OneTeam Partners: Athlete and Brand Amplification for the Cutting Edge Sports Marketer

Backed by founding partners NFL Players Association, MLB Players Association, and RedBird Capital, OneTeam Partners helps brands and athletes maximize opportunities across group licensing, athlete marketing, digital marketing, content, and gaming.

In this webinar, Grant Jones, Randy Domain, and Ben Ashbrook of OneTeam Partners join Joe Londergan of Front Office Sports to discuss the various ways OneTeam Partners helps find the right athletes, build audiences, promote and amplify content, and share custom analytics and insights to partners.

Edited highlights appear below:

On the athlete marketing arm of OneTeam Partners (5:25)

Domain: “What we know is that fans of athletes tend to follow them an average of 10 times more than they do the teams they play for and the leagues they play in. And so our objective is through a very one-stop shop service to provide brands that opportunity to come to us. We procure the players. We do it in a very authentic way. And so what we want to make sure is we want to find that brand, that athlete, that authentically meets that, or matches up with that athlete and brand. And then we create the platform for them to be able to tell the story through a number of different verticals that we represent.”

On keys to reaching an esports audience (12:44)

Ashbrook: “To speak to this audience, it’s all the more important to tell those authentic stories and be genuine. As I’m sure you guys all know, the Reddit channels, the Discord channels, Twitter, the streams themselves, if a brand tries to come in here and is disingenuous and it doesn’t understand the community and the way the live stream world works right now, they will bite you. They are so reactive and they have the resources to make big statements. So speaking to this community in an authentic way is so, so important.”

On college athletes maximizing their NIL rights in the near future (34:30)

Jones: “In the content space specifically, there’s obviously the scale kind of group licensing opportunities, but I think the more kind of regional opportunities with specific athletes, certainly with some of the higher revenue generating sports, it’s something that I hope and expect to see a lot more of, especially as it relates to partnering with brands.”

Biggest lessons learned since the beginning of OneTeam Partners (54:45)

Domain: “Just be patient, and to look back after a full year and then learn what we’ve learned, I’ll steal from our CEO, it’s better to be lucky than good. I think this sort of move into esports was something that everybody was very bullish on. And then with COVID everything happening in the last six months, that looked really smart. And what it really was just sort of good timing on our side.”