Welcome to Chase Griffin’s NIL World
By Les Morris
Jan. 9th, 2023 - As we head, incredibly, into the fourth calendar year of the NIL era, I can’t think of a better person to touch base with than Chase Griffin. If you follow NIL, you know Chase Griffin.
A highly decorated quarterback from Hutto, Texas, he is a quarterback at UCLA. It takes a lot of hard work and talent to earn a scholarship at a Power 4 school like UCLA, but I’d submit his gridiron skills have become the least impressive part of his time in Westwood. He has struggled for playing time behind superstar Dorian Thompson-Robinson now with the Cleveland Browns and freshman phenom Dante Moore.
But he is a superstar in the classroom. This guy hoards college degrees like other folks collect cell phones. He is working on his third UCLA degree, a master’s in legal studies, which he expects to collect this spring to complement his undergraduate degree in public affairs (earned in 2 ¼ years) and master’s in education. His plans are to come back for one more year with the Bruins football team and one more degree.
And he’s a superstar on the NIL front, too. He is a winner of the national NIL Male Athlete of the Year Award at the INFLCR NIL Summit and has received UCLA honors such as the Chancellor’s Service Award. Bloomberg profiled his entrepreneurship skills in a 30-minute documentary.
He has worked with 25 to 30 brands on NIL activations, and they’re brands with which you’re familiar, not Joe’s Surf Shop in Hermosa Beach – companies such as JP Morgan Chase, Whole Foods, Dunkin, LegalZoom, Degree deodorant, and Boost Mobile.
How does he do it?
He credits increasing social media follower engagement and most crucially, the quality of his content as the keys to his NIL success.
“Making sure,” he says, “that every single piece of content I submit to brands is something that that brand, if they had created within their own marketing department, would feel reached their KPI’s (key performance indicators).”
He has definitely seen a change in the market.
“I think the brands that invested in the space early and saw early success but also saw how they could better maximize the output and ROI of those brand deals are seeing more sophistication. There have been a couple of brands in particular, a couple I work with, that have been able to continue their marketing deployment of NIL.”
He cites the apparel retailer American Eagle, where he was a holiday ambassador, as one of those brands.
“Earlier on,” he says, “they focused on certain revenue generating sports. Over time, they shifted to more niche audiences that fit the consumers of American Eagle. They found that working with athletes who focused on content creation and focused on pairing their following with what American Eagle is about delivered better return on investment.”
Craig Brommers, chief marketing officer for American Eagle, appeared on Griffin’s most recent edition of his podcast (yes, he does that too) called “The Athlete’s Bureau” and cited research he had seen which indicated sports remains the leading passion point for the Gen Z generation, which are his company’s customers. Passion is great but Brommers works for a public company and its shareholders expect positive returns.
“And the reality,” Brommers told Griffin, “is college sports has allowed us to drive business results. And as long as it continues to do that, we will continue to invest in it.”
Philanthropies also benefit from Chase’s myriad NIL efforts. He has established the Chase Griffin Foundation, and it has benefited several philanthropic partners including, notably, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, where he pledged $11 (his jersey number) for every point the Bruins scored this fall (344 points), to the organization’s Backpack program. This initiative began in 2006 and provides food to children over the weekend when they are away from school.
Griffin’s work with the food bank doesn’t stop there. He has also volunteered and toured the facility.
David May, the director of marketing and communications for the food bank says, “Not only do Chase’s contributions make a big difference but raising awareness and using his platform helps as well.”
Griffin thinks revenue sharing is on the near-term horizon, coming as soon as two years. He says, “Now when I think of NIL, I think of what it is turning into, and it is that it’s the first stop on the way to revenue share and that’s where a lot of my focus is now.”
Griffin has prodigious marketing and entrepreneurship skills so you can bet that whatever form student-athlete competition takes in the future, he will be at the head of the class. NIL has plenty of detractors but for someone like Griffin, there can be no denying it has set him up for a lifetime of business success.
