Male Sports Opps: Barstool Sports taps chief commercial officer amid significant spend increase (Score 73)

Sales Lead: Stephanie Lynn became the chief commercial officer at Barstool Sports earlier in 2023.

• Lynn joined from Edgewell Personal Care, where she was the SVP of the global e-Commerce and consumer experience.
  • This role's responsibilities included D2C, B2B, Amazon, omni-channel, digital marketing, analytics, CRM, and digital content creation.
• She seems to have succeeded Tom Boland, Barstool's CMO until March 2023, but we will, of course, update you as we learn more.
• The company will likely:
  • Shift strategy
  • Continue ramping up its partnerships and experiential activations
  • Keep increasing spend
    • ​​​​​​​We recently predicted that Barstool's spend would ramp back up.
• Target demographic: 
  • ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Male millennials and Gen-X, especially sports enthusiasts

Additional spending insights:

• Digital and social insights (digital ad spend, effectiveness, impressions, and performance)
  • YTD spend: Barstool has spent roughly $2.3m on digital ads YTD, almost double the roughly $1.3m spent by this point last year.
  • YTD data: So far this year, the company has earned approximately 612.3m digital impressions via mobile display (66%), Facebook (22%), and Instagram (12%) ads.
    • ​​​​​​​Top site destinations for this year's mobile display ads include foxnews.com (23%), accuweather.com, buzzfeed.com, tmz.com, and cargurus.com.
  • Last year: In 2022, Barstool's estimated full-year spend of $1.8m reached less than half of that of $4.8m in 2021.
• Additional channel insights  
  • The company utilizes Google Ads along with Facebook, X/Twitter, and online video (via Youtube Android and Youtube.com) ads.
  • Barstool sponsors podcasts such as Pardon My Take, Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey, 93X Half-Assed Morning Show, Stu Does America, and the Drinkin Bros Podcast.

Additional agency insights:

• Opportunity: Get on Lynn's radar soon in case she kicks off agency reviews, as new hires of this kind often do.
• Current agency roster:
  • ​​​​​​​No current agency relationships yet confirmed

Insight Sources: Digital spend insights estimated by Pathmatics; additional channel insights estimated by Vivvix; podcast insights by Podchaser.