, where we scale up the campaign locally and everywhere else, is extremely important.
Super Bowl plans
With the target being: How do I resonate in all 30 key local DMAs [designated marketing areas] in the NFL cities, we had to activate locally. That’s really where we got to the point of creating Verizon Super Bowl FanFest, which is 30 simultaneous parties in 30 markets.
We can hit the loyalty play in a meaningful way on one side, and on the other, we can drive new customers.
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