ADthlete, a Dallas-based ad platform launched in April 2025, entered the nearly $2 billion Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) market with technology that integrates brand messaging into athlete content. The company’s AI-powered system enables brands to purchase athlete content, such as programmatic media, while allowing student-athletes beyond the top 2% to monetize their existing social content without additional production demands.

“We’re building a scalable, trackable way to activate student-athlete content,” explains Erick Schwab, co-founder and CEO of ADthlete. With over a decade of experience in digital media and brand partnerships, Erick identified inefficiencies in how brands connect with college athletes in the NIL market.

“The NIL playbook is built on influencer marketing, and it’s failing,” Erick asserts. “Athletes aren’t creators, so they need to stop being treated like creators.” Student-athletes, he adds, face unique constraints that traditional influencer marketing ignores. “They’re student-athletes with 70 hours of commitments already,” Erick notes. “When are they supposed to sleep?”

As NIL spending surges, the current process for activating campaigns remains fragmented, manual, and difficult to scale, according to Erick. This largely benefits top-tier athletes while most student-athletes struggle to monetize their followings despite having engaged audiences.

“Brands can only hire a few. They’ll hire the quarterback, the starting point guard, the ones likely to get drafted. What about everyone else?” Erick asks, adding that this dynamic creates a significant gap in the market, one that ADthlete aims to fill through technology designed for scale and accessibility.

Programmatic Integration: The Technology Behind ADthlete

ADthlete functions as an ad network specifically designed for sports-culture creators. The platform’s main feature lies in treating athlete content as media channels that brands can access programmatically, similar to digital advertising.

“I’m plugging into these athletes’ feeds,” Erick explains. “The ‘get ready with me,’ ‘workout with me,’ ‘my post routine,’ all that stuff they already do. I built a way for marketers to drop ads inside that storytelling.”

The process resembles setting up a digital media campaign. Marketers log into a dashboard where they establish campaign parameters and budgets. They then use ADthlete’s AI assistant to define their target audience and messaging. “Talk to our AI and tell it who you want to reach, where you want to go, and what your message is,” Erick says.

The system then generates a channel rundown showing profiles that match the brand’s requirements. Marketers can review these profiles and either approve or remove them from their campaign. Next, they create ad specifications, including the script, text overlays, and logos. The system packages these elements and sends offers to approved athletes.

Erick says that for athletes, participation requires minimal additional effort. Once they accept an offer, they record the ad read following the brand’s script. ADthlete’s technology identifies natural integration points in the content and inserts the brand message, ensuring it flows organically within the athlete’s narrative.

“Our tech identifies the placement and inserts the ad from the marketer,” Erick explains. “But it’s still in the athlete’s voice, so it feels native.”

The Performance Advantage in the Creator Economy

ADthlete’s approach aligns with insights from The Goat Agency’s recent report, which identified college athletes as Gen Z’s most trusted influencers. The report notes that “unlike traditional influencers or professional athletes, NIL athletes bring something different: they are peers,” creating a powerful dynamic for brand influence.

This peer-to-peer relationship makes college athletes particularly effective for reaching audiences that traditional advertising struggles to engage. The Goat Agency found that “64% of young men said it is clear when an influencer has been paid to represent a brand,” but “college athletes break through as they’re athletes first, creators second, making their voice trusted.”

ADthlete’s platform capitalizes on this trust while solving the practical challenges of efficiently activating these influential voices. “We’re talking about 50 to 60% savings for marketers,” Erick notes, comparing ADthlete’s approach to traditional influencer campaigns that require extensive coordination.

The platform also addresses what The Goat Agency identified as a key opportunity in NIL content: “The posts that typically go viral aren’t highlight reels or buzzer-beater moments, but everything around the game: game-day fits, reels of mic’d up players making unhinged comments on the field, or locker room interviews of players weighing in on pop culture.” By integrating with these everyday content moments, brands can connect effectively with student audiences.

In one example Erick shares, a student-athlete transitions naturally from describing her daily routine to mentioning an energy drink: “I want to show you the strength that gets me through my workouts. Postgame, pregame, anytime I need a boost, NOS Energy gives me the edge before any big event.” The narrative continues without disruption, maintaining the genuine voice and flow of the content.

From Media Expertise to NIL Solutions

Erick’s path to founding ADthlete was shaped by his experience across digital media. His career began at Mania TV during the early days of internet broadcasting, where he saw firsthand how younger audiences were gravitating toward online content.

After working with traditional media companies, Erick moved into the YouTube ecosystem during its early growth phase. “I was working for Believe Entertainment doing the LeBron and Tiësto shows, and YouTubers were already surpassing us in viewership.”

This led him to co-found Sylo in 2016, where he developed creator authentication and third-party measurement solutions for influencer marketing. “We were walking around getting creators to give us their backend data.” This work with GroupM and brands like Unilever provided deep insights into how brands evaluate and measure creator partnerships.

After Sylo, Erick developed Talent Pitch Pro, a software that helped talent agencies present analytics to marketers digitally. “We built software that helped sales, agents, and managers close tens of millions in brand sponsorships, establishing the digital talent roster as a new industry category,” his LinkedIn profile states. The tool expanded to over 200 talent agencies, deeply connecting Erick with the athlete and sports ecosystem.

Transforming NIL from Cost Center to Revenue Driver

Beyond helping individual athletes monetize their content more effectively, Erick envisions a key shift in how universities approach NIL, moving from seeing it as a cost to recognizing it as a revenue generator.

“I believe NIL will become a revenue center, not a cost,” he explains. “Schools will use it to drive ticket sales.”

Universities could leverage their athletes’ content networks for event promotion, ticket sales, and enhancing corporate sponsorships. “Imagine if Michigan State had all its athletes in and said, ‘This Saturday’s game, we’re 5,000 seats short. Let’s pick our top 100, buy the media inventory, and run ads on their channels to sell tickets.’ Where better could we market?”

This approach aligns with The Goat Agency’s findings about athletes’ “hyper-local influence” that is “highly relevant and engaging” for campus communities. The report notes that “athletes have influence where it matters most: on campus and in surrounding communities. Local fans know them personally, which makes partnerships highly relevant and engaging.”

Erick also sees NIL programs becoming powerful recruitment tools. “When recruits choose a school, what are they going to remember? Probably the NIL program, which helps them succeed. Maybe they have 20,000 followers now, but look at what we’ve done with athletes who have 500 or 600 million total followers.”

Insights on Performance-Driven NIL

As digital ad spending continues to grow, ADthlete aims to redirect a portion of funds toward student-athletes across all tiers, not just the stars. “There’s so much viewership happening with zero advertising,” Erick observes. “It’s like having a great website with no ads on it.”

For athletes beyond the top tier, the platform offers the chance to monetize 20-30% of their content views rather than the typical 5-10%.

“I trust we’re doing something meaningful that’ll make an impact, not just in our lives, but many others,” Erick concludes. “I want to make sure female college sports make money. That was a lot of the motivation behind this.”

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