IMG will celebrate 65 years in business next year and throughout its long, storied history, it has remained in lockstep with the well-heeled worlds of tennis, golf and private members’ clubs.
Rather than bucking that trend, the agency’s rebrand last year kept it intact. In clubhouses the world over, dress codes are relaxing, memberships are more diverse. Under the leadership of its president of media, Adam Kelly, IMG is moving with the times.
A new wave of younger men and women – gileted, T-shirted and pantsuited – are now leading the agency into a future that it can only partially control. IMG’s parent company, Endeavor, is currently considering whether to sell the agency, as well as several other of its sports-adjacent properties such as 160over90 and On Location Experiences.
Speaking exclusively to SportBusiness on the back of the agency’s IMG x RedBird Summit, Kelly is confident the agency’s transformation has positioned it to thrive no matter what parent company it sits under.
“Is there a chance that the IMG business has different owners in the future? Well, we’ve had multiple owners in the past, and the biggest change that we’ve gone through has not been connected to the change of ownership,” Kelly said. “It’s been connected to how we’ve evolved the business under our current ownership.”
Perhaps in preparation for the future, IMG has shifted away being an Endeavor ‘network’ company and toward becoming a simplified, one-stop-shop for companies wanting to grow their revenues from sport. Aside from the visual elements of IMG’s rebrand, Kelly has focused on creating a single point of contact for the agency’s clients, rather than several different contacts across an Endeavor ‘network’ it may eventually be separated from.
“We are building a further evolution of the full-service agency model and operate for our clients through a single point of interface,” Kelly explains. “All the work that we execute and deliver for our clients comes through IMG.”
The hiring of Luke Organ, who runs IMG’s brand partnerships group, is indicative of the approach. Where it may previously have leaned on Endeavor-owned sponsorship and marketing agency 160over90 to take things forward, IMG is now looking to own as many verticals as it can.
“Historically, we might have asked whether sponsorship sits within a different part of the machine,” Kelly says. “Now, we are confident that this connect comes through a single relationship with IMG.”
Blending science and art
Under Kelly, IMG is no longer interested in being a pure rights-trading representative. IMG wants – and expects – deeper involvement with a rights-holder’s product before selling it, ideally shaping its format, content and brand to ensure it fetches the right price at market.
The agency’s recent brokerage of US media rights deals for the French Open and US Open grand slam tennis tournaments are prime examples of how Kelly wants IMG to be operating and performing.
Both properties secured gigantic increases in their latest US deals, which he says is the result of IMG’s work now extending well beyond the sale.
“We have worked in a scientific, detailed way, conducting point-by-point analysis with clients to tweak their scheduling, to adjust their product, to understand the US market and to build, through our strong relationships, a detailed understanding of how to maximise value. That is a process that we would not have gone through a handful of years ago, let alone in the old world of our business.”
IMG’s ability to conduct this kind of work is brand new, according to Kelly, who says that huge numbers of data analysts, digital specialists and strategy consultants have been hired to support these efforts.
“We didn’t have a strategy and growth function. We didn’t have data analysts. We didn’t have researchers. We didn’t have the skills that are required to build the kind of modelling and data analytics, the calendar variations and scheduling variations. We’ve added dozens of people to support that function, and it didn’t exist before. There wasn’t a single person.”
He continued: “All we used to focus on was the results and the outcome – we would hold ourselves responsible for the number and the deal because, frankly, that would be the only part of the process we were heavily involved in. Today we’re able to support a rights-holder from the very beginning of that analysis, because we’ve realised that they need our support.”
The big fish
SportBusiness understands IMG has applied this philosophy to the most recent Uefa club competition rights process, which seeks to find one or more agencies to commercialise Uefa Champions League rights from 2027-28 onward.
SportBusiness exclusively revealed in September that IMG had once again thrown its hat in the ring. The agency is understood to be seeking an arrangement similar to its ‘holistic’ relationships with other rights-holders – a model that would require a significant departure from the mostly sales-based relationships held by Team Marketing and Relevent.
Kelly refused to comment on any aspect of IMG’s involvement in the Uefa process, but expects even the biggest rights-holders to outsource more and more functions in order to “stay at the forefront of innovation”. Uefa currently operates its club competitions with an in-house digital and content team, using Team and Relevent as external sales agencies.
“That battle for eyeballs and attention is something that many, many more rights-holders are realising is a risk that they don’t want to take on their own shoulders,” Kelly explains. “They want to outsource and partner with people that have this expertise immediately on-hand, ready to deploy with a high likelihood, if not certainty, of best outcome.”
Whether or not IMG is successful in convincing Uefa to hand over the keys to its content empire, Kelly believes that there are huge numbers of rights-holders that could benefit from agency expertise at an inflection point for sports media.
“For clients below that threshold – below the super tier of rights-holders in sport – it’s a false economy to try to build huge in-house teams in order to save on pretty insignificant fees. We can draw on a fraction of someone’s time from the digital group, or a fraction of time from our studios group, in order to build an extra piece of content to ensure a rights-holder is building audiences on digital and social.”
After an era of football rights-holders building large in-house media teams, top leagues are beginning to gravitate back toward agencies as media rights growth slows. It has been particularly prevalent in the US, where agency Relevent has become the go-to agency for football leagues looking to stand out in a crowded market.
Regardless of success or failure in the Uefa process, Kelly is keen to keep IMG away from drawn-out fights over commission percentages. Instead, Kelly is looking to invest IMG’s time into long-term deals that provide the agency with the freedom to work as it wants to.
Kelly points to IMG’s expanding relationship with the Saudi Pro League as an example of what he and his agency want to be doing more of.
“We began a relationship on a more traditional basis of simply supporting rights distribution, and we’ve now signed a five-year ‘production partnership’, but it’s much broader than that,” Kelly says of the SPL arrangement.
“It is built around how we use content to build audiences and drive value into that ecosystem. Both sides there have absolute confidence that this is going to transform the league long into the future.”
Without the opportunity to “transform” a sports property over the long term – be that the Uefa Champions League or the Saudi Pro League – Kelly is reluctant to get IMG involved.
“We never go in for a short-term win if it’s not the right relationship, primarily for the client. It’s not right to receive large payments if you can’t prove that you’ve delivered against that cost.
“As an agency, you are constantly having to prove and demonstrate that you are delivering value through expertise, knowledge, execution, results. If you come in, take a big fee and then fail, that’s reputational damage that many others have decided to swallow in order to bank a quick buck. We never do that.”