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Athletes who become influencers rake in the bucks when they’re on top and still cash in when they’re not
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Canadian Genie Bouchard recently lost in the second round of qualifying at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, a setback that came just a few weeks after she lost in the first round of qualifying at the Canadian Open in Montreal, which was a month after she lost in the first round of qualifying at Wimbledon.
The defeats were unfortunately not atypical for the 29-year-old former phenom, who initially exploded onto the tennis scene in 2014 with a magical run at the Australian and French opens before becoming at Wimbledon the first Canadian to ever play in a Grand Slam singles final.
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Bouchard has won over fans with her powerful game, crowd-pleasing flair and gee-whiz, it’s-great-to-be-here, all-Canadian sunny disposition. She also happened to be tall, blond and athletic, which probably didn’t diminish the appeal.
She didn’t win Wimbledon, but she gained something that has proved immensely profitable: a substantial fanbase known as Genie’s Army. Despite the general’s best days on court being a thing of an ever-distant past, Bouchard is still cranking out the winners, and raking in the bucks on social media, thanks, in part, to her 2.42 million Instagram followers.
A recent study by gaming firm PlayOjo ranked Bouchard as the fifth most bankable Canadian athlete/social-media influencer on the market, capable of earning an estimated $40,000 per sponsored post. Topping the study’s list was Alphonso Davies, a transformative soccer star currently employed by Bayern Munich in Germany. Davies is 22. His best years and most lucrative paydays directly related to his on-field performance are presumably still in front of him. Just in case they aren’t, however, he has 5.4 million followers on Instagram, and can pull in $100,000 per sponsored social-media post, according to the research.
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“Historically, athletes got endorsements because the fans liked them — they followed them, so to speak,” Tanjim Hossain, a marketing professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said. “But unless an athlete continued to perform, staying on peoples’ minds was much more difficult than it is today.”
But the economics of the athlete-as-social-media-influencer mean stars cash in when they are on top, and still cash in when they aren’t.
Of course, fanbases don’t spring from nothing. Possessing a supreme athletic gift and a splash of personality is what initially pulls people in. What is different today is that a savvy, social-media-attuned athlete knows — or their agent knows — of the almighty earning potential associated with fan engagement.
Give followers a glimpse of your authentic, famous self gutting it through a training session, clowning with friends, hanging with family, championing a worthy cause or serving a ball against a wall in a parking lot, which was a tidbit Bouchard posted that was viewed by 1.6 million of her followers, and the social-media crowd will, in theory, keep showing up.
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The more images fans like, comments they leave on posts and videos they share, the more attractive the athlete is to sponsors, particularly if the images being lingered upon feature the company’s wares.
Bouchard did not respond to interview requests, but she has previously spoken of the importance of social media to the business of being an athlete.
“I am very aware that I am in the public eye,” she told Forbes magazine in 2021. “The first thing any company asks is how many followers I have on social media.”
Among the great, existential conundrums facing sports leagues and senior sports executives is that generation Z typically doesn’t watch a lot of sports. Nearly half of the cohort that has grown up only knowing the digital age doesn’t watch any sports at all, according to a 2022 survey by Morning Consult, a business intelligence firm.
The first thing any company asks is how many followers I have on social media
Genie Bouchard
Less startling to learn is that the gen-Zers who are keen on sports consume it online, and often through their heroes’ social-media feeds. In this formula, winning and losing certainly still matter, but it is the behind-the-scenes, day-in-the-life fare that the young are really looking for, and the athletes who actively engage with them know it.
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“It is not just the big metric of how many followers you have, it is how much do they care about you and your success,” Russell Reimer, the founder of Manifesto Sport Management, said.
Reimer is a commercial sports agent whose clients include Olympic medallist and Canadian snowboarding icon Mark McMorris. The ‘boarder is always hustling to pay the bills, and largely does so by dreaming up ways — along with his team — to provide his nearly one million social-media followers with fresh content.
Reimer said the key when it comes to a mainstream brand — for example, the Subway sandwich chain that has featured McMorris in its commercial spots — is for the finished product to “feel real.” To achieve authenticity, McMorris has a seat at the table during the creative process. With Subway, he suggested tweaks to the script, as well as some rad-looking snowboarding tricks he could incorporate in the final product.
The desired result is that when he shared a blatant commercial on his social-media feed, in this case, him flipping through the air on his snowboard with a sub in hand, it was true to his persona.
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“If it doesn’t pass the McMorris litmus test, it’s not going to do it with his audience,” Reimer said. “If sponsors want to gain engagement and access, it all starts with authenticity and realness, and the brands have figured this out. It is how things work now.”
Some brands now direct 80 to 90 per cent of their advertising budgets to social-media campaigns, according to June Cotte, a marketing professor at Western University’s Ivey Business School in London, Ont.
If sponsors want to gain engagement and access, it all starts with authenticity and realness, and the brands have figured this out
Russell Reimer
There are plenty of reasons why companies do this, and one is that companies can mine a ton of information in the digital realm about who is seeing their message, and whether it is convincing them to go out and buy that groovy-looking new outfit the athlete they follow is wearing while working out.
Executives in the ad department use the metrics to justify the expense of a social-media campaign to the boss, or wear its failure, by simply tracking the clicks. What the campaigns can’t do is reach new audiences in the way a traditional billboard advertising campaign or television commercial can.
In other words, if the only people you are selling to are Genie Bouchard’s followers, who already love her and everything she does, a brand is not going to win over any new admirers.
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“I get why companies have done this, because they can justify spending the money to a CFO or a CEO,” Cotte said. “But to build brand awareness to a wider audience, you still need these tried-and-true broad appeals, whether it’s a billboard or TV.”
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Back in New York, the U.S. Open is in full swing, and none of the coming games will feature a former Canadian tennis phenom. But Bouchard didn’t seem all that far away from the action, having shared some photos from the match she didn’t win, as well as from a night out at a New York Mets game, kicking back with an extremely comfortable-looking pair of shoes on her feet.
• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com
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