The Future of Influencer & Athlete Marketing with Ishveen Jolly

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Why is influencer sponsor the it medium for helping grow a brand of any size?

It's the new word-of-mouth marketing.

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We're talking all about sponsorships, NIL.

Have anybody heard of that?

I'm going 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 Ishfin Jolly.

She is the CEO and co-founder of Open Sponsorship.

What's up, Ishvin?

Hey, 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.

I 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, Ishfeen, 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.

Ishvin'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 Ishvine, do set the table and you know, give everybody a little synopsis of open sponsorship and you know, give it a little bit of the bragger.

Come on.

No, thank you.

Well, I suppose very quickly, because I do love the marketing stuff more as well, but I 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 capped in multiple teams while at university

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, 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.

We have 19,000 athletes and influencers today.

We work with brands like the Walmarts 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.

Yeah,

where,

what's the what's considered the home base of open sponsorship?

Is there

open sponsorship?

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 business is 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, yeah, US is our base for multiple reasons.

Love the marketing dollars, of course, the budgets 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, you 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 was a billion-dollar sponsor, not a big sponsorship deal.

I 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, you know, one-in-one.

You know, 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?

100%.

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.

And so, like,

it's, it's the,

um, 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.

Yes.

And it's, I love, we're getting into really fast and nitty-gritty, but I love it because Ishvin, you just nailed it.

I've, we've worked with a lot of brands.

I, you know, I've been on both sides of it.

I own a digital agency, I own 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.

Like, 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.

Like, it's like,

why, 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.

That'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 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?

And 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 to not do,

it's ultimately our problem.

And so

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

Yes.

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, yeah, I got it.

Honestly, yeah.

It's true.

And 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%.

100%.

Yeah, I love that.

And it's an interesting

pivot.

I mean, I've definitely seen with like the athletes, especially,

you know, they can get all these deals.

They want the deals, but creating the content is like the hardest part, isn't it?

How many emails have been sent with, we got to get content for this brand?

Yeah, and making it not look like it was like read off a script or that they'd be

able to do it.

Definitely a challenge that still exists.

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.

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, reminder, 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.

Yeah.

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?

Yeah.

That's, I'm going to go down that path with you here.

But since you brought up Clemson, I mean,

did you know as a Clemson guy?

No, I didn't.

I graduated from Clemson.

I'm a Clemson grad.

Yes, Tigers, Kay Klibnik.

Yeah.

Is he on your platform?

You're going to ask me questions about individuals.

I'm sorry.

No, 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 life.

Yes, I have faith too.

We'll get him on there if he's not.

So

I always have this trepidation, so I want to see if you share it.

You know,

I don't know about you, but awareness is not free.

And,

you know, the age-old influencer deals for affiliate deals for

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 tell you 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?

And it's not the rule for everything.

I know the big guys get paid, but you know what I'm saying?

It just seems like that said 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 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 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 tick tock 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 is because athletes this is not their primary job yeah but if you're a content creator let's say on tick TikTok, firstly, you need content to post three times a day.

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

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, right, we're influencer marketing, and sports sponsorship is kind of yeah,

exactly.

Well, if you're the buyer and I and you buy influence marketing, I'm here for it.

Um, 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.

Yeah, um, And they're probably the ones doing the affiliate deals.

I know.

I just, and I understand.

And 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.

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, okay, 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 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 myth 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, 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.

Exactly.

Exactly.

We'll hit it.

Yeah.

You know, we'll deliver it.

But it can't just be bottom line sales

because

there's just too many complications.

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 got to have a really tight funnel or like, because you

friction is the enemy of influencer deals.

And

what do I mean by that?

From knowledge to click,

from

influence to sale has to be super clean.

I think also the other thing is, is like, then, what, 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 influencer's 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 this, there needs to be a very separated approach, like your macro, like,

you know like your macro and what does that look like or 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 a 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 to produce content that you're going to put in your paydards that you're going to be proud of, you know, blah, blah, blah.

I think there needs to be a college course or a re-education of the brand marketers out there.

You know, a course put on by Ryan Alfred and Ishvine Jolly.

I love it.

And it's going to be royalty-based only.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, talking to Ishvin 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, you 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

you have to, you know, 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 when we feel like we built a mobile app, and that was 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 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, and they'll, 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 we want to work with Dron Coliphant.

And so, they love it when we bring them better brands.

So, they respect the fact that's our job, and

we just give you great deals.

Who do you like?

Who's the marketing funnel for open?

I mean, for you guys, like, are you out?

You got to pitch both, right?

You're going after the athletes and the brands, right?

Yeah, we 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 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, like, why aren't you 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.

Like, we've really flipped our focus because we would rather like completely service you 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,

you know, the old term LTV,

lifetime value.

Yeah.

It's the 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 the door number two.

And it's just

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.

Like, 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 for.

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 company based on that.

Like I, 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 the advert.

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.

And, you know, we did that successfully for seven years, but the last couple 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 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,

helping a young athlete who's getting it going, who's, you know, got some things going, they get a little money in their pocket, the brand sees results from it.

I mean, ding, ding, ding, ding, right?

100%.

I absolutely love it.

Especially like we do, we do loads of like deals in 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, help you get fit, or it's a product you used to use, That's like the coolest thing we can do.

Tell me, if I'm a listener out there, Ishvin,

why is influencer, sponsor,

why is this the it medium for helping grow a brand of any size?

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

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, they 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.

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 some people, 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'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 is, 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 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 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 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,

their best case study, and it was Dale and our

junior.

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 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

wherever.

Probably it's where I'm at, in South Carolina.

Yeah, probably.

A lot of NASCAR lovers in North Carolina and South Carolina.

Exactly.

So 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 the stuff.

So, why influencer?

It's not

do 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 at.

There you go.

There's a little study called

Z-M-O-T,

Zero Moment of Truth.

That's what that is.

It's when in the store walking by, Google put that on.

Not yours truly.

Well, 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.

I mean, you know, 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 and number two is our attention is not where it was 10 years ago yeah it's not on linear TV it's not it's barely on radio

it's like 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.

And so you have to to be, and it's so funny, Ishvi.

You and I think a lot alike.

I used that exact word of mouth thing the other day.

I was trying to describe it.

I'm 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.

That's probably the hard part, you know, of your job, I'm sure, is to take that balance of, you know, you know, you got the right brand, you got the right athlete, like, but bringing all that magic together 100% 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 and 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 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 I'm like, give us, give us your category, and we'll find a fit for you.

There's, there's literally not a, there's not a vertical or a type of brand that there isn't like a fit to some sort of retired, younger, older US international athlete.

And so we love making those matches happen.

So yeah, come find us on LinkedIn and wherever else.

It's been a lot of fun talking to Shane.

I'll 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.

We appreciate Ishvin.

You can find all our content at ryanisright.com.

Highlight clips, the full episode, and links to open sponsorship.

We'll see you next time 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.

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