Getting drafted in the NFL will land you a jersey and a spot on a team, but without the celebrity status of being an early-round pick or a position on the starting lineup, landing endorsement deals can be difficult.
It’s something that Kaden Smith, a North Texas native and pick No. 176 going to the New York Giants in the 2019 NFL draft, found out quickly, despite a desire to work with the brand he was interested in. So, when he met with high school friends and co-founders Kyle Fenner and Jake Nelson during some downtime amid the pandemic, the team launched a platform to connect brands with athletes for social media endorsement deals directly.
“Every team has those one or two stars with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers. They’re getting the Hulu, the Nike, the Coca-Cola deals,” Smith, who also serves as the head of athlete engagement, said. “How about everyone like me, who is young in the league? We don’t have a huge following yet, but every year it starts climbing, and we’re looking for endorsement deals.”
Called Progage, the platform has been in a public beta phase for the past two months, and it has its eyes on a full launch in mid-to late-summer.
Like many two-sided marketplace platforms, businesses and athletes make profiles and match each other based on budget and compatibility. The focus is on lower-tier athletes, whose agents are less likely to source endorsement deals due to small payouts, and smaller brands, whose budgets and ability to reach athletes may be limited. Progage also offers businesses – who pay to be on the platform – specialized agency services, managing the marketing for them.
Already, Fenner said Progage is working with a little less than 25 companies, including Picky Bars, GaXtracts and MET-RX. He also said there had been about 100 athletes sign up to be part of the platform.
“It’s relatively simple the concept… that brings a lot of efficiency to a market that’s, right now, pretty inefficient,” Fenner, head of product development, said. “Brands are finding that it’s so much simpler to quickly get in touch with athletes that they know actually want to do these marketing deals than toiling to find athletes to work with that may or may not be even interested in anything at all.”
In addition to connecting brands and athletes that can benefit from each other, Fenner said he hopes Progage can also be a tool to help to close the gender pay gap that exists in many professional sports.
While the company’s launch isn’t related to the pandemic, it did give the team of friends time to fine-tune the concept. It also had a few other advantages for the company. For one, Fenner said remote work has allowed Progage to get in front of some customers that it likely would not have been able to this early in the game. In addition, he said the rise in social media use during the pandemic had attracted more interest in the company, especially since he said athlete endorsement posts are some of the most engaged with on social platforms.
“Talking with our clients, they realize that connecting with humans digitally is becoming such a huge trend, and it’s a trend on social media and in life, but it’s also a trend in advertising,” Fenner said. “The tech giants have really nailed their ability to get accurate advertising algorithms. However, we’re also seeing a lot of ad fatigue from individuals because we’re spending so much time on these devices. Being able to hear from a human about a product… rather than just seeing another ad that we scroll through is something that they’re really interested in tapping into.”
So far, the Progage has been bootstrapped, although Smith said it has already caught the attention of investors, many of whom are other NFL players. However, the company has turned down those offers instead of focusing on growing the number of businesses and athletes on the platform to generate steady recurring revenue. After that, Fenner said the company might look to outside capital.
“We don’t like to mess around with vanity metrics and what’s going to make us look best, but rather what is truly working for our customers,” Fenner said. “As we figure that out, as we answer those questions… then we’ll hit marketing and PR hard.”
