Sponsors, partners and licensees met with 40 of the NFL’s most marketable rookies last week, as the 20th annual NFL Players Association Rookie Premiere took place in LA, where brands ranging from Nike, Pepsi and Electronic Arts to Topps, Uber and Panini America got face time with the newest class. What began as a convenient photo session for upcoming trading card releases has now evolved to a business summit for the athletes who are now walking brands. NFL Players Inc., the licensing and marketing subsidiary of the NFLPA, transformed the opportunity into a full-fledged workshop complete with veteran players such as Marshall Faulk delivering business of football seminars, along with networking opportunities to prepare the recent student for the path ahead.
Cynopsis Sports was embedded at the event, and spoke with NFL Players, Inc. President Keith Gordon as well as brand executives about the growth of Rookie Premiere and how players are benefitting from their new-found knowledge. By the way, make sure to read Gordon’s diary from the multi-day event and view a photo gallery here.
Gordon on 20 years of Rookie Premiere: We’ve been looking at this year to commemorate 20 years of blood sweat and tears for the players. It started 20 years ago as an idea to get the card companies what they needed in time to get the rookie cards out. What started out as a very big need for three trading card companies at the time has now grown into something much deeper. Now, the photo shoot is almost an afterthought. So much of what Thursday and Friday is about is content capture: meeting these guys in a way that they will never be able to do again, just before they launch their career.
On brands: They want to know whether or not this guy is going to connect with their consumer. With PepsiCo for example, they have family of brands and the most notable ones are Gatorade for on-field performance while Pepsi is all about off-field and lifestyle. So they want to know how they can get these guys to open up and show their lighter side and do whatever they can to bring that out for their audiences.
On the takeaway: Players should take away, and we tell them this at orientation, that it starts with their on-field performance, we don’t want to take away from that. But once you’ve got a job, we want you to be able to turn it into a career. Once you do that, you take your potential to take more away from football than it does from you. In order to be successful, you have to be able to perform on the field and then you also have to let your personality shine in order to establish connections both with the brands and their consumers. You don’t have to be liked because you are some sophisticated guy who loves tech companies and you know how to Tweet a million things for a million brands, it could also be that you are an Air Force guy who grew up in a military family and you have this connection to the military. Their story is what we want guys to take away from this weekend, the value of their story and the value of how they got it to work for them.
Jason Howarth, VP, Marketing at Panini on player visibility: The dynamic has changed in the marketplace. There’s definitely a lot more visibility for these players in everything that they do from a social media perspective, and they have to be that way. I think they are probably more dialed in to the process. They still have to understand the process and this event and what happens here is really a good learning tool for them to understand what happens when you are not on the field and how you can maximize that opportunity when you are not on the field.
Kevin Eger, Football Brand Manager at Topps on communication: Communication is the key thing. This year, being the 20th anniversary of Rookie Premiere, we have coined the phrase “the Topps family.” Rather than have them come here and sign a bunch of cards, where they don’t really know how it is helping them and how it is helping us, we can now let them know, hey you’re part of a family. We show them how a lot of other rookies who have come through here and some of them are now in the Hall of Fame while others have won Super Bowls. If they open up, we can help them make the most of this opportunity.
