Before we get into the show today a reminder for those of you listening on the podcast that Winfluence is now available in amazing technicolor. If you’d like to see the magic as well as hear it, just pop over to the YouTube channel and subscribe. The easy way to get there is jasonfalls.co/youtube. Of course, you can also search for Jason Falls Winfluence or just Winfluence on YouTube and find it.

The new video episodes will also be offered up on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter each Monday. We’re going to shift the publishing of the show to 11 a.m. ET so folks can join us for lunch, brunch or breakfast viewing on the stream. The audio podcast will still be there for you, just a couple hours later than it normally fires. 

Regardless of where you’re listening or watching, thank you for being here and following along our journey to understanding more about influence and influence marketing.

And now to today’s topic.

It’s been more than two years now since the NCAA passed legislation that allowed college athletes at its institutions to accept payment for use of their name, image and likeness. The NIL push as most people know it has created millions of dollars for student-athletes who had long been handcuffed by eligibility rules that prevented them from profiting from their status as influential or celebrities within their sport, or geographic relevance. 

We’ve seen some interesting, if not amusing, uses of NIL deals between brands and athletes. One law firm in Kentucky has billboards all over the state for personal injury service with several University of Kentucky athletes on it, claiming “Bigger is Better,” talking about the size of their firm … law firm, that is. 

The kid of the Popeye’s chicken meme now plays college football and just signed a long overdue NIL deal with the chain restaurant to actually profit from its use of his likeness, too. 

As the usage of NIL has grown, there are some interested people out there studying it to see how well they work, what athletes are profiting, if it’s actually leveling the playing field for some sports and such. One of those such people is Tiffany Kelly from Curastory. 

Her interest in student-athletes migrated from her work as a student at Nova Southeastern, then a tutor and athletic department intern at LSU. She then worked on staff as an analyst for ESPN. She’s a statistics and analytics person … not in the points per game sense, necessarily, but analyzing the data around things. Some of her work at ESPN included analyzing fan passion, for example.

Under her leadership, Curastory, which is a video editing platform, did an analysis of NIL student athletes and projected the average monetization amount per video each had across all sports. The results were quite surprising. Let’s just say football and men’s basketball student-athletes are not the highest earners. 

I asked Tiffany to come on the show and walk us through the analysis and discuss what it tells us about student-athletes we should, and maybe shouldn’t, be investing in as brands. We also talked about Curastory and how it can be a useful addition to the content production and distribution for any brand or creator.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

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