Oct 30, 2015
NBA jersey ads opens door for other leagues
As TSN Senior Correspondent Rick Westhead writes, the NBA will be the first North American professional sports league to place corporate logos on player jerseys at the All-Star game in Toronto.
The NBA will be the first North American professional sports league to place corporate logos on player jerseys, reaching an agreement with Kia Motors for the company to place its ads on jerseys during this year’s All-Star game in Toronto.
The deal will likely embolden other leagues such as the NHL and NFL to follow suit. Currently, North American pro leagues only carry logos of athletic companies such as Reebok, the NHL's official outfitter.
The NHL and NHLPA have spent months negotiating with corporate sponsors about selling ads for player jerseys in the World Cup of Hockey.
The NHL and NHLPA, who are jointly staging the event, have been asking $8 million for a global sponsor to buy rights to all eight team jerseys. Companies have bristled over the demand, and the league and union are now looking at whether it makes sense to sell team jersey ads piecemeal, meaning selling different corporate ads for each jersey.
“Maybe we partner with a North American company for the U.S. and Canadian teams,” said an NHL team source. “But the question is what do they do with the young stars team? You have to do all of the teams or none of them.”
The NBA has been the most aggressive major North American sports league to dip its toe in the water on player jersey ads.
In 2009, the NBA began to allow Footlocker, a corporate partner, to place its logo on jerseys used during events such as the three-point contest, held a night before the All-Star Game.
“This is a bit of an evolution,” an NBA source told TSN. “The patch we’ve used since 2009 has had the event name along with the corporate sponsor - “Footlocker three-point contest.”
As part of the NBA’s landmark nine-year, $24-billion TV contract signed last year with ESPN and Turner Sports, Turner received the right to sell the All-Star Game jersey patches, a source said. The media company later sold the rights to Kia. A Kia patch will be on the upper left corner of the all-star jerseys.
The NBA-Kia deal comes a year after NBA commissioner Adam Silver said corporate logos on player jerseys was “inevitable."
"It just creates that much more of an opportunity for our marketing partners to get that much closer to our fans and to our players,” Silver said at the time. "It gives us an opportunity just to have deeper integration when it comes to those forms of sponsorship. ... Increasingly as we see Champions League and English Premier League televised in the U.S., I think it's going to become more acceptable and more commonplace for our fans as well.”
Kia has been in a sponsorship partner of the NBA since 2008. Los Angeles Clippers star Blake Griffin, who endorses the automaker, jumped over the hood of a Kia Optima to win the 2011 slam dunk contest. Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James endorsed the K900, Kia’s luxury sedan.
Brian Cooper, a sports marketing executive in Toronto with S&E Sponsorships, said he expects the NHL will eventually have on-jersey ads.
“We’ve already past the point where we see blatant ads on jerseys,” Cooper said. “If you watch golf, NASCAR or the CFL, you’ve already seen these ads. It’s going to be a gradual, but unavoidable progression.”