Tauntr.com was our second equity partner venture. The sports and pop culture content site was incubated inside of Fort Franklin’s offices as we raised a seed round of capital from a group of angel investors. The mission was best expressed in their tagline “Adding insult to everything”- whatever happened in sports and culture that day Tauntr had something to say about it. With a staff of 20 writers, animators, designers, and technologists it was an operational hybrid of a newsroom, content production studio, advertising agency and late-night talk show writers’ bull pen. The site steadily grew its monthly unique visitors to 4M with over 40 different content syndication deals, the largest being with FOX sports. Notable PR wins were with ESPN Sports Nation (above video) a mention during a Jimmy Kimmel monologue and Brian Cranston requesting a custom pair of shoes with his Breaking Bad character Walter White illustrated on them. While the site sold display inventory and had a robust apparel business, significant revenue came from our custom content creation for brands. This is where our agency background provided a distinct advantage over traditional publishers. We understood how to create against a strategic brief, delivering the brand message without having it become completely lost in the tone and content of the site. Ultimately, we followed the money and the money was not in publishing, it was in creating content around the moments people cared about every day for brands. In 2011, without hesitation, we left the publishing business and made the pivot from Tauntr.com to Relevant24, an agile marketing agency that we sold to the Publicis Groupe in 2014.
As Tauntr’s audience and syndication network grew, we began to test the power of its influence on internet culture. One such experiment was with a fake pop culture store that sold products which did not exist. If we generated enough interest, then who knows maybe we would produce a popular product. Almost immediately, our Breaking Bad Chuck Taylors were a huge hit, with hundreds of people begging us to make them real. Then Bryan Cranston’s assistant wrote us and requested that we send Bryan a pair of shoes, size 10.5. We quickly found a specialty shoe printer in Venice, CA (who ended up becoming a contestant on Shark Tank). As soon as Bryan got his shoes, he wore them to the SPIRIT awards and then his co-star Aaron Paul (aka.Jesse) wanted a pair, so we made one for him. Instantly we were in the fan art shoe business and funneled all our customers to the Venice printer and took a percentage of sales. And as an extra bonus, the folks from Breaking Bad invited our artist to Arizona to watch the filming of the final season.
The custom content projects we did for brands were designed to authentically engage their audience in the context of the big sports and pop culture moments they cared about. English brown ale maker Newcastle had no business being associated with college basketball, so we led with that, creating the best moments in NCAA basketball from a distinctly English point of view.
One of the best parts of having makers and thinkers working together in the same agile pod is that it’s possible to achieve unheard of levels of speed and quality. This custom video was created within eight hours after the announcement of a new Star Wars trailer.
This work for Hornitos leveraged the same Star Wars conversation, in the same production time, but from the brand’s unique tone of voice, which worked perfectly for their Black Barrel “Dark” tequila. Post copy: Not sure why, but we've always preferred the dark side.
Tauntr content ranged from quick daily headlines to short form video to weekly live action and animated shows. Much like producing a live TV show, we were constantly weighing the options of last-minute rewrites to be more relevant versus spending more time on production to really work through the details of a concept.
Fantasy Minute was a weekly show that talked about real topics in fantasy sports; however the hosts thought their show was about a different kind of fantasy. Can you guess which brand sponsored this episode?
