PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. – Jeremi Gorman, chief revenue officer of Fanatics Advertising, would like to clear something up before anyone files Fanatics under “people who sell hats.”
“It’s actually much bigger than a lot of people think,” she said, describing a portfolio that stretches from officially licensed merchandise across major leagues to trading cards, collectibles and betting and gaming.
Fanatics runs league storefronts such as the NFL Shop and NBA Shop, and the commerce engine behind them is not small.
“We do about $8 billion a year in commerce on that side of the business,” Gorman said. She added that the company owns Topps, “which is going gangbusters as an industry right now,” plus Lids and even the NBA Store in Times Square.
In short, Fanatics sits “in every intersection of sports,” which is a polite way of saying it can find you whether you are buying a hoodie, chasing a rare card or pretending you are only “looking” at odds.
The company has been busy on the rights front too. Gorman said Topps recently “got the NBA rights back,” and that Fanatics “signed David Beckham back to have his collectibles and trading cards as well.”
FanGraph turns fandom into an addressable signal
Gorman said the company has spent months building what it calls the FanGraph, a backend system designed to understand what customers want and their “definitive league team and athlete affiliation.” The idea is to help advertisers activate against real fan identity, not just generic sports interest.
That matters because fandom is personal in a way many categories are not.
“People can be fans of things,” Gorman said, but when it comes to what they “truly love,” sports teams sit in a very small club alongside “family and pets.”
She illustrated it with a linguistic tell that advertisers should file under “useful and slightly terrifying.”
Ask someone when a TV show is on and they might say, “It’s on Thursdays.” Ask when a team plays and it becomes “We play on Saturday,” she said, because fans do not just watch, they join.
Onsite, offsite, endemic, non-endemic: yes
When asked what the advertising actually is, Gorman did not pick one channel.
“All of the above,” she said. Fanatics offers onsite placements across “the 900 sites that we run,” where “about 110 million customers plus come through those sites.”
Brands can also activate offsite using Fanatics data, supported by partnerships that include Snowflake and Magnite.
One product, Sponsor Plus, is built for brands that want adjacency with some guardrails. Gorman gave an example of a sponsor wanting to appear next to coverage about an athlete they sponsor, but only when the news is positive.
The system “checks for sentiment,” she said, so a brand can show up “next to any article about” that athlete if it is “a positive article.” She added that the concept extends into game moments too, like being present around “every goal and every dunk,” which is either a dream for the right brand or a warning label for anyone who dislikes excitement.
Fanatics Fest is where commerce media becomes a real life crowd
Fanatics is also bringing advertisers into physical events, including Fanatics Fest at the Javits Center in New York.
Gorman called it “the largest gathering of sports fans in the world,” with about “250,000 people expected to come through.” Last year, she said the event delivered “35 billion social impressions,” and it features the Fanatics Games, where “50 professional athletes compete against 50 fans.”
The pitch to brands is access, scale and the kind of cultural electricity that is hard to fake. Gorman said Kevin Durant “got traded on stage during Fanatics Fest last year,” and brands activated with Dick’s Sporting Goods, Starbucks, Meta and Raising Cane’s. If you ever wondered what commerce media looks like when it stands up and starts yelling, that is the vibe.
Why sports still works when culture does not sync up
Gorman argued that sports has grown even more valuable because it remains one of the last truly shared experiences.
“Like right now, more than ever, the value of sports is so palpable,” she said, noting that mass, in-unison TV finales are rarer now.
With sports, “you don’t know the ending every time you watch it,” she said, so people pay closer attention and brands can be adjacent to something audiences “care deeply about.”
She also framed sports as unifying, even when rivalries get spicy.
“It is true that everybody from Boston hates New York sports teams, and everybody from New York hates Boston sports teams,” Gorman said, adding that people still “gather together around sports,” which gives brands a chance to show up in moments of joy, heartbreak or, in her case as a Rams fan, “sadness sometimes also.”
For advertisers, the thesis is simple: Fanatics is not just a place to sell merch after a big win. It is an always-on sports graph, a commerce engine, an onsite and offsite media layer and a live event megaphone, all wrapped around the one thing aud
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