Episode 235 Snippets: Jared Kleinstein of Fresh Tape Media and Gondola

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 235 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil
chatted with Jared Kleinstein, Founder and CEO of Fresh Tape
Media, and Founder and President of Gondola.
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the
full interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast
platforms and at www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 235: Jared Kleinstein

Jared’s Career Path
“So when I was in college at Wash U in St. Louis I had a sports news
parody show. I was a marketing and entrepreneurship major. I
thought that working in sports was the dream, but I didn't go that way
right away. I worked in New York for a company called StreetEasy, it
was the top place to find apartments in the city. If you live in New
York, you know StreetEasy for sure. If you don't, it's probably just
some random company you've never heard of.

“We got bought by Zillow in 2013 and I guess to your point about lessons to
people in the industry about what this means, the lesson is you don't have to
start down your dream path to have the right path. I loved my time there. I had
the best coworkers and an amazing opportunity. I went from [being] the first
intern who was in charge of SEO to running our strategic partnerships and
managing our relationships with the entire real estate community, and it was
awesome.
“While I was there I either famously or infamously, probably more infamously,
took an opportunity on a random Sunday night to make up a meme that
became the Tebowing phenomenon. For those of you that are either Florida
Gators fans, general pop culture fans, or really into the Denver Broncos, you
may have remembered it. So that was a fun phase of my life of selling t-shirts
and being on news broadcasts around the world for some reason.

“We got bought by Zillow in 2013 and I guess to your point about lessons to
people in the industry about what this means, the lesson is you don't have to start
down your dream path to have the right path. I loved my time there. I had the
best coworkers and an amazing opportunity. I went from [being] the first intern
who was in charge of SEO to running our strategic partnerships and managing
our relationships with the entire real estate community, and it was awesome.
“While I was there I either famously or infamously, probably more infamously,
took an opportunity on a random Sunday night to make up a meme that became
the Tebowing phenomenon. For those of you that are either Florida Gators fans,
general pop culture fans, or really into the Denver Broncos, you may have
remembered it. So that was a fun phase of my life of selling t-shirts and being on
news broadcasts around the world for some reason.

About Tebowing and how Jared stumbled into creating it and turning
it into something monetizable
“It was 2011. I turned 24 a month after it started, so I was young and
reckless. And at the time I was constantly thinking of other business
ideas, it's just how my brain works. I was working at StreetEasy and
loving my time [there], but at one point I wanted to start a kosher
hibachi restaurant called Ben and Hana's. I thought that would've
been a really brilliant business model. I had all these crazy ideas and
[this was] also a time period where making a meme wasn't publishing
a funny photo on Twitter or on Instagram — it was spin up a Tumblr
page, that was what people did back then.

“So when that moment happened at the end of a Broncos game [after which] I
told my friends we should do the Tebowing, and they said what's that? And I
said, you know, the thing he was just doing on TV, and then I took a picture. I
only did it because I posted on my Facebook with the caption ‘NYC Jews for
Tebow.’ It was just me and my friends and I thought this'll be fun. Then I got nine
likes and I was like, ‘Oh my god this is viral.’ But that's like the epitome of a 23-
year-old who let's just say spent a good amount of time at a Broncos bar that
afternoon. I'd also gotten into domain buying and thought that that was a fun
thing that I could one day make money off of because that was a big thing back
then.
“So I bought Tebowing.com for $9.99 and spun up the tebowing.tumblr.com and
had it route to Tebowing.com because I had done this with a bunch of silly ideas
before this, like my friend Barry's website that I was just making fun of him, I had
spun up a Tumblr and bought the domain. So it felt like an easy process.

“But to monetize it, luckily there was a company called Spreadshirt that was
able to handle the t-shirt stuff. The swag was a little bit ahead of its time, I
don't think that many people realized that that was available. It’s not at the
same level of customization and quality that it is now that you get through
all these other ones, but it was really wonderful at the time. Then I also was
working at StreetEasy on ad delivery for clients of the platform, so I
understood the ad world. So spinning up banner ad slots at 728x90 or all
these things that are very 2011, I was adept at, I knew what I was doing. So
it wasn't that crazy to go monetize it. It was just taking my skillset from
StreetEasy, and I had my friends from college making our designs for the t-
shirts and we all would sit in my friend's apartment and work until two in
the morning, like [pitching] ‘Do you like this t-shirt design for St. Patrick's
Day? Do you like this?’ It was pretty wild.”

How Tebowing would’ve fared today
“The memes nowadays that seem to stand the test of time are a bit more either
personality-driven in that it's about the person's face, which is my favorite part
about Tebowing — it wasn't my face. I didn't wanna be famous. ‘This is not a face
for fame.’...I never wanted to be famous and it was more fun to have it be
something that I could be responsible for, but nobody would really know it was
me when they see it.
“A lot of the things nowadays are a face; like Britney Broski [Kombucha reaction
girl], right?...You translate a meme into a running channel based on a
personality, right? That's kind of where memes are directed — the meme is the
trigger for account growth for something bigger. Versus it was very different back
then.”

“It's also a difference in what is funny in 2011 versus what's funny in
2022. Like, even before 2011. Do you remember? 2003. I'm sorry if all the
people listening to this are way too young for this stuff, but Anchorman
and the 40-Year-Old Virgin, there was a whole comedy genre around
random. And you even had like when Steve Carrell in Anchorman says ‘I
love lamp.’ We all thought that was the most hilarious moment.
“And Summer Heights High comes out and Ja’ime was like, ‘That's so
random.’ Random was funny. And planking, Tebowing — that was was
part of a generation of, like, ‘Oh, that's so random.’ Like, he's lying in
there in the middle of the street. That's not what people find funny as
much anymore, so I don't know if it would ever work in a day like today.”

About developing an instinct for content and engagement and also
learning Vine
“I'd say that the light bulbs that went off back then, my favorite thing
about them is that they have not changed. The strategies for social, for
content in terms of what works on social [with] content today in 2022
are pretty much the same as they were in 2014. I actually gave a
presentation a few weeks ago at Denver Startup Week, where I
actually showed a Vine deck from 2014. It said, ‘If I hide this first
page, you'll think that these are relevant strategies for creating great
content for social video and I made this eight years ago.

“So the platforms that we publish on are obviously changing all the
time, the mechanisms for increased engagement via things like, [for
example] TikTok may prioritize when you use their internal tools
versus when you import entirely, versus go vertical because people
wan to see things in Reels and they don't wanna see things letterbox
and stuff like that. That stuff changes and those are more strategies
for engagement and whatnot. But if you wanna talk about what makes
great content, it hasn't changed in a long time.

“I'm gonna say a few sentences that have not shifted in forever:
People's attention spans are shorter than ever. Literally. Vine was a
six-second platform, we were saying back then the same thing about
TikTok and everything now. Creating evergreen content that shows
player personalities and really gets to emotional attributes, that's
gonna be wins — hasn't changed. Little things like when you're
framing for social media, don't think of it like framing for a traditional
interview. You only have so much square footage on the screen, so
where a traditional interview may do a three-quarter shot or you can
see somebody sitting back and you see from the top of their head down
to their belly button — on social, you wanna be more faces. So getting
more faces and showing more personality is great.

“The other thing is there seems to be a constant rolling arc between whether people
want more raw or more high quality. Every year or two it shifts. So you'll see in 2014,
people were so excited about the raw nature of Vine and they were like, ‘Oh my God, I
can see something from the sideline.’ 2015-2016, people start getting Gimbals out, then
you start getting DSLR and mirrorless cameras that are capturing beautiful footage and
publishing it on social and it's amazing. Then you get back to like, even our producers
here [are like] ‘We don't wanna shoot. with a Gimbal because raw is what people want.’
They aren't looking for smooth transitions, they're looking for a bit more grit. So there's
up and down. People wanna see high quality, but they also wanna see raw, sort of an
arc that shifts over time.
“So I can just change what I'm suggesting based on what is in with the times. But yeah,
I think the biggest learning about the state of the creative industry is that what makes
great content isn't changing. The only difference is how you adapt to the platforms
you're publishing.”

On helping organizations adapt to Vine and the original content vs. repackaging
question
“I'll give you a great example of what it means to repackage — a successful version in my
eyes of repackaging the wheel instead of reinventing the wheel. The NBA highlights have
been something that I remember five or six years ago, I would go to nba.com and I'd
watch the highlights and I could picture the voice of the guy who did all the highlight
voiceovers going through like how the Nuggets won over the Clippers 105-103 or
something like that, right? You'd watch a two-minute thing, they’d publish it and you'd
watch this two-minute thing — that's how you’d consume the highlights. The NBA app
that just came out that they rebuilt has a Stories-style viewing experience for highlights
with the broadcast footage. Because if you're the NBA, the reason that they got to a
billion loops on Vine before anybody else in the brand world is because their highlights
are great and they're constantly putting out good content…The worst [Orlando] Magic
game [for example] is still gonna have some amazing Bol Bol highlights, right?

“So the NBA is an amazing product. Now they've realized that people like
me would rather consume the highlights of a game by tapping through in
a Stories style, still with the same content, packaged in a different way,
cut so that it doesn't feel jarring that’s it on a vertical view and edited in
a style that makes sense for a vertical and more social experience.
“So I think that people should not be so scared to have to completely
shift how they record things, what they're publishing. You as a brand
know what your audience likes, right? They may like memes, they may
like your highlights — don't be afraid to use what works best for your
customers, and show highlights, while always pushing the envelope a
little bit and testing other things.

“That's kind of the balance we all take is like, don't be convinced that
because TikTok has hilarious green screen memes and people doing
things in that very like classic TikTok editing style with green screen
[showing them] over a highlight. That doesn't mean that if you're the
NBA that's how you should be publishing all your highlights. You
should do things the way that works for you and then mix it up, test
some different things for original content, see if any of them stick.”

On platform vs. content strategy
“You can have a general strategy of what your content should look like and what
you want your sort of brand ethos to be and what you want it to look like. But I
think that some of the most successful accounts on these platforms individually
also are knowing the platforms well, right? Like when the [Chicago] Bulls are
great on TikTok, it's not just because they have great content and because Benny
[The Bull] is hilarious, it's because they're consuming content on TikTok, so
they're aware of things a little bit before everybody else. They never seem like
they're late to a trend. So having your general strategy on a per-platform basis
based on what you think that the audience and age and demographic as well as
like what works well on the platform in general. That's important. But the most
important thing is consuming on each platform so that you know what those
audiences are seeing.

“The toughest thing with TikTok at this point is everybody's
consumption experience is so different because of how amazing their
algorithm is. So I see a ton of dad humor and cooking stuff, and that is
not what the Denver Nuggets should be publishing. So the challenge
is how do you make sure that you and the algorithm you consume if
you're a social media manager is the team's algorithm, and a little bit
more focused on those, that team audience instead of just your own
personal one.”

On achieving success on social platforms and what matters
“I think that if you don't know [the client’s] goals before you start
your production and start shooting and editing and publishing
content, you can assume that they're trying to think about numbers. ‘I
want more views. I want higher numbers.’ But if you have the
conversation earlier, you may learn it's completely different. Some of
the best creative teams are not only considering publishing content.

“There's a team that comes to mind whose work is so good creatively
that some of it does really well; it performs extraordinarily well on
social [and] some of it doesn't, and that's okay. The reason it's okay is
because people see it and they know that if a creative sees that piece
of content, they're gonna take this team seriously and want to go work
there. So their recruiting funnel is stronger because they make great
content. If you put out a doc series that 10,000 people total watch, but
two creatives that are some of the best in college sports want to
graduate and come work for you because it's their dream to come
work for that team that produces this kind of quality level, then it's
still a win.

“So just setting expectations early on about, like, do you care about
the views? Do you care about the stats? Because in that case, shoot,
we can just repurpose your highlights over and over again. Do you
care about community engagement? Do you care about creative
reputation? Sort of all those things. We just wanna make sure we have
those conversations early”.

On how teams are/are not getting comfortable with focusing on more than the
usual numbers
“There is, and there has to be because of how game-ifiable and how viable results
can be. Like, you can put paid spend behind most social content and get to some
of the numbers. We don't do this [at Fresh Tape Media], but theoretically if I was
scared that our video wasn't gonna get the reach that I thought it deserved based
on the client's investment, I could take an extra thousand bucks, put it into a paid
spend, and all of a sudden, hey, our numbers are in.
“So I think that you have to get into the intangibles and you have to think about is
the brand or somebody you're working for, are they making money off it? Like,
does it help their bottom line because it's a part of a brand campaign, in which
case they can start selling more and more things like this?

“Then also just considering are there soft things, like, does this help
them win any relationships with a player? Did the player have such a
good experience with this that they [will be] more willing in the future
to collaborate on creative executions? So we love making sure that, for
every project we do, that the athlete experience was good, that
internal people got what they needed in terms of did they make
money off of it and all that stuff, and then did it help the brand overall
in terms of engagement and exposure.”

On how teams can best work with agencies like Fresh Tape
“Well, I would start by saying that what we do isn't what everybody should
do. A lot of companies that are great at something should do what they're
great at. If you're a photographer, you shouldn't go marketing your services
as social media manager as a company if the thing that you're gonna
continue to scale is your photography. Fresh Tape has had this policy over
the years rooted in the fact that, when I founded it, I had no tangible skills.
I'm a good idea person, but I am a bad photographer, a mediocre editor,
and I'm pretty good at Excel. That's it. But as a result, we are built on a
foundation of listening first. So instead of telling you all the things we can
do for you, it's important for us to know before that, what do you need, what
are your focuses? And we completely tailor our offering to that.

“I think that whenever we send a general deck and say, ‘Have at it,’ it doesn't reflect as
well on us as saying, ‘Hey, what do you need right now?’ And they say, ‘Well, it's funny
you asked that, we need TikToks’ or ‘Funny you ask that we need a set design for our
media day,’ and then we can show them we can be the experts in what they need in this
moment. And that's kind of our adjustment, that'll keep us alive through pandemics,
through recessions and whatnot, is we will always just adjust. When Covid hit, we
started doing podcast editing, making assets to promote podcasts. We started doing a
little bit of everything on the post [production] side. Our post capabilities are so much
stronger than they ever were because of the pandemic and being required to do so.
“So I think that just being nimble is always gonna be our differentiator. And as a result,
I cannot tell you what we're gonna be doing in two years because I have no idea. I just
know we're gonna be [in] the general theme of creating cool content that performs well
on social is the goal.”

On how Fresh Tape executions come together
“The easiest way to describe it is structured insanity. And what I mean by that is we
have a system in place. Our budgets are tight. Our budgets are customizable and fast.
Our contracts are quick and we understand how to negotiate a contract with clients
efficiently. And we have really wonderful systems in place for task management
through Asana, managing our time in QuickBooks and all these things. So there's a lot
of structure. When it comes to brainstorming, it's hearing the client's needs, putting
those in a list and then coming together for the insanity part. And the insanity part is
there's no such thing as a stupid idea. We all throw ideas [out], everybody from me to
[our] head of production to a creative director to an intern sitting in the room coming
up with crazy ideas for the World Cup or something like that.
“So our baseline is [to] create a structure so that we are always kept in check and then
go crazy with concepts and send the client everything from the silliest idea to the most
bland one in the world and see where they go with it.”

On working with clients that are eager to try new platforms and how
Fresh Tape approaches them in general
“I think that we've been a little less aggressive trying to tell people
what they need to be using and how to invest in the different
platforms, and have been a bit more focused on hearing their needs,
but understanding everything so that we can be ready for it. We don't
push people to use BeReal, [for example]. I mean, I know brands are
doing it, but we don't push people toward any sort of platforms. We're
a bit more reactive for better or worse. We're a bit more hearing what
they need.

“The most important thing is we just need to understand the
platforms themselves. If we seem like we've never heard of something,
it puts us in a bucket of non-helpful, you know, just generic
production partners. So it's really important for us to know the social
space well, but we're not really pushing people towards that. And if we
do know each platform, we can at least — take that thing I was saying
before [about how] general creative strategies haven't changed in 10
years, and apply them to each platform as they come out.”

“I think that the application for us is a little bit different at Fresh Tape. It's
less about the platforms and more about staying ahead on the tools — like
what are the best cameras that are the best for capturing this kind of content,
the best mechanisms for delivery of the content, innovative things like robots
and AI for content creation. Those are the things that we're a little bit more
focused as a company on, [and] how we see ourselves staying ahead of the
trends, so that we can just sort of listen, but be ahead on those tools.
“But then also understanding that editing and on the post-production side,
it's really important to have people that know what they're editing for and try
to specialize those editors. You may have a TikTok editor who uses CapCut
and not After Effects, and that could be totally okay. That could actually
perform even better because they're doing things a bit more on the fly.”

How Fresh Tape fits in to team’s planning and content infrastructure
“I think it's pretty fascinating to think on back when we first started in 2017 and I was
concerned that if we did really well and we created great content, then it would help the
teams justify investing more in their social channels, investing more in their social teams
and content teams, and thus they would have enough of an internal team built up that
they don't need to use external resources. And what we learned over time that I'm really
grateful for is, yes, that happens. If we succeed, then the teams are gonna be really likely
to go higher internally. But then what happens is if those teams, the new team crushes it
again, then they are gonna have the capacity to scale even more. And they're still gonna
need external resources.
“So we have noticed that success by internal teams and external teams collaborating with
them begets more external collaboration. Not just ‘Oh, we're gonna keep hiring full-
timers.’ It just means that they're gonna continue to rely on external sources and also it
helps them with travel costs and all the other things that we can help with — efficiencies.”

On how success is getting measured nowadays and the metrics Jared is
seeing matter to Fresh Tape clients
“I think the vanity metrics still matter because they're both an internal and
an external indicator. If you think about a video with a million views — yes,
the difference between a million views and 950,000 views to the internal
team when you're thinking about reviewing your stats and you're like, ‘Oh,
our total views on the year is this amount’ — and the 50,000 views is not that
big a difference,’ but certain vanity indicators tell the world, yo, your video
popped. When you see something where the retweets are in the thousands or
where the views are over a million, that is something where…we think a lot
about the vanity metrics — let's call them public-facing metrics. The public-
facing metrics are an indicator to the public that you're doing well.”

“And I think that it is more valuable nowadays now that there has
been years of foundational data to calculate your year-over-year
engagement for each platform, and for each tentpole event and stuff
like that, to compare your year-over-year engagement and your return
on your investment. I think people are getting more granular about
ROI in terms of like, ‘Listen, we got a million more views. Last year
we were at 46 million, this year we're at 48 million, 2 million more,
right? But we spent $50,000 more. So did we get the ROI on that?’ So
people are definitely being a bit more granular about the ROI.

“And then earned media is probably more valuable than ever. So just
not just looking at your own stuff, but looking at the distribution of
your content outside of your own channels. Are meme accounts
picking it up? Are major media outlets picking it up? And tracking
earned media, there are a bunch of tools out there. Gondola is only
one of a few other tools that are doing a really great job helping
people track and find the reach of their content beyond their owned
and operated channels.”

The story of how Gondola came to be
“I can give you the whole story, it's a fun one. So it all kind of
happened by accident in 2018. Back to 2014, when I started at Vine,
the NBA came to us and…and they were like, ‘We want Vine analytics.
Can you give us analytics?’ Nobody's been able to do it. There's no
external API or anything like that. So I knew how much clients cared
about analytics from before I started Fresh Tape.

“So in 2018, I had this realization that like our content at Fresh Tape
isn't going out on our own channels as much as it's going on a million
different places. And we were literally copying the URLs to the content
we were making in 2017 and 2018 and putting them into Google Sheets.
That's how we were tracking our work. And then we would paste the
link, who the client was, and then how many views does that have?
Okay, 1.3 million — and the next day it was inaccurate, right? So it
wasn't a helpful system for reporting. So I reached out to an old Vine
engineer and said, ‘Hey, can you build the most basic scraper for the
public-facing data and put it into a database so that we could access it
with a very simple, ugly front end?’ He's like, ‘Sure.’ I don't think I asked
for it to be ugly, but I probably said I didn't care about [how it looked].

“So we built it, we called it Fresh Tape Admin, and we didn't tell
anybody about it, but we just started using it. We started plugging in
links and it was really helpful and every time we would work on a
project, we'd put in the links and then it was easy to get back to them
in the future. Maybe a year later we were thinking about what we
needed more than what we were getting from it. We said, ‘Oh, let's
add who on our team worked on the project.’ That way we can sort of
say, you know, Brandon did something for the NBA All-Star. Like,
‘Who did that design?’ ‘Oh, that was Brandon.’ It would just be like a
helpful tool for our own understanding of our work.

“So we built it, we called it Fresh Tape Admin, and we didn't tell
anybody about it, but we just started using it. We started plugging in
links and it was really helpful and every time we would work on a
project, we'd put in the links and then it was easy to get back to them
in the future. Maybe a year later we were thinking about what we
needed more than what we were getting from it. We said, ‘Oh, let's
add who on our team worked on the project.’ That way we can sort of
say, you know, Brandon did something for the NBA All-Star. Like,
‘Who did that design?’ ‘Oh, that was Brandon.’ It would just be like a
helpful tool for our own understanding of our work

“I can't tell you how many times a day I see a tweet that's like, ‘Who
made this’ or ‘Who took this photo? This is sick.’ And unless you're
looking at a watermark, Getty Images thing, or it's an influencer that
was tagged very intentionally, the majority of content you see is not
credited on social and it's not gonna change anytime soon to uniformly
have Facebook and Twitter and YouTube all have the same style of
credits. They all have very different formats of [it]. So like YouTube
having an extensive description section, Twitter having tags,
Instagram having tags — there's no continuity. So we realized like,
wait, we've actually built something that works on all these platforms
and it lets you track the work, we should probably let other people use
this.

“So instead of calling it Fresh Tape Admin, we decided to rename it
Gondola. The idea for the name for Gondola was you could take a
gondola on the top of a ski mountain on your own and it's fine, but it's
more fun with the group. Because we didn't believe that this should be
a product for people to credit themselves and say, ‘Me, me, me, I
made this.’ It should be a product for you to say ‘I made this for
[someone].’ And that notion of having to advocate not just for what
you've made, but for who you worked on behalf of was a big
foundational part of the product itself.”

On how Gondola can help patrol the original source of content, especially amidst
aggregator accounts
“I think it's really cool that if a lot of people use the platform, we could solve the
worldwide debate over original posts. We have a pretty good mechanism for
content identification, so if two people publish the same video, we can recognize
the similarities and see which one came first. So [Fuck] Jerry and House of
Highlights and every other aggregator out there has used the, ‘Oh, we tag them with
a “via” as a give and they'll be excited about the growth we can give them. And
anybody who's had a viral post lately that one of those aggregators published on
their social channel, even on SportsCenter or the others, the amount of views that
those brands get is millions of views relative to the amount of follower growth that
actually happens for those distributors, like if you post a meme and then it gets
used and they give you credit, it's fractions. It's a tiny amount of new followers.

“It's also like they can't get the data back to say, my video got this
many, even millions of views [across non-owned channels]. They'd
have to do it pretty manually. So we've given them a system where we
can give people cumulative analytics on all their content’s earned
media and posts on their owned and operated. So I think that we can
both give something to make every creator happy because they feel
like not only are they credited on both Gondola and on the meme
pages, but they can actually figure out what the reach of their work is,
and I think that's really beneficial.”

On goals of building community on Gondola
“I think we've only started to scratch the surface. Right now Gondola is a lot of
people that can connect and see each other's content, see credit, celebrate
themselves and celebrate each other and build each other up. But we actually
haven't built any mechanisms for them to communicate with each other. So that
is next,probably via Discord is being able to let people connect with each other in
private communities. We want to be the place that, if you are a part of a niche
community in the creative industry, whether that's as slightly bigger like hashtag
SMSports world or Red Komodo (camera) users or Denver sports photographers
— the smallest micro-communities to the biggest ones deserve home bases for
content and what we can do that not many people can do is we can give them a
place to connect and communicate with each other, but also a place for people to
discover them.

“So Denver Sports photographers isn't just a community for people to
talk to other Gondola users, it's for people who are looking for Denver
sports photographers to find them. So right now it takes both the
niche elements of the community for connection and turns it into a
discovery system. So we're really excited about that component of
it…We have so much more to grow.”

Jared’s favorite class he took at Wash U St. Louis and also the class or
subject he wishes he would've learned more about
“My favorite class for sure was Intro to TV Writing. Richard Chapman
was the professor. He wrote Simon and Simon, a bunch of awesome
cop shows in the ‘70s and ‘80s, one of the smartest people I ever
learned under. It was the most fun class I ever took. A class I wish I
had done more — I wish I had taken two more computer science
classes. I did a basic computer science class to learn to code and do the
very basic design things. I wish I had taken just one or two more, just
to be a little bit more well-versed in all the things that our engineers
do.”

Jared’s favorite Vine that he created and his favorite Vine that
somebody else created
“My favorite Vine that I created was there was a woman in an elevator
who was drinking wine from this crazy contraption and was chugging
the whole glass herself. And I panned over to her husband and he
goes, ‘That's my wife.’ And just the pride on his face, I was so proud of
that. It went pretty viral.
“Then favorite Vine of all time, in general, is ‘Look at all those
chickens.’”

The most memorable campaign or piece of content that Fresh Tape
has worked on
“I cannot choose. I refuse to choose…I'll go two. The concept of
retweet-like-mute as a game for Twitter that we did at the College
Football National Championship years ago was so much fun. We've
done it a few times since.
“And then the other one is the NBA 75 diamond ball. Working on that
campaign with the NBA for the last year was so much fun.”

The most memorable game that Jared has ever attended
“Either the 2001 Colorado Avalanche Stanley Cup Final game seven
[win] over the [New Jersey] Devils or the Pittsburgh Steelers [playoff
game in] 2011, [Tim] Tebow game-winning [pass to] Demaryius
Thomas 80-yard touchdown pass in overtime. Or for some reason I
saw a Rafa [Nadal] match at the US Open many years ago, it went to
five sets and it was extraordinary. I couldn't even tell you who he
played against, but it was one of the best [matches].”

The most important lesson that Jared has learned in running a
business
“Have money for when things are good, not when things are bad. It
turned out that I started with a certain amount in our bank accounts
when I bootstrapped Fresh Tape, and I didn't realize that like, we
would need money when things were good. And then when things are
bad, you have plenty of it. You know, people pay their bills and all of a
sudden you're not spending that much. So that was probably the most
surprising thing. Then also set up your operations early and use
QuickBooks.”

On Gondola right now, which user has the highest numbers and which
post has the highest numbers that's been tracked
“I think that the highest user is Gordon Smith, who makes a bunch of
stuff for [popular online barber] Vic Blends and some huge
YouTubers. He probably has the most total engagements…138 million
likes and a billion views.
“Then the number one post of all time is probably, I think, let me just
see which one it is…It was a Will Smith Post made by Chris Ashley,
who's like a really talented VFX artist who I've worked with for many
years and it has 269 million views and 19 million likes on TikTok.”

The social platform that Jared thinks will be the most important three
years from now
“As a social platform. I think Instagram will be the predominant one,
and I don't think TikTok is gonna replace it from that component,
though total watch time as an entertainment platform. TikTok will be
number one.”

The best meal to get in Denver & where to get it
“Number one, let's just say the most consistent
that I'll always go to is called SAFTA. It's a
Mediterranean restaurant. And if we're feeling
like taking a trip somewhere else in that
neighborhood, then probably Uchi for sushi.
Those are probably my top two…There's [also]
a place called Cherry Creek Grill that my dad
used to go to like three or four days a week.
And they've just got such good prime rib and
food like grilled artichoke that makes me very
happy.”

The brand or team whose social media Jared most admires right now and
why
“This is cliche, but the Chargers. I think that Jason [Lavine’s] team has just
done such cool shit lately. Like, the Hot Ones partnership combined with the
quality of the general content and combined with their willingness to meme it
up is top of the ladder. The Bills are coming in at a close second, having way
too much fun. I'm judging it a little bit less on everything being perfect and
aesthetically beautiful and more diversity of content and depth of humor…
“Then I'd say above Bills, but below Chargers probably is the Chicago Bulls.
They also have an operation for having a bunch of different creators that I
really admire.”

The most memorable/notable Tebowing instance
“It's not a single one, but the fact that every [remaining] wonder of
the world was accounted for at one point…And I think Antarctica was
pretty impressive. Also just the amount of people that happen to be at
the Taj Mahal Tebowing still confuses me. It wasn't that it was one
picture that blew my mind, it was how many there were; like, people
went to the Taj Mahal and they were like, that's what I'm gonna do
now...”

Jared’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“Parker Lyons (@tweetsbyparker), the dude from Twitter who has
been documenting the de destruction of the company in the funniest
way. If you're not into Twitter, then you won't find it that funny, but I
think he nailed this whole experience; as a former employee, he sort
of brought joy to the whole process.”

Where to find Jared, Fresh Tape Media, and Gondola on digital/social
media
Jared is @jarzod on all platforms
Gondola is @OnGondola on all platforms
Fresh Tape Media is @FreshTapeMedia on all platforms

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
Thanks again to Jared for being so generous with his time to share his
knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.

Episode 235 Snippets: Jared Kleinstein of Fresh Tape Media and Gondola

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Episode 235 Snippets: Jared Kleinstein of Fresh Tape Media and Gondola