Podcast: Athlete, influencer, or other? Dissecting sponsorship in the social media age

Sponsorship in cycling is a moving target. In all aspects of the sport, sponsorship is a crucial marketing tool, but it is often economically inefficient. What’s more, those two outcomes are difficult to track, adding to the complexity of the topic.

While the importance of sponsorship is integral to a wide range of elements of the cycling business, it is so difficult to discuss because everyone has their perspectives and interests shaping how they interact with it. Even journalists cannot be entirely unbiased as relationships and support are unavoidable. Conflict of interest, to some degree, is unavoidable. 

Yet, here at Rodeo Adventure Labs, we are unphased. Sponsorship is a constant topic of conversation here, so we felt we needed to bring that conversion out into the open. To do that and to avoid one that was restricted to the Rodeo perspective, we called up Hailey Moore from The Radavist to add to our collective understanding of sponsorship in terms of marketing, storytelling, and athletics. 

After two recordings, many emails, lots of outlining, and a dose of audio cleaning, we came up with an episode that we found fascinating. For those of you who have liked what we have done before, we hope you will enjoy this as well. 

You can read more from Hailey on The Radavist here, including a profile she wrote about the Rodeo HQ that sparked this whole conversation that you can find here.