New NBA Commissioner Supports Jersey Ads

New NBA Commissioner, Adam Silver may finally be the man to bring to fruition what the basketball authority has been talking about doing for quite some time now – allowing advertisements on NBA jerseys.  Speaking during a conference last week, Silver said that it was “inevitable” that jerseys would carry ads and it made sense from a marketing perspective.

“It just creates that much more of an opportunity for our marketing partners to get that much closer to our fans and to our players. It gives us an opportunity just to have deeper integration when it comes to those forms of sponsorship,” said Silver.

“Increasingly as we see Champion’s League and English Premier League televised in the US, I think it’s going to become more acceptable and more commonplace for our fans as well,” added the new commissioner.

There is no hiding the lucrative revenue potential for NBA teams if they move towards advertisements on their jerseys.  A rough estimate is that the league will be able to rake in more than $100 million extra – per season!

While Silver hasn’t given a rollout date for jersey ads, some believe that it will happen within the next five years, a fact supported by the commissioner.

Silver has been a supporter of jersey ads for a number of years, with his first public discussion on the issue taking place in an ESPN interview in 2011.  At the 2014 All Star Weekend, he told ESPN reporter Arash Markati that it ‘made good business sense.”   When asked at the IMG World Congress of Sport whether he believed jersey ads would appear on the scene within the next five years, the commissioner first replied “definitely”, before thinking and watering his reply down with a “most likely.”