Earlier this year, Fox and the new Big East agreed to a deal reportedly worth $500 million over 12 years to air the newly-formed conference’s games on Fox Sports 1. Now the two entities are going to market with a new collaboration to jointly sell the conference’s sponsorship assets and broadcast advertising.

The two-year agreement will involve an integrated sales strategy for presenting sponsorships for all conference championships and categories, and official conference sponsorships for TV and other media assets.

“This agreement will allow us to further align our sponsorship and sales priorities so that we can leverage our commercial opportunities across a wide range of platforms,” said Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman in a joint press release with Fox Sports.

“The rationale for doing it is that we really would like to have more control over our brand,” says Big East Chief Marketing Officer Ann Wells Crandall. “In most companies, these sales efforts [between broadcaster and conference] would be separate. What we’ve decided to do is put them together because we have such a great relationship with Fox.”

The package would include sponsorships for touchstone events such as the Big East Men’s Basketball Tournament at Madison Square Garden and the Women’s tournament in Chicago, as well as conference championships in soccer, lacrosse and track and field.

“We’re a basketball-centric conference that believes in our tradition and really wants to celebrate our heritage,” Crandall says.

When the carriage deal was announced this spring, the new conference and the new cable network seemed like a pretty good fit. The “Catholic 7”, basketball powerhouses from the old conference, were looking for a lucrative TV deal. The Fox offer allows the seven schools to split the rights evenly, earning about $5 million annually and splitting the remaining money with newcomers, Butler, Creighton and Xavier who would all be earning significantly more than they earned in their previous conferences. Fox Sports 1, hoping to position itself as a competitor to ESPN, made an aggressive play for the conference as a new cable network looking to solidify its programming mix.

While the deal is decidedly less than the $120 million per year the old Big East reportedly turned down a few years ago for a renewal contract with ESPN, it seems to be a better deal than non-football schools in the conference were previously getting. It’s also much less than the massive deal ESPN and Fox agreed to for the Pac-12, but considerably more than the $20 million a year ESPN is reportedly paying for the American Athletic Conference, or the Conference Formerly Known As the Big East.

Brief Take: By offering the Big East its sales and marketing services, Fox Sports made its programming offer that much sweeter.

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