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So today we have a different setting. Obviously I'm in my home office, I'm in the middle of moving, so it's a little hectic in here. But in today's episode, the main thing I'm going to be talking about is bpn. So if you're in the sports and performance kind of fitness industry, if you pay attention to any of that, and I'm guessing if you listen to this podcast, you do a bit just because we talk about it a good amount, you probably saw that BPN put on this Go One More Last Man Ultra. It was a backyard marathon. It was this idea of who's going to be the last man standing. You're going to be running four miles every hour on the hour until there was just one person standing. Because of that and because of the content play, they added over 50,000 followers in a three day span. In today's episode, I'm going to be breaking that down. This is going to be a solo episode. Today. Brian is traveling. I was traveling the week before. We didn't get to get together and, and make an episode. So I'm going to dive right into it. So the first thing I want you to pay attention to is the power of actual storytelling and content creation. So if you look at the content on BPN's page before the, the, the Last Man Standing or the Go One More Ultra, right, they were getting anywhere from four like two to six thousand likes on any post. And that's not bad. Right. If you actually look at brand accounts they have probably before this they had three hundred and something thousand followers. It's not that that, that's poor engagement rate by any means, but, but they're a big account. Brand accounts are typically harder to build than personal accounts or creator accounts. So you have that to take that into consideration. And when an account is actually creating really good storytelling and storytelling that or content, sorry, that, that people want to pay attention to, people want to consume, people want to be a part of. They feel like they're getting something exclusive by following the brand account. That's how we watch. Brand accounts have a high engagement rate and have a loyal audience and an audience that's actually engaging with that content. So when we look at the content before the marathon, the Ultra marathon, they were getting in that range again, 2 to thou, 2 to 6,000 likes. If you look at the engagement during the Ultra and then since then, engagement has climbed significantly. So during the Ultra there was posts that were getting 20, 30, 40 upwards to 90,000 likes. Right. That is a, that is a crazy number. And the reason they did is they created this takeover takeover effect which I will talk about. And because of that, it created this engagement where people were bought into this race. So that's something to pay attention to that you can obviously with your content you can have a in based on the storytelling and how you're getting people to buy into the story that you are telling. You can have your engagement rate climb. Now the reason this is important is because when we think about how an algorithm works, specifically on Instagram, it's interesting to think about when you start engaging with a brand's account or even a personal or creator's account, there is a trickle down effect. Meaning if I post a piece of content today, it gets hundreds of thousands of views, it gets tens of thousands of likes. I can post a piece of content tomorrow. And let's say, sorry, those 10,000 people that engage with it, right? Whether that was liking, saving, sharing, whatever it is, if they engage with that piece of content, they will now see my next piece of content. And this is why this is an amazing thing for, for bpm because they got so many people to engage with their content. Their stories are going to be showing up more frequently on people's feeds. Their content's going to be showing up on people's feeds more frequently as well. And so that's a big thing to consider when we're thinking about top of funnel content and how top of funnel content actually impacts your bottom of the funnel content. Top of funnel content being things that are driving awareness. They're. They're made to gain reach, they're expand outside of your ecosystem. When I say that, I mean there's your existing follower base. This is content that's made to go past your existing follower base and start reaching net new audiences that you haven't reached in, in the past. And so when I think about this content and I think about how they did this, they created a lot of top of funnel content that really was focused around the race. But still because of that, they're now tracking for much higher engagement rate than they did in the past. And it's not just because of growth, but it's also because of, of the amount of people that are engaging with that content. And now it's repeating and getting onto people's, onto net new people's feed. So that's, that's the first thing that we really want to pay attention and that's, that's super interesting. The second thing is they had a good amount of their athletes racing in the event. They also had a lot of big name kind of craters running craters hybrid athletes running in this event. And what I think that they did strategically was they selected people that were already documenting their training, people that were already documenting their races and their runs and essentially you know, whatever they were doing in the space. That's super interesting to me because it makes me think of of course they had, you know, amazing ultra marathon runners. Like you know there, there was two guys who tied for like 250 something odd miles. But what's interesting is to think about okay, let's, let's make this race and then let's invite the people that are already documenting their, their running and their training because of course they're going to document it for this race. So you have someone like Lucy Davis, you have all of these different big name athletes or people that are know spending time and money documenting their, their training to then as a brand have those athletes, even if they're not your athletes, document it for free for this big moment because this is a big race on their calendar. That's super interesting. And so there's obviously moves there for, for other companies and brands to take notice of, of hey, if you're going to put on some activation, something that is a challenge, something that somebody can, can tie their name to and fits in with their training and their media, there's a good chance if you, if you play this card right, you will create a lot of hype and buzz and awareness around this by inviting those people to participate. And the fact that you can make it exclusive like BPN did, where hey, we're only going to invite 100 plus people. I don't know the exact number but probably in the range of like 100 to 125, maybe 150 people to race in this and they're going to document it. Hey, that is, that's free marketing for us. That, that is like if we ran hundreds of thousands, if not millions in ad spend, probably hundreds of thousands in ad spend to get in front of these folks. But we have some of the biggest names in the space doing it for, for free because they want to partake in this again big thing on their calendar. It's in many ways not free media but it's a, it's a big moment for them to be able to create content around. So that's super interesting. Now let's talk about the interesting thing relative to the race and bpn. So the reality is BPN could have held just a regular, you know, ultra marathon, 50 miles, 75 miles, 100 miles, whatever the case may be at their new ranch. And that would have been super cool, but the format of this and not, and it's not anything new, right? Like Last man standing is not, I think it's a, it's a format that's been around for 10 to 20 years. Like this isn't anything new. But the fact is this was an interesting play where if you run a 50, you know, 50 mile marathon or ultra marathon, sorry, like that has an end time, that has an end date. And so because of that, you know, you could only squeeze so much content out of that. If that's going to take a whole day, if that's going to take 12 hours, you know, like that there, there's a certain amount of time that that is going to take and there's an end date and so the, there's an end date on the content and yeah, you might want to see who wins, but there isn't like the possibility, as much of a possibility of hey, two people are battling it out for first place and they just keep going, they just keep like thugging it out, right? The idea, and the, the idea behind the go one more ultra and, and this Last Man Standing, it's created in a way where like you, you, you want to view it, right? Like you want to see who the last man standing is. And this is part of like why this was such an engaging race and why it felt like it was taken over because people were sharing. So many people were sharing these two people and including the people who race who also raced and lost, like they were all sharing like, hey, these two incredible athletes are, are still out here going for, I think like the person who was in third place, you know, capped out at like 100 and something miles, 130, 40, 50 miles. And like, you know, the, the two that kept going ended up at 250 before the weather kind of took over. So the format is, is imperative. Whatever that event is, it has to be something that people want to tune in for and it has the potential to, to really create excitement as the Last Man Standing did. But let's get into the concept because to me this is the, the most interesting thing. So how did they assemble a team? How did they create content to, to garner, you know, 50,000 new followers? That is a lot of people. And when I think about building a team for this, it's imperative to have the right people focused on the right things, executing very, very fast. The, the key to any event like this is volume and speed like that Is it? You know, I, I talked about an episode before we went to Wadapalooza with Tier and we assembled a team. We were getting content out essentially every, I think it was two to three hours. We had to get a piece of content out. The way to do this and the way BPN had to do this is you have to have a market, a content strategy going into this. You don't just go into it and say hey, like I want to document the thing. Like that is not a good strategy. You want to go into this knowing what your content strategy is going to be. You're going to have your, your narrative. Right. This is the overarching theme of the event of the weekend, of all the content and how it's, it's all the content is essentially amplifying this narrative. And so when we think about the go and more Ultra, the last man standing Ultra, like it's obviously all centered around this idea of, of being the last man standing and documenting that. That's the narrative. Then you want to have your content pillars. So here what are going to be the repeated themes in your content that you're going to be pushing over and over again throughout the weekend. And then you want to have your different formats. Your formats are then going to be how you actually create and package this content. So when we look at how the team was assembled and then also the content that they were creating, there's really two parts to break down. So let's first talk about the team. So the team assembled was five shooters, okay. So five videographers shooting all of the different athletes. Then there was three photographers producing day of photography of, of all the athletes and them performing and racing. And then there was a dedicated editor and then there was the videographers who were also editing in the meantime. Right. They were also getting, sometimes taking over and doing some of the edits. Right. And so they're able to publish, I think it was 23 in the ballpark, sorry of 23 to 26 pieces content in a two to three day span. Right. Which is a lot of content when we're thinking about. It's not just a photo, it wasn't just 23 total photos. Right. Like there was many carousels or a lot of one shot videos. There was a lot of like kind of documentary style snippets of, of the race. And that takes a lot. When we're talking about sound bite pick, finding the right sound bites, when we're talking about color grading, when we're talking about editing the, the photography, putting something in slow mo, all of these, these different elements. And so that's, that's the first part. But when we talk about assembling that team, it is imperative to have an ample amount of videographers and then have those videographers focused on specific content pillars. Right? If I have a. If I have three to five content pillars, I have five videographers, I'm going to have videographers focus on. On specific content pillars at a time, right? And those content pillars are then typically broken down into how the event looks like, right? So if you look at Last man standing, there is start of every. This is how I would look at it. There's the start of, of every lap. There's, you know, that actual lap. So running the four miles, there's the end of the lap, and then there's the recovery time after you finish a lap. And so you can look at all those moments and say, okay, how do I build content pillars around each one of these? Is it the recovery? Is it the talking to your, your pacers? Is it talking to your team? Is it kind of the, the, the grunt and the excitement of starting another lab? Is it the dread and like the agony of ending a lab? Like, you want to look at all these elements and say, hey, how do I build my content pillars around this? Then the next layer is how am I going to package this? Right? But when we think about the content pillars, we are now then thinking about, okay, I shot this, I need to get that story out. I need to get to people while it's still relevant. You know, people can't be on lap 20, and I'm editing lap 10, right? It's not relevant anymore if lap 10 just happened by the end of lap 11, like, I have to have a piece of content out, if not beforehand. And so the way I did it when, when we were shooting w paloa for tier was we, we had the video offers shooting on everything. We had our content players, we had our briefs, we had the descriptions for each one of those. We would take, like, little notes in between, and we would essentially memorize like, like very important moments, things that we thought fit those, those brand pillar or those content pillars. And then we would take note of them and get them to the editor in real time. We would literally go sprint to a tent, drop them, and be like, hey, there's moments here, here, here, and here that fit these content pillars. That editor then had to turn that content around in roughly in an hour. And so that is the key part of how to create this engine. The Photographers are the same thing. We had when we did this. We had reference shots, we had specific kind of looks and aesthetics that we wanted to get in specific moments. You know, we had this, an analogy that we were looking at where it was like focus, agony and glory. And we were looking at that as okay, we're always creating moments around that, whether it was photography and there was like wide angle, almost felt like you were in a coliseum. Like people roaring to, then close ups and showing the agony and the pain on somebody's face of just finishing event and leaving it all on the, the, the table. I believe BPM did something very similar where they, they looked at those moments and were like, hey, these are the moments we're going to create. This is how we want the art direction to be. This is how we want, want it to look. This is how we want it to be perceived. And so when we look at their actual content pillars, they had a lot of raw moments. So think about like what you would see in a documentary. Think about when you, when you watch a documentary, you see like an athlete who's injured and is like on the table and they're in their, they're in pain, they're going through pt, their coaches telling them xyz, like they were creating a lot of moments like that. Then you had updates, right, who, who dropped out, how many runners are still running. All of these different updates of essentially the athletes who was left, who was racing, how they were feeling. And then you had one shot videos. One shot videos are think of like legitimately one shot, one very dramatic shot. Whether the, you know, one that stands out in my mind is I think like 1, 2, 3 million views. Like in that one, in the ballpark of 1 to 3 million views where one of the athletes was just like running in the rain in slow mode, dark, moody. And you know, and he's just, he's just going through it, right? He's on probably mile 100 plus, if not 200 plus and he's just going, going through it. And so when I look at how they executed and how they put this together and how they really created something special and was, was a growth lever. It was the idea of, hey, we need to put on an event, an event that is very focused on what our, our brand ethos is, you know, go one more. That is their brand's narrative. How do we put on an event that feeds that, that amplifies that. Okay, when we do that, then how do we create content pillars and content formats that absolutely get somebody fired up and rallied behind it. And then how do we bring on ultra marathon runners and creators and all these individuals to be a part of it and to become a giant media machine for us, which is what created the takeover effect. There were a lot of people in the space who or sorry that weren't even in the space that knew about this race, that followed them because of this, that are now fans be of them. And so it's super interesting to, to see and think about how you could actually use your, your events not just as an event to get a community together, but actually put on an event to have people really fall in love with the brand, rally behind the brand and ultimately a growth lever to expose net new people to the brand. Another thing that they did was they, they were live streaming at the beginning, beginning and ending of every lap. It started at like a thousand to a few thousand people watching it. You know, at at peak, you know, it had 20, 30,000 people watching a live stream off a brand account. You know, that is, that's phenomenal numbers. So kudos to the BPN team. You know you can still apply this as a small brand. I know looking at BPN and seeing how much they invest into media, you probably think, you know, like I can't do this as a small brand. You truly can't. It really comes into how dialed your pre production is, how, how detailed you are and how in the process that you really create around capturing content, getting content to an editor, editing the content yourself and being to really maximize volume and speed while moments are still hot and and they're still relevant. That is the name of the game. So hope you enjoyed this just 20 minute breakdown of BPN, what they did, how they did it and what I thought was interesting of it. Hope you enjoyed this like and subscribe if you haven't already. Back to regular scheduled programming after this episode. Thanks y' all.