SBJ Marketing: Bad Birdie turns EA's virtual golf bags into real products

Jason Wilson here, filling in for Terry Lefton. As I look at the shattered remains of the Pac-12, I wonder when the sponsor exodus will begin, further hurting the non-revenue sports at Cal and Stanford -- whose student-athletes are mainstays on U.S. Olympic teams.

It’s business as usual when a video game developer like EA Sports makes partnerships to put gear from companies like Bad Birdie into their games. But the reverse happens as well, when a game studio first makes an item that a gear partner decides to manufacture, reports SBJ’s Jason Wilson. It’s the story behind one golf bag from Bad Birdie, which started its life as an item players could purchase in EA’s PGA Tour 23 golf sim.

“EA partnered with Vessel and Bad Birdie, and they presented an idea to do a collaboration,” Bad Birdie founder and CEO Jason Richardson said. “We took that inspiration, reiterated [on] it and put something in market around the holidays last year, and we launched a really limited collection of those.”

This is the first time Bad Birdie produced an item first created by EA Sports.

“All of our partnerships are collaborations, and we inspire each other in lots of different ways. And I thought that was a really cool idea,” Richardson said. “We went for it.”

And how did Richardson react when he saw the final version of the bag in PGA Tour 23?

“It's surreal. To see our product in an EA Sports video game is insane,” Richardson said. “I grew up, me and my buddies, playing video games, we'd always say ‘EA Sports: It’s in the game,’ or whatever the trademark is, and then we played, playing Tiger Woods. And now we're in the game -- 15 years later! -- it's surreal. Seeing the bag, seeing our polos in the game -- it's awesome. It's a little badge of honor for me, like, ‘Hey, we made it.’”

Bad Birdie loved the golf bags that EA Sports made for PGA Tour 24 so much that it produced one

Rising NASCAR driver Toni Breidinger is not even running full-time yet, yet she’s already landing blue-chip corporate partners and catching the eye of Cup Series sponsors (and some new ones, too) along with being one of the sport’s most followed athletes on social media, reports SBJ’s Adam Stern.

The 24-year-old Californian is one of the top female prospects in NASCAR, and she made her Craftsman Truck Series debut earlier this year, finishing a solid 15th. She also competes in ARCA and a spec Toyota support series called GR Cup. Making it to the top of American racing is hard for any driver, and Breidinger’s path to reaching the Cup Series will not be an easy one. NASCAR often refrains from heavily marketing drivers until they show they can win. But while still young and trying to work her way up the NASCAR ladder, she’s already become perhaps the first-ever race car driver to be sponsored by Victoria’s Secret, and other partners include well-known consumer brands like Raising Cane’s, PepsiCo’s Gatorade and Mattel’s Hot Wheels. She’s also the first ever Arab-American female driver in NASCAR. Breidinger is represented by L.A.-based agent Alvina Roman, president of Roman Empire Management & Media, which has its roots in the entertainment space.

Social media is where young athletes tend to drive value for partners these days, and the quality of Breidinger’s slickly produced content rivals or exceeds that of many full-time drivers in NASCAR’s top series. She works with freelance videographer Tyler Cresser on her social video content. On social media, she’s turned into a genuine powerhouse -- particularly on the buzzy, youthful platforms Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. While she only has about 32,000 followers on X (the former Twitter), she has 736,000 followers on Instagram, the second most of any active NASCAR driver behind another woman, Hailie Deegan (not including the F1 driver Jenson Button, who is now moonlighting part-time in NASCAR and has 1.5 million followers). She also has 2.1 million followers on TikTok, which is somewhere around 100,000 more followers than the official TikTok account for NASCAR. Deegan also has more followers than Breidinger on TikTok, clocking in with 3.1 million. According to social media analytics firm Zoomph, Breidinger this year is No. 1 in engagement and No. 1 in social value on Instagram out of all NASCAR drivers, an astonishing mark given that she only competes part-time in NASCAR’s third-tier national series.

Other sponsors of Breidinger’s include Kelley Blue Book, Pit Viper Sunglasses and women’s activewear brand FP Movement. She also has worked with Gap.

Roman said that she’s had sponsors in the Cup Series tell her that they want to sponsor Breidinger in 2025 but can’t do anything yet due to having exclusive team deals already locked in. She declined to reveal the brands. Breidinger competed earlier this year for the Toyota-affiliated Tricon Garage, but her plans for 2024 are not yet clear. Roman: “Toni is just changing the game. From the people we have working with her to having her signed as an elite model as well ... it’s taken us a couple years to take her to where she’s at. Is she the future of NASCAR? That’s a question for NASCAR. ... It’s tough to bring sponsors into the sport and create a fanbase when you’re racing (in the lower rungs) and it’s not getting that prime-time TV slot, so for us, (social media) has been a way to build that fanbase.”