If you are a company or brand whose product or service directly impacts and derives revenue from the fall football season, and you aren’t currently planning for the upcoming season, you are going to fall behind quickly.
Yes, it is technically the NFL and college football offseason. There are no games and no records being broken, but your brand’s success for the upcoming season is forged in the summer. Here are three reasons why you should be planning for the upcoming season now.
1. The business of football does not stop in the offseason.
It is currently early June. We’re in the throes of the MLB season, the NBA and Stanley Cup Finals are starting imminently, the World Cup is weeks away, and the NCAA baseball and softball World Series are in progress... but the leading sports news of the moment is Myles Garrett getting traded to the Rams and AJ Brown heading to New England.
Football remains the most influential driver of attention in the U.S. sports economy. Brands that understand this build accordingly.
If you aren’t actively planning how your product or service fits into the football ecosystem, you’re already behind. The time to build relationships is now.
Once the season starts, reporters, producers, hosts, ad reps, sales teams, etc. are all moving at the speed of the game and thinking 3-4 weeks ahead.
Those gatekeepers have limited capacity for new outreach, unfamiliar voices, or unvetted partnerships once the season begins.
They work with people and brands they know, trust, and can rely on, especially under pressure when content and activation decisions happen quickly. They have partners they can call on with short notice to execute an ad buy, fulfill an activation, or join a last-minute segment tied to a breaking storyline. You aren’t going to get a call to be a guest on a TV segment talking about Seattle’s defense unless the producer knows you and feels comfortable with your ability to deliver.
They say summer bodies are made in the winter. The building blocks of the business of football are forged now, in the offseason.
2. Campaigns aren’t manifested overnight.
Any strategic campaign in PR, marketing, social, brand, or digital creative takes time to ideate, build, refine, and launch. The best-case scenario for any agency creating a season-long campaign or media push is to have 1-2 months of build ready to go and garnering results by Week 1.
If your goal is to impact the football season, the work needs to begin before it starts. It’s not impossible to expedite a plan in a few weeks, but doing so often means sacrificing refinement, distribution strategy, or relationship-building, all of which become harder to recover once the season begins, when those same gaps lead to slower results and delayed impact.
3. Timing determines attention and impact.
The timing of the launch of any news, product, or service is critical. You want to max out the potential for your target audience to understand it, publish it, buy it, or inquire about it.
While football content never slows down, the offseason still offers more space to break through and create a focused moment.
If your news, product or service will impact how you do business during football season, you want to launch it before Week 1, so your audience is familiar with it before the season begins.
Launching after Week 1 isn’t impossible, but it creates more obstacles for your news, product, or service. Your audiences won’t be as attentive. The media will be stretched in multiple directions and between the games, the commentary, the reviews and the projections week-to-week, your announcement is just jumping into the void.
In the sports universe, football season is the High and Holy Season. Executives across many different business verticals have told me that their entire year is predicated around the football season. Basketball, hockey, baseball, and soccer combined can’t make up the revenue that football can.
If your year is built around sports’ Holy Season, why wouldn’t you plan ahead? There is still plenty of time to build for this season. Take advantage of it, otherwise you’re just preparing to fail.
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