Decoldest Crawford heats up NIL

Everybody has been talking about Decoldest NIL deal they've seen thus far.

Nebraska student-athlete Decoldest Crawford has been the hottest thing in Name, Image & Likeness the past few days after his activation with Omaha-based SOS Heating & Cooling dropped on Aug. 15.

National media coverage and social conversation certainly gave a tremendous ROI for the sponsor, at least in terms of positive buzz far beyond their typical reach.

But what else could we learn? I dug into the data on the Talkwalker Consumer Intelligence platform to see what I could find in the first 48 hours after the ad was published.

No surprise here, this thing went viral. Cool name, cool partnership = hot social sharing.

But where was it discussed? Talkwalker's real-time heat map shows this was discussed far beyond Cornhusker territory.

We could also see that sentiment around the deal was highly positive. In addition to the 5 million+ video views the ad generated, Talkwalker analyzed more than 11,000 unique digital conversations about it across social media, blogs, podcasts, websites and more. These conversations generated more 120,000 engagements in the 48 hours after the ad took off. Talkwalker's AI sentiment engine, which analyzes language in context, scored 58 percent of the comments and posts as "positive." That's an excellent score.

We also could glean important demographic data about who was discussing Decoldest Crawford. This information could be highly useful in helping him pair with potential partners in the future.

Strong NIL partnerships are about good fits. And, yes, it doesn't hurt to have an interesting name that aligns with a brand. I mean, what HVAC company wouldn't have interest in a guy named Decoldest? But over the long haul, it takes more than a catchy connection. The early returns show that interest in Decoldest could remain sizzling for a while.