NIL Content for Athletes: What Brands Look For and How to Build a Library

Name, image and likeness rules opened the door for college and high school athletes to earn from their own brand. Walking through that door is a different question. Plenty of talented athletes never land a deal, and plenty of athletes with smaller stat lines land several. A lot of the difference comes down to content: what an athlete has posted, what they can show a brand, and how easy they make it for a brand to picture them in a campaign.

We produce NIL campaigns for brands, so we see this from the brand side of the table. We’ve worked on athlete content for Adidas’ college NIL program with Miller Moss and Chloe Spreen, two Crocs campaigns with Indiana volleyball’s Ava Vickers, and Stanley’s Notre Dame Football campaign with Riley Leonard and Jeremiyah Love. This guide is the advice we’d give an athlete who wants to be ready when the opportunity shows up.

New to NIL as a whole? Start with our overview, What Is NIL Content Creation?, then come back here.

A quick note before we start: NIL rules vary by state, school, governing body and level, and they keep changing. Nothing here is compliance advice. Before signing anything or posting sponsored content, check with your school’s compliance office or athletic department.

What brands actually look for

When a brand or agency is deciding which athletes to approach, they’re rarely looking at stats alone. Here’s what tends to matter.

1. A clear identity

Brands want to know who you are in one sentence. The gym rat who posts every early-morning workout. The funny one. The fashion one. The athlete who’s all about family, faith or their hometown. An identity makes it easy for a brand to see where they fit. It doesn’t have to be loud. It has to be consistent and genuinely you.

2. Audience trust, not just audience size

Follower count gets attention, but brands that have run campaigns before know engagement and trust often matter more. An athlete whose followers comment, share and show up for them can be more valuable to the right brand than a bigger account with a passive audience. Local and niche audiences can be exactly what a regional or specialist brand wants.

3. Proof you can make content

The quickest way to reassure a brand is to show them you already produce content that looks like a campaign. If your feed shows you on camera comfortably, talking naturally, with decent quality, a brand can picture the deliverables. If it doesn’t, they’re taking a chance.

4. Professionalism

Brands notice how you reply to messages, whether you hit deadlines, whether you follow a brief, and whether your public presence is something they’d be comfortable putting their name next to. Reliability is a big part of why athletes get re-booked.

5. Fit with the brand

The best NIL partnerships make sense instantly. A volleyball player and a recovery shoe. A quarterback and a drinkware brand that’s part of game-day culture. Think about which brands you already use and genuinely like. Those are your most believable partnerships.

The content types that matter

Not every post needs to be a production. A strong NIL presence usually mixes a few kinds of content.

Game and performance content

Your sport is the foundation. Game highlights, big moments, training and the grind behind it. This is what earns attention in the first place, and it’s where good sports videography pays off twice: once for recruiting, once for your brand. If you’re still sorting out what kind of sports video you need, see highlight film vs. recruiting video vs. game film.

Personality and lifestyle

Day-in-the-life content, game-day routines, what you eat, what you wear, what you listen to, your teammates, your hometown. Brands buy people, and this is where audiences actually get to know you.

Short-form vertical video

Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts are where most NIL audiences live, and most NIL deliverables are vertical. Content planned and shot vertical from the start almost always works better than a horizontal video cropped afterwards.

A signature piece

One polished, cinematic piece about who you are: a short spotlight film or a story-driven edit you can pin to your profile and send to brands. It shows a brand what you look like in a campaign before they’ve paid for one. The Max Clark Project is the long-form version of this idea.

Photos

Brands almost always need stills as well as video: for posts, for pitch decks, for their own channels. A set of high-quality photos (action, portrait, lifestyle) is one of the most useful things you can have ready.

How to build a content library

The athletes who do best with NIL treat content like a library, not a feed. A single post disappears in a day. A library is something you can draw from for months, and something you can show a brand on short notice.

Batch your shoots

Instead of trying to make something new every day, plan shoot days that produce a lot of material at once: multiple outfits, multiple locations, multiple formats. One well-planned shoot day can produce weeks of posts. That’s the same approach brands use. On our Crocs work with Ava Vickers, for example, we deliberately shot performance and lifestyle content in the same production block so the brand got range from one day.

Shoot motion and stills together

If someone’s filming, someone should be photographing, or the plan should allow for both. It costs far less to capture both at once than to set up twice.

Organize what you have

Keep your best clips and photos organized in folders by type: game, training, lifestyle, portraits, behind the scenes. When a brand asks, “Do you have anything showing you in your training gear?”, you want to answer in minutes, not days.

Build a simple media kit

A one-to-two-page media kit makes you easy to work with. Include:

• A short bio and your one-sentence identity
• Your sport, school and key accomplishments
• Your social handles and a snapshot of your audience (use the analytics the platforms give you, and keep them current)
• A few of your best photos and links to your best video
• Examples of past partnerships, if you have any
• How to reach you, or your representative

Own your footage

Before any shoot, understand who owns the footage and who can use it, for how long, and where. Content you own is content you can reuse in your own channels and your media kit. Read usage terms carefully in any brand deal, and if you’re unsure, ask your school’s compliance office or an adviser.

Keep it consistent

A steady rhythm of solid content beats bursts of perfect content followed by silence. Polish matters most on the signature pieces. Everyday posts mostly need to be real and regular.

Where professional production fits in

You don’t need a production crew for everything. Phone content is the backbone of most athletes’ feeds, and it should be. Professional production earns its place in a few specific spots:

• The signature piece. A cinematic film that sets you apart and shows brands what a campaign with you would look like.
• Photo and video library days. A planned shoot that stocks your library with high-quality material for months.
• Brand deliverables. When a brand pays for content, the quality reflects on both of you. A meaningful partnership promoted with low-quality content can make both sides look small.
• Game and event coverage. Footage of your biggest moments, filmed properly, does double duty for recruiting and branding.

The other thing a production partner brings is experience on set with athletes. Good NIL content captures personality, not a performance. That’s a directing skill: making an athlete comfortable enough on camera that the content feels like them. It’s also why brands bring in crews who know sports culture. Our NIL and brand division is built around exactly that.

A simple starting plan

1. Define your identity in one sentence.
2. Audit your profiles. Clean up anything a brand wouldn’t want to stand next to, and update your bio.
3. Post consistently for a few weeks across game, training and personality content.
4. Plan one library shoot for photos and video, ideally including a signature piece.
5. Build your media kit.
6. Make a list of brands you genuinely use and would be proud to represent.
7. Talk to your school’s compliance office about what you need to disclose and how.

If you’re an athlete or a family ready to build that library, or a brand planning athlete campaigns, Start a Project. You can see the work first on our work page. We reply within 24 hours.

FAQ

Do I need a lot of followers to get NIL deals?

Not necessarily. Brands also weigh engagement, identity, audience fit and professionalism. Smaller, engaged or local audiences can be exactly what some brands want.

What kind of content do brands want from athletes?

Mostly short-form vertical video and high-quality photos that feel authentic to the athlete. Specific deliverables vary by deal, so read every brief carefully.

Should I hire a videographer for NIL content?

Not for everything. Phone content is fine for everyday posts. Professional production makes the most sense for a signature piece, library shoot days and paid brand deliverables.

Is NIL legal for high school athletes?

It depends on your state and your state’s high school athletic association, and the rules are changing. Check with your school and the governing body in your state before doing any NIL activity.

What’s the difference between NIL content and a recruiting video?

A recruiting video is built for coaches to evaluate you. NIL content is built for audiences and brands. The same game footage can feed both, but the edits are different. See our recruiting video guide.