YouSaid · the spoken record

Erika Ayers Badan

lines on the record: 108
first: 2024-06-13
most recent: 2024-06-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“If you think about it, they had all of these different state regulators, they had different levels of concerns. Barstool would flare up in the news and it would create a nightmare for Penn in terms of how are they going to manage the street? How are they going to placate the analysts? How are they going to explain this to the regulators? And it became a lot. So that's kind of the first part of it. And then the second part is you had this kind of wild freeform, very organic, very exploratory comedy sports media lifestyle brand. And you're fitting it into one of a casino operator that again is highly regulated and publicly traded. The DNA was insanely insanely different. And I think at some point it became very obvious that this was not going.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think the marriage between Barstool and Penn was tough, right? Penn, you know, one is that they're publicly traded company, highly, highly regulated. Sports betting is, you know, at the time was so nascent in this country.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Penn wanted to arrive with a brand and they felt that Barcel could offer that to them better than they could grow themselves. And so we rode with Penn the sports betting introduction, the rollout across 19, 20, 21 states, and then when they acquired Barstool, the intention was to grow the Barstool Sportsbook brand, which was the sports book brand, to grow downloads and acquisitions of customers to the app and to continue to run the media business.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a series of puts and calls in the deal, obviously. And the bet that Penn was making was Penn needed a brand for its sports betting operation. They needed a partner who could drive audience and they had a belief at the time of driving growth profitably, whereby you could organically acquire customers. The single biggest cost in sports betting is the acquisition of betters. Betters are fickle, they're smart, they're going for the best deal or offer, best odds.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the avenue was sports gambling, so the gun went off. And we met with all different types of sports betting operators and Penn, you know, came to the table and became the right partner at the time for Barstool. And so they bought, you know, they were deliberate about it where they bought a 36% stake and then I think two or three years later they would buy the balance of the company.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, bets are on, I suppose. Oh, bets we're on. And so we knew. We were always looking for an acquisition. So in the early days of Barstool, or at least early days of my time, 2016, 2017, 2018, the bet was that it would be a media company who would acquire Barstool. It was becoming more evident as time went on that it was not going to be ESPN or Disney who were going to.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, Yeah, I mean, it was amazing. I spent a year of my life on that deal. Dave and I knew when Paspa was repealed. When PASPA was repealed.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, exactly. The world, you know, everyone is in a bubble and they're speaking of cacophony, like you only hear, you're just served more of what you're interested in, whether it's somebody's opinion, whether it's a piece of content, whether it's the next video. And it's a difficult. It's scary. I actually think it's quite scary.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think media is so interesting. I think media as most people In their 50s or, you know, late 40s, 50s would say it's dead. You know, traditional media does not have the hold. It is not defining. It is not definitive. Things do not have a clear beginning and ending. Everything is amorphous. Everything is living on different feeds and is so fast. Like media has become so very fast.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look, I think most editorial people, business people, and certainly comics were canceled and the only ones who did not get canceled were those that pushed back. And Barstall was very good at pushing back. We were very, very good at that”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone who didn't like Barstool or had concerns about Barstool. And don't get me wrong, I did spend a huge amount of time doing that. But that wasn't why I was there and that wasn't actually what I was very interested in. I was interested in we had a tiger by the tail. It was the right time in the internet. It was the right time in podcasting. It was the right time in comedy. We had insanely talented people and we just needed to let the tiger out of the cage and like try to keep up.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the eye of the hurricane, and I, you know, I said it when I joined Barstall, I don't know if I wrote about it in the book, but I had a choice. I had a choice to either apologize to everyone Barstool had offended or try to placate.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome. I think there was so much noise. There was so much noise that it made, it almost became quiet, if that made sense. There was too much to pay attention to. I really chose to only focus on Barstool. Everyone had an opinion. Everyone had a criticism. Everyone had a sky is falling moment about this, that or the other thing. And there was such a cacophony of all of that and more that it really made it quite almost peaceful in the inside because...”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're not 24 sports. But they're not right to work here. And this isn't right for them. Speaking of Thanksgiving, like. Thanksgiving night, we always launched a Black Friday sale at midnight on Thanksgiving, and we would work until four in the morning getting people's orders, getting orders out. If you don't want to do that, you should not work at Barstool Sports.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to know how online they. And are they serious? We work in sports. Sports happens on nights and weekends and on holiday weekend and on holidays. The stuff that goes wrong at Barstall goes wrong Friday afternoon at 7.30 or Friday evening. So I needed people who were bought into that. And if you weren't going to buy into that, you should just not come here.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was amazing. I mean, it was, look, it was just very alive. It was a heart attack every day. It was a heart attack because you never knew where stuff was coming from. Your head was on a swivel 24-7 at Barstool. And that's what made Barstool so great. And, you know, I took a lot of because I had done this interview with the New York Times. probably 2017, 2018. And I said that when I was interviewing candidates to work at Barstall, I texted them at night or on the weekends. And it became this like kind of international like, oh my God, she's a, you know.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a really talented guy, but he just. So we hired him full time. And then we hired more engineers and we hired product people. And we made the app functional. You can watch video in the app. You could read a blog in the app. You could listen to our podcasts in the app. So, you know, a lot of it, we had all the right problems in a way where we had audience, we had content that people liked and responded to. We had a workhorse team where Barstool is very mission driven. It is a punch above its weight. It's a bunch of misfits who are rallied. And we had the right company DNA. And we just had all the wrong stuff that most normal companies had. And the places I had been, we were good at that stuff. So it was really keeping and preserving the nucleus and then applying that logic.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, the app was a disaster. I mean, when I got there, I think they had an IT person part-time. Like 15 hours a week or something. Some high school”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I moved them over to Periscope until we crashed Periscope, and then I would move them back to Facebook. So it made everybody pay attention. And then we really set about learning how to thrive on those platforms.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram, Snapchat, Sirius XM, SiriusXM was one of the first big breaks for Barstool. But I wanted to exist on every single platform out there. And I wanted to make the most of that platform. So I can remember going to Facebook. I write about this in the book when I was, you know, 2016. I had a meeting with Facebook that somebody gave to me as a favor and the like sports guy at Facebook like pats me on the head and is like. Good luck with your regional sports blog. That was the quote. And I was like, all right. So what I did was Facebook had just launched Facebook Live and Twitter had just bought Periscope. Both were live streaming platforms. And I was like, I will show you. So we put our talent on Facebook until we crashed their live stream because we had so many people on it and so many people commenting.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second was I created a very diverse business model. When the advertisers were mad at Barstool because somebody said something stupid, we shifted to the commerce business. When the commerce business went down, we pivoted back to ads. So I was very intentional about growing multiple lines of revenue. We had t-shirt revenue. We had ad revenue. Over time had licensing and product development revenue. We had live events revenue. For a time we had subscription revenue. And so having all of those levers to pull enabled me to have become in a sea of content and chaos and at times controversy because I always knew I could dial one up and dial one down. And we set to do that. The second thing we really did was we learned how to live on. Other platforms, which is something most media did not do.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it was chaos and it was chaos, you know, it was chaos in the best way. I really believed that it was a highly volatile business and I did not want to go back with my tail between my legs. So I was like, we are going to make this work no matter what. So the first thing we did was to diversify the content and explode the amount, the productivity. Everything at Barstall to this day is really monitored on productivity.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm trying Yeah, there's nobody. Like I'm trying to think of who else is new. And Barstow was the same, which is Barstool started by Dave in 2004. And it's a very old internet brand by internet brand standards.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then to be able to distribute it very, very rapidly. One of the things that was true when I got to Barstool, I knew going into it was that no one was coming to help us. You know, there wasn't, you know, there wasn't going to be ESPN wasn't going to help us. The big media platforms weren't going to help us. Big advertisers would never give Barstool Sports a look the way they do now. So we had to fuel ourselves of our own propulsion. Every dollar we spent, we agonized over. Every move that we made, we were maniacal about is this working to gain audience or is it not? And then we had the gift of insanely talented and funny people and a time on the internet that was incredibly less cluttered than it is now.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. But I started working pretty immediately because the Chernin Group had invested and they had had six months. You know, they're in California. Dave was in Boston and then New York. And really what we said about doing is we had a very clear vision to grow. We had a very clear vision to make content and comedy. And Barstool is really a comedy operation dressed up as sports or dressed up as lifestyle. We wanted to, I really wanted them to move beyond the blog. When I got to Barstool in 2016, it was predominantly a blog operation. Podcasting was just starting. Pardon my take, which is the biggest sports podcast in the world was probably two episodes in. KFC Radio was maybe a month worth of episodes in. So when I got there, we really set about exploding the amount of content that we made.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably two. You know, I think I went through two weeks of interviews and the recruiters had to be caught up and placated because none of their candidates got the job.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These days, it's nothing, but we were incredibly cost conscious You know, when I got to Barst We didn't have a PL. There just wasn't any infrastructure, but it was this incredible luxury where I could build something from scratch. And that's what made it so incredibly fun. And I built it from scratch with a bunch of people who were wildly talented, but very underestimated and never, no one ever had barstools back. You know, we grew and evolved in this very, in a very challenging time, in a challenging time in comedy, in a challenging time in politics and in a challenging time in media, obviously. And to be able to be that forward on a very small P&L and go up against companies 10, 100, you know, 200 times our size was exhilarating.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will most of the capital went to the secondary? So the business itself probably had, I don't know, $2 million. So we had to grow this business on millions.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we stepped in it all the time, and the business was just very, very fragile. And it was, you know, there were, in the early days, there was probably 14 of us in a one floor office and nomad. And then there was 65 people crammed in the same office. Like the growth we had, the journey we were on, the stuff we were experimenting with, the way we were thinking about media and content and commerce. And it was just very, very forward. And it was very free.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's, I was there almost a decade. So I look back on those early days where, you know, I was stressed about payroll. They were offending someone by the minute. You know, I had to keep them very busy. I kept them very busy.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I loved it. I will never love a job the way I loved Barcelona. Really? I loved it. I loved every second of it. It was amazing.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. But, anyways, it made me mad enough that I was like, okay, well, I'm just going to own this now. That's really interesting. That's what”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really? Yes, oh, definitely, all the time, that the only reason I was at Barstool Sports or hired to Barstool Sports was that I wore a skirt, that I, you know, that I would wash, you know, the sins of Barstool, that I was to make Barstool look something like it wasn't, that I was the beard, essentially. And so the...”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I thought it was so rude. You know, people would say. Think people said it in conversation, and then it was said in the media quite a bit.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Giving up control is really difficult. Giving control is hard. And Dave, to his credit, really wanted that. And he had no ego in it. And I also worked really hard to gain Dave's trust. And I listened and I learned and I watched everything I possibly could so that I understood what he was trying to do. And then I brought what I was capable of to that and kind of the alchemy created in a really, really electric place.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple things. One is that Dave has this really great gift, you know, around that same time. I was talking to other companies and there's a lot of founders and especially big personality founders who say they want a business person, but they really don't. They want to be the business person and the star and the personality.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not his opposite of who he is. For people who pay attention to Dave, you would see how that would never work. Now that said, they went through, I don't know, 50, 75 candidates before they got to me. I was the only woman and I was the last of a long line of sports dudes. But I think what made Dave and I work and click is.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have the Patriots. That was a great couple of decades. It was. Not so much anymore. But I pursued every avenue I could to meet Dave. And I had a mutual friend. I had a woman in my, what I would call my women's mafia, another Colby grad, a woman I really respected, who the Chernon group had brought on to advise Dave. And I just said, Betsy, you've got to introduce me to Dave. You've got to introduce me to Dave. You've got to introduce me to Dave. And finally, she did in a coffee shop in the West Village. And I remember running down 14th Street. I was late. I was wearing a dress. I like my kitten heels. We're like getting caught in the cobblestones. And I showed up like sweaty and kind of disheveled, but so excited and I felt very alive. And I loved what Dave had to say. And we shared a great amount of enthusiasm for what Barstool could be. And that was really the end of that.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a sports, you know. I mean, in Boston, it's in the water. Right. You know, it's osmosis. And it was, you know, far stools run and the New England sports run.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what a brilliant brand. And then I just wouldn't shut up about Barstool. And I left feeling very jealous because I knew that they would find, you know, some white guy with an MBA who worked in sports to go run Barstool. And I was kind of obsessed in that I want that job. I know that job is for me.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was raucous, no holds barred. It was no holds barred. They said what everybody was thinking. They went up against every adversary they could. And I was feeling, you know, I had made it through the corporate ladder. I had gotten to the job I had always wanted, which was a CMO job. I got there and I realized, oh, I hate this. Like I'm still desireing to create something and build something and fix things and do things. And I was finding myself feeling suffocated at these big companies. And so I left AOL for a startup in music. And we had gone to the Chernin group to raise money. And the Chairnan group said, hey, somebody made a throwaway comment in the meeting of, you know, we've just invested in this company. You've never heard of called Barstool Sports. And it was the record scratch like. And I was like whipped out. I know Barst. I know Barstol Sports. I whipped out my phone. I was like, they have the.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How did that come about? I always loved Barstool. So when I lived in Boston, Dave was handing out the paper at the train station until Dave figured out that pretty girls handing out a paper would sell more papers than Dave. Especially sports, right? To a male audience. So I had seen Barstool firsthand from the ground up most of the guys I was friends with would send Barstool stories in text. That's how people read Barstool. That's how guys read Barstool. They would text it in their group chats. And I thought they were wildly funny. Like they just had a very...”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She is a force of nature, and she calls it like it is. And I really just wanted to work for Joanne. And then I did for the next 12 years. So that was great.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worked for a woman named Gail Troberman, who I write a lot about in the book, who worked for Joanne. But I remember meeting Joanne. I somehow found myself invited to. MSN client retreat that Joanne was running. And I thought Joanne was fabulous.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was Explorer, exactly. And I had built something when I was on the agency side. I had built something for Volkswagen on MSN where I was figuring out how MSN music you could configure a playlist. And I played it so that you could configure your Cabriolet, which was the car the Volkswagen was launching. And it was very, you know, it was a rainy day or top-down playlist. I got my first taste of using technology and content and a user interface to deliver something to a consumer and also to pay off a brand marketing message. And I really loved it. And I went to go work for Microsoft to do just that.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For MSN, which is, you know, in that day, which is hard to conceive of now, you know, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL were it. Like they were the front doors to the internet. That's how you got your email. That's how you got all your news. That's where you got your entertainment. Does your landing page?”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, the same thing happened to me at the ad agencies where then I realized whereas I'd realized at fidelity I was just buying at the agencies I realized I was just planning. I was still taking somebody else's ideas and putting them together in an order that made sense and delivered against an objective. But I really wanted to go make the thing. And I think working for Microsoft, which was the first publisher I worked for, that was my big break.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was all sales, exactly. So I then chewed through that as much as I could. And it was a great experience. An agency is a great apprenticeship. It's a great place to cut your teeth. You're on somebody else's dime. You're at somebody else's beck and call. You have to manage young people in very dynamic, ever-changing situations. You have to travel a whole lot, a lot, a lot. And you have to be able to pitch.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So after Fidelity, I also found eventually myself wanting to put my hands into things. At Fidelity, I could buy the plan. I was a media buyer. So I could buy what someone else proposed to me. I could negotiate it. I could manipulate it slightly so that it worked for our objectives. But I was really buying. And what I wanted to do was the construction. So I left Fidelity and went and worked at a whole bunch of ad agencies. And I felt the ad agency experience would enable me to create marketing, not just buy marketing, if that makes sense.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it worked out. So I really liked Fidelity because I saw how something operated at great scale. I saw something very serious. You know, the marketing of an investment firm is not to be taken lightly. And I was also given a huge amount of opportunity because nobody believed in, cared about, or understood the internet.”
2024-06-13 · Masters in Business · Erika Ayers Badan on Digital Innovation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source