5 key strategies for getting and negotiating brand deals as a college athlete, including how to price sponsored posts
Influencer-marketing firm Gen Agency shares key slides from a recent presentation to college athletes on how to negotiate NIL brand deals.
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- Rachel Maeng Brown is a former NCAA rower who now works with student-athletes at her firm Gen Agency.
- The agency has provided NIL education and consulting to college athletes, collectives, and schools.
- Brown shared a presentation with five strategies to help athletes price and negotiate brand deals.
Knowing your worth is a struggle many college athletes face now that they can make money from their name, image, and likeness, known as NIL.
To help athletes understand their value, influencer-marketing-and-production company Gen Agency has been educating and consulting college athletes on NIL.
"Our big focus is creating a sustainable NIL marketplace at each university," Rachel Maeng Brown, the founder and CEO of Gen agency, told Business Insider.
Brown, a former NCAA rower, said the NIL side of Gen Agency educates universities to help them build curriculums. The agency also offers athletes on-site and virtual workshops about NIL marketing.
In April, Gen Agency hosted its first NIL-educational summit for University of Michigan influencers in partnership with Reach, a student-driven organization helping content creators grow their platforms and connect with brands. The presentation, which was shared with BI, covered how athletes can understand their audience, price sponsored content, post properly on social media, and protect themselves with a contract.
The summit also featured a panel of guest speakers, including former NFL player Isaiah Johnson. Johnson told BI that social-media followers and engagement are more important to brands who work with athletes than on-field performance.
"Followers, everyone wants to know how many people are following you and then two, just how genuine you are," he said. "If you are genuinely using a product, this could be a wonderful fit."
Johnson said athletes with the best media presence are natural and real with their followers. He said sports fans love behind-the-scenes footage they can not get from somewhere else, like athletes' day-in-the-life videos.
Here are five key slides from Gen Agency's NIL presentation on how athletes can brand themselves and negotiate fair pay:
Rachel Maeng Brown
Brown said knowing your target audience is key to working with brands. It helps companies understand who they can reach by recruiting you.
During the summit, Brown showed athletes where to find key stats on their Instagram audiences, including follower count and growth, location, age, and gender.
Rachel Maeng Brown
The presentation offered a formula student-athletes can use to calculate how much to charge brands for a sponsored post. It's based on a $10 CPM, which refers to the cost per every 1,000 impressions, though CPMs can vary.
To calculate what to charge per post, take the average number of views over the last 30 days and divide it by 1,000. Then take that figure and multiply it by the CPM.
Using that math, an athlete with 600,000 average views over the last days would charge $6,000 per post, based on a $10 CPM, per the presentation's example.
Rachel Maeng Brown
Athletes, like other influencers, need to comply with brand, platform, and regulatory guidelines for social-media posts and ads, such as copyright rules and what kind of content is permitted on a platform.
Student-athletes also need to abide by NCAA rules because posting inappropriate content can result in losing scholarships, eligibility, and future career opportunities, according to the NCAA.
Brown said college athletes should also exercise caution and not include other brands or anything illegal in a sponsored post. She advised double-checking the spelling before posting, too.
Rachel Maeng Brown
The agency also emphasized the importance of double-checking disclosures for paid ads, partnerships, and more so athletes do not have to delete or redo sponsored videos.
"This is really important to student-athletes as well as smaller influencers because a lot of brands will try to bully them," said Brown, "to say, 'You don't need to put hashtag. You don't need to disclose that we're sponsored.' But it's actually illegal across social media."
She said failing to disclose a sponsored post could result in an athlete's account being banned or messing up their average views and algorithm.
Rachel Maeng Brown
Brown also talked about contracts and W-9s, which are tax forms for independent contractors. The presentation emphasized in capital letters that athletes need a contract to make sure they get paid for their work.
They should also be mindful of terms such as "usage" and "ownership" because it could mean their videos could be posted on any social-media channel or site.
Brown said brands are not going to protect the athletes, so they need to look out for themselves.