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NIL deal breakdown: UW's student-athlete ticket ambassador program

What works - and what could be tweaked

Trying something a little different for today’s newsletter - which is similar to how the original newsletters were crafted: doing a deal breakdown with commentary.

After you read today’s version, I’m open to your feedback, thoughts, improvements, etc. (I’m actually always open to feedback, but moreso today.)

Four University of Washington student-athletes will launch a first-of-its-kind partnership with Paciolan and Learfield's Compass NIL platform to offer discounted tickets to Husky games.

Jonah Coleman (football), Elle Ladine (women’s basketball), Vazoumana ‘Zoom’ Diallo (men’s basketball) and Kierstyn Barton (women’s volleyball) will leverage their social media accounts to provide Dawgs Discounts to fans for upcoming games and will be eligible to receive a portion of each ticket sold as an ) distribution.

Washington Athletics will leverage Learfield's Compass NIL platform to track program performance and distribute payments to student-athletes, highlighting the value of the connected enterprise ecosystem.

Partnership breakdown

• Love the idea - and more schools with follow suit

  • Leveraging students to sell tickets (especially at discounted prices) is a smart move - and a good way to convince fans who are 50-50 about purchasing tickets.

    • This moreso taps into the general population/Seattle area fanbase as opposed to students (who I assume receive free or heavily discounted tickets to Husky sporting events).

  • Learfield and Paciolan work with over 150 schools (including many that overlap), so I’m thinking more programs will roll this out (or something similar) with their respective athletes.

• Cross-promotion is smart

  • I’m digging the athletes promoting teams that are not their own.

    • As seen below, Ladine (women’s basketball) is promoting men’s basketball, Barton (women’s volleyball) is promoting gymnastics, etc.

Execution feedback

• While it’s good to feature the athletes, content should always play to the strength of the athletes.

  • For example, here is Elle Ladine’s video and Zoom Diallo’s video. Both of them are reading queue cards off-camera. (Not great.)

    • This can be enhanced by having featuring the athletes shooting jumpers and adding a voiceover, with each athlete speaking directly into the camera at the beginning and end of the video. (Provide bullet points, not paragraphs.)

    • Also, having each athlete have more enthusiasm in their voice would be beneficial to hype up the promotion and the discount for fans. (I get it: They are athletes, not actors. However, small improvements can go a long ways in creating engaging content.)

  • Lastly, if being on camera is not a strength of the athlete, pictures can work just fine.

Thank You for reading today’s newsletter

^{I discuss insights and news related to NIL and personal branding for athletes every Wednesday at 12p ET/9a PT.}

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