Episode description

In the Season 2 opener of Beyond the Bottom Line with Bert Miller, Ishveen Jolly, CEO and Founder of OpenSponsorship, discusses how she took her love for sports and boosted an analog industry to the digital age by creating a model to accelerate the non-top 5% sponsorship market. 

Ishveen walks through lessons she's learned as a leader, OpenSponsorship's "secret sauce" in creating the data-driven and intentional platform, what she's found is the major difference between a successful and unsuccessful company, and the categories that are experiencing the greatest opportunities within this digital sponsorship model.

The Story of Ishveen and OpenSponsorship:
My love for playing sports started as a child from playing catch with my father in our backyard, which led me to captain the Keble College, Netball, and Cricket teams at Oxford University. It also gave me the courage to leave my career in management consultancy in London and move to New Delhi, India to become a sports agent. Working with premier leagues, teams, clubs, and athletes – brokering sponsorship deals gave me an insider perspective on how fragmented and unanalytical the sports sponsorship industry is. Realizing the industry lacked transparency, information, access, tracking, and tech innovation meant there was a huge untapped potential in the annual $60 Billion sports sponsorship market. 

Why wasn’t there an Airbnb for sponsorship? Well, now there is, OpenSponsorship.com. 

Today OpenSponsorship is the largest and smartest marketplace connecting brands and smart marketers to over 5,700 professional athletes. We are democratizing sponsorship by making it accessible, efficient, and data-driven. Using analytical insights, AI-based matching, and proprietary ROI information tracking we are leveraging technology and data to create meaningful partnerships and revolutionizing the way you search, secure, and track sports sponsorship.

The network effort - with 3,500 deals completed through the platform, covering over 160 sports, in 120 countries – the marketplace only gets smarter. We plan on applying the analytics and learning beyond athletes to teams, leagues, events, and other entertainment verticals. 

Bringing sponsorship into the digital age!



About Beyond the Bottom Line:
In the Beyond the Bottom Line podcast series, Bert E. Miller connects with leaders across categories to discuss their proudest achievements, greatest challenges, and where they focus their energy each day. Tune in for countless valuable lessons that can be applied to today’s World of Work.