At Least 70% of Student-Athletes Are Making a Serious Mistake
Northwestern Head Football Coach Pat Fitzgerald said in a recent interview about Name, Image, and Likeness, “If we focus on education, this thing will all kind of work itself out.” I couldn’t agree more which is why I created the NIL On-Demand 2021 Course which you can read about here. Until we educate all student-athletes, mistakes will be made. The most common error that student-athletes are making is not following the Federal Trade Commission’s regulations for social media influencers. It’s actually a pretty big deal, but it’s also pretty easily correctable. See Steps 1-3 below.
#1 EducatE SA’s About the FTC
Student-athletes who participate in any social media-related NIL activities are obligated to follow Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules. I’m not talking about an institution’s policy or the NCAA/NAIA rules. I’m talking about federal government regulations. The FTC’s mission is to protect consumers. And in that role, they have developed Endorsement Guides to help endorsers (now including student-athletes) to stop deceptive ads.
Failure of student-athletes to disclose their relationship with a sponsor puts the student-athletes in danger of what the FTC has described as their “crackdown” and can result in financial and other penalties.
72% of student-athletes don’t know what the Federal Trade Commission (or “FTC”) does relative to NIL*. 84% of student-athletes say they have never heard of the FTC’s Endorsement Guides*. In an audit I completed of close to 200 student-athletes who’d posted on social media on behalf of brands between July 10 - August 10, over 70% didn’t disclose their sponsor relationship.
[*Survey results from a July 2021 study of 1,050 current-student athletes in NCAA DI, II, III, and NAIA.]
#2 GUIDE STUDENT-ATHLETES TO FOLLOW THESE Four Rules
The FTC’s rules for social media influencers are straightforward and I’ve summarized them here:
Student-Athletes cannot talk about their experience with a product unless they actually have experience with it
Student-Athletes cannot make statements about a sponsor’s product or service that is not their honest belief
Student-Athletes cannot make statements about a sponsor’s product that the sponsor cannot prove
Student-Athletes must always disclose that they have a relationship with the sponsor so that people can weigh the value of their endorsement
Click image for pricing or request Free Trial Access to NIL ON-DEMAND 2021.
An on-demand course for student-athletes of 15 lessons, 90 minutes of video, and 95 downloadable slides & worksheets on NIL Rules, Personal Branding, and Student-Athlete Entrepreneurship. Access as an affordable Athletic Department-wide license for about $6 per student-athlete.
#3 Disclosures: Make It Hard to Miss…and Take Responsibility
Disclosure sounds like a simple concept, but many student-athletes are working with smaller, local companies that don’t have any experience in this area either. (I’m not seeing as many mistakes by student-athletes working with larger companies because those companies have experience and a structure to support this kind of marketing.) Here’s a brief summary of what a student-athlete should do to disclose:
The #1 rule for student-athletes is to make their relationship with the brand hard to miss! (Disclosures should be made with the endorsement message itself and not in an ABOUT ME, MORE or at the end of a post or video)
Student-Athletes should use language that thanks the sponsor or uses terms like “advertisement,” “ad,” or “sponsored”
It’s good to use hashtags like #ad or #sponsored, but it’s not an FTC requirement
If an endorsement is in a picture on Snapchat or Instagram Stories, it should superimposed over the picture
If the endorsement is in a video, the disclosure should be in the actual video and not just in the written description of the video
If making an endorsement during a live stream, the disclosure should be repeated multiple times so that viewers who only see part of the stream will see it
On Twitter, where space is limited, use the terms “Partner” or “Ambassador” right after the name of the sponsor
Finally, student-athletes should not be vague or abbreviate terms so that they become unrecognizable (using “sp” or “spon” as an abbreviation for “sponsorship” is not acceptable)