Corporate logos are coming to NBA jerseys -- at least for one game.
After years of discussion, the NBA is floating a trial balloon, allowing its official car sponsor, Kia,
to put a logo patch on the upper left-hand corner of the All-Star Game
jerseys this season and the next. The Wall Street Journal first reported
the story.
The
deal is technically an ad buy, as Turner, in its latest TV deal
negotiations, asked the NBA if it would be willing to allow the network
to offer real estate on the game jersey to make an in-game advertising
buy more appealing and valuable. The NBA previously allowed sponsors of
its All-Star Saturday night shooting competitions to put their logos on
the uniforms of competing players. In 2011, league commissioner Adam
Silver, who was deputy commissioner at the time, said that logos on
jerseys could generate at least $100 million a year in revenue for the
league and its teams. But last year, Silver admitted that progress on
making such a deal had slowed because the league's TV partners were
concerned that a logo from a non-advertiser could undermine them.
Sources
say that there are no current parameters that suggest that all future
purchases of logos on patches have to come with TV ad buys, or that the
networks themselves would be responsible for selling the space. It is
likely, however, that the sale of logos on jerseys will never be the
free market that NBA executives once dreamed it would be.
First
of all, non-league and non-team sponsors will likely be knocked out of
the process. Secondly, the couple hundred million that jersey-logo sales
could generate pales in comparison to the numbers involved in the newly
negotiated TV deal. Last October, Turner and ESPN announced an
eight-year deal, which will kick in next season, that reportedly is
worth $24 billion. That's almost three times as much on a per-annum
basis as the current deal. The financial arrangement between Turner and
Kia was not disclosed.
WNBA
teams have had logos on jerseys since 2009 and, in recent times, the
corporate logos on those jerseys have appeared much bigger than the team
logo itself. That won't happen here, as most patches, if more are done,
are expected to fit into a 2.5 inch by 2.5 inch space.
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