Barstool Sports

Background

Barstool Sports is a sports and pop culture blog founded in 2003 in Boston. Over the last 15 years, the company’s regional popularity and loyal following have launched the company and brand into the mainstream. Barstool Sports has a portfolio of podcasts, live events, video series, and social influencers that engage over 69 million unique viewers each month.

Challenge

Barstool Sports’ explosive growth created some unique challenges, including managing ad sales, inventory, and traffic across its many platforms and media. Barstool Sports purchased an off-the-shelf CRM solution to help. While the new system solved some of their sales challenges, it became extremely difficult to regulate advertising inventory and traffic. They resorted to controlling inventory in complicated Excel workbooks, making inventory reconciliation a cumbersome and time-consuming task. Barstool’s diverse media landscape made it difficult to understand social reach, report on revenue by channel, and achieve universal visibility into inventory sell-through. Barstool knew they needed to partner with an innovative company with groundbreaking technology in order to control their end-to-end workflow, gain crucial cross-platform insights and customize a solution to keep up with the needs of their ever-expanding media business.

Solution

Vinyl’s™ low-code / no-code platform with cross-platform integration capabilities and robust feature set was an ideal solution. Vinyl enabled Barstool to take control of their solution and run their ad business on their terms, not dictated by off-the-shelf canned solutions. Barstool Sports began working with our expert Solution Architects to design and develop an application that would replace their existing CRM system allowing them to manage inventory and social media platforms. Sixty days later their first application was launched and Barstool was able to create and manage ad campaigns and sponsorship packages while tracking ad sales against available inventory. A task which previously had been a burdensome error-prone data reconciliation exercise.

Today, Barstool Sports has grown its Vinyl suite to include billing, ad trafficking, and marketing applications, each creating their own efficiencies, adding substantial value to their business.

97% Reduction of billing turnaround from 1 week to 5 hours.
75% Faster implementation than previous CRM.
25% Increase in process efficiency.

Solution Technologies

• Social media integration via REST API (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook)
• Dynamic rate card generation
• Full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) integration with financial and accounting package software
• On-the-fly media plan PDF generation

The [Vinyl] platform’s capabilities and speed of deployment have been hugely helpful for our business. We built fully integrated custom CRM and Inventory management systems in a fraction of the time it would take to implement an out-of-the-box solution. Vinyl has been key to growing our business quickly.”
Wajeeha Ahmed, CFO, Barstool Sports