Building the scorecard that helped pick a Nationwide ambassador.
How a proprietary athlete-evaluation framework informed the brand's signing of Saquon Barkley for the "So Much More" campaign.
A $3.5M+ portfolio, a redesigned ambassador architecture, and no defensible scorecard.
Nationwide's NFL sponsorship portfolio at Wasserman covered a dozen-plus team partnerships and a $3.5M+ annual investment, plus league-level work across the NWSL, MiLB, the Memorial Tournament (PGA TOUR), and the Kentucky Derby.
The brand was rethinking its ambassador architecture: the long-running Peyton Manning + Brad Paisley pair was shifting toward two NFL ambassadors, with Peyton as the anchor and a second NFL athlete to come in alongside him. So this wasn't a single-athlete decision. It was redesigning the structure of the brand's flagship endorsement program. Nationwide needed a defensible way to compare candidates, something more rigorous than gut feel and follower count, that the team could put in front of leadership and stand behind.
Owning the analysis that fed the recommendation.
Marketing intern on the Brands & Properties team. I owned the athlete-evaluation analysis that fed the brand's recommendation. Designing the framework, scoring candidates against shortlisted alternatives, and producing the one-page output that went to leadership.
For a multi-million-dollar commitment, gut feel isn't enough.
Athlete-ambassador decisions tend to default to gut feel and follower count. For a multi-million-dollar commitment, that's not enough. I needed a framework that scored candidates on the dimensions that actually drive partnership ROI: brand fit, audience overlap, narrative trajectory, and category credibility. Not just reach.
A proprietary scorecard ranking dozens of NFL players across eight dimensions.
Built in Excel. Each dimension weighted, then players ranked composite-score against shortlisted alternatives. The output was a one-page recommendation Wasserman delivered to Nationwide leadership.
- Social affinity. How the athlete's audience engages with brand-adjacent content
- Sponsorship clutter. Saturation of existing endorsement portfolio
- Follower base. Raw scale and audience composition
- Social sentiment. Signal from public commentary
- On-field awards. Performance credibility (Pro Bowl, All-Pro, individual records)
- Off-field awards. Community and character credibility (Walter Payton MOY, Salute to Service, foundation work)
- News momentum. Current cultural relevance
- Brand-category fit. Nationwide-specific: how the athlete's audience reads on finance and insurance, plus the player's own engagement with that category
The market-research and competitor-analysis lens sat above the scorecard, framing what "good" looked like for this brand. Not as a player-level dimension on the diagram, but as the analytical posture that drove which dimensions got more weight for Nationwide vs. another brand running the same model.
"So Much More". Launched April 2025.
Saquon Barkley was signed by Nationwide as ambassador for the "So Much More" campaign, launched April 2025.
To be clear on the timeline: I built the scorecard and presented the analysis with my team during my summer 2023 internship. Nationwide's actual signing decision came after the internship had ended. The framework I built was one input among many in that call, but it's a piece I owned end-to-end and a moment I played a part in.
Three additions, two years on.
- AI-augmented sentiment analysis pulling structured signal from podcasts, beat-writer copy, and earnings-call mentions.
- Audience overlap scoring against the brand's existing customer data. First-party data should anchor the model, not just public follower demographics.
- A contingency view modeling sponsor risk if a candidate has an off-field event in the first 12 months.
- Sponsorship valuation
- Athlete-brand fit modeling
- Endorsement strategy
- Ambassador program architecture
- Partnership ROI analysis
- Quantitative scorecard design
- Senior-stakeholder presentation
- Brand strategy