Three patches, three stories, that was the message this past week as the Philadelphia 76ers, LA Lakers and Washington Capitals all found a niche in breaking some new, and additional, ground for brands looking to engage with teams at the big five leagues in North America.
On the historic side, you had the Capitals, who became the first NHL team to sell new real estate, the 3-inch by 3.5-inch sweater patch beginning with the 2022-23 season, and they did it with a triple pop, selling it to Caesars Entertainment only for their home jerseys (a rarity in the patch business) and becoming the first to expand the brand value category of sports gambling by now tying the Caesars brand directly to the front of an athlete uniform in North America (Eben Novy Williams at Sportico pointed out the irony of gambling kit sponsors going away in the gambling savvy UK market, while in the growing US market that uniform real estate is now open for business).
Then you had the L.A. Lakers bringing in what was reported to be one of the largest deals ever for a patch, and doing it with a new name, South Korean food line Bibigo — maker of dumplings, sauces, and frozen meals —a brand by the leading food company in South Korea, CJ CheilJedang. Bibigo takes the toe dip into North American sports marketing in a big way with big dollars as the Lakers look to bounce back with their usual national exposure for LeBron, AD and company as training camp starts this week.
Then you had the Sixers joining into the crypto game, taking on crypto.com s their patch sponsor and a growing brand partner as cryptocurrency continues to find ways to spend dollars to grow that category in sports business, one which didn’t exist a few years ago. While not the first, this summer, we saw the Portland Trail Blazers ink StormX as the first cryptocurrency patch sponsor, and MLB had one of the biggest spenders so far, FTX on umpires uniforms this Summer, it is still a signal of the vibrancy of the category (also rolling in the ability to use the platform to sell NFT’s) and the move away from NBA jersey patches being just an add on to a deal and now a larger part of new brand and category storytelling in sports. Crypto.com is a great example of that expansion, since it also has partnerships with Formula 1, UFC, French professional soccer team Paris Saint-Germain and the Montreal Canadiens in various forms.
What has become pretty clear since the 2017-18 NBA season when the NBA first allowed patches, coinciding with Nike becoming the league’s uniform and apparel maker, is that the brand story around the expensive buy has to be holistic. We saw early on disruptive brands like Bumble with the Clippers and Wish with the Lakers taking a shot at a lower cost, with little overall extensions tied to the spend on the patch. Those fell short and the patches circled back out to the marketplace. Now we have brands like Motorola with multiple NBA teams, and even patch deals that are coming into the marketplace have a much, much longer tail, and a higher price tag than ever before. We are also seeing variations of sales…the Caps selling just the home jersey, the Wizards, Wizards District Gaming, the G league Go-Go and the WNBA Mystics offering an overall basketball deal to a brand (the Nets were able to sell a similar deal on Monday)…that are also part of best practice learning and creativity. And as the North American leagues continue to be more global in engagement (don’t lose sight that the NFL is now opening up team-specific markets outside of the US for the first time for sale, and how could that play into a potential first-time patch deal in that league) we will see not just new names like the Lakers deal, but expanded categories tied to bigger ROI (gambling, gaming, health and wellness, Fintech) tied to all that new real estate.
All of that expansion, and that messaging, has to be tied to the storytelling of the deals, and this week we saw all three of the announcements do that well. The message…this is not just a patch, it’s a first ever (Capitals), it’s a new massive brand introduction to the US (Lakers) and it’s a next step signal of engagement in a category (Sixers) resonated well beyond the standard here is our new partner. The public, and the media, got to see the strategy with more than just buzz, and in this fast growing selling space of patches in North American sport, that story as part of a bigger picture, is becoming more and more critical. High process, high stakes, valued story.
All three needed to be able to patch together success, and three good examples from this week.
