Expert breaks down sports marketing newsfrom @jordanrogers

Transcript

Penn State leaving Nike for Adidas. Tennessee leaving Nike for Adidas. Yeah. But South Carolina is leaving Under Armour for Nike. Welcome to the merry-go-round of college sports marketing. I'm Jordan. I spent a decade in brand marketing at Nike, and half of that time was in football marketing. So let's talk about the changing landscape of college athletics. Let's start with Penn State. There's a big article floating around from the Penn State newspaper with a list of a lot of complaints from Penn State and why they switched to Adidas. Before you get into these, let me remind you that there was a building on Nike's worse headquarters called Joe Paternal Childcare. And maybe y'all don't remember, but Penn State harbored a violent sexual offender on their football team for a while. Not great for brand relationships, and that childcare center was renamed. I'm not here to litigate that, but it's important for the context. Best is essentially saying that Penn State's complaining that they don't get the same treatment as Oregon, which they acknowledge, but Ohio State and Michigan seem to be higher in the pecking order. Yeah. In general, sports marketing can be defined by what have you won for me lately. And when you go over the record of Penn State, it is not very impressive. And I know this probably has to do with being in a conference of Ohio State and many others now that these conferences are consolidating. Yeah. The Lions haven't won a championship since 1986. So there's a complaint in here about them not being able to wear a gold swoosh, and I think they're probably referring to the Fractal Swoosh. When Nike debuted this Fractal Swoosh back in 2014, we did it around the teams that were competing in the final four of the CFP. And once that expanded to 16 teams, I think this probably went out the window, and they're not able to do that for all 16 teams. Honestly, it's important to remember that Nike has the NFL, the NBA, the MLB, all the athletes competing at the US Open right now in tennis. They have the number one golfers in the world. They have a lot of athletes and teams under their signing. In Penn State's conference alone, they've got Oregon, Ohio State, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, USC, and plenty of other. If you go over to the SCC, which is the real priority as most people would probably admit, Texas, Georgia, Missouri, Ole Miss, Alabama, LSU, they now have South Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, Vanderbilt, OU, and the list goes on. Better you just can't accommodate every one of these teams. I assure you, most of these teams all have, like, very specific worst that they wanna no each year. When in doubt, win championships, and then you can get a lot of these special requests. Alright. Next up, Tennessee and Adidas. See my previous point. They cannot have everybody. So Nike doesn't lose Tennessee as much as, like, they just can't keep all of these schools. So this is great for Adidas. Adidas is not paying the big leagues or whatever. They need to go pick off a couple of these programs, and they are being much more aggressive with the NIL strategy. Good. A lot of this stuff Complete fluff. NIL has been much more of a priority for Adidas than Nike. And this ambassador program is cool, but this is a affiliate program, which every company in the world does, which means they will let you promote their products, and they will give you a small percentage of the sale. It's not nothing, but it's a little overblown in press releases. The Texas Tech and Patrick Mahomes relationship is one that has been really unique and creative. And having that type of alumni already signed like Candace Parker is super helpful, which brings me to Asia Wilson and South Carolina going over to Nike. This is great.