Athletes, Brands, and the Power of Influence: A Deep Dive with Ishveen Jolly

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Mark Evans: Welcome to Marketing Spark, the podcast where we dive into conversations with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and marketing leaders to uncover strategic and tactical insights on growth, overcoming challenges, and achieving success. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Ishfeen Jalli, the founder and CEO of Open Sponsorship, a a platform that connects brands with some of the world's top athletes and influencers. From securing over $1,000,000 in funding from Serena Williams Venture Fund to partnering with global icons like LeBron James and Tiger Woods, Ishfim plays a key role in the sports sponsorship landscape. Under her leadership, open sponsorship has worked with major brands like Walmart and Popeyes and closed deals at major global events like the Paris Olympics and the Paralympics. Recognized as an Inc. 100 top female founder and a Forbes 30 under 30, Ishfeen has also been at the forefront of influencer marketing in the sports world. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Ishveen Jolly: Thanks for having me, Mark.

Guest 2: Why don't we start with your origin story? What inspired you to start open sponsorship for connecting athletes and influencers with brands?

Ishveen Jolly: I think it was a work in progress. There were multiple little things in my former life that kept happening that that led to the eureka moment. But say, let's face everyone, the eureka moment was essentially the idea of an Airbnb or a LinkedIn for the sports sponsorship industry. It's a $60,000,000,000 industry and really fragmented, very much a boys club where you're either on the inside or the outside, lack of transparency, no ROI metrics, all of that. What we did is create a two sided marketplace to put both sides together, brands on one side, athletes, teams, leagues, events, influences on the other. Obviously, we've morphed into more tech enabled agency on top of the platform since. But really at the beginning, I'd say I I was a sports agent, and multiple little things happened. I was working on a golf tournament, and was talking to the marquee player, which means essentially he's paid extra to be there as a big brand. And this was actually in India when I worked in India, and the marquee player was from England. Did you do any of the sponsorship deals while you were out here? He was like, not really. My agent doesn't really know anyone in India or basically nearly every place that I play in now because, obviously, golf is so global. And this was back in 2010, 2011. That was interesting. I've never really thought about the fact that a lot of people's agent is their best friend or someone they know from their locality. And as soon as you go global, the golfer or tennis player, your agent is not really that well equipped to get you deals. That happened. Another thing, I was working for a client in Colombia, and I was looking at a sponsorship deal, and the timing wasn't right. They were, let's reconnect in six months. I thought, god. I'm gonna have to go back there to reassess the whole situation. This just seems really antiquated in a world where I I just started using Uber and Doc and all these homes, and I was, wait. Why is there not this? So I think there's little things that made me go, I think there should be a platform to do this.

Guest 2: Let's take a step back here. You were a sports agent. Love to get some more details about what that involved, what you liked about it. And what was that moment where you recognized that this was the entrepreneurial opportunity that was right in front of you? All these experiences that you had, people you had met, everything came together. Do you did you see yourself as an entrepreneur before what you're doing now, or was it one of these happy accidents that just emerged?

Ishveen Jolly: I grew up in an environment my parents both retired doctors. We're not a business family. It's not something we do. I I I studied economics at university, and then I became a management consultant. I studied Oxford, and people were not being entrepreneurs. That was in six by the time I graduated. This was not a career. Like, even sports was not a career that you had, accounting, law, consulting, banking, etcetera. Before open sponsorship, I started my own agency to try and do these cross border deals. Even when I started that, I didn't think of myself as an entrepreneur. This is a newer term. I thought I was solving a problem. I spoke to the market a bit and people especially back at the in the day, if you're in India, you do Indian deals. If you're in England, you do England deals. And I was, yeah. But what if I wanna do deals for someone abroad? I thought that was really interesting. But after I was a management consultant, just to give you a bit of a story, I moved to India for my first foray into sports. So I worked on cricket, as you can imagine, field hockey. I loved my experience in India, but frankly, after a few years, I realized that I wanted to move back to England, but I thought my skills are quite relevant. A lot of the cricket watching diaspora is in England. There's probably deals to be made, but people just were not getting their heads around this idea of cross border. That's why I started the agency. I feel even when they've been sponsored, it's not I wanted to be an entrepreneur or business owner. I just I felt there was a problem, and I wanted to solve it.

Guest 2: The classic I have I have an itch and I need to scratch a gut proposition. Yeah. What's really interesting is, obviously, the model is two is two sided. You've got brands, and you've got athletes on either side. So where do you start? It's one thing to say, I wanna create a marketplace. I wanna be the eBay sports sponsorship. I wanna have supply and demand. What comes first? Do you attract the athletes? Do you attract the brands? Do you try to do it at the same time? Talk to me about those early days when you're trying to take an idea and build out the model, and on top of that, get ammunition so you can run the business. What does that journey look?

Ishveen Jolly: There's loads of iteration. Right? So the first thing we did was, as I said, I was very obsessed with Airbnb. I thought, let's try their business model where we take 3%. At that time, it was 3% from the deal. Maybe it was both sides or maybe just from the deal. And quickly realized that's not gonna be feasible because the deal sizes that we were doing at the beginning, even talking about $250, they weren't very high. Business model iteration, that was huge. Today, where we've landed, we charge a management fee subscription fee to basically be your agency of record, then we take a cut off the deal between 1020%. So as you can see, it's definitely evolved over time. To your other part of the question, where do you start? So we onboarded the athletes first, and at frankly, at the beginning, it was I thought we were gonna do this for teams and events and leagues and athletes. It was really the rise of influencer marketing that led to us to be so athlete focused. The other thing is, obviously, team deals can be a bit more expensive. Having said that, minor league deals can be very inexpensive. But we kept hearing brands go, yeah, but athletes are interested because of their social profile. I have to say when when I was a sports agent repping people, athletes didn't even have social medias. The way that you would work with an athlete is to do a TV shoot, and you'd have to put that athlete on your billboards and that in TV. So, obviously, that was very expensive, so you had to have a full campaign around it. Now any brand can just pick up an athlete, and their own social media profile is gonna be the distribution channel. I think that was social was huge for the expansion of athlete deals. One other thing was because it used to be TV deals, billboard, radio, and you had to buy the media, which is expensive, you wouldn't do deals unless you were doing it with the top one, two percent because it wasn't really worth it. Whereas now, again, not to that point, you have this athlete who only has 50,000 followers, but they're very engaged. They're in a certain locality, or they follow him because he's a fast pro fisher or whatever else. He's got an ill inbuilt audience, and I don't need to spend any more on distributions. I'd say social media really changed the game for us in the way that we saw the business, much for the better, and that's why we went down the athlete route.

Guest 2: So before we get into Serena Williams and all the athletes you have on board, I think it's probably a good idea to describe the model. Tell me about how this works. What do brands get? What do athletes get? What does the business look?

Ishveen Jolly: As I said, that iteration over time, it would have been a very different thing if we'd sat down with each other six years ago. But today, the way that we are, a few things happen. Again, COVID was a big shift, a macro shift in the way that people work. Social media is a big shift in the way that people work. Obviously, the economy and things that are happening. I think as a startup, you have to be quite reactive. The big thing that we heard about three years ago was we started hearing this thing come out of clients. We run Walmart as a client, which is obviously huge, Fortune one. But they said to us, look. We love your tech. We love your reach. We love the athletes. We love all of this. We don't really wanna be involved in the platform. We don't have time, the bandwidth. We don't wanna learn any more tech. My team calls it hashtag not another login. What we did is, ironically, we had this amazing platform, and now we offer you the ability to pay us to manage that platform and manage the services and deliver you outputs, and we charge you more for it. Our margins are better, but actually, you're loving the fact that you don't have to spend time on this. Today, happens is brands come to us because they have a need for influencers, ideally athletes because that's our background, but often it can be lifestyle, wellness, or all of the other genres as well. They come to us and they say, we love the fact that we have 17,000 athletes out. We love the fact that you have that. We love the fact that you have social listening and data and demographic data and all of this stuff, but what we want is you to run our strategy for us, for and with us. We are an extension of their team, and we're partly relying on platform, but we're partly relying on our expertise of having done so many deals. So we charge about $19.50 a month, so just shy of 2 k, to be your influencer manager as an extension of your team. 20% of our brands are doing product only deals. About another 30% are doing very small, 100 to $500 deals, very micro, maybe just getting user generated content to repurpose, and then that other 50% is doing deals from anywhere from two k to 30 k depending on the size of the person.

Guest 2: I understand the model at high level. Give me an example of an athlete, and what does it look like? What are they doing? What do the brand wants? What is an athlete willing to do?

Ishveen Jolly: I'd say 65% of our deals are very social media heavy. So brand is sending product, vitamins, whatever that is, fashion, whatever product to the athlete, and the athlete is creating user generated content. Ideally and, obviously, we try and create it. If your vibe is funny, we find funny people. If you're vibe is serious, it's educational, whatever it may be, basically, the athlete will then post that on social media, their channels, and then the brand has the right to essentially repurpose it. So use it in their paid ads, their organic on their website, in their email marketing, across the board. So that typical deal. Beyond that, we have essentially athletes doing appearances, attending an event, and telling them a holiday party. A lot of companies at the moment are driving partnerships with their party retailers. They've just gotten to Costco or they've gotten to Walmart. A lot of brands that we wanna have the athlete go into store and pick it pick up the product and be like, hey. Love this product available now here. And then we'll do other things, photoshoots, but they are decreasing in number because, obviously, you don't need to spend a lot of that money when athlete and a lot of the tier athletes also have their own production team around them. So it's even easier to get good quality user generated stuff without the cost of a photoshoot, which really helps to minimize the cost.

Guest 2: In terms of the matchmaking, does a brand come to you and say, hey. I wanna have a relationship with Tiger Woods, or would a brand say, I I want relationship with these type of athletes in these particular sports, and you do the recommendations and matchmaking? How does that work?

Ishveen Jolly: A little bit of both. We prefer the latter because unless you have infinite budget, it's often and even then, a lot of those top tier talent, like, they say no a lot. I prefer the latter. And even if you said Tiger Woodsby, why? Is it because he's golf? Is it because he's a black he's a black guy in a white sport? Is it because he's whatever, his vibe or his age or whatever else? We try and zoom out a bit. There's two ways that we do our matching on our platform, put up a campaign, bit of job posting. So looking for athletes who are retired from this sport, live in Florida, whatever the criteria is, who love who have dogs or a diabetic or whatever the criteria is. And then athletes and agents will apply to work with the brand. The other is when the brand will also give us a criteria. So, hey. Social listening keywords or different vibes or whatever else, and then we go out and create that list.

Guest 2: I'm a sports fan. When I look at sports figures, I'm biased because I think a lot of them are pretty amazing. Some bad apples as well. From an influencer marketing perspective, is this a hot commodity now? Are you the right company in the right space at the right time? Sports has become a massive global industry in the NFL's playing games in in London Yeah. And South America. Do you find yourself, whether by luck or by circumstance, in the eye of the hurricane?

Ishveen Jolly: Obviously, right time you say that we've been going almost ten years. We both waited for our chance, but I would say the conversations today, everyone is thinking of an influencer strategy. If you have an influencer strategy, you're often thinking about what's next. Athletes are a natural add on. The way that I think about it is if you're in the health and wellness space, athletes are often your first influencer. You want validation, the testimonial, the content from an athlete. If you are in a nonhealth or wellness industry, let's say beauty, fashion, non sports apparel, cooking, whatever, any other vertical, you probably go for your niche influencer first, beauty to beauty, cooking to chefs, this. And then your second one is probably general, and then, again, athletes come in. I'd say we're definitely finding we're relevant for everyone. I think it's it's just about for us. The hardest thing is the education around, and this is why we added on our full service, our account management. The problem is people think it's just about getting a person, and it's definitely not. It's a little bit of a triangle. It's who's the right person for your brand. That's obviously important. You pick the wrong person, it's gonna fall apart. But when you get the right person, what are they saying? Are they is it are they talking about your 50% discount coupon code, or are they talking about the attributes of your brand, or are they talking about a specific product, or are they making it a day in the life of incorporating in their life? Or are they saying this was a special? Is it a before and after? What's I think the messaging is really important, which obviously makes sense because in any other creative, you wouldn't say a script is not important. But I think with influencers, sometimes people forget how important that is. And then the third bit is what's the median? So there's a big difference between an Instagram story and an Instagram reel. A story disappears after twenty four hours, but it hasn't a link through click. A reel stays on the feed forever, but there's no links. And there's a difference with TikTok to Instagram to YouTube. There's also a difference if they do it in person, and you shoot the content versus if they're doing it at home. And I think so the thing right now is we still have a lot of brands who are even when they use us, yeah, but we didn't get sales. That's And obviously the holy grail of all marketing is to drive ROI. And so I think this with the right time, but we're still having to figure out and work really hard on how do we deliver ROI. And we said it's not just about the match. I think we were quite naive at the beginning. We thought we were match.com, and we realized brands were, yeah, but that didn't really produce anything. When we sit down and look at it, did we advise you enough on the right strategy?

Guest 2: I don't know if this is applicable in the b to b world. Influencer marketing had its ups and downs. Everyone didn't wanna be associated with high profile personalities with large social media followings. It was super attractive. Why wouldn't you want to connect yourself with someone who had a large following? But sometimes the the execution didn't happen. The the personalities didn't perform as expected. They didn't get the results, as you mentioned, that brands were expecting. It would be fair to say that influencer marketing has been a bit of a roller coaster. It's up and down. Brands get excited about it, then they lose faith in it. How much education do you need to do with brands and athletes for that matter in terms of establishing the rules of engagement, educating them on best practices, and working with them to be realistic about ROI versus we want a massive spike in sales. How much work is involved in educating both sides of the equation here?

Ishveen Jolly: I think tons of work is required. But having said that, as I said about a little while ago, people don't have time. I thought this joke that everyone's unemployed, retired, or overworked. And, like, the I know that we do it with our team. It's cool. Can you also do this? Can you also do this? So people who are I'm a marketing person. I know I knew how to run Facebook ads, and now I'm being told to do influencer. And should we educate them? Yes. But actually, what we found is they're saying, can you just give us the results? Can we trust you? Can we can you help us out and do it for us? I actually think that's a bit of a win is to get the trust and then say, here are the five people we recommend. Let us write the content brief. Let us just produce the result. Because ultimately, I'm sure you feel the same way. It's I don't as a CEO, when someone comes along and they better at doing this, cool. Can you just do it? I don't need to know how you're doing it kind of thing. And then even on the athlete side, we can teach them how to do better content creators, but in a way, what we do is just, here's the brief. Follow the brief. Oh, here's an example of a video that looks really good, or here's the reason we picked you because of this thing that you did. It's really trying to simplify it versus complicate the education and turn everyone into PhDs in influencer marketing.

Guest 2: So in a sense, it's influencer marketing as a service.

Ishveen Jolly: Basically. Yeah.

Guest 2: Wanna talk to you, obviously, about the Serena Williams relationship. She's the world's best tennis player. She's an amazing business person. She's gotten into the venture capital world. I can imagine how that relationship might have started, but can you give us a story about how did you get to Serena Williams? I'm sure she's approached by a lot of entrepreneurs. How did you convince her that this was something that she should be involved in?

Ishveen Jolly: We were super, super lucky. Obviously, she's absolutely amazing. When we were raising our round, multiple people who had were partaking in our round of tap to say, have you looked at this deal? And so we it was over Zoom because this was towards the end of mid COVID, and so we got the opportunity to pitch her. She was super engaged, asked loads of questions, just lovely, but also not for the sake of it, real, and that was awesome. And then so we did that pitch, and she was interested, the timing, and we were closing quite quick, and then we went back and said, okay. We'll extend for you. And so, again, just really lucky that she came in and that we had the ability to convince our investors to to keep the round open for her, which obviously they were very happy to do. And then she's been awesome. So our first ever retreat post COVID, we did, and she zoomed in and spoke to the whole team, and that was amazing. That's been really fun. Of course, I'm really lucky that many people put us in front of her, and she and it was actually amazing because we did the she did the investment, and then literally about four weeks later, we did a deal for Venus completely separately. So then she's, hard to call. I'm just invested in you guys, and you just took this.

Guest 2: Given your experience raising around, congratulations on on that because raising money is super hard no matter what company you have, what advice would you give to female entrepreneurs seeking venture capital? Are the rules different? Are there obstacles that you have to overcome as a female entrepreneur?

Ishveen Jolly: None of the rules are different. I think you maybe have to be slightly it's hard to say, but I think you have to be maybe a bit more aggressive aggressive with your own validation and getting people to be the champions around you. Say, there's a lot of people who are helping female entrepreneurs out to get you in the room. I think it's probably never been easier to be in the room. But once you're in the room, you definitely have to look hard to get make your path, especially if you're in non female focused industries. I think it's getting better, but something I struggled with at the beginning, the first time before we we got money from Serena, the round before that. I met a lot of women, and they would say we're focused on beauty or fashion or female health tech and things like this. And I felt, okay. Who's gonna invest in founders who are working on male dominated industries? They do get the amount of money going into those industries needed to go up to bring them to equilibrium, which we've seen. But I do think it's really important to support women scientists and engineers and sports people and things out. So I I think that was the hardest thing, but it's definitely much easier now. I'm not taking it away. I'm sure it is still really hard, and I haven't raised now for three years. So I don't know what the environment's right is right now, but it it feels better.

Guest 2: Did wanna shift gears a little bit and talk about the Paris Olympics and the Paralympic and how those deals materialized. I'm based in Canada. During the Olympics, one of the big stories for us was Alicia Newman, who was the first Canadian woman to win win a a medal in pole vaulting. She's has a huge social media following. She raised a lot of awareness around influencer marketing and athletes' ability, especially amateur athletes' ability to monetize their activities. Tell me about those deals. How did they happen? What was the mechanics of getting involved with the Olympic and the Paralympics?

Ishveen Jolly: I was actually just looking, and I was like, it's Alicia Newman in our UK system. It looks she has, which is cool. Anyways, the Olympics come down every four years, and every four years, brands go, we wanna do something with the Olympics. Obviously, one of the challenges, there are athletes three hundred and sixty five days a year, every year between the Olympics as well. We do try and make sure that we are we jump on trends, whether it's Olympics or whether it's Super Bowl or whether it's whatever. But if they're good content creators, we try and keep them alive for way before and way after. But, of course, you have to react to the brands, and there's a lot of brands. And we do it in our marketing. Olympics around the corner, start thinking about Olympics and whatever else. I think one thing that we've seen is the big brands will have an Olympic strategy, but a lot of brands just have an an influencer strategy of which AfBees is part of the work that of which Olympics is part of that. We did a deal. We did a campaign for Vitrakos, the Kroger owned commerce site, and they had one Paralympian, they had one retired NFL player, they had one college content creator. I think that is the beauty of having Olympians mixed into other things. And, obviously, one of the challenges with the Olympics is it's hard to know who's gonna make the Olympics. We also did quite a few deals where and then they didn't make it through the trials, and that backfires a bit. That's obviously really tough. I would say it's a big advantage of working with us because we can do deals very quick turnaround, and you can actually pick up Olympians after they've gone through trials. But those deals are amazing. Of course, this is the first year for Paris where in Paris where the Olympics lightened up a lot about social media, and they really let athletes do more, which was absolutely great. There was less restrictions. There was more social posting, which obviously benefited everyone. So I really enjoyed it. I love doing Paralympic deals because it's great content and everything else, but it's such a good feel good factor for brands. And, also, these athletes deserve that money as well.

Guest 2: Asking a big picture thing is just getting your sense of the future of sports sponsorship. Over the last, you know, five, ten years, sports has exploded in terms of the size of the deals and the broadcasting rights that are out there for all the major sports. NFL teams are worth $5,000,000,000, and it's become a a global a mega global industry. What's your take on the growth of the industry, the impact of technology, the willingness of brands and teams to drive revenue from non sports related activities? Where do you see as the biggest opportunities or the biggest growth right now?

Ishveen Jolly: I think a few things. So one is brands. It used to be that the team or the athlete was big, and the brand was latching on to that. And we're seeing more that the brand is actually also big because often when we do these deals, often the brand will have more Instagram followers than a lot of these athletes do or these influencers do. Right? And so I'd say and you're seeing that with sports, right, where is what is the advantage to both sides of this? So I think we're gonna see more relationships where they're coming together to build something powerful. Both sides are leaning I'm gonna use the credibility, the validation from being part of this NFL team or athlete or league or any sport that they're also gonna get from me. Maybe it's data. Maybe it's technology. The AWS NFL relationship, whatever it may be. So I think you'll see that more. I think with social media, whatever your views are, it's not going away. And we thought Instagram was gonna be big, and then it's like TikTok and now TikTok's everything, and I'm sure the YouTube shorts is coming up, and I'm sure there'll be the next one in the next few years. And so I think keeping an eye on that and realizing that social isn't going away, digital's not going away. We're being asked by brands, hey. Can we partner with an NBA team, but just digital? And a lot of that is also it's very trackable. I can put a unique link and and just see what the results are versus a logo in a stadium. I have no clue how many people saw it. Did it drive anything at all? I think trackable is that's another part of sponsorship. Digital has meant sponsorship as trackable. That never really existed in the sponsorship world before. So I think that will be a huge part of it. And then I think the third is a lot of this stuff that we do with education is the repurposing. We'll do one deal with an athlete and a brand. And as said, they will use that the best brands that we have, they will use that content in their emails, drives loads of sales. They'll use that on their website to increase conversion rates. That's helpful. They'll pass it on to maybe third parties to say, hey. We've already done this deal. Do you wanna use it? They'll use it in their PR. And so I think sponsorship has previously sat in quite a silo, which is always my grievance with sponsorship. It's where's the marketing team? They're oh, they're working on creative over there. We're the sponsorship team. We basically spend loads of money on deals, and no one really cares what we do. I think that going away, and it would be really lovely for people to think that sponsorship is a seat that is done and everything is done around it kind of thing.

Guest 2: Wanna ask you one question about the athletes in your portfolio. You have LeBron James, Tiger Woods. Is there an athlete that is super popular, that brands love, that wouldn't be considered a tier one kind of global superstar? Is there anybody quirky or surprising within the portfolio that comes to mind that you would point to and go, because of this guy's social personality, because of the fact that he's engaging and accessible, that brands just gravitate to this athlete? Anybody come to mind?

Ishveen Jolly: I'd say, obviously, on the back of the Olympics, Ilona Merha. Chris Mazda was one. You can tell because they go from being an athlete to going to dancing with the start. Those are obvious, obviously, crossovers. Another one that's really interesting is athletes' partners, typically athletes' wives, but it could be the other way. Really high engagement, often on some sort of reality TV show, The Real Housewives or whatever else, are married to an athlete. I think why they're really popular is because they do the behind the scenes stuff. I'd say we see it in football, but they're usually good athletes as well, but maybe they're more of a personality on fuel. Chad Johnson's a great drum player. I love working with Chad. We've got Vernon Davis. They've got personalities. They're retired, but they're still relevant. If Chad Johnson's really funny, and he also has a lot of personality. So he loves soccer, FIFA. He plays games a lot. So often, these things are really useful when you can say that athlete has they're not just an on field athlete. Russell Westbrook is an on field athlete. He's so serious. Whereas you've got other people who they're a little bit more jokey, and they are a little bit more verbose, and they give you more of a behind the scenes. Maybe they do more locker room shots. Those are really good as well.

Guest 2: Who are your most popular female and male athletes in your portfolio?

Ishveen Jolly: To do deals with. We're doing a lot with Vernon at the moment. He just started a a podcast, so that's quite useful as well because it's another form of distribution, going back to that. So we've done quite a bit with trying to think female. It goes in ebbs and flows. Like, at the moment, we're doing a lot with Dallas cheerlead Cowboys cheerleaders.

Guest 2: Okay.

Ishveen Jolly: And that show just came out and trending, so that was quite useful. I'm trying to think during the women's soccer team. We've done a lot with in the past. That was awesome. We actually just did a deal with a WNBA player, Lexi Hull, and it was a giveaway campaign. Not that expensive. Pretty amazing. And Caitlin Clark, she commented, and she entered the competition, which is just great. Loved that. So I think I wouldn't say there's one. It depend honestly season by season. We're hoping to do a deal with a US based tennis player at the moment who I won't talk about to jinx it. But, again, as soon as they do well, they get limelight, and then we wanna try and jump on that bandwagon.

Guest 2: Any examples of deals that just exploded wildly beyond your expectations or the brand's expectations? Anything go viral or just catch fire?

Ishveen Jolly: Second question. We did a deal with the Formula One driver, Alex Albon, and OnePlus. And it was his team's idea for the creative, again, talking about why I love this new model where you work with them to say, what did you think is gonna get engagement versus here's the script? Then obviously, the brand vetting it, but they did something where they shot he shot himself on the one glass bone, but with the filter where he had no hair. And he's got quite a big mane of hair. And so obviously, it went quite viral because people are like, my god, have you got rid of your hair? And everyone realized it was a filter, but it was a really good filter. And so that was amazingly well received, really good impression, shares, likes. As I said, I love the Lexi one. I love these deals where Caitlin Clark will comment. You can't even pay for that, so you can pay. It's got a lot of money. So that was really good. Some of our big photoshoot deals. We did a deal with Sean White. That has done really well. We have a tool where we can see who is a user of the brand already. We do anonymous customer matching. Those deals that you do, whether the athlete is already a consumer of the brand or a fan of the brand, are just great because they just resonate so well, and it's just so authentic.

Guest 2: This has been an amazing conversation. At the end of these interviews, I usually say, work from people, learn more about you and what you do. I guess I should add to that if someone's an athlete and they're looking to expand their brand, and if there's a brand looking to connect with athletes, where can they connect with you? Where can they learn more about how how your platform works?

Ishveen Jolly: Absolutely. I'll start with the athlete side. It is free to sign up. Opensponsorship.com. Really easy. The best way because you can go in, you can download our mobile app, and then you can almost Tinder. You can swipe left and right on campaigns and just apply and get going. And once you start doing deals, our account management team will spot you and help you out a bit more. So I'd say, anyone, athlete, influencer, whatever, just go to online. Obviously, if you need help, there's a chatbot there. So that's really useful. And as I said, free to sign up, just take a cut small cut of the deal when so it's a win. Right? On the brand side, obviously, a big part of this, as you said, was education about why we do it the way we do it, why we think of ourselves more tech enabled agency than just a platform. So love for anyone just to reach out. You could go take a sponsorship, get in touch with me. We do free strategy sessions where we'll discuss your goals and how athletes could slot in so you can really visualize what it looks and then get going from there.

Guest 2: Thanks, Ishfeen, and thanks for everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, please subscribe and leave a review. It really helps others just discover the show. And if you're a b to b SaaS company looking to accelerate your growth, overcome marketing challenges, or refine your strategy, I'd love to help. As a fractional CMO and strategic adviser, I create tailored marketing plans that deliver results. Feel free to contact me via LinkedIn or visit my website, marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you soon.