Join Katie for an inspiring conversation with Peyton King, Associate Director of Marketing, Sports Innovation Labs, about our fascination with women in sports, the power of data, navigating health challenges, and tapping into creativity in unlikely places.
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Hi, I’m Katie Kempner and welcome to Perspectives, which is a series of inspiring conversations with remarkable working women. And I am really excited for this interview today and to bring to you Peyton King, Associate Director of Marketing, Export Innovation Labs.
Peyton, welcome. Thank you. I’m so excited to be here. I’ve been listening to the podcast a lot and I’m already a big fan, so excited to get started.
You’re starting on a great note. Thank you for saying that. And I have to say, I’m a big fan of yours. You know, through Advertising Week, I’ve really had the privilege of being a judge for the past few years for the Futures Female Awards. And when I read your submission, even before meeting you, as you know, you were one of the winners, I thought, oh wow, this woman sounds amazing. And so it is such a thrill to talk with you and to bring your story to everyone that listens. So thank you.
Yeah, right back at you. So enough of that. Let’s get started. But why don’t we start, I mean, you’re young, but you’ve already had such a terrific career. Can we talk about how you got to your role now at Sports Innovation Lab?
Yeah, definitely. So I am originally from Minnesota. Grew up a hockey player and tennis player from a big sports family. So kind of fitting that I ended up working in sports. But that’s where the story started.
I went to Boston College for my undergraduate degree and really loved it. I studied English there. One of my interview questions for my first job was actually like why I chose to study English. And I said that it really just helped me learn to talk about every topic that you could ever need to in this world, which I think is kind of a dying art. And so I loved my English degree. I did a minor in business and creative writing, which are two big passions.
After graduating, I graduated in 2020. So it was very hectic. We got cut off a couple months early, had a crazy end to my college experience. I went home to Minnesota for a bit and just started networking as much as I could remotely. I did informational calls with people, knew I was looking for full-time work. But one of those informational calls was actually with my current boss at Sports Innovation Lab, Gina Waldhorn, who is fantastic. You should look at having her on the show as well. But we really got along and I was dying to work for her, but obviously sports was kind of on hold at that point because of the pandemic. So the industry was not hiring, they’re on a hiring freeze. And so we just had a great conversation, said to stay in touch. She would reach back out.
I ended up landing a job at MediaHub in Boston, which was an IPG agency and Mullen Lowe associated. But MediaHub was an awesome way to kind of jumpstart my career. It was the weirdest time to go into advertising because it was during a pandemic and I was also working on the Outback Steakhouse account. So all of our advertising was for pickup orders. And so I was listening to a lot of Australian accents and blooming onions and sitting at my laptop in my little apartment in Boston. But I learned a massive, massive amount about media and advertising and how things work.
Ultimately, I realized after about a year there that it wasn’t creative enough for me, and I’m kind of a creative at heart. So I started out by seeking out more creative opportunities within MediaHub and got involved in a really cool thing that they do at their agency called the Radical Disruption Group or R&D Group, they call it at MediaHub. And it’s basically because MediaHub is a very data-driven, awesome media agency. There’s this wing of their company that’s dedicated to doing the super old school creative activations in media. Like they did something for a Netflix show where they put like a diagram of a full body in a glass case and just doing crazy activations.
So I got involved with that during my last like six months there and loved it. And I just totally created, connectedto my creative self again and got to come up with really cool ideas for like a Ken Burns documentary on PBS and just brainstorm. And I feel very lucky, like kind of right as I was feeling ready for a jump, the sports industry kind of started going again. And I got a cold email from Gina, who I had interviewed with informationally like a year and a half before. And I saw that in my inbox and she’s like, we’re hiring for a role. Would you be open to interviewing for it? And I said, absolutely. And two weeks later, I found myself at Sports Innovation Lab and it’s been like four years and I don’t regret it any day. It’s been a really great journey and I’m super happy to be here.
Tell us about your role now and about the company you work for. Yeah, so I’ll start with Sports Innovation Lab and then go into a little bit about what I’m doing day to day. Sports Innovation Lab has evolved a lot since I’ve joined. It is a data company and we are dedicated to helping sponsors and brands figure out how to spend their sponsorship dollars and helping teams, leagues, and properties find and acquire their next 100,000 fans. And we do this because we have a big sports and entertainment data cloud made up from a bunch of different data sources: publisher data, we have transactional data, we have data from teams and leagues, all under our giant data cloud.
And because the data business is very complex, I like to also explain how it is that brands, teams, and leagues can work with us because sometimes that paints the picture a little bit better than just this cloud, right? So primarily people work with us in three ways:
Insights reports: Sometimes a team might come to us and say, we don’t really know who our fans are. Can you help us figure out who our fans are so that we can spend our marketing dollars better, that we can do activations that will better benefit our brand and our fan base? Or a sponsor might come to us and say, we have this big sports marketing budget. We have no idea where to put it. Should we be sponsoring like grassroots pickleball? Should we be doing youth sports like sponsoring USA hockey? Should we be sponsoring the NFL? Like what makes sense and where is the most growth opportunity? So basically teams, leagues, sponsors come to us with a question and we can help answer it through our insights reports.
Programmatic audiences: Our data cloud is all addressable. So you can actually use programmatic audiences from our data cloud to go once you find out that pickleball is a smart community for you to tap into. We have an audience of pickleball fanatics. We have youth hockey parents. We have all of the niche sports communities that you wouldn’t necessarily get anywhere else. In addition to major entertainment communities like concerts and festivals. Because we’ve taken the time to tag all of that manually and all of that is addressable. So really easy to use our audiences if you’re trying to grow in those specific groups.
Enrichment or data as a service: This is the big massive giant where we work with holding companies a lot of the times or big brands and they actually bring in our data or a subset of our data to enrich their own and then they can build audiences themselves using our data. But they ingest a big collection of our data depending on if they have certain clients, certain areas, bringing in our auto data or our football data or whatever they think can help them grow.
So that’s kind of the third pillar. But that’s Sports Innovation Lab as a whole and how we work with companies all across the ecosystem. And then my role specifically at Sports Innovation Lab as the associate director of marketing is a very fun one. We have a pretty lean and mean marketing department. So it’s super fast moving and I really get to wear many hats and do anything and everything that relates to brand voice. So we are really excited that we are launching a new website later this week with kind of a whole new company identity. Had a huge part in writing and creating that. All of our social content events all lie under myself and my CMO and our team. So at this point in my career, I really couldn’task for a better job to just show me what it takes to build a marketing department. And I just am really grateful for the opportunities and exposure that it has given me and taught me so much. Just, you know, having a small department, it forced me to grow in ways that I never think imaginable.
I mean, and you’ve done so many things. Can you, I know you co-launched this Women’s Sports Lab. Can you tell us what that’s about?
Yeah, definitely. So Women’s Sports Club is definitely a huge highlight of my career and a passion point for me because we were founded by a female Olympic athlete. Our roots are deep in women’s sports and we work across the whole sports industry, but have become a really big thought leader for women’s sports. And that is because, and it’s pretty cool to say this, but using our data cloud, we predicted that women’s sports would have this inflection point that you kind of saw come to fruition this year back in like 2019. So it’s really cool to say that we were ahead of that curve. You can look on our websites and see our research reports from 2020 and before then that said, hey, we looked at the data and we can see these communities growing at exponential rates. And actually there’s a huge business case for why you should invest in women’s sports and female athletes.
So we did this big report series called The Fan Project, which is kind of how our work in women’s sports got started. And through that research became a big thought leader, did a lot of speaking and stuff like that. And was approached by a great client of ours, Ally Financial. And Ally made a really impressive commitment to women’s sports media where they said they were going to spend 50% of their sports marketing budget on women’s sports and 50% on men’s. So exactly split down the middle, which is, it’s kind of sad that equality is like, you know, so hard to come by. But like a lot of the brands spend now like 9% or less is allocated to women’s sports and female athletes.
So Ally realized through this massive spend commitment that there was a deficit of stages and places that women’s sports inventory was brought to the forefront. So they had all this money to spend, but they were like, we don’t know where to spend it. You know, we really, we want to spend all of this money and we don’t know where to spend it. So with them, we launched the Women’s Sports Club in 2022. And basically a huge part of my role was to get people to join Women’s Sports Club.
It’s senior level executives. We’re at about 700 right now from across all the major women’s sports properties and leagues and teams, and then brands and agencies with budgets to spend. So only people that are actually going to be able to move the needle with making deals. We call it a deal-making club, not a networking club, because that is the purpose. And in our inaugural year, we helped close 12 deals and push them across the finish line between brands and women’s sports properties, which was a huge win.
And the evolution of that club brought us to what was the highlight of my career. Last year, we co-created the first ever IAB Newfront dedicated to women’s sports. And Sports Innovation Lab showcased a lot of our really cool women’s sports programmatic audiences and solutions that can be used. And then we partnered with Trailblazing Sports Group, who brought a bunch of women’s sports inventory opportunities and sponsorship opportunities and podcasts that brands who attended our session could actually go out and buy.
And a lot of sleepless nights and time went into putting on that event, but just having to be the first was a really, really cool moment and just kind of reminded me why I do this every day. So that’s kind of the evolution of Women’s Sports Club.
And this year, we’re really focused on how to help women’s sports properties who have budget limitations and a lot of challenges that their counterparts in men’s sports don’t, how to help them use AI and data to make their marketing departments and data departments more efficient, because it can make one person do the work of 10. And women’s sports properties really need that right now.So that’s kind of a big focus in this upcoming calendar year that we’re really excited to dive into more. That’s amazing. I mean, all of that is amazing and congratulations. And you say your career highlight and yet you still have so much more and it’s going to be fascinating to see what you do next.
So changing gears a little bit, I understand that you’ve also been dealing with a health challenge and I’m wondering if you can share a little bit about how you deal with it and have dealt with it all the while having such an intense career.
So first of all, first off, I will say it is not easy and anyone going through a health challenge, like the first thing, because I’ve had some people open up to me just since that I have been pretty public about my battle with endometriosis and I’ve had some people reach out to me through social media and other stuff just saying that they’re going through the same thing. And the first thing I always say is I’m so sorry because there’s kind of a grief that comes with your body kind of turning against you in a lot of ways.
I guess I’ll start with just explaining my experience and then I can talk about my advice and what I’ve learned from it. So there was a few years that before things got really, really bad where I knew something was wrong with me. I was having a ton of joint pain. I was just tired. I wasn’t able to work out in the same way that I was being an athlete that drove me crazy because you just are programmed to work harder, work harder, work harder. And I would just be getting hurt in a bar class or yoga class and so inflamed, had a bunch of digestive issues and a bunch of other issues that aren’t fun to talk about with women’s health. Like I think that’s a big part of the reason that people are so silent and quiet about women’s health is because it’s tummy issues and urinary issues and stuff that people don’t necessarily want to talk about at the dinner table all the time. It’s not super fun. But I realized until I started talking to people about it, I was just pushing through and battling in silence and it was really hard. And I knew something was wrong with me and I kept going to the doctor and I thought I had a thyroid condition. I thought I was, you know, trying to figure out what was wrong with me so hard and just couldn’t. And so I just kind of pushed through it for a few years and was in a lot of pain.
And then it kind of all came to a head in at the end of the summer last summer, I woke up one morning and I could not walk. I lost control of my right leg and realized through having an aura ring actually because this kept happening that it was happening during my ovulation and when I was on my period, I would get this nerve pain down my leg and lose the ability to walk normally. Like I was hobbling around like a 90 year old, really, really not mobile and in a ton of pain and things escalated very quickly. I say my journey happened very slowly and then all at once because I was in a lot of pain, but there’s this point where it goes from manageable to not manageable anymore and that hits you like a ton of bricks. And so it became not manageable at all.
And it basically took not being able to walk when I went into the doctor’s office and I realized because the pain was for the first time it was spread out for the years before, but then it was very centralized when I wasn’t able to walk on my pelvis and like my reproductive organs and my hips and my back. So I went in and I said, something’s going on here and I can’t walk and I really need help. And I didn’t get a diagnosis right away because with endometriosis, it takes the average of eight to 10 years to diagnose for the average woman. And it doesn’t pop up on ultrasound or MRI for most women. So the only way that you can actually get a full diagnosis and not just have suspected endometriosis is by getting laparoscopic surgery.
So I went into surgery like most women with endometriosis that have to get surgery, not knowing if I even had the condition that I was getting the surgery for. And that’s how the system works, which is really messed up. But I knew something was wrong with me. I trusted my gut. I got strength from women who have done it before me. And I had a friend who really supported me and she got a surgery the year before me. And she said, I didn’t know either. You just got to trust your gut. You’re in pain. It’s worth knowing. Even if you don’t have it, you need todo the surgery. And I couldn’t walk. So I was like, again, not a choice. This is something I have to do. And I did get a diagnosis of endometriosis. And it hasn’t been a linear path upward. I think after the surgery, I expected to just snap back into my old self and my old energy levels and the lack of pain. And it has not been like that. It’s been really up and down and ugly progress. But it’s brought out a strength in me that I really didn’t know I had. I wish I didn’t have to find that strength. But when you’re forced to, you do.
And I guess advice to women that are going through a health challenge: I did post about this on my LinkedIn. And I just realized, and from listening to your podcast, a lot of women have so many individual battles that they have to face every single day. And I just have gotten so much more respect than I even had before, which I didn’t even think was possible. Or the strength that women have to have through women’s health, through pregnancy, through all of the individual things that menopause that women have to deal with, right? It’s a lot of silent battles.
And I just got nominated before I got surgery when I was not able to walk for the Future is Female Award. And I was like, how fitting is it that I get this award in this specific moment? And I just took that moment as the opportunity to be open with people about my challenges with endometriosis. Because it seemed like the universe was really like, one, giving me this award to help me through that hard time. And two, using me as a platform to talk about this thing that one in 10 women deal with. And some women that have it don’t have any symptoms. Don’t even like, they could have it all over their body and it doesn’t bother them and they can live with it. And some women have just a couple spots of endometriosis and can’t walk. So it’s just, it’s a very complex condition. Doctors know nothing about it. The medical system is really broken. And it’s really hard to keep pushing through in your career.
And I would say just have grace with yourself. Listen to your body. Be honest. I felt lucky that I could be honest with my boss about the situation. I think if it gets bad enough, there’s not really a choice again to be honest. I am lucky that I was working remotely at the time. And I think work for me during that period looked like my legs propped up on pillows, a heating pad on my abdomen and my laptop propped up on my lap. And like, I think before then, like kind of perfectionist, like I just had this pressure to be put together, have my makeup on, be ready to go. And I was like, you know what? Might not be pretty, but I’m getting my work done and I’m showing up for my family, my partner and my job as much as I can. Even if on a day I might not be able to give 100%. If I can give 75% and do my very best and that’s all I have on that day, that’s okay.
But just, I guess, giving yourself grace and being honest with people you trust in your mentorship circle or your direct company:
Hey, I’m going through this challenge. My work may look a little different.
You know, I might not be able to travel, but I am going to get my work done and I’m going to be present.
And I just wanted to let you know that I’m going through this because it just helps you know that you’re not alone in this condition can be really isolating.
And there’s a lot of emotional and physical stuff that you have to go through with it. And so I just think being able to have open conversation with people inside of your company, that’s great. If you don’t feel like you can do that inside of your company, just have a mentor or have a friend that you can talk to about managing this with a career and managing whatever condition somebody may be going through, right? With their career, I think is really important.
Thank you for sharing that because I think you are, you know, I try with this podcast to talk with women who can inspire other women. And so much of what you said is incredibly inspirational in a lot of different ways. But I think this part of our conversationis especially important because women are taught to just forge ahead, keep going and to keep things private, things that are ugly or messy, as you say, to themselves. And I see it changing. I see it changing around menopause and perimenopause, which is so important. And it needs to continue to change. And for people to hear from someone like you after hearing of all the things you’ve already done and what a powerhouse you are. I love that word. You know, it especially resonates. So thank you for sharing that.
So I want to ask you, just hearing about all the different things in your life, is there one theme that you see through your life? If we were going to make a movie? Yeah, so I really, really like this question. My high school hockey coach had coached at the professional level. He was a super good coach. I don’t know how we scored him as our high school coach for White Bear Lake Varsity. But he was really, really focused on building the whole person, not just the athlete. So he had us do all of this really intense team building stuff before the season. We had a Navy SEAL come in and do team building exercises in teams. And then one thing that, as an English major, I obviously loved was he made all of us each individually go for a walk alone and come up with our personal mission statement for life, which is kind of a crazy thing to ask a bunch of high schoolers to do. But I absolutely loved it. So I went for a long walk at this nature preserve by my house in Minnesota. And I realized that my mission statement was to live a life worth writing about. And just making every decision with intentionality of, you know, is this something that brings meaning to me and my story? Is this something, you know, and it also encourages me to take risks and do new things and be open minded and not just live this mundane life where you do the same thing every day. And I just I live to make stories and tell stories. And so that is my personal mission statement.
I love that. Well, to add to that and sort of bring our conversation full circle. With that mission in mind, is there one piece of advice that has really helped you through your life and your career that you could share with us? Yeah. So this one, when I was just thinking about things in life that have really helped me in the hardest times, I think as you were saying, how women specifically, but I think people in general are so programmed to and like high achieving women so, so programmed to work so hard and outperform everyone because they’ve had to and push ahead. With like my health battles and also just hitting roadblocks in my career and stuff, something that has really helped me in changing my mindset is like sometimes working so, so hard at something doesn’t get you any closer to your goal. So if something isn’t working and you can’t try harder, try different. And I really so many times when I’m just exhausted and I come up against a wall and I’m like, this isn’t working or like, you know, with getting my diagnosis, it was so hard, right? Like find something new, join a new club, just try something different because sometimes, and this is a lesson I’ve had to learn, like you can work as hard as you can and sometimes you still don’t get the result that you want, right? So just leave room for trying different and pushing yourself, I think.
Well, it’s working for you. Thank you, Peyton. It was a real pleasure to speak with you. You too. Thank you so much for having me on. And thank you for listening. Thank you.
