How Marketers Choose College Athlete Influencers

Since 2021 McDonald’s, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, Unilever, and other leading companies have done something that was never before possible: They have paid U.S. college athletes to act as product endorsers and influencers. Until a Supreme Court ruling that year, paying college athletes was forbidden under the rules of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). In the aftermath of the Court’s ruling, the NCAA adopted a policy that enabled more than 520,000 student athletes to monetize their names, images, and likenesses by signing what have become known as NIL deals. Although no definitive count exists of athletes who have signed such deals, 278 students (40% of varsity athletes) at Texas Tech had been sponsored as of 2022. In just a few years marketers have already spent more than $1 billion on such endorsements. For individual athletes these deals can be lucrative. Consider Paige Bueckers, a University of Connecticut basketball player, whom Gatorade chose as its first sponsored college athlete. Bueckers is expected to earn more than $1 million while playing college basketball.

College athletes are especially attractive as endorsers and influencers for several reasons. Brands hope that their age will make them effective at engaging and connecting with a younger audience. Their sponsorship deals cost less than those of professional athletes. They allow brands to tap into the loyal and passionate relationships that fans (especially alumni) have with university sports teams. And by signing them, brands can build a relationship that may extend into Olympic and professional sports careers.

These relationships come with risks, however. Misbehavior and scandal can threaten celebrity endorsers, and college students may be even more likely to behave in ways that cause negative publicity. Therefore marketers work to identify and partner with those whose character suggests they represent a low risk. Such due diligence can take a variety of forms, but one important element is scrutinizing the content of the athletes’ social media posts—especially because social media is often a primary channel through which athletes will promote their brands.

To understand what companies look for in college athletes, we relied on observed behavior—the patterns that athletes who have been chosen for sponsorship by top companies exhibit in their social media posts. We identified 64 college athletes hired as influencers by the 100 companies with the best reputations according to the 2022 Axios Harris Poll. We then analyzed the Instagram posts of those athletes and identified 20 characteristics, including the number of followers, the number and pace of posts, whether posts were about the athlete’s sport, whether posts were about the athlete or others, whether posts were sexualized, whether images were posed or candid, and so forth. Wherever possible, we used objective measures or established methods of assessing images.

Our analysis revealed five insights that may be useful as marketers consider their own best practices for sponsoring college athletes—and as college athletes produce social media content that may maximize their odds of receiving sponsorship offers.

High follower counts aren’t essential.

Perhaps surprisingly, few athletes sponsored by the top brands had a high number of followers compared with other types of influencers. Only 29% had more than 100,000 followers. In fact, 59% had fewer than 50,000 followers, 14% had from 2,000 to 5,000, and 3% had fewer than 2,000. Many athletes not chosen by the top brands have more followers than those who were chosen. Apparently, brands select athletes for the strength of their image: who they are and what they represent.

Sponsorship deals with college athletes allow brands to tap into the loyal and passionate relationships that fans (especially alumni) have with university sports teams.

Jonathan Cotten is a leading franchisee of the Good Feet Store, a national retailer of arch supports. When he decided to sponsor college athletes as part of his company’s marketing plan, he paid little attention to follower counts. Instead he sought “strong character” in someone he trusted would fit with the values of the company. To gauge character, Cotten and his executive team looked at players’ social media posts, had conversations with players, and even talked to the parents of several athletes. While considering whether to spend money on college athlete influencers, Cotten decided that the biggest potential cost was not the payment to the athlete but the reputational risk if the athlete behaved in ways (whether during the sport or not) that reflected poorly on his brand. He eventually signed several University of Virginia athletes with little regard for the size of their followings: Yonta Vaughn, a women’s basketball player, had fewer than 2,000 followers; Skylar Dahl, a rower, fewer than 1,300; and Isaac McKneely, a men’s basketball player, fewer than 16,000.

When we asked Cotten why he was willing to choose influencers with relatively small followings, he said that when he and his team identify the right kind of athlete, they are willing to begin by promoting the relationship on the company’s own social media platforms, rather than relying on the athlete’s platform. They are betting that the influencer’s following will grow over time. Our research indicates that Cotten is not alone in his thinking. If follower count was a priority for big brands, the profile of athletes chosen for sponsoring would be different.

It’s not just football and basketball.

Historically only football and men’s basketball have generated substantial revenue, media exposure, and game attendance in the United States. An early effort to track NIL deals focused on those two sports, because it was assumed that marketers would concentrate on them when choosing sponsors. But the people chosen by the top 100 companies include athletes from golf, gymnastics, hockey, lacrosse, soccer, and other sports. In fact, about 50% of sponsored athletes came from sports other than football or men’s basketball. Clearly, the value of an athlete’s brand extends beyond the revenue associated with a sport. Consider Matthew Boling, a track-and-field athlete at the University of Georgia who partners with Dunkin’ Donuts. Boling’s social media posts include images of him in competition, training with teammates, and ordering Dunkin’ coffee. Boling emphasizes excellence on and off the track—an attractive position for the company.

It’s not about striking a pose.

If you’ve spent time looking at college athletes’ posts, you’ll have seen that many of them share predominantly posed images. Often their feeds are filled with what look like professional modeling photos: The camera is aimed straight at the athlete, who is alone in the picture. In contrast, more than half the images posted by the athletes in our study are natural and unposed.

Consider Blake Corum, a running back on the 2023 national champion University of Michigan football team, who has worked with Subway (and a number of other brands not among the top 100). His social media is full of photos of him working out, playing football, talking in the middle of a team huddle, walking past Michigan fans, and so forth. More than 80% of the Instagram photos featuring Corum in our study were candid rather than posed. They make him appear more natural and authentic (and less self-centered) than others, and prior research indicates that audiences react more positively to candid photos than to posed ones in online contexts.

The mix of posts leans toward sports.

Athletics are not everything in the life of a college athlete. And because most college athletes today have been active on Instagram and other social media platforms since their early teenage years, they’ve grown up posting both sports and nonsports content, such as photos from parties, concerts, milestones, or activities with friends. However, the athletes in our study have started to shift away from personal content and toward sports-oriented content in their Instagram accounts. That makes sense. The brands are choosing to pay them because of their involvement in sports. Among the Instagram images of college athletes with NIL deals, 48% featured sports content. The proportion of sports content goes up among college athletes who transition to the pros as well. Sixty-three percent of the postings of professional athletes sponsored by the top brands were sports-focused. It’s not clear whether brands are encouraging this or the athletes are simply mimicking their peers. But the difference is striking—and when we speak with student athletes about shaping their own brands to appeal to corporate sponsors, we suggest that they emulate the pros and keep the ratio of sports to nonsports content high.

The chosen athletes avoid suggestive imagery.

College students often post sexualized images of themselves. When we asked college athletes who post suggestive content why they do so, they said that such posts typically increase their followings; and in their view, gaining a lot of followers is the primary goal of their social media efforts. However, our research found that 85% of the athletes chosen as influencers by top brands never posted sexualized imagery or content. Among the 15% who did post such content, just two out of 21 photos, on average, were suggestive. That makes sense. Although brands hope that college athlete influencers will reach young audiences, the top brands are also targeting parents, grandparents, and others who may be put off by such content.

. . .

For brands that are allocating marketing budgets to college athletes, the obvious question is, How well are those expenditures paying off? It’s hard to say. Sports marketing’s return on investment can be especially difficult to measure. (One of us, Kimberly, once oversaw the laundry brand Tide’s partnership with NASCAR. She tried to quantify the return with a variety of methods, such as assigning value to stronger business relationships with retailers, with limited success.) That’s compounded by the fact that NIL deals didn’t even exist three years ago. But signing college athletes costs so much less than signing professional athletes that a good ROI seems likely—especially given the possibility of forging a long-lasting relationship with a potential Michael Jordan before the athlete reaches the pinnacle of his or her career. Future research will illuminate how to maximize a brand’s odds of success with this new marketing channel.