Ishveen Jolly

Yep. And that would be easy, right, Ryan? Because then you'd be like, well, if I don't hit it, I'll just do two extra ad reads for free. And if I do hit it... Exactly.

Yeah.

I think also the other thing is, like you said, awareness or whatever else. What that also does is it goes against everything we were saying before, which is like, The value is also in like using that ad read and putting it in paid ads, posting on LinkedIn, posting it organically, doing a marketing email and being like, hey, did you see us on this podcast?

Like did you like, you know, or putting it like using it in PR. And so by trying to make it free, you're basically saying it's got no value anywhere else other than the influencers channel, which is like the wrong way to think about it. So. that whole thing doesn't really work. But I think what needs to happen is almost like there needs to be a very separated approach. Like your Mac, like,

you know, like your macro and what does that look like? Whether it's macro or micro or like strategies and buckets. And it's like, this is my royalty only people, but these are my people who do something else. And these are my people and they've all got different goals.

And that's what we've been trying to work on with our clients where we're like, your product only deal is for a testimonial or review for you to use. It's not going to drive sales because they've probably got less than 5,000 followers. Yep. This person, you know, they're going to produce content that you're going to put in your paid ads that you're going to be proud of, you know, blah, blah, blah.

I love it. And it's going to be royalty-based only. Yeah, exactly.

I'd say having been in the sponsorship game a long time, if you have the brand dollars, the right brands with the right dollars, you can make any deal happen.

And so we needed enough base to say like, hey, brand, become interested. But really, the last eight out of 10 years, it's been servicing the brand.

when we feel like we built a mobile app, and that was predominantly with the focus of the athletes and the agents, because we realized that they're on the go, they don't sit at a desktop all day, they want to upload content from their phone, you know, all of that stuff, right?

And so we've actually probably built more tech, not, well, it's like the tech is 50-50, but the service is probably 75 brand, 25 athlete agent. And it goes back to the fact that at the end of the day, well, one is we work with a lot of agents, so they do part of the servicing.

And two is, you know, we've had companies approach us for partnerships and they're like, hey, we've got this great business, put it in front of your athletes. And we're like, look, our athletes come to us for sponsorship, for marketing dollars. They're not coming to us for like a merchandise line. Or to launch a Shopify. Like maybe we'd get there.

But to be honest, if we didn't give them brand dollars, they'd be like, why am I here?

You know, like, you know why you go to Uber. You know why you go to Airbnb. You know what? So I think we've been very clean and clear that we're not trying to give you. We're not trying to do everything for you, athlete and agent. We're trying to do this. And to do this, we need to have have the brands. And once we have the and, you know, right at the beginning, we had very small brands.

You know, you're a smaller company. You don't have any notable names. They love it now. We just did a great campaign for Live Golf in Miami. And they're like, oh, yeah, we want to work with Live and we want to work with Western Union and we want to work with Drunk Elephant. And so they love it when we bring them better brands. They respect the fact that that's our job.

And we just give you great deals.

Yeah. We, again, probably same thing. So dollars wise, we focus on the brand, um, And then what we tend to do is because we have like so many athletes now, like, you know, like we've got like 80 percent of the NFL. We've got thousands of college athletes, got loads of influencers. So when we need to fill a brand campaign that we don't have, like we've now moved into different verticals.

So we just ran a campaign with a Costco vegan parmesan cheese brand and they wanted foodie influencers who drive Costco sales. So like we'll go out and get new people, but to fulfill a campaign, kind of like what I was saying about podcasts. So like if one of our brands is like, we're actually interested in podcasts. We're like, cool, we'll go out and get like opportunities for you.

In terms of our marketing dollars, I'd say very brand focused. But actually, I don't know how you feel about this or what you've seen on your side of the table, but we are more focused now on retention and growing our existing client base than new clients. Yeah.

We've really flipped our focus because we would rather completely service you and get more of your growing influencer budget outside of sports or get your podcast budget or get your events budget than having to sign another person and starting from scratch and proving ourselves.

It's also like it just feels so good to produce wins for customers. Like I think about five years ago, it felt good to sign new customers that like what you're saying, that the whole thing was like growth and customer acquisition. And that's what the world is. And now it feels so good when someone tells us something worked.

Yeah, I just love the feeling of being able to go like we actually produce something for that person.

No, thank you. Well, I suppose very quickly, because I do love the marketing stuff more as well, but started Open Sponsorship about 10 years ago. I used to be a sports agent. Prior to that, my background in sports, I played a lot growing up. I captained multiple teams while at university and then fell into sponsorship and then fell in love. I just thought, what a wonderful form of marketing.

Yeah, it's true.

100 percent. I absolutely love it, especially like we do. We do loads of like deals and like the health and wellness space and, you know, truly authentic. And so you're like. Even if it is a small cash thing with a bit of product, these supplements are like hundreds of dollars.

And if they're actually helping you achieve your goals, help you get fit, or it's a product you used to use, that's the coolest thing we can do.

I think there's a few reasons, given that it's having such a growth moment. I think it is a few reasons. So one is it's the new word of mouth marketing. Essentially, right. Like word of mouth marketing, like you said, referrals used to be and still are technically the number one channel, but it's quite limited. And like influencer is like the new version of that. Fine.

There might be people you don't know necessarily that you follow them. So I'd say if you think word of mouth traditional, what's the word of mouth? It's the new version of that.

PR is still hugely important but it is so like for us when we had when we raised our last round and had like Serena Williams and David Blitzer and something like getting PR was so much easier when you're aligned with a person so like we're all trying to sit there getting more PR this is it it's like the new version of that in fact you kind of don't even need the PR because it almost is its own PR in a way it's PR channel like doing a podcast and sponsoring an ad read like

It's like paid editorial. So that's second. The third is, for better or worse, we have social media. And back in the day, the biggest thing for us is back in the day, you needed to put a TV ad up. That TV ad was one spot and it would cost a million bucks, let's say. You're not going to put a person in that ad unless it's a LeBron James or a Tom Brady or someone big. But now...

You can literally you don't even have to pay for production. These people are putting it out themselves. And so it's like buying a milk. Like the one thing I haven't done, I really want to still do is Super Bowl. Do take someone's budget instead of a Super Bowl ad on NBC. Give it to us and let us do like.

500 NFL player deals across all and see what the return is so I feel like that's another one and then the fourth thing is around like the idea about localization and personalization like I was at a talk last week advertising week and some guy was talking about in-store retail and like how

When you walk around the grocery store, there's so much inventory and they're going to start putting like digital banners in inventory and that's going to be the place. And it completely made sense. And then they gave the one case study of the best case study. And it was Dale Earnhardt Jr. on a little thing with Hellman's mayonnaise.

Of course, sponsorship today, is it influencer marketing? Is it affiliate marketing? Is it PR? There's so many crosses with the other verticals, but really fell in love with sponsorship. The idea that your brand could leverage another brand for one plus one equals like 50 kind of thing.

And when you walk past, he would speak and go, how are you doing your mayo for 4th of July? And they were talking about the results of this. But let's be very clear. That is because it's him. It was local to that market. Where was it? Probably Indiana. I don't know. Somewhere.

Yeah, probably.

So it was it was a local store. And that is probably the cost of that versus doing a TV ad, which they might not have seen, which is not like you said, not even connected to retail. So, of course, you walk past that. He interacts with you and you use AI to do this stuff. So why influencer? It's not. I don't think the Instagram reel is the answer.

I think it's the integration of people who influence you at points. where they can make an impact for you at values that you could never have got them before at.

A hundred percent. Yeah. It's super fun.

Yeah. Well, come check us out online and sign up for a free account, play around www.opensponsorship.com. And then, um, if you want to have a chat, we, we love kind of any brands and they often, there's a lot of brands who are like, yeah, but it's athlete focused. And, you know, I'm like, give us, give us your category and we'll find a fit for you.

And obviously the fact that the money goes into sports, which I'm very passionate about, or entertainment, music, which I'm really passionate about. And so started that 10 years ago. Fast forward today, yeah, very lucky to have received quite a lot of accolades. I suppose highlights are we have Serena Williams as an investor, one of our lead investors.

There's, there's literally not, there's not a vertical or a type of brand that there isn't like a fit to some sort of retired, younger, older U S international athlete. And so, um, We love making those matches happen. So, yeah, come find us on LinkedIn or wherever else.

Thanks, Ryan. Same to you.

We have 19,000 athletes and influencers today. We work with brands like the Walmart or Reebok or whoever else, and it's just fabulous. We run a small team that's mostly all in the U.S., and it's really rewarding.

So we headquartered in New York for the longest time until COVID. Very US focused. I personally just like to live in London, but the businesses in the US, I love working in the US market. Obviously, I get to meet people like yourself with all your great energy. And so the US is our base for multiple reasons. Love the marketing dollars.

Of course, the budget's there, but also just the willingness to try something new. And as a small company competing with bigger agencies, which I'm sure we could exchange notes like the American market is very much like, all right, we'll give you a little bit. If you prove yourself to get more, you know, and it's quick turnaround. Yeah, I love that.

A hundred percent. And I think the biggest thing is just like the extension of, um, That piece of content or that partnership across all the other marketing channels and the sales channels and the impact it has on like your employee base or whatever else. And so like it's it's the. And it's the fact that I don't think there's anything like it where sponsoring an athlete, using an athlete.

And today it's never been cheaper because you literally can pay them to do one Instagram story for a few hundred bucks. But then you can take that and suddenly scream and tell the world this is what we do. And you put it in your PR, you put it on your website, you put it in your own personal LinkedIn, you tell your team members.

All of this and the amplification and the ripple effect of all of it is so huge.

100%. And this is why, you know, we talked about it slightly when we were kind of chatting before that. We started off, you know, I created open sponsorship with my co-founder as the LinkedIn, the Airbnb, the match.com of the industry. You know, we were like, right, we're going to help you find the person, connect, boom, done. And then...

We realized in the journey that if you're on like a dating site or like a job recruitment site or something, if you get the match, that's success. But we were, people were coming to us and they're like, great, you, you're great. But what the outcome wasn't, the ROI wasn't there.

And I was like, shit, I need to start thinking about the ROI on these deals because otherwise we're just going to see all of these guys like trying at once and leaving. And then we did what you did. We started trying to build into what you were saying. We tried to build into the platform. Have you thought about doing this? Have you thought about doing this and share this?

And then we realized people just either don't have the time, the knowledge or whatever else. And so that's kind of why about three years ago, we were like, you know what? We're going to get rid of the self-service. We're going to be completely full service. We're going to be like an extension of your team. And we're going to like make you we're going to we're going to do it for you.

Great examples like. A few months ago, I was speaking to my team and I didn't even know that they did this, but like they'll go to like a tool like CapCut and they'll put music overlay and the text overlay onto a video. And I was like, you do that for our clients?

And they're like, yeah, but it's just like, it's harder to get them to do it and teach them and say, oh, this video would be so much more effective. They're like, we'll just do it for them and it'll take a few seconds. And so I think like what I've realized is it's whatever the brand's reason is, is to not do, it's ultimately our problem.

And so there's no point in doing these partnerships if you're not going to make it happen.

Yeah, I got it. Honestly, yeah.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Yeah. I'm making it not look like it was like read off the script or that they've been forced to do it. Definitely a challenge that still exists. Yeah. I think, again, going back to the point, like, what are you using them for? So if what you want is content creation and great UGC to put in ads, don't use that guy who never does reels and, like, is a little bit stiff.

But if what you want is to be able to say that you sponsor the quarterback of Clemson, then great. Then... you know, or whatever else, then... And I think that's the other thing is I realize that a lot of times when you... And I do this as a CEO with a marketing budget. You conflate everything. You're like... You start off going, I want... I want a testimonial.

And then five weeks later, you're like, oh, but it didn't produce sales. And you're like, well, that was never the goal. And so I think it's really important. Again, the benefit of being hand in hand is like you can keep saying, remind that this is the goal of this campaign. This is the goal of this partnership. If you want to change the goal, we've got to change the creative.

We might need to change the person. We've got to change the deliverables. So it's like if you like a great example is if you want sales, reels doesn't allow you to have a link.

It's not going to produce sales. But if you want a brand awareness piece, stories disappear after 24 hours. Very, very different. Which one do you want?

No, I didn't.

Hey, Ryan. Thanks for the intro.

Don't ask me questions about individuals. I'm sorry.

I'm going to say the answer is yes because I have faith in my team.

It's the new word of mouth marketing.

I love what you say. We don't do as many of those deals, to be honest. But we also count product as value. So I'd say cash is king, product is second, then really equity if you've got it, and then it's royalty, exactly what you're saying. So we basically do zero royalty-only deals with no product. And when people say to us royalty, I say do a deal for product.

And if it works, if there's alignment, if you like their work, if they like you, then fine. Talk about a longer term deal with royalties. But the expectation that you're going to come in and get good things. Now, let's talk about then why is it still, why is it happening? Well, obviously TikTok shop is changing the whole game because they've got this whole thing.

I don't think it happens that much on Meta or wherever else. It might be on Amazon. And if I was going to play like devil's advocate, like why is it happening? Why is it not happening to us so much is because athletes, this is not their primary job.

But if you're a content creator, let's say on TikTok, firstly, you need content to post three times a day. Yeah. So if you get paid like 20 bucks for a video or like you're going to just generate a bit of sales, like one, two, this is your job. So you need to figure out ways to, because like those brand awareness dollars are drying up if you don't produce content. if you don't have a viewpoint.

And that's why I love the space that we're in because I used to say, we're not influencer marketing, we're sports sponsorship. And then obviously I was like, all right, we're influencer marketing.

Well, if you're the buyer and you buy influencer marketing, I'm here for it. Yeah, exactly. But I'd also say like, with the rise of the athlete and the celebrity and the TV star all becoming... better value, I think it's hard for someone who's not famous for a reason to make money from brand awareness. And they're probably the ones doing the affiliate deals.

I wish there were more. And we've done a few of these. I wish the deals were like more creatively set up. So it's like, OK, what does your funnel look like? I can guarantee you this amount of traffic. Let's pay for that. And then let's do royalties on top of. So it de-risks you. It gives me a bit of upside. But there's also...

Like you said, if your website crashes on that day, I shouldn't be held. And also, I say this to our brands. We're not in the business of understanding your competitive set, your pricing, your packaging, your flavors. So we can't predict the success. But I do feel like there's probably a myth that it's like no guarantee or sales. Ideally, it should be like a guarantee of something within funnel.