Sports Licensing

An Exciting

By Tiffanie Lane, Product Manager, OpSec Security

For sports brands, there has never been a more exciting time to being taking a more strategic approach to leveraging their IP with license agreements. The lack of live sporting events over the last year has meant that fans globally have broadened their horizons beyond their usual teams to a range of different sports or leagues that they wouldn’t have watched before. For example, someone in the US might now be an avid follower of the UK Premier League thanks to streaming, whilst a French sporting fan now closely watches the US NBA. Ultimately, the sharp uptake in sports streaming has made audiences increasingly global, and sports brands need to be taking advantage of the opportunities available to them to increase their revenue, without raising their risk portfolio. IP licensing can provide sports brands with additional revenue streams and enable them to raise awareness and push their products into new markets and in particular, new geographies. This can be done with minimal output or investment from the brand itself as the third-party licensee takes care of manufacturing, quality control, distribution or marketing the products.

This means that merchandise can be pushed out more widely and adopting a resource allocation approach can help the brand to be more efficient and explore alternative markets whilst ensuring they retain agility. There are also other options for sports brands to capitalize on their assets through licensing. For example, esports is one of the fastest growing industries For sporting bodies and organisations, this opens up fresh opportunities to license their brands to make sure they are reaching the broadest of audiences through a variety of means. To efficiently manage this influx of new opportunities, a license management system can be a strategic way of gaining total visibility of all elements of the process, from onboarding new licensees all the way through to reporting sales and royalties. It can also allow brands to track the authenticity of goods throughout and flag any suspicious behavior – helping prevent any reputational damage to the brand through the sales of fake sporting goods. An example of this is the brand being able to set restrictions on their licensing agreements, which can be reviewed and reset as and when necessary. This allows the sports brand to maintain ownership of its IP with full control of where and how it is being used, and who it is being used by. They can prevent specific licensees from selling in certain regions, or from selling certain types of products on selected marketplaces. Brands can also benefit from greater visibility of areas where the IP is popular and product types that will sell well when the IP is applied to them. Naturally, sports brands who are considering licensing their IP may feel concerned about giving up control. However, fears around their IP being applied to faulty or poor-quality products or being used in ways that don’t align with the brand’s values can be removed by taking a strategic approach to license management and using the right solutions to ensure end-ton-end visibility throughout the process – increasing revenue and reducing risks.