The University of Alabama Athletics Department, one of the most recognizable and influential brands in all of sports, on Tuesday announced it has created The Advantage, a comprehensive program that will seek to provide Crimson Tide student-athletes with the education and tools necessary to build and elevate their personal brands.
In working with both campus partners and external entities, The Advantage will reportedly focus on brand management, maximizing personal social media platforms and financial literacy.
“We are excited to launch this new program, which even further demonstrates our commitment to fully developing our student-athletes,” stated Greg Byrne, Alabama director of Athletics. “We are blessed to have incredible resources on campus with our institution, allowing us to better fit our specific needs and evolve The Advantage, as needed.”
This comes as UA has ranked in the top two in royalties generated among the Collegiate Licensing Company’s partner institutions each of the last 11 years and was No. 1 in five of the last six seasons. Over the last five years, officially licensed Bama products were sold in over 9,000 unique retailers, and during the last decade, over 60.3 million units of officially licensed Alabama merchandise has been sold by licensees.
Most recently, the Crimson Tide set the 48-hour post-national championship win record for NCAA merchandise sales across all sports.
The latest announcement continues the university’s commitment to supporting the goals of its student-athletes. Prior to the 2020-2021 academic year, Alabama partnered with Socialie, one of the top content distribution platforms, which has been instrumental in providing student-athletes, coaches and staff direct access to photos and videos. For the month of April, Tide student-athletes added nearly 140,000 followers on social accounts connected through Socialie for an overall total of 2,235,124 followers on connected personal accounts combined. In 2020, Alabama athletics social channels generated north of 1.1 billion impressions, while the previous month totaled more than 50 million interactions on the sport Instagram and Facebook accounts alone.
Sean Ross is the editor of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn
