Scoring in a New Field : The NFL Is Playing Catch-Up on Product Endorsements

There’s something that basketball stars Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal can do that drives National Football League players bananas.

Score corporate sponsorships.

Until now, few NFL players--hidden under hardened helmets and forced to share TV time with hulking teammates--have been able to attract big endorsement dollars. Joe Namath and William (Refrigerator) Perry had their day. And Joe Montana, who pulled in about $6 million last year for product endorsements, is hoofing it for LA Gear. But Montana’s endorsement earnings aren’t in the same stratosphere with Jordan’s, which exceeded $30 million last year.

With the football season just two weeks old, it appears things might be changing. NFL attendance and television income has become stagnant, and team owners have realized there’s only one place to turn to increase revenues: merchandising and licensing. And the best thing to merchandise is something they have basically ignored for years: the players.

“The owners all know that the only place left to grow is in the areas of sponsorships, merchandising and licensing,” said Brian J. Murphy, publisher of the Westport, Conn.-based Sports Marketing Letter. “If they don’t grow there, the day will come when there’s no more professional football.”

The NFL is chasing after promotional dollars from all angles. Taking a cue from the National Basketball Assn., it has adopted a marketing strategy that puts the league in the background and the players’ personalities in the foreground. As a result, big-name advertisers, including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Frito-Lay, are featuring NFL stars in their TV spots and promotions.

“It’s a real departure from the past,” said Alan Friedman, publisher of Team Marketing Report, a Chicago-based newsletter. The league placed such little importance on the athletes themselves that during a players strike several years ago, the league brought in replacement players, essentially saying the game was bigger than its stars. “Now it’s as if they’re admitting the players are bigger than the game,” he said.

Since last season, Frito-Lay has been running spots featuring a number of NFL stars--mostly quarterbacks--including Boomer Esiason, John Elway and Troy Aikman. In the ads, the players all end up with shaved heads after losing bets that they can’t eat just one Lay’s potato chip.

Sales of the brand have increased “double-digit” since the campaign began, said Randy Gier, brand director of potato chips at Frito-Lay.

McDonald’s is also--for the first time--running a national campaign in conjunction with the NFL. The campaign, “McDonald’s Kickoff Payoff,” features NFL-related prizes, from trading cards to team season tickets.

“The NFL is very important to key groups of our customers,” said Jackie Woodward, senior manager of sports marketing at McDonald’s.

In a few weeks, McDonald’s will air a national ad campaign featuring Miami Dolphins kicker Pete Stoyanovich matching field goal kicking skills against Washington Redskin Chip Lohmiller. It will be a football version of last year’s popular basketball TV spot that featured Michael Jordan shooting increasingly exaggerated shots against Larry Bird.

Behind-the-scenes collective-bargaining settlements between owners and players during the off season have helped make NFL players more accessible to advertisers.

“A number of companies didn’t want to get in the middle of a battle between team owners and players,” said Pat Allen, director of licensing for the NFL Players Assn. Now, she said, “they don’t have to worry about that” because the courtroom battles are at least temporarily over.

NFL sponsors are “much more comfortable with us in this environment,” said Brian Hughes, vice president of corporate sponsorships for NFL Properties, the league’s licensing arm.

Product licensing--in which merchandisers pay the league a set fee in order to use team names, logos and images on everything from trading cards to wristwatches--may be the NFL’s golden egg.

Income from product licensing has grown steadily over the last decade. By one estimate, NFL team owners split licensing royalties exceeding $110 million last year.

Meanwhile, the licensing group at the NFL Players Assn., which represents 1,500 active NFL players and 1,000 retired football stars, reports that the number of product licensees it has signed up over the last year has grown to more than 70--compared to about 30 last year.

Among the NFL’s new licensees for this season is Sega, with a new computer game featuring NFL players. And Kenner Toys--which stepped back last season--is returning this year with plastic NFL figurines.

“The NFL has gotten a lot more aggressive about marketing itself,” said Frito-Lay’s Gier. “The NBA may have led the charge, but the NFL went to school and is catching up fast.”

Briefly . . .

New Zealand agency Colenso Communications was the big 1993 Clio Awards winner Monday, receiving three awards, including Best of Show. Eight Southern California agencies were also honored, led by Dektor Higgins & Associates of Hollywood and Team One Advertising of El Segundo, which received three awards each. Other area winners included Aspect Ratio of Hollywood; BBDO of Los Angeles; Gartner of Los Angeles; La Agencia de Orci & Asociados of Los Angeles, and Sarley, Bigg & Bedder of Hollywood. A radio spot created by Larsen Colby of Los Angeles earned the nonprofit group Greenpeace a $10,000 donation from the awards organization. . . . The $1-million account for the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority, formerly handled by Santa Monica-based Suissa Miller Advertising, has been handed to the Reno office of Trahan, Burden & Charles. . . . The Newport Beach agency Clark & Westlund has been given the ad business for Newport Beach-based Yamaha Computer Based Products Group, a division of Yamaha Corp. of America. . . . Smith’s Food & Drug Centers, the Salt Lake City-based supermarket chain with 20 stores in Southern California, is launching its first Southern California TV ad campaign. . . . Trying to cash in on holiday gift buying, Coca-Cola will distribute a mail-order catalogue to 2 million consumers.

Product Sales Score Card

Football players may lag behind their basketball counterparts in endorsement fees, but the National Football League leads all professional sports in licensed product sales. The products--with team names or logos--range from bumper stickers for a few dollars to satin jackets that can cost several hundred dollars. Each $1 billion in sales is worth an estimated $100 million in royalties.

Licensed Product Sales (billions of dollars)

National Football League

1992: $2.6

Major League Baseball

1992: $2.4

National Basketball Assn.

1992: $1.8

National Hockey League

1992: $0.6

Sources: NFL, Major League Baseball, NBA, NHL, Sporting Goods Intelligence