Intro (00:00):

Welcome to the Taylor Ten. A fast-paced, 10-minute deep dive into the minds of those shaking up the marketing world, bringing you the sharpest insights, boldest ideas, and breakthrough trends driving the industry forward. So tune in, get inspired, and stay ahead.

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Shan'T (00:16):

Hello, I'm Shan’T-Erica and welcome to the Taylor Ten. I'm here with Dylan Manfre from the Sport Profile to learn as much as I can about the current era of sports storytelling in only 10 minutes. But before we get into it, I just want to introduce Dylan a little bit more. His words have appeared in Politico, Bleacher Report, Business Insider, and plenty of other major outlets. He's passionate about telling authentic stories about everyday people, and when he's not recording, you can probably find him hanging with his family or hosting some very competitive bar trivia according to his bio. Dylan, welcome to the show, and I am so glad that you're here today.

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Dylan (01:02):

Thank you very much for having me. It's really cool to talk to you after knowing you all these years.

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Shan'T (01:07):

So before we do jump into strategy and industry insights, I do want to start with the heart of what you do. The sport profile feels different from a typical sports podcast. It leans into people, their paths, their challenges, their joy and their purpose. So walk us through the mission. What makes the sport profile an authentic tool for the sports industry, and why should executives, leaders, writers, and other relevant media want to engage with a platform like yours?

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Dylan (01:37):

I think because I'm fulfilling a mission and a gap that is very, very large, everybody says they want to tell authentic stories go beyond the X's and O's, but they don't actually do it. And PR folks say it all the time. Storytellers and journalists say it all the time. They're constrained by editors, they're constrained by clicks and things like that, but at the heart of what they want is to tell that authentic story. So what I'm doing is I'm interviewing the sports reporters, broadcasters and content creators that we see on our feeds and TV screens every day, but don't always know them as people. I'm a huge believer in we are more than our work. I'm a huge believer in that you have a life outside of work. So that's what I want to get at. I want to know the things that, the hobbies that you do, what's the best book you've read lately? What made you who you are, because all of that informs your storytelling ability, it informs your interests, and that's really what I try to get at, just to get to know these people a little bit more than what we see them as.

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Shan'T (02:45):

What I noticed is something that stands out across your episodes is basically how intentional that storytelling is that you're talking about. You don't really just chase moments, you uncover them, and I think a lot of executives and creatives in sports are trying to do that, but don't always know how. So if you think about the biggest challenges that brands and decision makers face today, what is one page from your playbook that they should borrow and what should they be thinking about when they are trying to tell meaningful stories in an industry that moves fast and sometimes rewards noise more than nuance?

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Dylan (03:21):

Yeah, that's a great point. It definitely rewards noise more than nuance, and I think the page to take is to just have the simple conviction that nuance will bring you further. Ultimately, that's something I lean on every day because it's true. You see those dividends every day, and I think that it's, like I said before, everybody says they want to tell the authentic story, but they don't actually do it. And again, there's some constraints around that. You and I have talked about, whether it's a legal constraint, whether it's an editorial constraint, but the nuance involves going deeper than the banner headline and a press release of a partnership announcement, say an athlete partners with an alcoholic beverage company. Great, love that. There's multiple ways people can pitch that, and obviously there's strategic insight that's involved there, but if you pitch it as, Hey, this athlete is partnering with this alcoholic beverage company, this is hypothetical, it's their father's drink of choice. They always grew up having a insert drink here with their dad on Thanksgiving coming out, and it's really meaningful to them. It's like, Hey, that's, they actually got some equity in the brand. They're doing all these different campaigns around the brand at the Super Bowl, NBA All-Star insert big events here. That's a much more meaningful story than like, oh, hey, athletes partnering with alcoholic beverage company and is getting equity in the brand. Oh, here are some of the other investors in the brand. 

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Shan'T (05:08):

I do want to just kind of take it back to the brainstorming aspect. So if a brand came to you today and said, Hey, if I'm trying to look for the best campaign idea, the best athlete partnership, what would you want them to understand before they even begin the brainstorming process?

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Dylan (05:30):

I think I would want them to understand the objective feelings. What do you want your reader, listener, audience to feel when you read that story for me? Hey, I would like them to know that, hey, maybe you just feel a little bit closer to the man or woman covering your favorite team or creating the content that appears on your social media feed.

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Shan'T (06:00):

So where do you think sports storytelling is heading and how can brands, media execs and creators prepare now? Well prepare now to make sure that they are not just keeping up but leading with purpose.

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Dylan (06:16):

I think we're going to be a lot more intentional about that in 2026. I think a lot of the second half of 2025, I mean, I've personally seen this brands try to take a more authentic storytelling approach, whether it's NIL, whether it's in the college sports space. I've seen examples about, I heard one example at Baylor, I can't remember the specifics off the top of my head, but somebody did an NIL deal with a haircare product because she just loves the product. Wasn't looking for any financial gain off that she was looking for a hair product. 

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(07:05):

I'm looking forward to it. And I think that we're really going to see authenticity put into strategy meetings with intention. If you lead with authenticity being your best strategy, you're going to find an audience that's going to desire you even more. And back to what you said about conviction, if you double down on that, there's going to be a very interesting thing that happens. And Taryn Hatcher, my latest guest on the sport profile described this very eloquently. You're going to lose the audience that doesn't care about authenticity and are just looking at you for you, and you're going to gain the audience that likes your brand for who you are, likes the stories that you're telling, and you're going to retain them. So those are three reputation capital aspects that brands are brands are going to love. You need all those three things. You don't have a brand without those three things.

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(08:11):

You don't have reputation capital without those three things. So all of that is to say you're going to have haters, so to speak. You're going to have people who maybe don't like what you're doing, but guess what? They're probably going to respect the conviction that you have to double down on that. I feel that same way as well. People might want to hear a sports reporter's hot takes on New York sports. Lord knows there's a bunch of them, but I'm not going to talk to them about it. You can read their work. They do that for a living. They don't talk about themselves for a living.

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Shan'T (08:46):

And I think that really just kind of puts a nice bow on all the things that can be found underneath just the generic stories and the generic campaigns, generic activations. There's just so much more to it. And this was really just such a thoughtful conversation, Dylan. So thank you so much once again for joining the Taylor Ten. Yeah, this is an awesome episode and really leads us into 2026 and all the things that sports can look like when it comes to telling those stories. And your mission really reminds us that sports are not just about what happens in the arena. They are about people and passion and the threads that really connect all of us through the games we love. So again, thank you for being here, and thank you for giving the industry just a blueprint that's more honest and meaningful, especially as it comes to storytelling. So thank you for your contributions to the sports world and to everyone listening, make sure you check out the sport profile for conversations that stay with you long after the episode ends.

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Dylan (09:52):

Thank you.