The largest bank in America looked at everything money can buy and decided what it really wanted was Ohio State.
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is paying the university roughly $17 million a year to be its bank — and to be on its jerseys. Not just football. The deal covers all 36 varsity sports.
Thirty-six. That is football and basketball, yes, but also the rowers, the wrestlers, the fencers. Somewhere in Columbus, a synchronized swimmer is now, in a modest way, a bank asset.
And JPMorgan is late to a party that is getting crowded. Michigan State banks with — who else — the MSU Federal Credit Union, a pairing so on-the-nose it reads like a typo. The Big 12 conference signed Monster Energy, the drink made by Monster Beverage (MNST), at $20 million a season across all twelve teams. SoFi (SOFI), not content with its NFL stadium, has been talking with Notre Dame.
The Journal’s Jason Gay surveyed all this like a man watching money hose down the last corner of sports it had not reached. He has a point. College sports once at least pretended to be separate from commerce. The pretending is over. The invoice is itemized.
Why buy a marching band
Set the nostalgia aside and ask the cold question: what is JPMorgan actually buying?
Attention. Specifically the rarest kind: live, shared, fast-forward-proof attention. A college football Saturday is one of the last places in America where millions of people watch the same thing at the same time and cannot skip the parts with the logos.
Sponsorship dollars are a map of where marketers believe attention actually lives — a map drawn by people spending real money, not giving speeches. Right now that map has a giant arrow pointing at college sports.
For a bank there is a second layer. An Ohio State deal is not just eyeballs; it is a pipeline. Hundreds of thousands of students and alumni opening first checking accounts, first credit cards, first mortgages. Seventeen million a year to become the default bank of a small nation of Buckeyes is not sentiment. It is arithmetic.
And unlike a one-night TV ad, the jersey works every week, in every sport, for years. Spread the cost across 36 teams’ worth of seasons and the price per viewer starts to look downright frugal.
The tell in the checkbook
Here is the investing lesson, and it is why this story earns a page.
JPMorgan is writing these checks out of record profit. Companies do not fund 36-sport, multiyear sponsorships out of anxiety. They fund them when the core machine is throwing off so much cash that planting a flag for the next generation of customers is the obvious use of it. A company advertises like this when it is flush and thinking in decades. Marketing budgets are confidence made visible.
We hold JPMorgan in the Capital Wealth Growth Portfolio, and we recently added to the position. A jersey patch changes nothing about the bank’s loan quality or its deposit base. But as a tell — a public, expensive signal of how management feels about the next decade — a deal like this is worth more than a dozen carefully hedged conference-call sentences.
Meanwhile, watch who else is buying: banks, a credit union, an energy-drink maker, a finance app. Consumer companies fighting to be the young customer’s default choice. That is where this era’s marketing war is being fought — not on prime-time television, but on a linebacker’s shoulder.
Somewhere, a fencer lunges for the glory of a giant bank. It is a strange country. The dividend, however, clears just fine.