The Future of Influencer & Athlete Marketing with Ishveen Jolly

0:00Why is influencer, sponsor, the it medium for helping grow a brand of any size? It's the new word-of-mouth marketing. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always keeping it right for you. You know. You know we're right. You know. I mean, the website is RyanIsRight.com.

0:44You know, that's why I bring the best and the brightest from around the globe. Coming from London today. We're all over the planet. We got you covered, baby. We're talking all about sponsorships. NIL. Has anybody heard of that? I'm going to go there with our guest. We're going to tell you what that means. But ultimately, it's about getting value for your marketing dollar. We got Ishfeen Jolly. She is the CEO and co-founder of Open Sponsorship. What's up, Ishfeen? Hi, Ryan. Thanks for the intro. Yeah. Hey, we're in this marketing game together. You know, we got to stick together. Love it. I love it.

1:21I know. It's a fascinating world out there. Navigating new media, the new stars, the new spokesperson, you know, all the people. You got all the changing laws and rules with what happened with NIL in the U.S. I want to get down that path. But at the end of the day, it's about I always say this is being people have never been more aware that they're being marketing to, you know, being marketed to. They know. And so you've got to be more authentic and you've got to use their peers to sort of get to them. That's what I really love about what you guys are doing with open sponsorship. Let's set the table for everyone And they can go check out your YouTubes And all the stuff Ishfeen's got all the accolades of the world Let me just tell you I'll let her mention a few of them When she describes herself Very accomplished And her journey stories are out there So we won't go that We want to keep it real raw And interesting about the topic But Ishfeen, do set the table And give everybody a little synopsis Of open sponsorship And give a little bit of the brag reel Come on um no thank you well i suppose very quickly because i do love the marketing stuff more as well but um 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 um and then kind of fell into sponsorship and then fell in love i just thought what a wonderful form of marketing of course like sponsorship today is it influencer marketing is it affiliate marketing is it pr um there's so many kind of cross crosses with the other verticals but really fell in love with sponsorship the idea that like your brand could leverage another brand um for one plus one equals like 50 kind of thing um 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 um started that 10 years ago fast forward today you're very lucky to receive quite a lot of accolades, I suppose, highlights are we have Serena Williams as an investor, one of our lead investors.

3:33We have 19 ,000 athletes and influencers today. We work with brands like the Walmart or Reebok or whoever else and it's fabulous. We run a small team that's mostly all in the US and it's really rewarding. What's considered the home base of open sponsorship? Is there one? Of open sponsorship? So we headquartered in New York for the longest time until COVID. Very U.S. focused. I personally just like to live in London, but the business is in the U.S. I love working in the U.S. market. Obviously, I get to meet people like yourself with all your great energy. And so the U.S. is our base for multiple reasons.

4:17Love 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, 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 turnarounds. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's a fascinating industry. I came up in marketing and sponsorship was part of what we did for Verizon and the NFL, helped shepherd in that agreement. I mean, that was a billion-dollar sponsor. That's not a big sponsorship deal.

4:54I worked on that one for about three years. And it is, though, a very fascinating and sort of, I don't know, I love what you said about the one and one. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole. It's something like the amplification that happens when a great sponsor, a great brand, and a great entertainer, athlete, influencer, whatever it is, comes together. It's like magic, isn't it? A hundred percent. And I think the biggest thing is just like the extension of 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.

5:43And so like it's it's the 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 is so huge. Yes. And we're getting into really fast and nitty gritty, but I love it because, Shane, you just nailed it.

6:19We've worked with a lot of brands. I've been on both sides of it. I own a digital agency and a podcast network. And then now, I mean, I hate even using my word of the name influencer, but got a good following, good show. And so I'm on all sides of it. and it pains me when we've worked with brands and they don't atomize it and use it the way you just said. I'm like, I just gave you gold or one of my clients or one of, you know, we gave you gold and you treated it like silver. Why didn't you use it all over the place? It's like, it doesn't need to just live within the influencer's channel. You got to amplify it.

7:02that's such a miss, isn't it, sometimes? 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 the 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.

7:59And 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 to not do it's it's ultimately our problem and so there's no point doing these partnerships if you're not going to make it happen.

8:57Yes. And what you realize is the total, I don't know, the total filling the entire circle in, okay, is not just connecting brand to influencer. It's all the magic in between, making sure the content gets done, making sure the content gets used. Make it, you know, all of, you got to lead them to the water and make them drink it. Yeah, I got it, honestly, yeah. It's true. Because ultimately, it's what makes it work. And the only way for it to keep happening and to have success is if it works, right? 100%. Yeah, I love that. And it's an interesting pivot. I mean, I've definitely seen with the athletes especially, they can get all these deals.

9:49They want the deals, but creating the content is the hardest part, isn't it? how many emails have been sent with we got to get content for this brand yeah i'm making it not look like it was like read off the script or that yeah exactly to do it um definitely a challenge that still exists um i think again going back to the point like what who 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 um 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 a testimonial.

10:52And 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, reminder, this is the goal of this campaign. This is the goal of this partnership. If you want to change the goal, we 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. Yeah. It's not going to produce sales. But if you want a brand awareness piece, stories will disappear after 24 hours.

11:25Very, very different. Which one do you want? Yeah. I'm going to go down that path with you here. But since you brought up Clemson, I mean, did you know I was a Clemson guy? No, I didn't. I graduated from Clemson. I'm a Clemson grad. Yes, Tigers. Kay Klubnik. Yeah. Is he on your platform? The quarterback? ask me questions about individuals. I'm sorry. I won't go there. I know. He should be. He's going to win the Heisman this year. I'm going to say the answer is yes, because I have faith in my team. Yes, I have faith too. We'll get him on there if he's not.

12:06I always have this trepidation, so I want to see if you share it. I don't know about you, but awareness is not free.

12:19And, you know, the age old influencer deals for affiliate deals for, you know, percentage of sales is great. But what I've never understood about that whole equation as a marketer and an influencer is why the hell would you give away free awareness? You know, like nobody gets to run, get free awareness like Verizon and AT &T. you see those commercials over and over and over again and they don't know if they're generating sales television is not direct to consumer not you know but because they know they have to feed the top of the funnel to get to the bottom but for some reason influencers and i'm sure you guys are working big athletes where maybe this isn't as big of a problem anymore but why the hell should i give you free awareness and if only if i drive you a sale do i get paid who made that rule up it's not the rule for everything.

13:12I know the big guys get paid, but you know what I'm saying? It just seems like that's at a false reality of what you have to spend as a marketing and as a brand. I love what you say. We don't do as many of those deals, to be honest, because, but we also count product has 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 do very 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 um because they've got this whole thing um i don't think it happens that much on meta or wherever else it might be on amazon and if i was gonna play like devil's advocate like why is it happening well why is it not happening to us so much it's because athletes this is not their primary job yeah 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 if you're not if you don't have a a viewpoint and that's why i love the space that we're in because you know i used to say we're not influencer marketing we're sports sponsorship and then obviously i was like all right we're influence marketing and sports yeah exactly well if you're the buyer and i and you buy influence marketing i'm here for it um yeah exactly frankly 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.

15:32I know. I just, and I understand it. I just, it more drives the shit out of me that brands sort of expect it, like more than they should, I think. And I get that the dollars have gotten to where, and they want it. Look, we need outcomes. But if your funnel's not good, it doesn't have anything to do with how good my read is. 100%. And so if I do a read, how do we know that the vacuum cleaner I'm pushing doesn't get sold three weeks from now and I get no attribution for it? I mean, 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?

16:18I 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 like i shouldn't be held and also i say this to our brands like we're not in the business of understanding your competitive set your pricing your packaging like your flavors um so we can't predict the success but what we can but i do feel like there's probably a mess that it's like no guarantee or sales ideally it should be like a guarantee of something within funnel yep and that would be easy right right because then you'd be like well if i don't hit it i'll just do two extra odd reads for free and if i do exactly exactly we will hit it yeah you know we'll deliver it but it can't just be bottom line sales but because it there's just too many complicated i mean i'm not saying never depends on the like you said earlier you know trying to get an instagram reel to drive sales good luck i mean you gotta have a really tight funnel or like because you friction is the enemy of influencer deals and and what do i mean by that from knowledge to click from from influence to sale has to be super clean i think also the other thing is like then what like you said awareness or whatever else what that also does is it like 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 um 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 well 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 review for you to use.

18:53It's not going to drive sales because they've probably got less than 5 ,000 followers. This person, they're going to produce content that you're going to put in your paid ads, that you're going to be proud of, blah, blah, blah. I think there needs to be a college course or a re-education of the brand marketers out there. You know, the course put on by Ryan Offord and Ishving Jolly. I love it. And it's going to be royalty based only. Yeah, exactly. Oh, talking to Ishveen Jolly. She's the co-founder and CEO of Open Sponsorships, making it accessible to everyone. I think it's interesting serving the brand, serving the athletes.

19:34You got to serve both if you want to eat, you know, like it's they're both part of the equation. You know, I mean, they're both the main course. No, they're both equally important. Is it ever feel like like you have to, you know, who who am I serving first? I'd say having been in the sponsorship game a long time. If you have the brand dollars. The right brand with the right dollars. you can make any deal happen. Yeah. 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. But 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 set a desktop all day.

20:42They 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 approaches 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 the marketing dollars they're not coming to us for like um a merchandise line or to launch a shop if either 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 yeah 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 every 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 and work with John Telephant.

22:01And 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. Who's the marketing funnel for Open? I mean, for you guys. You got to pitch both, right? You're going after the athletes and the brands, right? Yeah. Again, probably the same thing. So dollars-wise, we focus on the brand. 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 of the nfl we've got thousands of college athletes we've 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 vertical 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 uh kind of like what i'm saying about podcasts so like if someone one of our brands like we're actually interested in podcasts we're like cool we'll go out and get like opportunities for you um in terms of our marketing dollars i'd say very brand focused um but actually i don't know how you feel about this so what you 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 like we've really flipped our focus because we would rather like 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 improving ourselves I have a book that's halfway written and you know how they uh you know the old term LTV lifetime value.

23:51The name of the book is Lifetime Loss. In a world hyper-focused on growth, the customer you already have is the biggest secret to your success. You got to nurture it. You got CRM, baby. I mean, customer relationship management, nurturing what you already have is the name of the game because you take care of them. There's always more budget, especially if it's a good customer. There's always referrals behind door number two. And it's just, it's real damn hard to get a new customer. And it's real damn hard to replace a great one. It's also like, it just feels so good to produce wins for customers.

24:38Like, I think about five years ago, it felt good to sign new customers. that like what you're saying, 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. I pivoted my whole country company based on that. Like I've I've been doing digital advertising, you know, advertising agency life for 20 plus years. Left that world because I got tired of every tower. I was the creative account guy and I'm like, I don't, I'm going to do my own thing and saw the video thing coming.

25:17And, you know, we did that successfully for seven years. But the last couple of years, I felt like no matter what we did, I didn't feel like the clients appreciated it or saw the value in it. And but we got good at the podcasting and we found something where I knew we could deliver wins for both sides. and that's exactly right like it's it's so rewarding and fulfilling when you deliver the wins like if if you're not in it to do that then i don't know what the hell you're in it for yeah it's true it's true and when especially i mean yeah helping a young athlete who's getting going who's you know got some things going they get a little money in their pocket the brand sees results from it.

26:04I mean, ding, ding, ding, ding. Right. A hundred 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, like, you know, these like supplements are like hundreds of dollars. And if they're actually helping you achieve your goals, get, help you get fit or it's a product you used to use is that's like the coolest thing we can do. Tell me, if I'm a listener out there, Ishvane, why is influencer, sponsor, why is this the it medium for helping grow a brand of any size?

26:49I 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 it? So word of mouth, it's the new version of that. So 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.

27:39So 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 second, the third is for better or worse, we have social media. And back in the day, the biggest thing for us is I 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.

28:18But 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 million like the one thing i haven't done that 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 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 um in-store retail and like how um when you walk around the grocery store there's so much inventory that 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 earnhard jr jr on a little thing with hellman's mayonnaise and when you walk past he would speak and go how are you doing your mayo for fourth 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, where was it?

29:40Probably Indiana. I don't know. Somewhere. Probably where I'm at in South Carolina. Yeah. A lot of NASCAR lovers in North Carolina and South Carolina. Exactly. So it was, it was a local store. And that is probably like 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 real 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.

30:23rock. There you go. There's a little study called ZMOT, zero moment of truth. That's what that is, is when in the store walking by, Google put that on. Now you're truly a billion dollar study on consumer behavior and the moment of truth. And when you hit the decision points in that, and that's what you're talking about. Hey, they're in the freaking grocery store walking by. How many people are putting that in the shopping cart? That's the zero moment of truth right there and leveraging it across. And look, attention is fleeting. There's never been more things vying for our attention. That's number one.

31:06And number two is our attention is not where it was 10 years ago. It's not on linear TV. It's barely on radio. It's on these social media channels. it's on podcasting 18 34 year olds listen and watch podcasts more than they do television that genie's not going back in the bottle uh and so you have to be and it's so funny issue you and i think a lot alike i use that exact word of mouth thing the other day i was trying to describe it as like this is the new word of mouth it is and because it's more authentic and it's more on that local, granular, authentic level, especially when done right. And that's the key.

31:51That's probably the hard part of your job, I'm sure, is that balance of, you know you got the right brand, you got the right athlete, but bringing all that magic together. A hundred percent. Yeah, it's super fun. It is fun. Where can everybody keep up with everything you're doing, learning more about open sponsorships and open sponsorship in yourself yeah well come check us out online and sign up for a free account play around www.opensponsorship.com and then if you want to have a chat we we love kind of any brand 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 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.

32:42international athlete. And so we love making those matches happen. So, yeah, come find us on LinkedIn or wherever else. It's been a lot of fun talking to you, Fane. I'd like to do it again soon. Thanks, Ryan. Same to you. Hey, guys. Today's sponsor is the Radcast Network. If you're out there listening, thinking about starting a podcast, I already have one growing. We're here to help you. Guaranteed growth, guaranteed monetization. and look, we got top 30 shows left and right from using our formula. We're ready to help you go. Go to the radcastnetwork.com. Hey, guys, appreciate all our sponsors.

33:15We appreciate Ishveen. You found all our content at ryanisright.com. Highlight clips, the full episode, and links to open sponsorship. We'll see you next time on Right About Now. This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities thanks for listening