How Shake Shack cooked up its first NIL campaign

Shake Shack had never done an NIL campaign before this month, but by the time next spring has sprung, the fast-casual chain plans to have worked with 75 college athletes.

In the more than two years since brands got the green light to start signing sponsorship deals with student athletes, marketers have approached the opportunity at different speeds. Some, like American Eagle, took advantage fairly early, while others have hung back— perhaps in part because NIL execs have warned against copy-pasting influencer marketing strategies onto college athlete campaigns.

In Shake Shack’s case, the brand took its time researching before looking into NIL deals, Rachael Caine, director of regional marketing, told Marketing Brew. But now the restaurant chain has a game plan that, if effective, could lead to more NIL and broader sports marketing deals down the line, she said.

Route running

The new campaign, called “Stand for Something Good,” will run for eight months—allowing Shake Shack to tap into both football and basketball seasons—and feature student athletes from 10 different schools.

Five athletes have been chosen this month (but haven’t yet been announced), and 10 (one from each school) will be selected for each of the seven months to follow. The campaign is meant to highlight the athletes’ contributions to their communities outside of sports by allowing them to select charities for Shake Shack to make donations to.

Athletes will each host a donation day at their local Shake Shack to raise money for their charity of choice, and 25% of sales from individual orders where guests mention donation day or use a code on digital channels will go directly to the selected organizations. As part of the campaign, the athletes will create social content encouraging fans and friends to come by, Caine said.

Those athletes selected to partake in the campaign must be active in their communities and on their teams to be chosen, according to Kim DeCarolis, VP of Altius Sports Partners Brands, an NIL consultancy that Shake Shack tapped to help with the campaign. They should also have experience doing charitable work, Caine said, and, of course, they’ll all “have genuine love for Shack Shack.”

To choose the schools, Shake Shack provided Altius with a list of markets of interest where the restaurant chain already had locations. That list included locations where the company wanted to drive more traffic, as well as locations that were already doing well, DeCarolis said.

ASP then cross-referenced that list with states and schools that are “friendlier” to NIL deals, DeCarolis said, which led to the final 10 schools: The University of Wisconsin-Madison, LSU, Marquette, UNC, The University of Texas, UC Boulder, Penn, The University of Washington, Stanford, and Ohio State.

Rookie season

Thanks to research conducted by Shake Shack’s internal guest insights team, the brand knows that its customers are big fans of sports, especially football, Caine said. And while Shake Shack has done some local sports sponsorships in the past, she said, it’s nothing she’d consider “major.” Starting with NIL deals means that the brand can test the sports market “at a smaller scale” before potentially doing more, she said.

“Because we’re a regional brand, we really loved the idea of doing it in multiple locations at once, so that it’s more of a national, holistic story,” Caine said. “If you do things as one offs, it just doesn’t have as much impact.”

The campaign is mostly meant to be a learning experience, she said, but the brand will be tracking sentiment, social engagement, and press coverage to help gauge its success. While Caine said other NIL deals she has seen have had uneven effects, in some cases, she believes they can be “incredibly valuable.” In the case of Shake Shack’s Stand for Something Good, Caine is hopeful that partnerships with athletes who genuinely love the brand’s food can help boost fandom for everyone involved.

“If we see that from this partnership, we’ll definitely continue to do more,” she said.