Table of Contents
- Four names, one 30 second spot
- The math is production, not talent
- The biggest NIL program in the country pays everyone the same
- Volume advertising is a different business entirely
- The local commercial never stopped working
- Somebody is building the fix
- What it means for everyone else
We wrote recently about food NIL and how it scales down. A restaurant three blocks from campus doesn’t need a Heisman finalist, so the deals reach the middle of the roster in a way almost nothing else does.
Advertising is the mirror image.
It’s the category where NIL money concentrates hardest, where the shortlist is genuinely short, and where a handful of athletes take a share of the spend that looks nothing like the size of the population. Which makes it worth understanding, because the exceptions inside the category are where the interesting things are happening.
Four names, one 30 second spot
Powerade’s most recent “It Takes More” campaign, its third season, was built around a roster of four: Garrett Nussmeier at LSU, Sam Leavitt at Arizona State, Xavier Nwankpa at Iowa and Nate Frazier at Georgia. All four were top 2026 NFL Draft prospects. The spot ran 30 seconds and built around what drives each of them.
Leavitt is at LSU now. That is worth pausing on, because it is the other cost of casting a commercial around draft stock: the roster you signed in the fall is not necessarily the roster you have in the spring, and a national spot is an expensive thing to attach to a player who might be somewhere else by the time it finishes running.
The season before had the same shape with different names, including Carson Beck, Zachariah Branch, Patrick Payton and Kaleb Johnson. Draft stock, then draft stock again.
BODYARMOR did something similar returning as the official NCAA sports drink, putting LSU’s Flau’jae Johnson in national spots that debuted on Selection Sunday, alongside NBA guard Jalen Brunson. And Nike’s July signing spree shows where the endorsement money actually sits: the brand reportedly carries 58 college football players on NIL deals nationally, 40 of them at SEC schools, with eleven at LSU alone.
None of this is a criticism. It’s just what casting a commercial is. You need a face, faces are singular, and the list of college athletes a national audience recognizes on sight is not long.
The math is production, not talent
Here’s why it works this way, and it isn’t about who deserves it.
A 30 second spot costs roughly the same to make whether the person on camera has a million followers or four thousand. Crew, director, location, edit, music, and then the media buy behind it, which is usually the largest number on the invoice by a wide margin. All of that is fixed before anyone gets cast.
The only lever that changes the return is how many people already know the person on screen. So the spend collapses toward the top, for the same reason luxury NIL does. When your fixed costs are enormous, you need reach to justify them, and reach lives with the stars.
A restaurant is running the opposite equation, which is exactly why food NIL spreads out and advertising doesn’t.
The newest advertising surface in college sports follows the same logic. Jersey patch sponsorships put a logo directly on the uniform, which sounds like it should benefit everyone wearing one. It doesn’t. A patch is worth what the broadcast is worth, and the broadcast is worth what the program is worth, so the money lands at the same schools it always lands at.
The biggest NIL program in the country pays everyone the same
Then there’s EA Sports, which is the strangest and most important thing in this whole category.
When College Football 25 launched, every FBS athlete who opted in got $600 and a copy of the game. Not a negotiation. Not a tier. The same number for the projected first round pick and the third string long snapper, with no services expected in return and payment guaranteed regardless of how the game sold. More than 14,000 players opted in and over 11,000 likenesses made it into the game.
The game became the best selling sports title of all time in total dollars, and for College Football 26 EA more than doubled the rate to $1,500 per athlete. That put the company past $16.5 million in direct player payments, the largest single sport NIL commitment on record. A separate group, Pathway Sports & Entertainment, started buying video game rights on its own and paying $1,500 up front, which meant some players collected $3,000 for the same likeness.
There was still a marquee layer. Cover athletes and ambassadors got paid extra to promote the thing, and they were the ones on the trailers and at the launch events. But underneath them sat eleven thousand players getting an identical check, most of whom nobody was making a commercial about.
If that structure sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same one Chipotle used. A visible top and a very wide base, with the wide base doing the actual work. EA now leads every brand in the country in active NIL deals, at around 145.
Volume advertising is a different business entirely
The other exception isn’t really advertising in the traditional sense, and that’s the point.
Powerade has competed with Gatorade partly through volume, running 35 or more college athletes in a single push while Gatorade tends toward fewer, larger faces. Adidas announced fifteen female student athletes at once in New York, a roster that spanned soccer, volleyball, softball, tennis, track, gymnastics and basketball, and ran from Power conference programs down to Grambling State. Several were sophomores. Several were in sports that never see a national broadcast.
Nike Swim’s first NIL class did something similar from the other direction: eighteen athletes across swimming, diving and water polo, reaching UConn, San Jose State and San Diego State alongside Texas and Stanford. That class isn’t a bet on who becomes famous. It’s an attempt to own a category nobody else had claimed, and owning a category means covering the whole pool deck rather than one lane of it.
Push further and the numbers stop looking like advertising at all. The platform Launchpoint reports running C4 Energy across more than 4,000 athletes at 535 campuses, generating over 80 million views at a $1.62 CPM with no paid amplification behind it.
At that scale the athlete isn’t the face of the campaign. The athlete is the distribution. Nobody is casting anyone, because there’s no spot to cast for, and the fixed production cost that forces concentration simply isn’t there. That’s why a roster can be four thousand deep and still make sense on a spreadsheet.
The local commercial never stopped working
Underneath the national tier, regional advertisers have been quietly doing this the whole time, and credit unions have been the most committed of anyone.
Meritrust ran a connected TV and mobile video campaign across Kansas with Jalon Daniels at KU and Avery Johnson at Kansas State. Bank of Hawaii signed eight University of Hawai’i athletes at once. Neighbors Federal Credit Union in Baton Rouge signed LSU receiver Brian Thomas Jr., who had been a member with his family for years and had played at a high school where the credit union has a branch.
These deals put athletes in print ads, on billboards, in actual television commercials. They work because a local advertiser only needs recognition in one market, and in one market the bar for recognition is a lot lower than it is on Selection Sunday.
We went deeper on this in Why Credit Unions Are Going All In on NIL Deals.
Somebody is building the fix
The industry has noticed the problem and started building for it.
This week Publicis Sports launched Tekta, a name, image and likeness business designed to help brands pick athletes and schools, structure the deals, and measure what comes of them. Travis Kelce is advising, and the talent firm that represents him is the strategic operating partner. Publicis also picked up the sports agency 160over90 from WME’s parent earlier this year, so the agency side of this is consolidating quickly.
The reasoning behind it is worth reading closely. Publicis Sports chief executive Suzy Deering told the Wall Street Journal that some brands have already run into repeated obstacles in NIL, while others are waiting on the sidelines because they cannot work out how to enter at all. Marketers, she said, often end up choosing talent based on how well a particular agent happens to be doing their job, then have no dependable way to monitor or measure the result, because the whole thing was assembled piecemeal and never quite matched the strategy underneath it.
That is an accurate description of the problem, and the money justifies solving it. Opendorse projects college NIL spending will reach $4.5 billion in the 2026-27 season, up from $3.6 billion the year before. Sums like that attract infrastructure.
But notice which way the infrastructure points. Publicis Sports sharpens the brand’s strategy, then hands it to Tekta to go and identify athletes and schools that fit those objectives. It starts from what the brand wants and searches outward from there. That is exactly how you should run a campaign. It is also why it will keep arriving at the same names, just faster now, and with better reporting attached.
What it means for everyone else
Every version of advertising NIL has a floor, including the generous ones.
EA covers 136 FBS schools, which is football, at the largest programs, and nothing else. The big marketplaces verify around 20,000 athletes. The local credit union covers one campus and usually a couple of names on it. Almost none of this reaches most athletes.
There are roughly half a million college athletes in this country.
The D2 volleyball player who is genuinely beloved on her campus is not going to be in a commercial. Not because she isn’t worth it, and not because any of these brands are wrong. It’s that no campaign structure exists that could find her, and building one to reach her would cost more than the campaign. A $4.5 billion market is about to get much better at searching, and it will still be searching for something else.
Fans don’t need a campaign structure. They already know who she is.
That’s the whole idea behind RallyFuel. No brand has to notice first. No agency has to make the call. No casting session, no shortlist, no media buy. Here’s how it works: 90% reaches the athlete, and every deal is refunded if its conditions are not met.
Q&A
Question: What is an advertising NIL deal? Short answer: A NIL deal where a brand pays a college athlete to appear in advertising, rather than to post on their own channels. That covers national television spots, streaming and connected TV, billboards, print, and increasingly the sponsor patch on the uniform. It is the most concentrated corner of NIL, because the cost of producing and running an ad does not change based on who is in it.
Question: Why do national NIL commercials go to the same few athletes? Short answer: Fixed costs. Crew, production, editing and the media buy are priced the same whether the athlete has a million followers or four thousand, and the only lever that improves the return is recognition. That pushes brands toward quarterbacks, draft prospects and Heisman contenders, which is why a campaign roster usually runs to four or five names.
Question: Which brand runs the largest NIL program in college sports? Short answer: EA Sports. Every FBS athlete who opts into the College Football game receives the same payment, raised from $600 to $1,500 for College Football 26, with more than 11,000 likenesses in the game and over $16.5 million in direct payments. It is the largest single sport NIL commitment on record, and the projected first rounder and the third string long snapper are paid identically.
Question: Do brands ever sign athletes outside the top tier? Short answer: Yes, when the economics change. Nike Swim’s first NIL class ran eighteen deep and reached mid-majors alongside Texas and Stanford. Adidas announced fifteen female athletes at once across seven sports. Creator programs go further still, running thousands of athletes at once, because there is no commercial to cast and no production cost forcing concentration.
Question: How much are brands spending on college NIL? Short answer: Opendorse projects college NIL spending will reach $4.5 billion in the 2026-27 season, up from $3.6 billion the year before. That scale is now attracting dedicated infrastructure, including Tekta, the NIL business launched by Publicis Sports with Travis Kelce advising.
Question: What about athletes who never get a brand deal? Short answer: They are the overwhelming majority. There are roughly half a million college athletes, and national advertising reaches a few hundred of them, concentrated in football at the largest programs. Local partnerships, school and collective arrangements, and direct fan support are the realistic routes for everyone else.
