How to measure the value of an athlete’s social brand? That is a question being tackled by opendorse which continues to evolve the industry’s fastest growing content distribution platform that gives marketers direct access to athletes’ social media channels. Boasting 4,700 social media campaigns with top brands as well as 2,300 athletes, Cynopsis Sports caught up with Blake Lawrence, CEO of opendorse, to chat about the growth of the company, the best athletes for brands and creative uses of its property.
Lawrence on the evolution of opendorse: It’s been a great year for us at opendorse. We continue to see the interest in activating athletes on social media grow. If we go back two years we would sell access to advertisers looking to team up with athletes for their campaigns to reach their audience. We used that model from 2013-15, bringing opportunities to athletes on a consistent basis. At the same time, we realized the value of the platform we built, being able to quickly access and activate these athletes in these social media campaigns wasn’t something that was just valuable to advertisers. It was also valuable for rights-holders, teams, leagues, properties and whatnot who could benefit from having access and activation tools at their disposal as well.
So we started to license our software to athletic departments, who wanted an easy way to get content to fans or alumni; or sports teams, or to pro sports teams so they could increase distribution of that post-game content; or sports leagues who wanted to drive tune-in by making sure payers are sharing content by talking about their leagues. That has been a big key for growth over the last two years.
On creative uses of the service: Through real-time activation of athletes, who –when posting the right thing at the right time – can drive major engagement for themselves and their partners. During the Super Bowl, GNC saw their commercial pulled and they had invested heavily in this high-quality commercial that they still wanted to get in front of fans during the Super Bowl. So they took that commercial and came to opendorse a few days before the Super Bowl and said, ‘Hey, we would like to get this commercial in front of these consumers in these markets. Which athletes drive engagement in those markets?” We were able to put together a roster of eight athletes to distribute that commercial through and in less than three days we had achieved some terrific numbers.
On athletes: To recommend that right athlete to the partners who come to us, you have to know the ins and outs, engagement levels and metrics behind the scenes for each athlete. We analyze every post of every social platform for each athlete to get a feel for their audience engagement level and their activity level and where there is a potential match. We find that the more active the athletes are, the higher their engagement rate is with their audience. The most followed athletes tend to have a lower engagement rate, not because of the quantity of the audience, but just because they aren’t the most active. A good standout athlete would be Marquette King of the Oakland Raiders. His engagement level is incredibly high and his audiences have come to know him as a source of entertainment and when he posts a video, they share it.
