Navigating the Wild World of NIL: Inside Athlete-Influencer Marketing

Masters in Marketing Agency

Dive into the dynamic intersection of college sports and influencer campaigns as we chat with Brent Barkin, CEO of PlayBooked. Discover the ins and outs of utilizing athletes to amplify brand messages and learn the secrets to targeting the elusive 18-25 demographic. From pinpointing micro influencers to creating impactful marketing strategies, we're dissecting the playbook for modern brand engagement. Don't miss these game-time decisions in the marketing arena!

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Athletes as authentic brand voices
• The rise of NIL in college sports
• Harnessing micro-influencers at scale
• The evolution of athlete marketing
• Strategies for targeting 18-25 year-olds

Resources:

• PlayBooked
• DevNoodle

Connect with Brent Barkin:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 35:15 - And it's my personal opinion that that aggregation of their following is infinitely better than paying an Uber influencer or paying somebody with 10 times the following and paying them 20 times the money to do the same thing. And I also personally believe that athletes have a unique value proposition because their voice is really felt to be authentic that if they talk about a product and if they back something just like the uniform they wear that it stands for something more than themselves. So it's that authenticity of their voice that that really enhances the message.
• 43:11 - I think the worst thing that a marketing agency can do is pretend to be good at something they're not. I think it's dangerous and I think it's stupid. I would rather tell one of our clients that we're working with the brand or group and here's what we're doing. What a lot of them won't do is they won't tell you they're working with a third party. They'll just do it and then they'll just jack the rates up so their margin is the same. So it ends up being much more expensive. And I would say if it's more expensive, it's usually not as productive.
• 11:47 - I think the main thing is people don't necessarily know what they know, what they want to do, know what, what interests them. And what's so crazy is, you know, the more I do what I'm doing with, with PlayBooked and talk to student athletes, the more you realize how many different types of jobs there are out there in the world and every day you learn about something else that you never knew existed, right? So if you are at that stage, if you're a young person at that stage, I think the main thing is, you know, LinkedIn is a great tool. Talk to as many people as you can. Have one-on-one conversations with people and ask them what they do and if you have no agenda, other than I really wanna understand what they do, how they got that job. Do they like it? Do they not? If they don't, why? And if you're at that age where you're really trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, I think the first thing is recognize that there's 10 times more opportunities out there than you ever thought there were.
• 31:00 - What that kind of reinforced for me was when people are just on autopilot, that they just get there and they do it. You don't realize how valuable that is for business to have people that just kind of know what they're supposed to do and do it without being told. And that's, you know, functionally you and I then started talking about the value habits and you know, the emotional effort or emotional energy it takes to do something that is, that your brain is recognized as a habit is a ton less emotional effort, physical effort often, and emotional energy. And when I say emotional energy, those tasks, if they require thought and effort and intellectual energy, they drain you. So just like that Roomba definitely imagine Roomba, but the Roomba doesn't have to keep going and being recharged. So if you as a person, as an individual create positive habits for you every day for yourself every day and you layer those habits on top of each other, you, your productivity skyrockets and your energy to do that, to do those tasks really stays almost the same.
• 25:02 - Brent: We're a marketing company. Well we don't use AI, we only use people and that's right. And then somebody next door to you could use AI and eat your lunch and you're patting yourself on the back that you.
  Alex: So would you put it as a like the way as he was calling you an efficiency expert, kind of like internally focused on the company and creating efficiencies, potentially saving money. Whereas he was thinking externally, how can we grow, how can we attract new people, do more things?
  Brent: This was expensive, you know, you hear this all the time, cutting expensive to a profit. So you, instead of a company, the best way to grow profits is to grow your top line. Because even then the percentage you play the law percentages, if we had 10% bottom line profit, and I do twice the amount of money I did twice the amount of profit, right? All my fixed expenses drop as a percent, you know, all the variable expenses will keep going up, but you make more and more money. He was basically saying, I was more focused on how do we save money than how do we make money.