Pixalate spoke with Trent Staley, President at Cast Iron Media, about campaign tracking and securing transparency for brands in the world of sports.
A competitor at heart, Trent Staley has been involved in sports his entire life. As an athlete, he pursued swimming success and served on the USA Swimming Board of Directors for six years, following his collegiate career at the University of Southern California. Professionally, he spent close to a decade at NASCAR where he worked across entertainment marketing, race track management & marketing, and corporate partnerships. In 2019, Staley left the motorsports league for an opportunity to work across a wider range of sports and he now serves as President of Cast Iron Media, a dynamic, rapidly growing, marketing and media solutions company focused on live games.
See the full Q&A below:
Trent Staley: At Cast Iron Media, we help brands activate their sports media and marketing strategies at a local, regional or national level. While we have relationships with leagues, teams and venues that allow us to provide bespoke solutions to our clients, our primary focus is on media, delivered direct-to-consumer via Connected TV. The migration from linear to CTV is happening rapidly and we’ve proven to be a great partner to those who are seeking highly engaged sports fans.
Pixalate: Tell us about what your Partners are looking for with Cast Iron? Agencies? Brands?
Trent Staley: In general, our partners - be them agencies or client direct - are looking to capture the attention of sports fans as they are enjoying their favorite pastime. As noted, the way we most often help them accomplish this is through ads delivered during live games on OTT with a focus on Connected TVs. We also activate in-venue and through influencer campaigns, providing our partners with target audience surround sound.
Trent Staley: There are a lot of complexities with delivering ads into live games. When systems break it can cause challenges downstream. Pixalate Analytics allows us to stay ahead of issues and allows us to protect our clients interests in near real time. We use Pixalate Analytics to stay ahead of potential issues and protect our client's interests in near real-time. Delivery and communication are essential, and we utilize every tool that allows us to do that best.
Trent Staley: TV is pretty straightforward - get ad, run ad. In CTV, distribution deals can send your ad on a journey of rights holders and ensuring industry compliance across that journey can be difficult. Partnering with a platform like Pixalate allows us to navigate with a sense of safety knowing that we are doing everything that we can to protect our partners, many of whom come from a linear background and are new to the CTV space.
Trent Staley: It will be interesting to see how privacy/tracking continues to evolve. One would think that with time, accuracy will improve, however that may not be the case if privacy controls continue to impair the ability to understand who is on the other end of the Connected TV set.
