The Creative Direction of Sports

Transcript

In this video, we are going to talk about the creative direction of sports, athletics, and the adjacent brands to them. We're going to cover content, creative strategy, merch design, and traditional creative direction. And I want to talk about this because I feel it's important for creatives and marketers to understand the niches where content and creative strategy have the most impact. Everyone talks about creative direction for fashion, but in terms of investment to result in content and creative, fashion damn near has the lowest impact. All of this work to sell something that's going to get a hundred of a drop or have 20% returns for sizing. It's ultra-competitive and one of the lowest-impact callings of creative work, but you add sport on top of it, it's a whole different thing. As many of you know, in my work, I work in beauty because it's the edge, the highest result of content. Viral videos spike Alta and Sephora sales crazily. It generates a higher fiscal return on creative strategy than any other niche. And the way they handle seeding influencer, it's the cutting edge with the highest stakes. The next one down is sports because you have teams, players, the brands that clothe them and sponsor them, the fitness industry at large. And right now, this is particularly relevant because of the massive amount of money in sports, in particular gambling money. It's propping up all of the media around it, the Ringer, Barstool, ESPN, the player salaries, all juiced by this massive sponsorship ecosystem. And the stakes are really high while the legality is there. And while people are still used to being taken advantage of, I think it's going to be a cultural move away from this, but it's turned as we are at a really pivotal point in the impact of creative in the sports world. So this video, we're going to cover everything, why you would invest in content and creative strategy in sports and fitness today. We're going to dive into merchandise and, in particular, teams that have turned around some of their perception with merchandise and teams that have hired creative directors and why. We're going to go into content and the role of content now in developing personalities and shifting teams and a lot that we can learn from it and how often sports and athletic brands should treat their content almost like a sports team. We're talking about the future and clipping and how big that plays into sports. And we're going to talk about brand positioning inside the space, in particular in sports and activewear and how that world's playing out. It's going to be a fun ride. I'm stoked you're here for it. Let's lock in. So first, we're going to be talking about two sides of the coin in the sports and fitness world here. First is the teams and players themselves, the actual executors of sports, soccer, basketball, football, small leagues, big leagues. And then we're going to talk about the brands that interact with them, so the Nikes and Kappas that sponsor jerseys to the Lululemons and all the new brands that have come out. They're just filling the world around everything from running to basketball because a lot of this overlaps extremely closely. And the reason it's such a big deal and it has such a big impact is the money that's at play is crazy. So notoriety for an athlete, how well they're perceived on social media, how well known they are, if they're liked or loved, in addition to their obvious skill level, is such a big deal in terms of the millions of dollars they're able to get on a contract one way or the other by just that shift in perception that it really matters. Same thing we're seeing now with the transfer portal in college sports in the US, where notoriety can change the amount of money you make from a young age. Same thing with attracting sponsors. Sometimes your skill on or off the court matters only as much as how your appeal is and what else is going on around the scenes. You were given a platform as an athlete. And then you take that over to teams. For teams, especially in smaller markets, to attract talent, the branding and perception of the team is a big deal. And so is the nurturing of fandom. Getting your team excited, having them stoked by the content, having them believe in their team, even when they're not good enough that they get tickets, is a massive fiscal driver. Same thing with the promotion of merch. And then the values of the teams themselves, which all sell at insane multiples, that even a minor shift in perception can lead to changes that are in the tens of millions of dollars. And to put some of this in perspective, I want to talk about Venezia first. I'm talking about some soccer teams. So this is a team in Italy, not exactly known as the best team, but known for its merchandise, for its lookbooks, for its fandom. It became the kind of team people support because their stuff looks so sick. And when we look at the role of creative direction inside of any of these circumstances, it comes down to merchandise. What are people selling outside of the core experience? And does that have resonance? When you look at evaluating if merchandise is good or not, there is, is it sick enough that people buy it? And is it sick enough that when people buy it, it's out in the world, that it has ripple effects? People go, they see it, and they say, I want that. Does it lead to more posts that people happen on social media? Does it build an organic buzz? So there's the execution of merchandise itself, and then there's, does it have that extra factor? And what Venezia did is really crush it with that X factor. So much that people were looking forward to their lookbooks. They set a new standard for teams at their level, and it became a pretty significant revenue driver, enough so that other teams were looking to duplicate this. We saw the same thing with Como, another small-market Italian team, doing the same thing by trying to promote these drops, build up almost like the streetwear version of the teams they have. And they're leaning on the legacy of the places they are, because by nature, these Italian teams and their histories and the places they're from have that X factor that you may not get if you are promoting the Portland Timbers, who've also done a great job with their branding. But it adds a world around the brand that allows it to generate more money, become a more attractive spot for talent, and change the trajectory of teams that might be having a hard time. Then you take this to the highest level. So Daniel Arshan was the creative director of the Cleveland Cavaliers in basketball. And he came in and was looking at the entirety of what the team looks like, from the actual jerseys they wear on court to what the merchandise is like to what the posters are like outside of the stadium, trying to craft a combination of their vision and his vision. And this is what's interesting with someone like him, because if you come in and try to put together a vision for a team itself, and you are not a person of your own creative direction identity, it's a lot different than when you have one himself. So Daniel Arshan, very well known for his, call them decaying sculptures, this kind of futuristic and crystal style, takes a little bit of what he does, a little bit of his Arshan studio flair, but takes a lot of the Cavs. And this is an interesting thing. When you have an identity, people bring you in because of your identity. You have to find where that line is between, do I want to be 80% Cavaliers, 20% Daniel Arshan, 80% Daniel Arshan, these are all crystal jerseys now, and 20% Cavaliers? Where is that line? I think he did a pretty good job at saying, look, I'm going to keep this extremely Cavaliers-centric, but we're going to add a design element on top of all of this. But then hiring people like him shows you where the future of this is going. They want to have more commercial appeal, they want to have nicer stuff overall, they want to be culturally relevant as a team, they want the players to be excited about this. And at every level of sports, you're going to see this type of integration you've seen from the soccer teams we just talked about all the way up to the top of the NBA. And this happens in underground sports too. So as many of you know, I used to work at the Surgeon, and in the building that the Surgeon was in, when I worked there, they hosted this thing called the League, basically a basketball and a futsal league, completely independent, completely underground, where they played inside of this invite-only area, had a lot of celebrity attendance, like Floyd Mayweather was some of the ones I was at, Kyrie was there, Justin Bieber has a team, a Skylark team, that plays in the League now, and they've gotten a lot of attention from that for people just executing amateur basketball at a high level. It's very skilled, but they have immaculate jerseys for everybody. They're capturing the content. They have this whole vibe and underground experience. This is just one of many of these things happening around the world, of people saying traditional sport doesn't serve all the economies of the world right now. And people want to either participate in or view something more interesting and more organic. And with that comes a lot more freedom to design interesting things, called the league, a basketball and a futsal league, completely independent, completely underground, where they played inside of this invite-only area, had a lot of celebrity attendance. Floyd Mayweather was at some of the ones I was at, Kyrie was there, Justin Bieber has a team, a Skylark team, that plays in the league now, and they've gotten a lot of attention from that for people just executing amateur basketball at a high level. It's very skilled, but they have immaculate jerseys for everybody. They're capturing the content, they have this whole vibe and underground experience. This is just one of many of these things happening around the world of people saying traditional sport doesn't serve all the economies of the world right now. And people want to either participate in or view something more interesting and more organic. And with that comes a lot more freedom to design interesting things, to sell off-kilter merchandise, to provide experiences outside of the normal sports infrastructure. This is where I want to encourage a lot of creatives who want to get into this kind of thing to cut your teeth locally, right? If you are designing the jerseys for your high school alma mater, for a local team, for your kids' team, whatever that looks like, all the way to these more underground leagues that exist, you're beginning to put your foot into these arenas. You can use that as a tool to promote your brand or to be able to change the perspective with which you engage with design. I think it's an interesting opportunity and exercise to think about, and it forces you to get out of that internet comfort zone and actually go talk to some real people and convince them that your design will make a difference. But I want to shift over into content and the importance of content. And the biggest one I want to highlight there is the Boston Celtics, who have an excellent social media presence and team. Sports highlights are a huge industry, but it's important because the proliferation of sports highlights for your team, your key players, is going to be directly indicative of how many people actually tune in to watch or go purchase tickets. It is purely an awareness of, do I need to see this team or not? And the Celtics did an amazing job with these compilations. They would automatically loop, or people would actually be frozen on the screen while others do things around them. They had those social media tricks, and enough that they had to think it through beforehand. They had to go in with a concrete plan of what they were going to capture, not just capture it and try to edit after, to say, we're going to generate these things that are really well built for social media. They end up sparking significantly more views than a lot of the teams that are on their same level because of the creative team's execution. That then leads to more hype for the Celtics or excitement for players who want to play there, for the fans to want to go, and awareness of their team. So the types of content that matter now in the sports infrastructure are important because there are a lot of teams of ownership of media companies who still live in the old, very traditional world of this, who haven't embraced the full look and feel of social media. That's when there's an advantage for younger, savvier creators to be able to dive into this and really build a name or reputation for themselves. And the playbook: A, is releases. Whenever you have a merchandise release, or they're doing home jerseys, or whatever it is, building campaigns around that where there's an actual content rollout. You'll see this with what Venezia did with their lookbooks, where they're saying, oh, actually, we have a whole new rollout for this every time we have merchandise that would be just as often seen on Hypebeast or Highsnob as it would just being emailed to fans because of the quality. Then we have the typical thing. We have the highlights. What happens during the game? They are posting this every time, on every game, every team. What can you do to creative direct that? How can you make that piece of footage more interesting, look different, be special, travel farther? And then there's aura in this world now, where if you go out and you look at Jackson Dart aura edits, or a new quarterback is being pieced together to look as cool as possible through a combination of highlights, music, and personal clips, is a trend, the thing that's happening on TikTok. That's a huge impact in the sports world for people to get excited about the players they work with, where someone does have a particular vibe or particular look. You're just as likely to have an Austin Reeves aura reels or LeBron James one. But highlights have turned into their own social media machine that builds fandom that a team and a brand need to understand what that looks like. Because if Kappa sponsors an athlete and is able to then introduce them into a system where they pump them out into generating aura online because of a combination of their actions and their editing and their infrastructure, all of a sudden the results of that sponsorship get a lot more powerful. We'll talk about that in brands in this section in a second. Then we have this whole world now of alternative casts, of people saying, I don't want to listen to the people that are on TV. I want to listen to our local people, or I want to watch something on Twitch with funny people that I follow as personalities. The rise of the alternate cast. And I think it's what we're seeing with brand social online right now, where everyone's doing these social shows, where they're doing episodic series. These teams have media companies like that. They have a lot of people following them around, and we're going to start seeing that too, where we're actually seeing play-by-plays from former players on that team, or they're breaking down the highlights in a SportsCenter-style way, especially with basketball, where they're very liberal with the use of that media, but certainly in other sports, where how can you apply personalities, especially known personalities, plus social media, plus this infrastructure people are used to consuming, and take some of that for yourself within the parameters of how these agreements work with everybody. And then we have the personality nurturing because the team part is a very important thing as well, because if you have a marquee player on your team but they don't do social media, or they don't do it well, that's actually a negative now versus what could happen if they really built that fandom and how many people will come to the games or want the merch or embrace the team. And there's going to be a responsibility somewhere, a personality nurturing this. My friend Jordan Rogers talks about this a decent amount with baseball, where it's like, hey, if you actually get the size of the prize for sponsorships, for life after baseball, for people that are able to build any level of following or personality while they're in it, it is a really important thing not enough people are considering. And that's where this goes beyond, oh, if you're a creative, I'm going to go get a job for a sports team. That's probably unlikely compared to, could you get on the extended team for an athlete who has videographers and creative directors on retainer, which more and more of those people do, and more and more of them need to do and can afford to actively do, and then see real value from. There's a lot of perception building around that that's going to be a big factor in the creative industry. And where this gets really important, where this all collides, and one of the main reasons I made this video, is this is clipping. So if you're not familiar with clipping, this is when people take clips of things online. They are paid a reward from systems like WAP or Direct, etc., to perform, to put views out there for a creator, a celebrity. Drewski is a known user of this TGR. People use it as a vehicle to sell courses or build a reputation. Brands will do it to repurpose their content. But also it really matters for sports. Let me break that down. So, for instance, let's talk about UFC. UFC is probably the best, most interesting example of this. But ESPN has a huge amount of social accounts. Clipping, at its most traditional, is people just taking highlights and putting them on multiple accounts. So ESPN has, I don't know, probably 70 different accounts, right, for different subsections and genres and whatever. And they're putting out clips constantly to help promote the things that they're doing. On top of that, you have the entire ecosystem of people that are not on official accounts that are clipping and distributing things. Let's look at just officially. UFC, moving from that, where UFC social media is mid, and certainly not of the caliber of what ESPN has built, moving over to Peacock, or sorry, Paramount, who does not have the infrastructure for this, who are not social media savvy, do not have the accounts, you're going to see significantly less of the storylines around what's happening in the UFC. And not the biggest moments, but all the smaller moments, they're not going to disseminate as far into culture. That's a really important thing. Because if they don't do something radical in terms of, are they employing a big clipping infrastructure like what we've seen with WAP? Are they introducing their own systems forward? Are they building new social media accounts? This is not just, oh, this is a nice to have. This is life or death for if that deal makes enough money to be worth it for Paramount, is how far that content is going to go beyond what and certainly not of the caliber of what ESPN has built, moving over to Peacock, or sorry, Paramount, who does not have the infrastructure for this, who are not social media savvy, do not have the accounts, you're going to see significantly less of the storylines around what's happening in the UFC. And not the biggest moments, but all the smaller moments, they're not going to disseminate as far into culture. That's a really important thing. Because if they don't do something radical in terms of, are they employing a big clipping infrastructure like what we've seen with WAP? Are they introducing their own systems forward? Are they building new social media accounts? This is not just, oh, this is a nice to have. This is life or death for if that deal makes enough money to be worth it for Paramount, is how far that content is going to go beyond what just gets watched. And so we're going to see this scenario where sports and teams and people in the future are going to be investing in how their content travels on the internet, knowing that there's ripple effects and networks and teams that work around this. And this investment in that early, and the understanding of it, how it works, is one of those career opportunities where people can get a lot of alpha. All right, in this segment, we're going to cover a particularly important topic for all my brand owners and operators, how to actually scale your brand when you're doing well but don't have enough cash for inventory. So every e-commerce and physical wholesale brand goes through this. You order inventory, you have 30 to 60 days of production. If you want to make the most margin, you send it by boat. That's another 45 days to get actually there into the warehouse and online or to whatever physical store. In the women's brand I've worked with for years, we got into multiple huge retailers. And what you don't know upfront is that most of them pay net 60 landed, meaning it arrives at their warehouse. So if you pay your factory a deposit, you're going to pay the rest on shipment or receipt and then still not get the cash actually paid back from the retailer for months. Same thing with an e-com business that's scaling for the holiday or busy season. You want to invest in ads, but you don't have the cash. There are tons of times when you could be scaling more as a business and you're stuck. So there are several services that offer cash in these scenarios. And one that I recommend and partner with for this video is Wayflyer. I actually recommended them last year to my friend Spencer and his brand. He was approved for 25K. That really helped him move faster by being able to get more inventory and invest in ads because he was bootstrapping it entirely as a single person who is still working. So what Wayflyer does is offer flexible financing based on your existing data performance from sales, marketing, and accounting, from 5K all the way to 20 million, for DTCs, for Amazon businesses, wholesale, retailers, even SaaS and professional services. Now, I'm not hitting that, but they do that too. Any of those people that want to scale up marketing or inventory. And best of all, it is tied to your business, not to you. They do not require personal guarantees on any of their products. And they've deployed 5 billion so far. And importantly, you get all this with one transparent fee, no hidden costs, typically 5 to 10% of the advance, much less than some of the platform offerings, which are a little predatory, and is done over a timeframe that aligns with your business cycle. You actually plan that out. And the real cheat code is that they actually provide funding decisions faster. You fill out the info and they give offers in minutes, and then funding in 24 to 48 hours. So if you want to fund inventory and marketing without giving up equity, check out Wayflyer at the link below. And don't wait until the last minute before your busy season. Know what your options are. And thank you so much to Wayflyer for partnering on this video. I want to tie that into brands and this idea of brands as teams. So if you're a sports team, you need to think through all the things we have before. You have your merchandise, your core product of actually attending the games, you have your team. You have all the people that are on it. How are they represented? How are you nurturing their personalities? The Buffalo Bills did an amazing job on TikTok of showing so much of their team in skits and action and bringing that out there. A lot of teams should model after that. And you have the supporting staff, the video crew, the coaches, the other people, again, alternate casters, personalities that travel it around. If you're a brand in fitness, you should be looking at it much the same way. And how are you promoting all those things? And a brand I thought has done an interesting job of this is Bandit. I'm not going to talk too much about them. I know they're very talked about on the internet. I've done interviews with them over on Ayer's channel, but they'll say something like, oh, we're going to the Olympics and we're sponsoring the team from the Grenadines. We're building our personalities into these sponsorships. We're doing these releases alongside the major events. They'll have a release for the Chicago Marathon at the store. They're timing events the same way you'd look at a sports team having their big games. They're bringing on athletes into their storytelling. They're enabling the consumer in the same way. They're building it so because it's hard to get into their run clubs and some of the stuff is exclusive, you feel like you're on the Bandit extended team when you wear the clothing. It's a really interesting play of this. But the one I really want to call out that I think is far ahead of the game, who I think a lot of these bigger companies should be really looking at modeling their new generation after, is this brand called Ladder. So Ladder is a fitness app that has workouts with coaches you can do. But they have lots of coaches. I don't know, 30-plus coaches that work for them. And each of those coaches has a social media presence that promotes themselves and promotes Ladder. And they function like a team. They do collab reels with each other. They're on the main account. They're there together. Plus, they have all their solo promotions. You add that up and you've got 30 accounts pushing a message or a new launch or the app in general and creating content that constantly interacts. You're building an algorithmic web that is extremely effective. Now add on top of that that they have a creative director who's doing a constant flow of campaigns. They have a big quitter campaign every January. They're throwing out conceptual-based content on main featuring their collaborators, featuring people in culture. So it feels like you're in this big entertainment athlete web. And that is their marketing presence, is media that moves alongside of that, that adds a go on top of that to the people that are already reached. That's a really savvy way to approach it. And an interesting way to think about it, if you are an actual athletic brand, who do you sponsor? What kind of content are they making? Are they making content with the other people you sponsor? How does it interact with your main account? Are they in the campaigns? And then how does it center around the major events that happen within your niche? If you have a brand in combat sports, how are your releases and sponsorships tying into the overall calendar of attention that happens in that world? That is the savvy way to think about athletic wear and sports and marketing now. And I'm going to end here with this conversation on brand positioning because it's really important and a huge opportunity for a lot of the entrepreneurial people watching this, and also great for consumers. So let me explain. So we have all these traditional companies, Nike, that's just getting their market share eaten, right? We have Lululemon activewear, where Lululemon's falling apart, right? Not giving the customer what they wanted, even after they built this surge. And we have a more educated consumer than ever. And so what do I mean by that? People are aware that you shouldn't go run and work out in full polyester head to toe. It's probably not the most amazing thing for you as someone concerned about your health. And brands that won't adapt to it, you can't right now go on the Lulu or Nike site and find almost anything that is not polyester or some rayon or a combination of those things. And brands are being built by positioning against that. So this combination of positioning against how you take something that is ubiquitous that people dislike and say, my brand stands for something else. When you see that dissonance between what people want and what's available for them and what big brands are willing to do, they're not changing fast enough. That is alpha that small operating e-commerce brands can take advantage of. And brands are doing this. So right now, if you don't want to purchase heavy polyester clothing, there are brands that position in that niche. You have Riker Clothing, you have Wavewear, you have Soul Department, for you as someone concerned about your health. And brands that won't adapt to it, you can't right now go on Lulu or Nike site and find almost anything that is not polyester or rayon or a combination of those things. And you have brands being built by positioning against that. So this combination of positioned against how you take something that is ubiquitous that people dislike and say, my brand stands for something else. When you see that dissonance between what people want and what's available for them and what big brands are willing to do, they're not changing fast enough. That is alpha that small operating e-commerce brands can take advantage of. And brands are doing this. So right now, if you don't want to purchase heavy polyester clothing, there are brands positioned in that niche. You have Riker clothing, you have Wavewear, you have Soul Department, Mate the Label, Mauro for socks. There's a whole bunch of these brands that said, we're going to build in that space. And so as a consumer, this is great because this is what you want. You have small brands you get to support independently who are doing that. For those brands, they have the opportunity to scale almost as large as where those other brands could be if they really want to put the foot on the gas. By using these modern techniques we just talked about, if those brands offering those things all of a sudden were embracing the next gen of athletes, the NIL people, people they can get for a cheaper price that may have outsized results, putting together savvy campaigns around it, giving the consumer what they want, brands can skyrocket out of nowhere. And the same thing for brands who want to revitalize themselves. We look at Umbro coming back over the last few years. It really came down to creative direction choices they made inside of product and merchandising and the execution of some of the contests they did in collaboration and whatnot. They actually brought it back into the forefront. And I believe they had the CD of Slam Jam involved in that. And this goes for male and for female too, because Riker is just as popular as someone like Fair Indigo doing cotton leggings, where you have this across any spectrum. You have a tailor to any sport, the ability and positioning to say we sell shorts for athletics versus we sell shorts specific to distance runners immediately niches you down to be able to have a better message for a specific consumer. It's an important positioning thing to understand. You start with the core. How do you position against it? Whether your core positioned against, how do you niche? You can better talk to one audience and expand to a second audience, the way District Vision started with running and then went into biking. It's worth thinking through positioning of how both you consume and what you'll be creating for a brand. And so on that note, if you are looking to get into stuff like this, I'm going to put, we used to have a paid report on merchandising that I made with Clayton maybe two years ago. I'm just putting it out for free now. If you want to grab it down below, you can get a free download for that. It has all the factories and people that we encourage for brand merchandising, people we've used and vetted of different kinds. Again, it's a year or two old now. You should be able to have tons of stuff in there for how to develop stuff like that for a place where you work or a place where you're at. And hopefully it got you excited about this new state of sports and athletics and where creative roles live inside of it. So by the time this comes out, I'll likely already be done with tours. I'm not promoting that here. But if you liked this topic, I'm going to do a deep dive in any of these or any of these brands. The thing about doing an art direction video, like I've done before, specifically about an active brand, maybe on, but I'm not certain yet. So let me know if you have any input on that below. I appreciate y'all so much for watching. full look and feel of social media. That's when there's an advantage for younger, savvier creators to be able to dive into this and really build a name or reputation for themselves. And the playbook A is releases whenever you have a merchandise release or they're doing home jerseys or whatever it is, building campaigns around that where there's an actual content rollout. You'll see this with what Venezia did with their lookbooks where they're saying, oh, actually, we have a whole new rollout for this every time we have merchandise that would be just as often seen on hypebeast or high snob as it would just being emailed to fans because of the quality. Then we have the typical thing. We have the highlights. What happens during the game? They are posting this every time on every game, every team. What can you do to creative direct that? How can you make that piece of footage more interesting, look different, be special, travel farther? And then there's aura in this world now where if you go out and you look at Jackson Dart aura edits or like a new quarterback is basically being pieced together to look as cool as possible through a combination of highlights, music, and personal clips is a trend, the thing that's happening on TikTok. That's a huge impact in the sports world for people to get excited about the players they work with where someone does have a particular vibe or particular look. You're just as likely to have an Austin Reeves aura reels or LeBron James one. But highlights have turned into their own social media machine that builds fandom that a team and a brand need to understand what that looks like. Because if Kappa sponsors an athlete and is able to then introduce them into a system where they pump them out into generating aura online because a combination of their actions and their editing and their infrastructure, all of a sudden the results of that sponsorship get a lot more powerful. We'll talk about that in brands in this section in a second. Then we have this whole world now of kind of alternative cast of people saying I don't want to listen to the people that are on TV. I want to listen to our local people or I want to watch something on Twitch with funny people that I follow as personalities. Kind of the rise of the alternate cast. And I think it's what we're seeing with brand social online right now where everyone's doing these social shows where they're doing like episodic series. These teams have media companies like that. They have a lot of people following them around and we're going to start seeing that too where we're actually seeing play-by-plays from former players on that team or they're breaking down the highlights in a sports center style way, especially with basketball where they're very liberal with the use of that media, but certainly in other sports where how can you apply personalities, especially known personalities plus social media plus this infrastructure people used to consuming and take some of that for yourself within the parameters of how these agreements work with everybody. And then we have the personality nurturing because the team part is a very important thing as well because if you have a marquee player on your team but they don't do social media or they don't do it well, that's actually a negative now versus what could happen if they really built that fandom and how many people will kind of come to the games or want the merch or embrace the team. And there's going to be a responsibility somewhere, a personality nurturing this. My friend Jordan Rogers talks about this a decent amount with baseball where it's like, hey, if you actually get the size of the prize for sponsorships for life after baseball for people that are able to build any level of following or personality while they're in it is a really important thing not enough people are considering. And that's where this goes beyond, oh, if you're a creative, I'm gonna go get a job for a sports team. That's kind of probably unlikely compared to could you get on the extended team for an athlete who has videographers and creative directors on retainer, which more and more of those people do and more and more of them need to do and can afford to actively do and then see real value from. There's a lot of perception of building that around that's going to be a big factor in the creative industry. And where this gets really important, where this all collides, and one of the main reasons I made this video is this is clipping. So if you're not familiar with clipping, this is when people take clips of things online. They are paid a reward from systems like WAP or Direct, etc, to perform, to put views out there for a creator, a celebrity. Drewski is a known user of this TGR. People use it as a vehicle to sell courses or build a reputation. Brands will do it to repurpose their content. But also it really matters for sports. Let me break that down. So for instance, let's talk about UFC. UFC is probably the best most interesting example of this. But ESPN has a huge amount of social accounts. Clipping at its most traditional is people just taking highlights and putting them on multiple accounts. So ESPN has, I don't know, probably 70 different accounts, right, for different subsections and genres and whatever. And they're putting out clips constantly to help promote the things that they're doing. On top of that, you have the entire ecosystem of people that are not on official accounts that are clipping and distributing things. Let's look at just officially. UFC, moving from that, where UFC social media is kind of mid, and certainly not of the caliber of what ESPN has built, moving over to Peacock, or sorry, Paramount, who does not have the infrastructure for this, who are not social media savvy, do not have the accounts, you're going to see a significantly less of the storylines around what's happening in the UFC. And not the biggest moments, but all the smaller moments, they're not going to disseminate as far into culture. That's a really important thing. Because if they don't do something radical in terms of, are they employing a big clipping infrastructure like what we've seen with WAP? Are they introducing their own systems forward? Are they building new social media accounts? This is not just like, oh, this is a nice to have. This is kind of life or death for if that deal makes enough money to be worth it for Paramount, is how far that content is going to go beyond what just gets watched. And so we're going to see this scenario where sports and teams and people in the future are going to be investing in how their content travels on the internet, knowing that there's ripple effects and networks and teams that work around this. And this investment in that early and the understanding of it, how it works is one of those career opportunities where people can get a lot of alpha. All right, in this segment, we're going to cover a particularly important topic for all my brand owners and operators, how to actually scale your brand when you're doing well, but don't have enough cash for inventory. So every e-commerce and physical wholesale brand goes through this. You order inventory, you have 30 to 60 days of production. If you want to make the most margin, you send it by boat. That's another 45 days to get actually there into the warehouse and into the warehouse and online or to whatever physical store. In the women's brand I've worked with for years, we got into multiple huge retailers. And what you don't know upfront is that most of them pay like net 60 landed, meaning it arrives at their warehouse. So if you pay your factory or deposit, you're going to pay the rest of on shipment or receipt and then still not get the cash actually paid for back from the retailer for months. Same thing with an econ business that's scaling for the holiday or busy season. You want to invest in ads, but you don't have the cash. There's tons of times when you could be scaling more as a business and you're stuck. So there are several services that offer cash in these scenarios. And one that I recommend and partner with for this video is Wayflyer. I actually recommended them last year to my friend Spencer and his brand. He was approved for 25K. That really helped him move faster by being able to get more inventory and invest in ads because he was bootstrapping it entirely as a single person who is still working. So what Wayflyer does is offer flexible financing based on your existing data performance from sales, marketing and accounting from 5K all the way to 20 million for DTCs, for Amazon businesses, wholesale, retailers, even SaaS and professional services. Now, I'm not hitting that, but they do that too. Any of those people that want to scale up marketing or inventory. And best of all, it is tied to your business, not to you. They do not require personal guarantees on any of their products. And they've deployed 5 billion so far. And importantly, you get all this with one transparent fee, no hidden costs, typically 5 to 10% of the advance, much less than some of the platform offerings, which are a little predatory and is done over a timeframe that aligns with your business cycle. You actually plan that out. And the real cheat code is that they actually provide funding decisions faster. You fill out the info and they give offers in minutes and then funding in 24 to 48 hours. So if you want to fund inventory and marketing without giving up equity, check out Wayflyer at the link below. And don't wait until the last minute before your busy season. Know what your options are. And thank you so much to Wayflyer for partnering on this video. I want to tie that into brands and this idea of brands as teams. So if you're a sports team, you need to think through all the things we have before. You have your merchandise, your core product of actually attending the games, you have your team. You have all the people that are on it. How are they represented? How are you nurturing their personalities? The Buffalo Bills did an amazing job on TikTok of showing so much of their team and skits and action and bringing that out there. A lot of teams should model after. And you have the other, the supporting staff, the video crew, the coaches, the other people, again, alternate casters, personalities that travel it around. If you're a brand in fitness, you should be looking at it much the same way. And how are you promoting all those things? And a brand I thought has done an interesting job of this is Bandit. I'm not going to talk too much about them. I know they're very talked about on the internet. I've done interviews with them over on Ayer's channel, but they'll say something like, oh, we're going to the Olympics and we're sponsoring the team from like the Grenadines. We're building our personalities into these sponsorships. We're doing these releases alongside the major events. They'll have a release for the Chicago Marathon at the store. They're timing events the same way you'd look at a sports team having their big games. They're bringing on athletes into their storytelling. They're enabling the consumer in the same way. They're building it so because it's kind of hard to get into their run clubs and some of the stuff is exclusive. You feel like you're on the Bandit extended team when you wear the clothing. It's a really interesting play of this. But the one I really want to call out that I think is far ahead of the game, who I think a lot of these bigger companies should be really looking at modeling their new generation after is this brand called Ladder. So Ladder is a fitness app that has workouts with coaches you can do. But they have lots of coaches. I don't know, 30 plus coaches that work for them. And each of those coaches has a social media presence that promotes themselves and promotes Ladder. And they function like a team. They do collab reels with each other. They're on the main account. They're there together. Plus they have all their solo promotions. You add that up and you've got 30 accounts pushing a message or a new launch or the app in general and creating content that constantly interacts. You're building an algorithmic web that is extremely effective. Now add on top of that that they have a creative director who's doing a constant flow of campaigns. They have a big quitter campaign every January. They're throwing out conceptual based content on main featuring their collaborators, featuring people in culture. So it feels like you're in this big kind of entertainment athlete web. And that is their marketing presence is media that moves alongside of that, that adds a go on top of that to the people that are already reached. That's a really savvy way to approach it. And an interesting way to think about it, if you are an actual athletic brand, who do you sponsor? What kind of content are they making? Are they making content with the other people you sponsor? How does it interact with your main account? Are they in the campaigns? And then how does it center around the major events that happen within your niche? If you have a brand in combat sports, how are your releases and sponsorships tying into the overall calendar of attention that happens in that world is the savvy way to think about athletic wear and sports and marketing now. And I'm going to end here with this conversation on brand positioning because it's really important and a huge opportunity for a lot of the entrepreneurial people watching this and also great for consumers. So let me explain. So we have all these traditional companies, Nike, that's just getting their market share eaten, right? We have Lululemon activewear, who Lululemon's falling apart, right? Not giving the customer what they wanted, even after they kind of built this surge. And we have a more educated consumer than ever. And so what do I mean by that? People are aware that you shouldn't go run and work out in full polyester head to toe. It's probably not the most amazing for you as someone concerned about your health. And brands that won't adapt to it, you can't right now go on Lulu or Nike site and find almost anything that is not polyester or sun or rayon or a combination of those things. And you have brands are being built by positioning against that. So this combination of positioned against how you take something that is ubiquitous that people dislike and say, my brand stands for something else. When you see that dissonance between what people want and what's available for them and what big brands are willing to do, they're not changing fast enough. That is alpha that small operating e-commerce brands can take advantage of. And brands are doing this. So right now, if you don't want to purchase heavy polyester clothing, there's brands that positioned in that niche. You have Riker clothing, you have Wavewear, you have Soul Department, Mate the Label, Mauro for socks. There's a whole bunch of these brands that said, we're going to build in that space. And so as a consumer, this is great because this is what you want. You have small brands you get to support independently who are doing that. For those brands, they don't have the opportunity to scale almost as large as where those other brands could be if they really want to put the foot on the gas. By using these modern techniques we just talked about, if those brands offering those things, all of a sudden we're embracing the next gen of athletes, the NIL people, people they can get for a cheaper price that may have outsized results, putting together savvy campaigns around it, giving the consumer what they want, brands can skyrocket out of nowhere. And the same thing for brands who want to revitalize themselves. We look at Umbro basically coming back over the last few years. It was really came down a creative direction choices they made inside of product and merchandising and the execution of some of the contests they did in collaboration and whatnot, they actually brought it back into the forefront. And I believe they had the CD of Slam Jam involved in that. And this goes for male and for female too, because Riker is just as popular as someone like Fair Indigo doing cotton leggings, right, where you have this across any spectrum, you have a tailor to any sport, the ability and positioning to say we sell shorts for athletics versus we sell shorts specific to distance runners immediately niches you down to be able to have a better message for a specific consumer. It's an important positioning thing to understand. You start with the core, how do you position against it, whether your core positioned against, how do you niche, you can better talk to one audience and expand to a second audience. The way district vision started with running and then went into biking. It's worth thinking through like positioning of how both you consume and what you'll be creating for a brand. And so on that note, if you are looking to get into stuff like this, I'm going to put, we used to have a paid report on merchandising that I made with Clayton maybe two years ago. I'm basically just putting it out for free now. If you want to grab down below, you can get a free download for that. It has all the factories and people that we encourage for like brand merchandising, people we've used and vetted of different kinds. Again, it's a year or two old now. You should be able to have tons of stuff in there for how to develop stuff like that for a place where you work or a place where you're at. And hopefully it got you excited about this new state of like sports and athletics and where creative roles live inside of it. So by the time this comes out, I'll likely already be done with tours. I'm not promoting that here. But if you liked this topic, I'm going to do a deep dive in any of these or any of these brands. The thing about doing like an art direction video, like I've done before, specifically about like an active brand, maybe on, but I'm not certain yet. So let me know if you have any input on that below. I appreciate y'all so much for watching.