Episode 238 Snippets: Dakota Crawford of MarketPryce

On episode 238 of the Digital and Social Media Sports
Podcast, Neil chatted with Dakota Crawford, Head of Marketing
for athlete marketing and brand platform MarketPryce.
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To
hear the full interview and more, check out the podcast on all
podcast platforms and at www.dsmsports.net
@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
BEST OF THE DIGITAL AND
SOCIAL MEDIA SPORTS PODCAST
EPISODE 238: DAKOTA CRAWFORD

Dakota’s Career Path
“I've had a pretty exciting and kind of winding career path. I studied
journalism and got my start as a reporter. I studied at Ball State
University in Muncie [Indiana] and got my first job when I was actually
finishing up my senior year there and started writing about Ball State
sports and spent about a year in that role. Then I moved to the
Indianapolis Star, which was within the same parent company, so it was a
natural progression and I had interned at IndyStar before as well. So that
made up the first two and a half, three years of my career.

“The IndyStar was really a dream job. I was working on the digital desk at
that point, so helping run social accounts, managing the website, writing
SEO and quick hit social stories, things like that. But they also used my
role as like a backfill reporter. So any given day, I might go to a Pacers
game and cover that, or Notre Dame football, or we'll talk more about this
later — an IndyCar event, right? So I really loved that work, but as I'm
sure any other young journalism students out there who might be
listening can understand and appreciate - it is a scary career path to be in
in today's world. Layoffs are a constant reality. So I loved that company, I
loved that newsroom, but when an opportunity came up organically to
jump over to IndyCar, which I went from IndyStar to IndyCar, which is a
fun rhyme to be able to throw in on your LinkedIn.

“I jumped on [the IndyCar opportunity] and that was my springboard right into the
smsports space. I think one piece of advice that comes in organically here, too, is
that the work that you do on any given day is always a networking opportunity. I
don’t know if people always think about it that way, but the contacts I had at
IndyCar were from working at the [Indianapolis Motor] Speedway for the paper,
right? So it's people who I had met and when the opportunity came up, they knew
my name. So they reached out and that came together organically.
“I was at IndyCar for a year and a half. I was a one-person social team for most of
that time. It was chaotic and fun and challenging. I traveled with the Series and I
learned a lot there. [It was] really my creative start because up to that point I had
been a writer, I had been running social accounts, but I had never created content.
And what I realized pretty quickly in that role is we do not have enough content to
fuel these channels. So that's where I got my hands into (Adobe) Photoshop and
Premiere and the rest of the Adobe Suite. That set me up for another pivot.

“So after about a year and a half there, I applied for a job — it was really a cold
application with the National Hockey League (NHL) to help them kick off a
player publishing program. They were launching this back in November of
2019 and I said, ‘This is what I've done at IndyCar, this is how I've helped
support the drivers here in building their brands and posting on their social
channels, and I think I could help you kick this off really well.’ They brought
me out to New York for an interview and the rest is history. It was a really fun
two and a half years there, building that program. It really turned into a dream
job. I loved that role, loved the team there. I was on a social team of, I think at
the time it was 18 people. And being on a team that big — it's special, man.
You don't get a lot of opportunities like that in social where you can be so
hyper-focused on one thing. It's like ‘Dakota gets to show up today and only
think about how to help players build their social presence.’ And in the other
roles I've been in, it's like you have to wear 12 hats all the time when you're in
the social space. So that was a gift.

“I loved it, but I really needed the remote flexibility in my personal life.
And NHL was, you know, after the pandemic, they were keen on keeping
people at the New York office. So I started poking around and found this
really cool opportunity with MarketPryce. This company is — for anyone
who's listening and doesn't know — it is a startup in the athlete
marketing space that is a two-sided marketplace for athletes and brands
to close marketing deals. And again, I'm back in a role where I wear a lot
of hats. We'll dive into what the day-to-day work looks like more, I'm sure.
But we're having a lot of fun building this company. We just celebrated
two years today and I've been here for seven, going on eight months of
that two years.”

On going from primarily written journalists to becoming a social media person
and content creator
“You know, what drives me is I'm a competitor and when I was at IndyCar, I
saw the incredible content that NASCAR put out, that F1 put out, and I wanted
to be on that level. It wasn't realistic based on the more limited resources and
the bandwidth that I had as a one-person social team. But in addition to being
competitive, I'm also just eternally curious and always wanting to learn new
skills. So everything that I learned is quote-unquote self-taught. It's like
YouTube-ing ‘how to use Photoshop’, how to do this thing. And I was just
talking to a colleague today — she is kind of learning Photoshop and there are
things now that I take for granted that I don't even think about. I thought back
to my early NHL days and my IndyCar days and I was like, man, it is such a
steep learning curve. But for me, that learning curve is really fun. It's fun to feel
uncomfortable and to have to find that growth.

“So I think occasionally it can be detrimental because I'm so attracted to
new challenges that it's always going to lead me to, like, potentially pivot
in my career. I think at the end of the day that can hurt you in some ways
if you're not hyper-focused or a specialist at one thing, I think long-term
that can have its drawbacks. But to this point in my career, it's been a
huge benefit because I've taken on so many different roles. I've had
opportunities for growth that required skills I didn't even think I would
need when I graduated college, right? It’s been this path that shaped
itself organically. So I've appreciated it and always look forward to
learning a new challenge.”

On picking up social media and fan engagement instincts at IndyCar and
beyond
“You know, when I was interviewing at MarketPryce, I talked to a woman and I
was like, ‘Yeah, you know, I started in journalism. This is what my work has
been up to this point.’ And she also started in journalism and she dropped this
line that I loved, she said ‘I was marketing athletes before I knew that I was.’
And that always stuck with me because at the core of what I learned in college
and what I started practicing as a journalist was: how do I take an athlete and
humanize them? How do I tell a story that — someone who's scrolling through
Twitter will take the time to click into and read, right? That was at the core of it.
My best stories, the things I look back on fondly, aren't gamers or reports
about specific things. They're stories that got into who an athlete was. So I
think that is a skill that has guided me always and continues to really support
the work that I do at MarketPryce as well.

“When I think to your question about how that ties into fan engagement,
that's a big part of it, right? Like profiling drivers, and putting their
personality out there. Much like we've seen this with F1 and Drive to
Survive. What that show did is showed a lot of driver personality and it
told a lot of compelling stories. That's what I was trying to do at IndyCar,
too, was find ways to show off who the drivers were and why you should
care about them and want them to win the next race.

“So I think that is how it organically ties in, but to the same point there were so
many challenges at IndyCar, so many nuances. Like, you had to know when
race control might make a very controversial call about when to throw a
caution flag and how that affected the race outcome or, God forbid, a big
accident. IndyCar races on ovals, right? Which, if you only watch F1, you may
not be familiar with it, but whether it is Pocono Raceway or Indianapolis Motor
Speedway, these are huge oval tracks where cars are going 200+ miles an
hour. So one of the first races that I covered, we actually had this huge
accident that involved the driver named Robert Wickens, who ended up being
really severely injured. But we were sitting up there for like 30, 45 minutes and
we didn't know if he was okay. Learning how to cover that on the fly is just
such a unique thing that, at least on my path with journalism — I didn't study
PR or crisis management or anything like that. So I was in that seat kind of
[thinking[ like, ‘Okay what do we do? How do we handle this with the right
sensitivity, with the right kind of measured approach?

“So there were little things like that, too, that were just unique challenges
that came with IndyCar specifically. But still, at the core of my day-to-day
[was] I thought how can I move the needle for this brand? It goes back to
those journalism roots and, like, I wanna tell the best story I can.”

About marketing drivers while he was at IndyCar
“I think it's tough. You know, you and I were talking earlier about the
early days of social when you had your start at Anaheim, and you're
launching these accounts. I think that [they] just had several years and
IndyCar was probably slightly behind the curve of where other leagues
were as far as investing in digital and prioritizing social media internally
and things like that. But there was such a learning curve for a decade. It's
like, how do we exist in these spaces? How comfortable are we putting
content out, and giving people access within the team? You talked about,
like, can the social media guy for IndyCar go into a team truck? There are
little things like that that kind of had to be learned and discovered. It's
just a process that takes time.

“So when I think about the resources that we had, it's that much harder
to say, okay, we're also going to invest now in specifically promoting
drivers and helping them build their brands. Again, at the NHL when it's a
team of 18 people, you can put a couple of people behind the social
player development engine, and I think at smaller leagues and smaller
companies, it's just harder to do, it's harder to take on. But when I got
there, IndyCar was certainly specifically and intentionally thinking about
it. There's also this nuance with IndyCar that, for example, it's a little
different than the NHL because drivers are inherently incentivized to post
[on social media]. They want to build the biggest brand that they can
because a big part of what allows you to be a driver is sponsorship
money. If you can bring a sponsor that is gonna pay to be on your car,
you're a lot more valuable to a team owner who might need to fill a seat
and bring a sponsorship in the next year. So drivers are excited to build
their brands.

“NHL players at times were very hesitant, right? It's a very team-first
culture there. They don't necessarily need to have the same kind of brand
development, because if they play well they're gonna get paid and they
don't need to bring a sponsorship to the team. So part of the challenge I
ran into at IndyCar was actually that drivers were already doing the work
or they had support, they had managers who were doing it for them and it
could feel redundant. So a big part of what I tried to do was figure out
how can we divide this into buckets where maybe the league gives you a
certain video angle, like an in-car camera will give you a shot of what
your lap looked like when you won the race or something, that you don't
have access to as a driver or through your manager? So it was how to
make it a naturally synergistic relationship between the support they had,
the access to content that they had, and how could the league support
that best?”

About the ROI of athlete social and athlete marketing
“Honestly, I've gotta give a shoutout to your company — in the last half
of my time at the NHL, we worked with Greenfly, who did a great job of
helping us recap what athletes were posting, and helping dig into the
metrics a little bit. So we actually were, I feel like, pretty well-equipped to
bring reports and say, ‘This was the real tangible payoff of what the
social player development team created and sent to athletes.’ So that was
a huge help…

“But yeah, I think that's always a challenge. When you go back to a
smaller company like IndyCar, figuring out how to internally say we
should be investing our resources in a channel that we don't own — that
can be a tough conversation to have at times. I've always tried to look at
it as rising tides lift all boats. I think that the one concrete stat I've always
pointed to is that athletes will always have a higher engagement rate than
the brand channels. They won't always have more followers, but if we're
gonna tell a story well from the league POV, why wouldn't we want that to
also be told on the most engaging platform that we have? So I think
that's an easy story to tell internally. It's something that I believe in fully
and it's been my work for the last three to four years now. For me that's,
that's how you sell it and that's how you build it.”

About the trend of social media platforms and users creating content with
the platform’s tools
“You're really getting into MarketPryce territory now, which is exciting. I
think to take it back to the NHL days, there are a couple ways I think of it.
One is like this graph of an x-axis and a y-axis where one is how good are
you at your sport and how influential are you on the field or on the ice or
what have you. The other is how much do I need to put my personality out
there? And they're kind of like inverted lines, right? So if you're Alex
Ovechkin, you don't necessarily ever need to do anything that shows off
your personality. You just don't. You're good enough at hockey that you
have a built-in following and they're gonna be excited if you post anything.
It can be a still photo, it can be a highlight of you scoring your 800th career
goal, and anything in between, and fans are gonna eat it up.

“If you are a rookie playing in Anaheim, you have a slightly different challenge and
I think you have to come in ready to put yourself out there, build your brand. And
that's even more so the case for the athletes we're working with now at
MarketPryce, who are D1, D2 volleyball players — your performance on the court
isn't gonna carry you to stardom on social. There’s not going to be an inherent
amount of engagement for you. Your star players will be a power five quarterback
or what have you.
“So yeah, I've always thought of it that way and I've also tried to, like at the league,
we would tell players we can only do so much for you, first of all, but what we can
cover is the base that is your on-ice performance. I can help you celebrate your
biggest moments on the ice, I can help you have great assets to share, to support
NHL campaigns like Hockey Fights Cancer or something to post during pride
month or whatever it might be. But the most engaging thing you can put out is
what you are willing to do yourself. It's you putting your face in front of the
camera, sharing your personality.

“I think it's just what you're getting at, like the TikTok content. What it takes to
really perform well on TikTok is a face and a personality. That was not always very
comfortable for NHL players to hear or to think about doing. Some were great at it,
but even the most social-savvy, the rookies who we were working with, the Trevor
Zegrases, the Cole Caufields of the world, I think there was still such a, like, there
was a hockey culture thing in the locker rooms [and] you would kind of get chirped
at if you were too active on social or if you were doing TikTok dances or whatever it
might be.
“There was this ridiculous era during the pandemic where all of us were locked
down and hockey players were at home with their wives and doing all the dance
challenges and we're sitting at the league like, ‘Whoa, we did it. All of our players
are gonna be on TikTok.’ But as soon as hockey came back, it kind of started to
fizzle out. So yeah, it's an interesting challenge. I think I would tell any college
athlete who we work with now ‘Figure out how to put your personality out there.
Tell your story, do it authentically. If you get a hype video from the team that you
play for, great; post that. But it can't be the only thing that you post.”’

“If you develop your own niche, that's going to help you that much more.
Even if you don't have a niche though — like one athlete who I'll shout out
specifically, his name is Jake Ferri, he's a Kent State wrestler. He has such a
unique [story]. He's from Boston, all the way down to his Boston accent, but
kind of just how he carries himself — he's a really fun loving, charismatic,
loose guy on social. He'll mess around with his teammates and do this kind
of irreverent content creation. And I think if a brand comes and sees that,
even if it's not him saying I'm irreverent and I love cars or whatever, they
still see an opportunity to work with someone who's unique.
“So it's like, put yourself out there and you're going to attract someone. It
may not be your dream brand, it might be a brand you've never heard of.
That's kind of the magic of MarketPryce and what we do. We help you make
connections. But the first step is always putting yourself out there and then
seeing what comes back.”

On helping athletes intentionally build unique brands and activate their
personalities
“Especially at the NHL, it took time to build the relationships that informed the
specificity that you're talking about. But Trevor Zegras, by the time that I left the
NHL, was my internal poster child of what we could do to support an athlete and
also what we could share with other incoming rookies to say, ‘Look, this is how
you can build out your social calendar for the first six months of your career’
because we made sure he was ready to post at every big milestone. It was around
the Draft, it was then around his NHL debut, around his first goal, and if you're a
hockey fan, you know that Trevor Zegras had some incredible viral moments and
we helped him post around those, and I think to this day it's probably some of the
highest-engaging player content that we've worked on at the league because he
was able to post and capitalize around his lacrosse goal, and then later the alley-
oop puck pass that blew up all over the internet.

“So we equipped him to post around those moments and that's great.
And it's kind of like we talked about — because he was doing awesome
things he's getting more engagement so he didn't have to lean into it with
his personality to keep those numbers going up. But where it really got
special — for me, when we think about how we were driving league
priorities and supporting the player, my favorite post of all time is Trevor
Zegras posting a lowlight, which is what fans ended up calling it. It was
ahead of the Las Vegas All-Star vote last year…We had Trevor Zegras put
out this lowlight of all of his audacious attempts at really cool dazzling
plays that failed. Because we saw the highlights, we saw the lacrosse
goals, but then we put together this highlight where he would turn the
puck over or try a lacrosse shot that just immediately gets blocked.

“And not every player was willing to laugh at themselves in that way, but
Trevor was, and we learned that, after six months, a year of working with
him through the first stages of his career. And when we sent that post it
drove — granted, this is from a tweet and it's hard to drive traffic from
Twitter, that's something that I'm sure everyone in the industry knows,
it's hard to drive traffic out from Twitter — we drove like 10,000 votes to
the All-Star page for Trevor from one tweet. And it's because he put out
the lowlight, put a sassy caption with it and had some fun.

“It's like, if you could get every — or if you could even get half of your
biggest stars in the game, which I would count Trevor in that group for
the NHL — to have that much fun with the content they're putting out;
that's not even him in front of the camera, like we talked about, that's not
the authentic TikTok content that you want, but it's somewhere in the
middle. It's taking the on-ice stuff, having a ton of fun with it and putting
it out in a unique way and that moves the needle. To me, that was the
moment where I was like, ‘We did this.’ Like, we really got a player
excited, bought in and posting something that moves the needle for his
brand and for the league.”

On athletes having some agency as creators when working with brands vs. being
prescribed a script
“The way that I view it, and I'm really speaking now to the work that we're doing at
MarketPryce and the connections that we're driving between athletes and brands,
but I think one of the best things a brand can do is just let that athlete do what they
do best. A lot of the student athletes who are on our platform are pretty talented,
pretty savvy creators, right? So I think to one of my favorite partnerships, it was
Coach working through our platform to hire five student athletes to help launch a
new line called the Varsity Collection. So they reached out to, this is a really cool
thing too we touched on earlier, but your power five quarterbacks, your power five
star football players and basketball players, they're gonna get NIL deals that are
coming to them, brands are gonna be knocking on their door. What's really cool
about what MarketPryce has done really well in the last year especially is we're
connecting brands like Coach to athletes like Cameron Baisden, who is a
cheerleader at the University of Central Florida. It's not who you think of when you
think of NIL, right?

“But Coach hired five athletes, and what was really cool about the brief is
they're like, ‘Tell your story.’ The tagline was, ‘Put me in Coach.’ That was
the whole thing. And each of the five athletes took a unique spin on that
and how they would feel excited about partnering with Coach. And like
Alex Glover, an SMU volleyball player, she's a really great creator. But
her whole thing was like, ‘I came for freshman orientation six years ago
and I had my Coach bag here, and now here I am as a sixth-year senior
with the Coach bag again,’ and it comes full circle. So the way I see it, it's
like brands look at these athletes and let them do what they do best. Let
them create and tell a story.”

What brands are looking for when finding and selecting athletes to work with
“When brands use MarketPryce, they're going to be able to scroll through athlete
applications and look at a profile page that shows some of the things you talked about.
They can see the baseline social data around the athlete's demographics, who follows
them, and where do those people live? They can see engagement rate and start to
make an informed decision on, within the actual post, are they going to move the
needle in a way that we want to, are they gonna reach a specific audience that we care
about?
“So that's one part of it. But I also think that, shoutout to our guys at Gondola, in much
the same way that creatives have to pitch themselves and say, ‘This is what I can
create’ if you're a freelance creative, like, ‘this is what I can do and you should hire
me.’ Athletes are kind of doing the same thing. And I think Alex Glover, I brought her
up earlier, when brands go look at her feed now and see OCA plant-based energy drink
and Coach and everything in between, and how she's created and told stories around
these brands, they're like, ‘Oh, she can work with us too.’ I think that that kind of
portfolio is just as important.”

On brands working athletes on social over other creators/influencers
“I think there are natural fits with athletes, that's where I'd start. Like, if
you are a fitness brand, if you sell anything in the physical or mental
health space, you're gonna be able to partner with people who are very fit
and perform at a very high level. It's the same reason we would say that
Tom Brady is a good endorsement partner, but at a different scale, right?
They're not bringing a 12 million (follower) audience from their Instagram,
but they are bringing the intangible athlete skillset. These are go-getters,
they're competitors, and they've proven that they can do things at a really
high level. I think pretty much anyone at, at the D1, even D2 level, like —
that's something a brand should want to be associated with. So I think
athletes bring that edge…

“Like another athlete, Keeley Davis, she's a volleyball player [at
Creighton] who we work with as well. She's really cool, really funny, great
personality, she puts out this interesting content, but then she's also
gonna mix in these clips of her doing really impressive things on the
court. It's an edge that creators don't bring, that aspirational part that
you're talking about in general. Some creators are; like a fitness creator
might bring the same edge that an athlete brings, but I think that's built in
for just about every athlete that you would partner with.”

Dakota’s favorite story that he worked on or wrote for the IndyStar or Muncie Star Press
“I'm gonna cheat and I'll quickly give you one from each. At the Muncie Star Press it is a
story that headlined the dark side of a player in the spotlight. There was a center on the
men's basketball team, his name is Trey Moses. He's this incredible kid. He worked in
the community. He worked with Best Buddies and, like, he went viral for a prom
proposal tied to Taylor Swift.
“Well, he was this incredible kid and then I got to know him a little bit when I was on the
beat covering the team. I found out that he had dealt with a lot of mental health issues
that you wouldn't assume based on how outgoing and how happy he always looked on
his feed. So the story was essentially, like, here's this kid who is literally showing up to
the basketball arena in the middle of the night trying to figure out how to find his peace
and his mental health while also doing this incredible stuff in the community. So I wrote
that story and it always stuck with me. And you know, it's the same thing we talked
about, like finding the human element in a player. That's the same thing I was doing then
that I tried to do now when we connect athletes and brands. So I always loved that one.

“[At the] IndyStar it was a story, what was the headline? ‘The Sacrifices a
Married WNBA Couple Makes Raising Newborn Twins.’ And this was a
story about DeWanna Bonner and her partner Candace Dupree…It was
about how they were going to raise a child while they were both playing
and one of them took a season off and they had twins. And it was just
this really cool story. That is one that I discovered as a reporter; I was
covering the postgame interviews and saw babies getting passed around
the locker room. So I was like, ‘Hey, whose babies are these?’ And it
turned into this really cool story about how they took a season off in
Indianapolis as a gay married couple. There were just a lot of really
interesting life dynamics for them to work through, and they were
professional athletes who were competing at a really high level through
all of that. So I really love that story as well.”

Who is the most well-known or accomplished athlete that's come out of
Ball State [Dakota’s alma mater]?
“There were a few options here. I did some research last night to make
sure that I wasn't talking outta my hat, but I think it has to be Brad
Maynard. 15 years as a [NFL] punter, we know there are only so many
punting jobs in the NFL. Fun fact, he was the first D1 player at the time,
this is a long time ago, to ever be named a conference’s Defensive Player
of the Year [as a punter] in the Mid-American Conference (MAC). He was
a punter and got that title. So that shows you the impact he had at Ball
State and then went on to the long professional career. So I think it's
gotta be Brad.”

Dakota’s favorite NHL player[s] to work with during his time with the league
“Yeah, it's Trevor Zegras. Like I said, he had such a willingness to try new fun
things, to put himself out there on social, to tie his really dynamic personality into
what we created for him in a way that a lot of players weren't. He helped really
further the cause and drive the mission forward for our social player development
program. And he was just really a joy to work with. Something we didn't get to talk
about before, but it's worth noting, is we would send him stuff and literally not
touch a caption suggestion at all because Trevor would write these captions that
were like six emojis and that's all he would post. But fans loved it. Like, it's a UFO
emoji and a zzz sleeping emoji, and that would be his caption. So we didn't even try
to entertain that or fill that need for him because he just authentically brought this
fun, irreverent tone to everything he did on social.
“So I’m a huge Trevor Zegras fan. Shout out to the Anaheim Ducks, they were great
partners as well. But yeah, that's my guy at the NHL.”

The most memorable athlete social post or content from Dakota’s time at
the NHL
“We've already talked at length about [Zegras], so I tried to think back to
a post that moved the needle in a different way, and Josh Morrissey had
a really cool touching story about losing his father to cancer, and we
were creating Hockey Fights Cancer content with him. He had a purple
jacket that had a custom lining that he wore in honor of his father to one
of the Winnipeg Jets’s Hockey Fights Cancer night and he then auctioned
it off to raise money in his father's name.

“We were able to get some really cool video of him talking about his
father's story. We had video of him walking down the hall, coming to the
game and just edited a really nice kind of touching sentimental piece that
at the time was so significant to us because we were able to help a player
tell a story that meant so much to them. But also it's in support of an NHL
campaign that we had to find a way tolike tell stories around. So we
posted that [and] at the time the collab feature on Instagram was still very
new, and it was so cool to have this storytelling piece that meant so
much to both parties to go up on Josh's account and the NHL’s account.
At the time I was over the moon about that one.”

What can IndyCar do to try to stay relevant as F1 grows in the States more
than ever and the sports space gets more crowded in general
“I think it's kind of a cop-out answer if you are familiar with IndyCar and what it
is, but if you're not maybe this answer is a little more interesting to you, but to
me it all comes down to the Indianapolis 500. This is a month-long event where
drivers are competing to qualify for the race. [A few years ago] we had
Fernando Alonso, who was a premier F1 driver at the time, come and try to
make the field of 33 for the Indianapolis 500, [and] he failed to qualify. It was an
incredibly widely read story across the globe, and I think that was the best
example of the drama that the Indy 500 brings and how much it can move the
needle. If they could do that consistently and do a ‘Drive to Survive’ style level
of storytelling through the month of May at IMS, the stories you can tell are
incredible. That race defines careers for guys. They get one shot at it a year,
and the guys who win it multiple times become legends.

“You know, Takuma Sato is a driver who I worked a lot with when I was at
IndyCar. He's a legend in Japan because he won [the Indy 500] twice and
the drivers, like, it's all they care about. We have 17 races in IndyCar,
[but] Indy 500 is always the one that they're focused on. So that month
has so much prestige. And just the passion that comes from the drivers
— if you can tap into that, you would pull new viewers in. It's just a huge
challenge. It's not easy to create what ‘Drive to Survive’ is, but IndyCar I
think has a platform, that's even more compelling than what F1’s season
schedule is, at Indy.”

Dakota’s favorite deal that has been done through MarketPryce
“This one's top of mind because we just closed the deal this week, but
we helped a high school football player, a young woman named Bella,
land her first NIL deal. She made history in California as the first girl to
score multiple touchdowns in a varsity football game. She was a national
storyline several months ago when that happened. Her team then went
through the state tournament, I think they won like a division
championship and now Bella is looking into college. She is not trying to
play any sport at the next level. So she's a really unique athlete for us to
work with.

“We reached out through our athlete engagement team and said, ‘Hey Bella, are
you trying to capitalize on your NIL? If so, let's talk.’ And when she got on the
phone with our team, she said, ‘I don't wanna go out and secure 10 NIL deals. I'm
not interested in turning myself into a billboard or my social feed into a billboard,
but I'm really passionate about two or three things.’ One of them is mental health.
So we helped Bella connect with an app that tracks behaviors on your
smartphone and helps you monitor your mental health in a really tech-driven and
tangible way. So now Bella is partnering with Keywise and we just announced
this NIL partnership this week and it's been covered by like 25 outlets. Shoutout
to a lot of people who responded to my request this week to to check Bella's
story out, but everyone from, HighlightHER to Togethxr to ESPN SportsCenter,
On3 - that's a really big publication in the NIL space - and everyone in between
talked about Bella's story and it was really incredible for us to bring this
partnership together and then see it make such a huge splash and not to mention
all of the girls who look up to Bella and you see them in the comments being
inspired by her. It's really special to be a part of that.”

The best meal to get in
Indiana and where to get it
“You're gonna make fun of
me for this, but the go-to is
always St. Elmo’s in
downtown Indy that has this
world-famous shrimp
cocktail. I think if you're in the
city [only] a night or two, it's
gonna be St. Elmo’s or their
sister restaurant is called
Harry and Izzy's, so you can
get the shrimp cocktail [at]
kind of a discount there…

“But I'll throw out an underdog
just so you're not too
disappointed in me. There's a little
place kind of tucked in an alley in
Downtown Indy, it's called Pearl
Street Pizza. It's kind of just like
bar food, get a good pizza. It's low
key, much different than the St.
Elmo’s vibe.”

The brand that's *not* yet on MarketPryce that Dakota would most wanna
see an athlete work with
“I could go in a couple different directions, but I'm gonna shout out e.l.f.
Cosmetics. If you, or if anyone listening to the show, knows the people
who are running the brand accounts at e.l.f. Cosmetics, give me a call.
We worked with a Florida State athlete, name is Michaela Edenfield, she
is a star softball player, and we've done this content series where we ask
players, ‘What's your dream deal?’ It's pretty straightforward, you could
get a pretty boring answer. A lot of athletes say something like Nike or
Under Armour, and it's like, well, cool, every athlete in the world wants to
be sponsored by Nike or Adidas, right?

“But Michaela came with this really cool, very specific answer about how she she
loves makeup. She always does her makeup before she goes and plays, so that's a
big part of her brand. She does like ‘get ready with me’ [videos] before her games
at Florida State, and she has these incredible eye-catching looks that she brings
out as a player and she says, ‘I would love to launch a line with e.l.f. and make an
affordable product that any girl who follows me and comes to my games could
buy.’ So we told this story and put it out on social and, for our accounts these are
big numbers, but we got like 15,000 video views and literally hundreds of
comments, particularly from the Florida State camp where fans are like, ‘Hey, e.l.f.,
give her this deal and my children will never well wear any other product.’
“It was really cool to see the FSU fan base rally around that. And it is the most
natural fit, I think that you could really dream up between an athlete and a brand.
So I pitched that out. Still haven't gotten a response from e.l.f., but man, I would
love it if we did.”

Dakota’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“I'm gonna throw out a couple GOATs who I love following — Amie Kiehn
(@amiekiehn on Twitter, @iamamiekiehn on IG) and Tyson Hutchins
(@tysonhutchins on Twitter and IG). If I'm looking for job opportunities or
I'm looking to connect with someone, Amie Kiehn is the go-to. She has
taken so much time out of her life to connect with me. I've always
appreciated her being so open. I know she's been on your show as well.

“And same thing with Tyson. Like if you're talking about the person to
follow to understand the trends and what's happening in the creative
space, he's the guy. And the one that I'm gonna throw out as a sleeper is
my guy Juan from the NHL, I connected with him there. He's a really
talented video creator, Juan Morales (@77JMorales on Twitter and
Instagram). I would encourage everyone to go connect with this kid. I
know he just launched his own podcast.”

Where to find Dakota and MarketPryce on digital/social media
Dakota is @DakotaCrawford_ on Twitter and Instagram
MarketPryce is @MarketPryce across all channels – Twitter, Instagram,
TikTok

Thanks again to Dakota for being so generous with his time to
share his knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow
me on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit
www.dsmsports.net.
@njh287; www.dsmsports.net

Episode 238 Snippets: Dakota Crawford of MarketPryce

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