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Marketing Brew

Marketing Explainers

Jasmine Sheena

marketingbrew.com

Ad Gamification Audio Embed

Everyone is playing games these days. No, we’re not talking about your dating life. We’re talking about major brands looking for ways to incorporate gaming into their advertising products.

Take Disney, which recently rolled out two new “advergames” on Hulu and ESPN called Quiz Show and Beat the Clock. Quiz Show offers brands the chance to give viewers a short trivia game on screen, while Beat the Clock incorporates a brand’s identity into rapid-fire games. Brands have already shown some interest. Topgolf was the 

 to take advantage of the Beat the Clock ad format in an experience where viewers were able to practice golf using their TV remotes.

The gamified ad formats, which are also being embraced by companies like Amazon and Discord, represent a bid to engage users while making the experience of watching ads potentially a little less tedious.

“Ads are very prominent now, so it’s really hard to break through and feel personalized to each customer,” Carli Jurczynski, associate VP and paid media client lead at the agency Kepler, said. “Something that feels new and interactive, especially in the TV space, is something that’s really appetizing to our clients.”

 of Prime Video a few months before, announced a new ad format for marketers: interactive brand trivia ads. The ads are meant to incorporate brand facts into a quiz-like game, during which users have the option to request more information from the brand via email, add products to their chart, and obtain rewards like Amazon shopping credits.

 this year, Kepler shared details about Amazon’s trivia ad format and other interactive ad formats available from the e-commerce giant in a company blog post, and Jurczynski told us that the firm advised clients on Prime Day strategies.

“A huge roster of our clients under Hasbro and a lot of our retail clients [like] Shark Ninja were huge sellers on Amazon, and we were using a lot of their interactive products,” Jurczynski said, adding that while those clients weren’t necessarily taking advantage of CTV ads, biddable, search, and shopping formats were a major focus. “We were very much leaned in on Prime Day.”

The possibility of inserting game-like experiences into ads has brought in some companies that have historically been resistant to advertising to try the format out.

Discord, whose co-founder and CEO Jason Citron 

 the Wall Street Journal in 2021 that the platform wasn’t interested in monetizing through ads, rolled out “sponsored quests” widely in April, the first of which was made available to players of the combat game 

. The format, which is targeted toward game developers, allows users who stream on Discord and play games that contain sponsored quests the chance to earn rewards. Users who are watching the stream can also join the game and complete the quest themselves and earn rewards.

 sponsored quests last year, including a “May the 4th” 

 quest run in partnership with Epic Films and Lucasfilm Games. Now, sponsored quests are more widely available to game developers, Peter Sellis, who runs Discord’s product org, announced in a company blog post in March.

Carly A. Kocurek, a professor of digital humanities and media studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said that gaming has long been a part of the marketing and advertising world: just think of word searches and puzzles on the backs of cereal boxes, collectible items, or even loyalty programs, which can be gamified.

“Advertising in general is always very smart as an industry about responding to and engaging with new media technologies and the cultural zeitgeist,” Kocurek said, adding that “video games now, compared to even five or 10 years ago, are really seen as a normal part of daily life…Increasingly, it’s not seen as distinct or novel that someone plays video games, because everyone plays video games.”

It’s no secret that games can help boost user engagement, and companies are getting into gaming beyond just planting them in ads. Earlier this summer, Warner Bros. Discovery 

 Player First Games, a studio it partnered with on 

, a free-to-play game released in May that features numerous WBD characters like the Joker and the Iron Giant.

At a Morgan Stanley event earlier this year, WBD CEO and President of Global Streaming and Games JB Perrette emphasized on the company’s 

 on live-service, mobile, and free-to-play games (even though video games can sometimes be a costly bet: WBD reported a $200 million 

 on 2023’s commercial and critical flop 

Streaming competitor Netflix has also leaned into mobile games, adding games including 

 to its mobile app. Netflix’s investment in games seems likely to continue: Netflix games boss Mike Verdu recently shifted over to a new role in the streamer’s gaming division focused on “new technologies,” 

Overall, consumer spending on mobile games broke $20 billion this year, the first time it’s happened in two years, according to a Sensor Tower report released 

, and the mobile game Monopoly Go made more than $770 million in the first quarter of 2024, Sensor Tower reported, the most a mobile game has ever made in one quarter.

“The strong bounce back on mobile has only accelerated as we enter 2024, with economic and regulatory headwinds fading further into the past,” the report’s authors wrote.

A hand holding a smartphone displaying a multiple choice answer quiz question

Ad gamification is here

Disney, Amazon, and Discord are creating ad formats featuring interactive forms of sponsorship.

Ryan Barwick

MKBR: Shoppable Ads

Since its founding in 1986, QVC’s on-air personalities have hawked stainless-steel steak knives and Tupperware with the same cozy-yet-ruthless refrain: act quickly, pick up the phone, and buy now.

If streamers have their way, that’ll soon be as easy as lifting the remote control.

Shoppable ads, which effectively turn television interfaces into shopping carts and let viewers purchase the products they see on screen, have followed in the footsteps of social commerce platforms, bringing the ease of e-commerce to the tube. While the ad format has 

 for a few years, there were considerable advancements in the format unveiled during this year’s upfronts.

 to shoppable ad formats for Prime Video, including formats like carousel ads and interactive ads that allow users to shop from a 

. Warner Bros. Discovery also announced last month that it would bring a “seamless and integrated shopping experience” to Max.

, which have all made strides to bring shopping experiences to TV.

In other words, the QVC of streaming is nigh—because if you’re going to be 

 for dog food or toilet paper, why not buy it right then and there?

Predictably, there is Big Tech to thank for the innovation, explained Lisa Herdman, SVP and executive director of national video investment and marketplace intelligence at the agency RPA. Google, Amazon, and Meta collapsed the marketing funnel, offering as many 

 as linear television (though not the same 

) along with the ability to move products off of shelves.

For streamers, shoppable ads give them a new lever to pull for advertisers and show that they, too, can drive sales. Once a few platforms started testing this inventory, everyone else was bound to follow.

“It’s just about keeping up with the neighbors,” Herdman said.

Naturally, this kind of inventory has tended to work for retailers, clothing brands, DTC products, and even food delivery, she said. What’s still unknown, though, is the kind of programming that might work best for shoppable ads to run against, she said. If viewers are deeply engaged in, say, a cliffhanger ending during an episode of 

“Maybe they don’t if it’s a drama, but maybe the research has shown that reality TV [works], it’s a little lighter, there may be a different demographic, and they will pause and go buy,” Herdman said. “I don’t think it won’t work. I think we need some time on it.”

For now, though, shoppable ads are “rarely—if ever—worth the upcharge,” David Nyurenberg, associate director of digital video at Rain the Growth Agency, told Marketing Brew, though he noted that some platforms, like Amazon, aren’t charging advertisers extra for their shoppable features.

“We never see them perform,” he said.

Most shoppable ads work in one of two ways:

viewers can either make the purchase with their remote, or they can use their phone, which usually involves a QR code.

Some retailers have used both, depending on the platform they’re advertising on. Walmart, for example, has run both shoppable ads with QR codes on Peacock and click-to-purchase ads on Roku, explained Marika Roque, chief innovation officer at Kerv Interactive, which makes technology that creates shoppable ads for platforms like Peacock, Paramount+, and Disney.

“There is a lack of standardization in that path to purchase,” Roque said.

But faith in the humble QR code is seeming to falter, in part because ads featuring the scannable images require viewers to find and pick up their phones, unlock them, and then successfully scan a code, usually within the span of 15 or 30 seconds.

“There’s too much friction,” David Zapletal, COO of Digital Remedy, explained. “The majority of time, it’s a struggle.”

When Roku began experimenting with shoppable ads, early tests showed that engagement increased more than 10x if viewers were prompted to use a remote instead of scanning a QR code, Peter Hamilton, director of ad innovation at Roku, said. “Remote control is still the primary way that people want to interact with their television.”

“Anyone can create a video ad and put a QR code in it, and we don’t have any issues with that—we just find that the performance is very low in that scenario,” he said, adding that roughly 1% of audiences that see a shoppable ad on Roku actually engage with it.

Figuring out the right path forward is a long time coming. In 2008, The New York Times 

 that “interactive TV has been sort of a holy grail for Madison Avenue” for years. Meanwhile, Google has had e-commerce features dating back all the way to 2002, and these days, platforms like Instagram and TikTok are littered with e-commerce ads.

Even still, shoppable ads may still need time to mature, Hugh Scallon, SVP and head of video activation at VaynerMedia, told Marketing Brew.

“I think it’s still early days,” he said. “I hope TV doesn’t wind up looking like a Sunday shopper or all TV looks like QVC.”

A hand pointing a remote control at a TV displaying a shoppable ad for lotion.

Streamers keep leaning in on shoppable ads. Who will get it right?

During upfronts, the tech was on full display—but questions about effectiveness and which approach is best remain. 

If you were one of the tens of millions of Americans who tuned into the Super Bowl this year, chances are you saw pop star/American treasure/master marketer Beyoncé teasing her new country album, 

, via Verizon commercial. That’s because the ad was “burned-in,” which means that it was pre-embedded during breaks in the game for all viewers to see.

But there’s another way that ads could technically appear in major television events, one that is sometimes touted as the future of the advertising industry. Instead of showing the same ads to every viewer, ads during the game could be personalized for different viewers through dynamic ad insertion, meaning that viewers would be shown different ads based on their attributes—which means that while some viewers could have been served the Beyoncé ad, others might have seen a different ad entirely.

In theory, dynamic ad insertion, sometimes referred to as DAI, could lead to increased personalization and engagement, which could result in 

, Dan Rayburn, conference chairman of the Streaming Summit at NAB Show, told Marketing Brew. In practice, though, it has left something to be desired, Rayburn said: “It doesn’t scale, and it doesn’t work well.”

Despite those challenges, experts told us that the technology 

still be promising—as long as some of the wrinkles get ironed out.

Currently, in a traditional linear environment, “burned-in ads are the only way to go,” IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur told Marketing Brew. But “as the industry continues over the next 10 years to move toward a world where television is largely streamed, I would see less and less of a need for burned-in ads,” he said.

Server-side ad technology can show personalized ads to different consumers watching streaming content, like live programming, and amid a broader shift toward streaming, there is a “marked shift” toward the technology, especially from networks, MVPD providers, and cable providers, Katsur said. (In addition to streaming, it can also be used in the context of programmatic linear TV, he noted, but given the streaming boom, he doesn’t expect it to be widely adopted.)

While useful for targeting specific consumers, being able to deliver different ads simultaneously during a big broadcast like the Super Bowl can risk a 

 in the programming, according to Katsur. As of now, burned-in ads are “much more reliable than dynamic insertion,” he said.

There is some hope that generative AI tools could potentially be used in the future to help deliver personalized creative efficiently—and, in some cases, create those personalized ads, too, Katsur said. He used the example of a hypothetical McDonald’s ad campaign to demonstrate how AI could convert user data into targeted ad creative: One viewer might see an ad promoting a Big Mac, while another might get an ad featuring french fries.

“The interesting thing about generative AI is that it could, to an extent, dynamically stitch those assets together on the fly, based on the understanding of a [consumer’s] predilections toward certain McDonald’s foods,” Katsur said.

Personalizing ads at that scale can pose another challenge for media companies themselves: sifting through the creative to approve (and, in some cases, not approve) before airing, Dave Morgan, founder and executive chairman of TV advertising platform Simulmedia, told Marketing Brew.

“There’s an incredible approval process in something like the Super Bowl, but there’s also a process in the local TV station in Des Moines, Iowa, or Erie, Pennsylvania,” Morgan told us.

Again, generative AI could come in handy. In a lot of markets, humans manually check dozens of ads each day, but not, say, tens of thousands, Morgan said. AI could be used to check large volumes of creative and identify ads that might not meet standards, Morgan said. That technology is already being deployed, like at Amazon’s AWS, where there is AI-powered ad verification, he said.

But there’s one thing that DAI can’t really solve: The fundamental unpredictability that comes with live events, as well as streaming’s historic challenges handling potential surges in viewership, Katsur told us.

“If it’s a boring Super Bowl, if it’s a blowout by the third quarter, people will tend to tune out, so you will lose viewers,” he explained. “However if it’s a shootout or a really close game, [like] 

...you’re going to see viewership potentially spike,” Katsur said.

To make the streaming experience more reliable, and to help make DAI a reality in the streaming space, the right infrastructure and server support will be crucial, Katsur said.

“There’s still some work to be done from an infrastructure perspective for streaming to be as reliable as cable and satellite have been for decades,” he said.

Two servers sitting next to each other, one labeled "Ads" and the other labeled "Content"

Can dynamic ad insertion get a boost with AI?

In theory, DAI can help personalize ads, but experts say it’s been hard to scale.

Dynamic ad insertion isn’t the silver bullet for advertising. Could it get a boost with AI?

The ’90s saw many landmark events: the OJ Simpson trial, the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton, and perhaps much less seriously, the rise of frosted tips.

One slightly less earth-shattering event was the development of search-engine optimization, or SEO, which has come to define search-engine rankings—and in turn, what content internet users encounter—since not long after the first search engines did.

But SEO is now, in turn, being affected by another landmark event: the debut of generative AI. Since 

 exploded last year, marketers are finding new ways to assist their clients’ sites’ search rankings using generative AI, whether that’s through content creation or internal linking protocols.

“There has been, for the past 15, 20, [or] more years, the ongoing, never-ending arms race between SEO optimizers and search engines,” George Strakhov, EMEA chief strategy officer at DDB and the founder of the company’s “hybrid creativity lab,” RANDDDB, said. “In content production, AI is just a very powerful weapon that was added to this arms race on the side of the SEO people.”

With that said, there’s a real possibility for things to get messy: “It does have the potential to be the final weapon that makes traditional search completely unusable,” Strakov told us.

For years, SEO marketers have worked to optimize the content on their clients’ websites in hopes that they will rank high in search results and more users will see them. Now, they’re leveraging generative AI tools to help do that work.

 is being used to help generate content for clients’ websites, which can help search-engine rankings, Joe Stoffel, SEO director at Marcel Digital, told Marketing Brew. Marcel Digital works to match the style and tone of content to clients by feeding client information to generative AI apps like ChatGPT, which it uses to help generate tailored content ideas. Marcel then leans on subject-matter experts to help fact-check and refine the AI-generated output, he said.

“We're most heavily using it coming up with new topic ideas, but also doing then 60% or 70% of that heavy lifting on actual client content creation,” Stoffel told us.

Stoffel mentioned one client that saw a 555% YoY increase in traffic to a certain section of its site for the last three months after Marcel used generative AI to help retool it.

Stoffel said that before, the company “was not producing informative resource content” for its website, something, he said, that can help with organic search-engine rankings. “A big focus of ours over the last year has been working with them to do the heavy lifting. With this AI content, you get more of this resource information onto their website,” he said.

Generative AI can also help augment clients’ sites’ internal linking protocols, he said, which can also impact sites’ SEO rankings. Marcel uses the web crawler Screaming Frog along with ChatGPT to audit and map the internal linking of a site, which helps uncover potential linking deficiencies, Stoffel said; ChatGPT can then generate recommendations on where to place internal links.

Marcel isn’t the only agency using generative AI to help clients create online content that could help their search-engine rankings. DDB built a customized generative AI tool for an airline client to help its internal copywriters create travel articles, Strakhov said. The 

 trained the tool on thousands of pieces of copywriting material and built a web-based interface that allows airline copywriters to specify details including word count and geographic destination; the tool spits out a first draft in the brand’s voice.

“Their department that is in charge of SEO is much more productive because they go ahead and go to the interface and say, ‘Give me the first draft for an article about the South China Sea,’” he said.

Some agencies are using generative AI to more closely target customers as a way to drive traffic to client sites. Marcel uses ChatGPT to help generate website metadata as well as help draft calls-to-action that are tailored to the needs and pain points of certain “target personas,” Stoffel said.

At the marketing agency TriComB2B, staff are leveraging Google’s AI tools to help target customers with the goal of driving website traffic, according to Andrew Humphrey, the agency’s senior director of media strategy. He said that feeding analytics data from a client’s site into Google’s AI-powered ad tools can help target users who could be more likely to click on the client’s site and buy the client’s products, he told Marketing Brew.

“Not everybody who’s searching the same keyword, for instance, is going to be likely to buy,” Humphrey said. “I’m telling Google, ‘Yeah, this is the keyword I want to target, but also of them, if there’s 100 people also searching for that one keyword, who are the 10 of them most likely to make a purchase on my website?’”

As agencies are finding diverse ways to employ generative 

 in SEO marketing, they are also erecting different safety guardrails. Stoffel said that his team anonymizes customer information and client data before feeding it into ChatGPT Team, a workplace version of the popular tool. At TriComB2B, any unpublished client materials will not be fed into a generative AI program, Humphrey said. And at DDB, while generative AI can be used to create drafts, it can’t be used to generate final output, Strakhov told Marketing Brew.

“There is always a human looking at those drafts, editing them, and sometimes completely rewriting [or] regenerating them,” he said.

A robot arm reaching out and touching a screen displaying a web browser

Generative AI is already transforming SEO marketing efforts

“AI is just a very powerful weapon that was added to this arms race” between search engines and SEO efforts, one agency exec said.

Get ready: Generative AI is already transforming SEO marketing efforts 

It’s been over a year since ChatGPT first rolled out, and while constantly hearing the phrase “generative AI” has been really a(i)nnoying, there’s no doubt the technology has transformed the world. It was one of the 

 earlier this year, and SXSW has a dedicated track for the tech.

When something’s trendy, marketers tend to take notice, and we spoke to execs at several agencies about how they have taken ChatGPT and other generative AI tools into their own hands. They told Marketing Brew that, so far, adland has found unique ways to incorporate generative AI into workflows while working to ensure there is still a human touch, all while 

 alike weigh potential restrictions on the tech.

For independent shop Billion Dollar Boy, generative AI has been useful in influencer marketing. The agency set up Muse, an emerging tech arm to help leverage AI for influencer content creation for clients, Thomas Walters, Billion Dollar Boy’s founder and its European CEO, told us. Muse, which has worked with AI artists like Jo Ann and Elmo Mistiaen on brand campaigns, has also worked with brands including Lipton Iced Tea and Versace, Walters said.

“[It’s] really at the bleeding edge of advertising,” he said.

Internally, the agency is interrogating ways to use AI to optimize work, Walters said. BDB set up a taskforce made up of folks across its departments, from leadership to business affairs, to identify workflow problems and figure out how to solve them using AI tools, Walters said. For example, after realizing the agency’s staff was spending a lot of time manually performing due diligence checks on influencers, the agency created a tool it built using ChatGPT that evaluates influencers’ posts and applies a “risk rating.”

Maxime Rozencwajg, senior account director at BDB, said that the agency spent months experimenting with ChatGPT and other AI with artists and clients. Through its trial-and-error process, the agency and its legal team have built out a framework for AI that aims to “protect our clients as much as possible,” Rozencwajg said. “But we don’t have all the answers yet. No one has.”

At independent agency Gut, a generative AI tool built off ChatGPT is being trained to be “promptless,” meaning that the tool can process data to the extent that it can then create 

 data by combining sources, Christian Pierre, chief intelligence officer and partner at Gut, told Marketing Brew.

What data points could be included in such work? They’re “randomized…[and] based on science and culture and history,” Pierre said. One data point the agency fed into the AI was a project that Gut’s São Paulo office 

 with Brazilian tech company QuintoAndar, that was designed to raise awareness of ways to help fight dengue, a viral mosquito-borne illness. This example was fed into Gut’s ChatGPT model, so it could potentially output similar ideas in the future, Pierre said.

Gut also trained ChatGPT to cross-reference data with an 

 from OpenAI competitor Anthropic, Claude. Gut also utilizes other AI tools, including Bard, Entropy, and Stable Diffusion, Pierre told us.

Besides building promptless AI, Gut is also investing in AI personas. The agency is working on six different personas, which are designed to model people in different life stages and backgrounds, Pierre told us, with the idea that brands can solicit input and advice from the personas based on the demographics the brand is targeting.

“It’s kind of [like] having a focus group on standby,” he said.

Gut requires that all AI-generated content be checked by a human staffer, Pierre said, and before AI is used at the agency, its usage is voted on and agreed upon.

“Generative AI today can solve routine tasks and things like that…but it cannot solve what a human can do: Use that data to do something that will resonate with people,” he said.

Gut isn’t the only agency setting boundaries around AI usage. Independent shop Mischief @ No Fixed Address’s VP of creative technology, Darrin Patey, told Marketing Brew that the agency is already setting boundaries around AI, sometimes with help from other companies: Mischief has been working with companies like Shutterstock on ethical attribution and AI artist compensation.

“They figured out a way to handle attribution and make sure artists are getting some sort of compensation for their work,” he told us.

Mischief has also diversified its use of AI instead of only relying on ChatGPT, employing Waldo and Jasper. While Waldo is a research tool, Jasper can be used to help create social media posts or reformat content, he said. At Mischief, AI is usually only used to generate internal materials, like imagery for a deck, rather than for public-facing content. Human refinement of AI output has become even more critical after Patey said that in some cases, “we were catching made-up attributions.”

“It really puts a huge emphasis on hygiene,” Patey said. “We’re double-checking everything that we see.”

An AI robot robot sitting side by side with a businessman at an office desk working

Marketing agencies break down how they use ChatGPT and generative AI

Billion Dollar Boy, Gut, and Mischief are focused on ensuring that work powered by the tech retains a human touch. 

Agencies break down how they’ve made ChatGPT and generative AI their own

Sure, people see a lot of ads, but are any of them paying attention?

In recent years, advertisers have tried to answer that question, investing in measurement tools that go beyond the industry’s typical standard of viewability and impressions, which track whether ads actually appeared and whether anyone saw them.

Lumen Research, Adelaide, Playground XYZ, and others have worked with companies like AB InBev, Coca-Cola, Mars, Kia, and HP to embed digital campaigns with something called attention metrics, which aim to measure the *jazz hands* quality of the media that advertisers are buying by combining eye-tracking data with web-page layout information.

The growth in attention metrics in the adtech space is likely the result of two somewhat contrasting trends in the industry. First, according to experts we spoke to, advertisers are tracking their dollars more diligently and evaluating impressions to ensure there’s a return on investment, and second, the tightening privacy landscape means that traditional attribution models (aka the fancy math that ties a customer’s online journey with behavior and purchases) are becoming less reliable as there’s simply less consumer data available for those models to use.

“As we lose the ability to track individual consumer actions…it comes down to media quality,” Ed McElvain, EVP of digital platforms and data-driven media at Mediahub, told Marketing Brew. “Attention is one of those quality signals we have considerable confidence in.”

Though there are some subtle differences in the methodologies they use, most attention metrics are grounded in eye-tracking data, which is pulled from panels and studies. That data is then applied to the geometry of a web page to determine where ads appear, their size, and how they fit alongside the page’s other content.

Those metrics can point out the obvious conclusions—bigger ads tend to get more attention than smaller ones, and a heavy ad load can distract consumers and hurt attention.

Attention metrics can also provide surprising insights, like, McElvain said, the fact that “leaderboard” banner ads at the top of websites don’t get as much attention as advertisers had previously thought, because “everybody knows that’s going to be there, [and] nobody’s looking at it.”

One of the “big learnings” from attention metrics, is that “there’s gold beneath the fold,” Mike Follett, CEO of Lumen Research, told Marketing Brew. “When people are reading articles and really deeply engaging with the content, as they scroll down the article, that’s when they notice the ads more,” he said. In other words, high-quality content can mean higher attention.

Lumen’s attention metric can be applied post-bid to programmatic buys to estimate the audience a campaign got, and it can also be used to understand how effective ad placements are on a publisher’s site. “You’ve got a million ads: 500,000 were in view, but only 100,000 got looked at, that sort of thing,” Follett explained.

The metric can also be applied pre-bid using whitelists or custom algorithms designed to programmatically bid on high-attention inventory, he said.

Interest in the tech appears to be growing among DSPs, and companies like Lumen and Adelaide are integrated with programmatic partners like Amazon and the Trade Desk to allow advertisers to use attention metrics to influence bids if they want to.

Crucially, though, attention can’t be—and isn’t—everything, Marc Guldimann, the founder and CEO of Adelaide, told us. If a campaign is optimized solely on the basis of attention, it could “create incentives” that lead to targeting slower readers (like older audiences or even drunk audiences), he explained.

Ultimately, he said, attention metrics should be one of many considerations in a broader marketing strategy.

“The amount of attention you pay to something is an outcome of the quality of the media, the creative, and the audience,” he said. “The outcome that advertisers should be focused on is the amount of sales they get, and they should be using attention as an input.”

A human eye surrounded by abstract data visualizations

Why advertisers are excited about attention metrics

The signals, which aim to quantify the quality of ad placements, have attracted interest from companies like Amazon and The Trade Desk.

Alyssa Meyers

It’s been more than two years since the first NIL deals went live, but some marketers still see the space as the “wild West,” as a few sports attorneys and marketers put it.

Maybe that’s because the legal framework for NIL is 

: “The landscape was shifting as we learned it,” as Ibotta CMO Richard Donahue put it. NIL rules also differ state to state, and brands can’t work directly with schools to facilitate deals with athletes (although that 

“It’s a space that a lot of people are interested in, but at the same time, traditional marketers may still be a little bit cautious, unsure of what the rules are, how to navigate [them]...once they hear ‘state-by-state rules,’ a lot of national advertisers kind of turn off,” Jim Johnston, sports and entertainment attorney at Davis+Gilbert, told Marketing Brew.

Still, many brands have taken advantage of NIL—an NCAA rule that lets student athletes profit off of their name, image, and likeness—over the past few years. Companies ranging from 

 have crafted campaigns centered on college athletes. As Johnston said, “the hurdles are not as significant” as some marketers might expect.

For those who might just be getting acquainted with student athletes, NIL experts advise keeping a few best practices in mind to avoid a false start.

Some marketers might want to revisit their school days before doing NIL deals: “My first advice is always do your homework on that particular student athlete,” Ricardo Jackman, chair of the sports and entertainment practice at law firm Morris, Manning & Martin, said. That could involve scrolling through their social media profiles, a formal interview, or even asking for references in cases where student athletes have prior NIL experience, he said.

“Instagram is an athlete’s résumé,” Jason Bergman, co-founder and CEO of NIL marketplace MarketPryce, said. “We tell student athletes all the time: ‘That’s what brands are going to go look at no matter what.’”

That homework also involves getting up to speed on the latest school, state, and NCAA regulations. For instance, brands and student athletes aren’t allowed to use “school emblems” in their campaigns, Jackman said, since those are trademarked by the schools and not included with NIL deals.

When marketers are working on NIL deals, different state and NIL rules can impact what a brand is able to do, and it is “worth being aware of how that might impact what they’re asking for,” Michael Isselin, partner in the entertainment and media group at law firm Reed Smith, said. By and large, though, lawyers we spoke to agreed brands likely don’t have to change their NIL approaches from state-to-state, as legislation tends to have similarities across state lines.

Once brands shake hands with student athletes, it’s best to be upfront and clear about specific goals, NIL experts said. “Not a lot of brands do that,” Bergman said. That’s perhaps because some have approached their work with student athletes the same way they would an influencer campaign, Isselin said, despite the fact that they often 

“I don’t think that an advertiser or brand should be necessarily tasked with educating the student athletes that they’re engaging [with], but don’t set anybody up for failure,” Isselin said.

“Student athletes are amazing at following directions,” Bergman said, so clear campaign objectives could go a long way. Jackman advised marketers to provide one-sheets that “set the terms and expectations of what you want,” including any details like hashtags that need to be included in posts, the numbers of posts required, and whether posts must be preapproved.

There is one thing that marketers might not want to be too specific about: posting schedules. Student athletes are particularly busy, especially when they’re in season, according to Danny Morrissey, co-founder of college sports marketing and branding agency Postgame, so brands should be flexible.

 the most popular for NIL deals, but several NIL experts said marketers would be remiss if they weren’t also flexible with the roster of student athletes they’re open to working with.

“This isn’t to say football players don’t take partnerships seriously, but we see a lot of care and commitment from athletes that maybe aren’t used to receiving dozens of deals a month or a week,” Sam Weber, head of brand marketing and communications for NIL platform Opendorse, said.

Ibotta did a deal with UConn basketball star Paige Bueckers this summer as part of its first foray into the world of NIL, according to Donahue. It went well enough that the cash-back app started a program last month that lets any college athlete who refers their followers to Ibotta make money.

Kate Jungers, group account director at marketing agency Intersport, which developed 7-Eleven’s first formal NIL program, said brands should have multiple conversations and keep an open mind. “Sometimes you build a list of target athletes, and then you go have some conversations and realize there may be other, better fits out there,” she said.

For instance, even within the world of football, a freshman may be a better fit than a senior, according to Jackman. They’re likely more affordable at that stage of their career, he said, and have the potential to become “a megastar” in another year or two.

Then, there’s the chance they go on to professional fame. While NIL deals don’t extend beyond college, Johnston pointed out that some have re-signed athletes once they’ve 

“What if they become an Olympian?” Jackman said. “You may still be able to have that reach in that relationship, and they’ll still want to do business with you.”

Sydney McLaughlin of Team United States competes in the Women's 400m Hurdles Final on day eight of the World Athletics Championships 

Back to school: Lessons in NIL for marketers new to the space

The legal landscape for name, image, and likeness rules is still changing, but “the hurdles are not as significant” as some might expect, one sports attorney said.