NIL Deals Have a Visibility Problem

The big picture

Morning Consult found that fewer than 1 in 5 U.S. adults have seen, read, or heard about most major Division I NIL deals — and similarly low shares have ever purchased a product or felt more positively about a brand because of one. That should alarm everyone in this ecosystem.

Why it matters

An important clarification first: we're talking about genuine NIL — real brand-athlete partnerships where a company pays a student-athlete to help sell a product or tell a brand story. Not synthetic NIL — the revenue-sharing payments, collective-funded deals, and manufactured arrangements that are really roster management dressed up in marketing language. Genuine NIL is the part of this ecosystem that has to actually work like marketing. And right now, it's largely invisible.

Pro sports endorsements have driven consumer behavior for a century. The machinery behind those deals — creative strategy, media placement, long-term storytelling — made them visible and valuable. Genuine NIL deals, by comparison, aren't breaking through. Invisible deals don't deliver ROI. Without ROI, brand dollars dry up. Without brand dollars, the only NIL left is the synthetic kind — and an ecosystem built entirely on synthetic NIL isn't a marketing channel. It's a payroll system.

The good news: Morning Consult's data shows NIL awareness and purchase intent are notably higher among Gen Z and Millennials. The audience is there. The problem is activation.

Between the lines

Everyone in the ecosystem shares responsibility. Agents need to stop over-promising on deals they have no plan to activate. Athletes need stronger content skills — when 85% of NIL deals involve social media, they're content creators whether they signed up for that or not. Universities need to treat NIL education like the living, breathing thing it is — not a one-time orientation module from 2022 but consistent, updated programming that evolves monthly as the rules, platforms, and best practices change beneath everyone's feet.

But the biggest improvements need to come from brands.

Here's the paradox: college athletes are outperforming traditional influencers on every platform. Student-Athletes generate better engagement on Instagram and TikTok compared to non-athlete influencers. The raw material is better than what brands are used to working with in the creator economy. So why isn't it translating to consumer awareness?

Because most brands are stopping at athlete selection and skipping activation entirely.

A pro sports endorsement gets a creative brief, a production budget, a media plan, and a measurement framework. A typical genuine NIL deal gets a DM and a deliverables list. That's not a partnership. That's an assignment.

Morning Consult itself flagged a possible culprit: oversaturation. Because athletes were locked out of marketing for so long, brands flooded the space all at once — and without activation strategies, the noise drowned out the signal. More deals didn't create more visibility. It created more clutter.

The fix isn't complicated. It's the same activation muscle brands already use everywhere else: develop a creative concept that plays to the athlete's authentic voice, build content across multiple touchpoints rather than a single social post, amplify it with paid media so it reaches audiences beyond the athlete's organic following, and measure against real KPIs — not just impressions but click-through, sentiment, and purchase intent.

The brands doing this well are seeing results. Beverage companies and tech brands that invested in long-term, storytelling-rich partnerships saw NIL deal volume grow 19% and 29% year-over-year respectively, according to SponsorUnited. The brands treating genuine NIL like a coupon code on an Instagram story are the reason fewer than 1 in 5 Americans notice.

The bottom line

The Morning Consult data isn't an indictment of genuine NIL. It's a wake-up call. The audience — especially younger consumers — is there. The infrastructure isn't. Agents, athletes, and universities all have work to do, but brands hold the biggest lever. They have the creative teams, the media strategists, and a century of playbooks proving that athlete partnerships work when you invest beyond the signing. It's time to bring that same muscle to genuine NIL — before the only deals left are the synthetic ones.

About Bill Carter

Bill has advised brands on Name, Image, Likeness for 25 years—first in pro sports, now at the college level. He was the Co-Founder of the Gen Z sports agency Fuse, which he sold in 2019. In 2020, he founded Student-Athlete Insights and consults on NIL strategy with Fortune 500 companies and 30+ DI universities. Read more about Student-Athlete Insights.

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