156 - Pros / Cons of Doing Trade Deals with Your Marketing

Trade deals are everywhere in sports—but most teams treat them like “free marketing” instead of what they actually are: untracked investments. In this episode, Jeremy breaks down how trade really works, where it provides value, and why it often fails to drive results. If you’re relying on trade without accountability, this will change how you think about it.

Key Topics Covered

• Why trade isn’t free—and how teams unknowingly give up real revenue
• The right way to use trade: unsold inventory, awareness, and sponsor amplification
• Why trade is almost always a top-of-funnel channel (not a ticket sales driver)
• The biggest mistakes teams make: no tracking, no accountability, wrong expectations
• How media partners often deliver leftover or low-value inventory
• The problem with inflated trade value across different market sizes
• Why digital add-ons (email blasts, banners) are often overvalued and underperforming
• How to treat trade like paid media with promo codes, landing pages, and performance reviews

Timestamps

• 00:00 – Intro: Why trade is everywhere—but rarely measured
• 01:25 – What trade actually is (and why teams love it)
• 02:23 – The “free marketing” illusion
• 03:47 – Why lack of accountability is the real issue
• 04:16 – Where trade actually works (unsold inventory + awareness)
• 05:56 – Budget constraints and why trade is so attractive
• 06:24 – Using trade to enhance sponsorship value
• 08:13 – Creative community exposure opportunities
• 09:08 – Trade = top-of-funnel (not direct response)
• 10:37 – The expectation gap: trade vs. paid media
• 11:07 – The tracking problem (and why nobody knows what works)
• 12:56 – Leftover inventory and bad placements
• 15:18 – Inflated value and market-size mismatches
• 16:00 – Why accountability disappears in trade deals
• 17:09 – The truth about digital add-ons
• 20:31 – How to actually use trade the right way
• 21:22 – What to avoid (high-demand inventory, no tracking)
• 22:47 – Treating trade like real media
• 23:16 – Final takeaways: awareness vs. revenue

Episodes Mentioned:
125 - I saw your ad but didn't buy
111 - Building Your Marketing Budget Like a Funnel

Call to Action

If you’re doing trade deals and not sure if they’re actually working, let’s take a look.
 Head over to sportsmarketingmachine.com and schedule a free 30-minute call—I’ll help you evaluate what you’re getting and where you might be leaving revenue on the table.

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Transcript

Jeremy Neisser (00:01.262)
Happy Friday and welcome to episode 156 of the Sports Marketing Machine Podcast powered by Revilocity Sports, the podcast to help you sell more tickets and grow your fan base. I'm your host, Jeremy Nizer. Today we're talking about trade deals.

because this is one of those things that almost every single team does specifically in minor league baseball and minor league sports and even at college athletics I see this a lot as well but very few teams actually think through it fully and I'm going to explain that and even fewer teams actually measure the impact of this so let me ask you this if I gave you a marketing channel where you couldn't track performance you didn't know if it was driving ticket sales

and you had no idea what your ROI was, you would probably not invest in it, right? But that's exactly what a lot of teams are doing with trade. All I'm going to break down what exactly it is, how teams are approached by it, why it seems attractive, and all of the pros and cons. Let's get going.

Jeremy Neisser (01:25.518)
So let's level set really quick. Trade is when you give a media partner, a radio stations, television, newspaper, digital, could be the bus company, could be your local billboard sales company, could be the Yellow Pages. You give them tickets, signage, some sort of inventory item that you have as a team. You give that in trade.

So equal value in many cases to the local radio station for radio spots or the local TV spot station for TV spots or the newspaper for an ad or could be the bus company to put your team logos on the side of the bus or billboard company or what have you, right? So they give you advertising, you give up some of your inventory. So no cash in many cases, it's not exchange. And that's why teams absolutely love it. Cause I'm just giving up

extra stuff that I have and in reality I'm getting advertising so this is a win-win I'm getting eyeballs and I don't have to spend money on my marketing dollars and teams love it because it feels free but here's the reality trade is not free it's just invisible you're still paying for it you're paying with it with inventory that could have been sold premium games locations or what have you

and you're giving up real revenue opportunities to give to your media partner, could be a local magazine to get in and out of there or what have you, you're giving all this stuff up, you're giving up real revenue opportunities. And because no money changes hands, nobody treats it like a real expense. And that's actually the root of the problem here that I see with a lot of teams that are doing trade. I am not saying trade is a bad thing.

but how it is approached and tracked is where I would pause for some concern with teams. Because the accountability disappears when you don't track what's actually happening. You are not getting really good gauge on what's actually happening. You are giving up something that in your mind may be viewed as free, but in reality, you still have to hold that standard that you have with your

Jeremy Neisser (03:47.938)
companies that you're paying marketing dollars to, actual dollars out of your budget, you need to hold the same thing with your trade partners exactly the same. The accountability needs to be same on both sides. And that's what I first see with teams is that they just treat trade completely differently than what you do for what you're spending cash for. So let's talk about some of the pros. Where does trade actually works?

and let's make sure expectations are correct. Trade is not at all bad. It can work if you use it in the right way. First, unsold inventory. You got Tuesday night tickets. Like you could use that for sure. Oftentimes radio stations want to use tickets for your Fridays and your Saturdays and your Sundays. And maybe they're co-sponsoring the Thursdays or whatever game it may be. And they're getting tickets that they would give away on the air. Like no problem.

Like it totally makes sense to give up some of that inventory to get caller number four wins X tickets to this weekend's game or something. So those totally make sense. Are you trading tickets that are worth zero? No, even though they could say comp on the ticket, they're worth something, but you're giving up some inventory. So I would not give them the best seats that you have, right?

Are you trading some of that for awareness? Absolutely. You're trying to get eyeballs, trying to get some awareness on your games to remind folks that you are still there and you're still playing and what have you. So it totally makes sense to give up unsold, some unsold inventory for awareness. That's a smart move.

It also gives you a cashflow flexibility for a lot of minor league teams, even summer collegiate sports teams, baseball teams, even college teams. Like you just don't have massive marketing budgets. Like I get it totally. Like I work with one team that they have 20 grand total for their entire sports season, the entire sports season, they have 20 grand. It's like that, that has to stretch.

Jeremy Neisser (05:56.482)
for four months and it's like that's just not a lot of money. So you really, really have to be very intentional and cognizant of it, which is why trade deals are like, they're very attractive. Trade lets you stay visible without cutting a check and that absolutely matters. And third, I think this is a major pro that we haven't really thought of and haven't talked out loud about, but the relationships. Trades can open doors with media partners.

It can open doors for sponsors. can open doors for community exposure. So you're trading a deal with a radio station or a TV station and you're promoting the sponsor within the ad that you're running. Like you just increased the brand awareness for them, which is part of what you're trying to accomplish when you're activating sponsors. Sponsors really want to get awareness or drive engagement or they have different objectives when they sign up for your team.

So a trade deal when leveraged correctly, you can really enhance the partnership that you have with your sponsor because you are getting them extensive visibility through additional channels where you're not spending a boatload of money to market it. Totally makes sense. So caller number four, you can win tickets this Friday's bobblehead giveaway.

buy Blue Ridge Motors, right? So Blue Ridge Motors is getting recognition, the radio station's giving away tickets, you're not spending any money to get the advertising, you're just giving up tickets and everyone's happy, right? You could totally do that and that's a lot of the ways that Teams leverage trade deals is to enhance sponsorship opportunities, but those relationships could most definitely open the door for community opportunities.

media partnerships and sponsorships and what have you, but you have to be intentional about it and have a really good working relationship with some of these trade deals. Let me give you another example here. A lot of radio stations, specifically the early morning on the morning drive, they do silly things in the morning. They may go out to a school and have a bunch of kids lead the national anthem and they're live on the radio. Well, the mascot can come with that radio DJ that goes to the school to do it.

Jeremy Neisser (08:13.174)
and the kids are excited to see their mascot, the team's mascot, the radio guys talking about the mascots here high-fiving kids, and they lead the national anthem. Like, that is such a great way to get additional exposure where you didn't have to think about how am gonna get my mascot out into the community doing fun things? How am I gonna increase my awareness without spending more dollars? Great, you can do things like that. Those things make sense, and they're great.

piggyback opportunities you can do with your media partner. So I'm just giving you some ideas here around this, right? But you got to be intentional. The one big point that I'm going to drive through with this entire episode is while you're thinking about trade, you have to be, there's two parts here. You have to be intentional about how you're doing it and you have to hold them accountable just like you would anyone you're paying for cash.

But on the marketing side of things, everything that you're doing with trade, 99 % of it is all top of the funnel. Sending that mascot out with that guy, radio guy from the DJ in the morning to do the national anthem at the kids school, that's top of the funnel brand awareness. Caller number 10 calls in to win four tickets to the game, that's brand awareness. That billboard on the side of the bus that you traded for,

That's brand awareness. Those billboards on the side of the road that you traded for, that's all brand awareness, right? It's all top of the funnel. It helps people know that you exist, helps them know that you are still and it's your season and keeps you top of mind. It is not a direct response channel. And oftentimes I see this with teams are I didn't drive any revenue from my billboard being on the side of that cement truck that drives all around town, right? No.

You're right. You didn't but you definitely need to ask well, many cars do you think you go past a day? You need to track the impression side of things because you honestly might be doing too much of the awareness and less of asking people to actually buy tickets through direct response channels Those things that you're doing with trade Are not designed to drive immediate ticket sales and this is where I feel like teams really get themselves in trouble because they expect

Jeremy Neisser (10:37.674)
trade to perform like paid media without treating it like paid media. I'm going to say that again just so it hits home because teams often expect trade deals to perform like paid media deals without treating them like paid media. All right now let's talk about the real problems with trade. This is such a great segue into this right so this would be the cons bucket. We're going to talk about

what's actually broken here. Number one, zero tracking. So you have no truth. You have no idea. You could do a trade with a local magazine company and it says, hey, we gave you a full page ad. All right, well, give me a copy of it. And they can give you a copy of it. And it's a one shot. Hey, we got this out to 60,000 businesses. Well, did you really get it out to 60,000 businesses or we printed 80,000 of these? Did you really print 80,000 like

It's not to cast doubt on what they're saying, but it's a whole lot different when you're spending money to get an ad in there versus when you are accepting what they are selling you from a trade perspective, right? We were on TV. Great. were on TV? When were our ads on television? Your logo was on the bus and we drove it around for three months. Okay.

Great, that's awesome, but like, hey, can you give me a rough idea of how many cars or how many hours a day or any of those things, right? That's all great and awesome, but it's the next level down where you need some sort of data around what actually transpired that you feel confident in. Now, the second question would be, did it actually sell tickets? And most of the time, nobody knows.

No promo codes, no landing pages, no attribution. If you ran Meta or Google like that, you'd probably turn it off immediately because you really can't tell what's actually happening with the trade. just like, yeah, we're good. Keep going. Everything is great. Right. And to be honest, and this happens a lot with teams is you get leftovers. lot of the trade inventory.

Jeremy Neisser (12:56.29)
that the radio stations and the TV stations and some of these other ones are what's left over after they've already pitched and tried to get revenue for a lot of things. It's not the best spots for TV. It is not the greatest spot for radio. It's low priority placements. And I was looking at a TV schedule for a team not that long ago and it was, yeah, we ran your TV ads from midnight to 6 a.m.

How many people are watching TV midnight to 6am? Like, come on, that was zero value for us as a team. So that remnants of what's left over after they went out and pitched and they went out and sold the TV station or radio, you're getting what's left over. And that stinks. That's terrible. That's not how a trade deal should work, right? You're getting these low priority placements because if they could sell it for cash, they probably would.

They probably wouldn't be trading a lot of these opportunities with you. So when you're talking through a trade deal, I would ask specifically, hey, when would my ads run? If it's TV or radio or when would this, this ad in this magazine hit? We really want it during the season instead of November where it really doesn't do me any good. Truth be told. Right. So being intentional on the timing and being intentional on asking.

when things take place and where they take place because you are trading up value on your end and you want value in return. So what you're actually getting is what they didn't sell in many cases. Now in some cases it's true they're going to give you decent but you really, really have to look at it and go, gosh did I get what I was actually paying for? Here's the other thing too and this one drives me bonkers.

is inflated value. I've seen this happen over and over and over again and early in my career it happened to me and I simply didn't know. Two teams get the same deal, same price, same trade value, but one has a market that's 10 times the size of an audience. One market could have a million people in there and then another market has a hundred thousand people in there, right? So one team is massively overpaying that this inflated, overvalued

Jeremy Neisser (15:18.606)
trade deal versus another team that says, this sounds like a good deal to me that the team that has a million people in their audience is trading this and the value they say is $2,000. But the value is still $2,000 in a smaller community. Well, that doesn't make any sense at all. But no one questions this. And that's the problem is that oftentimes teams are only in their little bucket and they don't see, this is what I'm trading in value and in

Jeremy Neisser (16:00.55)
I that makes sense.

but it's really a comparison from city to city in the population and they say that the value is exactly the same and it should not be because one person may feel like it's good deal but it's not priced on performance it's priced on perception which is terrible in all reality. Number four and this is a point I hit earlier was accountability. Biggest issue here when there's no cash involved team stopped asking questions. They stop asking

Well, did this work? Was this worth it? Should we keep doing this? They just say, Hey, we got exposure. Exposure doesn't pay the bills. Ticket sales do. man. And then the next piece here, and this has been recurring for the last 10 plus years is your TV and maybe your TV and your newspaper and some of the other, maybe even radio stations as well is that, Hey, we're going to give you some bonus.

some digital ads, some email blasts, some website banners on our website. Really, they're adding on this additional exposure on the digital side that they feel like are high values, but on paper it looks great. But in reality, engagement is low, the targeting is weak, your cost per thousand, your CPMs are worse than what you would get if you did it on Meta or Google, and reporting is questionable at best.

So you end up paying for more in value than if you did if you paid cash with worse performance, with less visibility. So it like the digital add on stuff is something that I always get annoyed by because it's actually not as valuable as the media companies would present to you. So, so I would hesitate on those, but all things being equal.

Jeremy Neisser (18:05.558)
and kind of assessing the situation, I would kind of look at that and just say, Hey, like, just don't think the engagements there, the visibility and targeting is great. just feel like it's an add on because if they're offering it to you, they're offering it to the local hardware store. They're offering it to the local aquarium. They're offering all of these opportunities to a bunch of other people. And if I'm on their email list, it's banner blindness.

because it's a bunch of different ads and a bunch of different things that I just don't feel like I get to stand out like I would want to. I just get lost in the shuffle. Keep in mind, a lot of these businesses that are offering trade to you are in the business of making money and they're advertising for other businesses. So sure, you want to stand out and you want to have prime, prominent space, but they're not in that business. They're in the business of selling

three minute increments of radio spots on the radio station or three to five minute increments of commercials on TV or ads in their magazine for their upcoming edition or the newspaper selling advertising around some of the content that they have they're in the advertising business and they're selling a lot of things to a lot of different people where you are simply saying I want prominent placement because golly I'm a big deal and I want to get people to our games

I want to increase the awareness, right? So, so I always think about the perspective from the salesperson side, the salesperson that's trying to pitch the media trade deal to you to know that, I getting remnants? Am I getting leftovers here? Like no one really likes leftovers and I definitely don't want that. But also they're in the business of selling advertising. So are they going to give us the prime spots? Are they going to create something that it's not banner blindness just for us? Maybe.

Maybe not. And that's a hard truth to think through because oftentimes we're always thinking about our side of things, but we never put our feet in the shoes of the people that are actually pitching the things to us and what they're trying to accomplish, what their goals and objectives are. So how should you actually use trade the right way? What should you do? I'm not saying don't use trade. Don't throw tomatoes at me and say, Jeremy's an idiot. Like, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying

Jeremy Neisser (20:31.866)
use it intentionally. When you use trade intentionally, you don't give up inventory that you are planning on selling. You are giving up some inventory that won't sell or you created something that's specific for them that makes a lot of sense rather than additional things. Giving up trade inventory items that won't sell or you create something for them makes them feel special.

You are focused on awareness and not necessarily looking for an ROI for a lot of these things. And if you can track it even a little bit, I think you're winning. So thinking about trade just exactly how you think about cash. I want you to avoid trade when you're giving away high demand inventory items, maybe even high demand games like

My early baseball, 4th of July, July 3rd, summer collegiate, a lot of these baseball teams that have huge games that are going to sell out, do not give up those because you don't need to, right? So don't give away your high demand games. You expect it to drive revenue without tracking it. Like this is definitely avoid this trap here. You are expecting it to drive revenue without actually tracking it. Well, that's technically on you to be candid with you.

Like, so avoid trade deals when you're thinking about it, driving revenue, always think about it, brand awareness, or you're using it instead of actually fixing your sales funnel. And this is something that teams need a lot of work on. And I could put a link in the show notes to a couple of episodes that talk about your sales funnel and how you're filling the top of the funnel with awareness. The middle is you're trying to get people to engage in everyone that comes out the bottom are purchasers.

So how are you moving them through the funnel? How are you turning a single game buyer into multi-game buyer? Like all of those things. If you haven't thought about that side first, trade amplifies the things that you're not doing. So treat trade like real media. That means if you want to do some things, do some dedicated landing pages, you promo code, trade down inventory, like giving up seats over your premium seats on your specific big games.

Jeremy Neisser (22:47.694)
Compare it to what you would get with paid media. Think about it exactly the same. And actually review the performance. And this happens a lot. Teams don't review the performance when it comes to trade deals. Here's the gut check. If you wouldn't spend cash on it, you probably shouldn't trade for it either. If you wouldn't spend any cash on what you are trading, then you shouldn't trade for it. Honestly.

Main takeaways at the end of each episode, I give you some main takeaways, really some big things to think through and talk about with your team and really to change your perspective on some things. So main takeaways today, trade isn't free. You're paying with an inventory and opportunity costs. It works best as awareness. that top of the funnel channel, not a revenue driver. Most trade deals fail because there is no tracking.

or accountability. Media partners often include low value or unsold inventory in their trade packages. So you really have to be intentional to ask, well, when will my ads run? What will this look like? Timing and really treating trade like you're spending cash. And the last main takeaway here is smart teams treat trade like real media measured, compared,

optimized really on top of it because at the end of the day trade isn't bad it's just simply misunderstood the problem is that teams treat it like a revenue strategy when it's really just an awareness tool and when you start treating it like an awareness tool you will start making way better decisions I appreciate you taking a listen today if you found some value in some of the content that I've shared today or in other episodes

Just pop one over to Spotify or Apple, leave a rating or review. It would mean the world to me, but more importantly, it would get this podcast and more people's eyes and ears who are just like you trying to sell more tickets and grow their fan base. If you've got questions about trade and you need someone to kind of take a look at it and you just want to bounce some ideas and you need someone who's not in the weeds with you every day to really give you a perspective.

Jeremy Neisser (25:11.352)
that you're really thinking about and you're just like, I just simply don't know. Like pop on my website, let's schedule a call, 30 minutes, you and I, can just have a good conversation. I'm here to help you win and here to help you sell more tickets. So you've got questions, don't hesitate. I really mean it, completely free. Pop on over to sportsmarketingmachine.com, schedule a call. Love to chat with you about your trade deal or any other marketing things that you're working through that you really need to unpack. I'm happy to help.

and looking forward to continuing and having a blast. Hope you have a great weekend and until next time.