David Brickley is something of a social marketing pioneer. In 2011, he founded STN Digital, a leading social-first digital marketing company in sports and entertainment. STN now has more than 50 employees and creates hundreds of pieces of content daily for partners like ESPN, Warner Bros., NBC Sports, Under Armour, the Philadelphia Phillies, and NBA star Jayson Tatum, among dozens of others. The company helped Elton John launch his TikTok. In 2023, digital sports viewership surpassed traditional television viewers for the first time. Forty-three percent of young adult sports fans follow their favorite league on social media, 54% follow their favorite athlete, and 32% of all sports fans use social media while watching games. Brickley and STN have been at the forefront of this social-first revolution. Brickley never wanted to start a social marketing agency. But when Kobe Bryant opens a door—even by accident—you walk through. Building a business A lifelong Lakers fan who grew up east of Los Angeles, Brickley took a job in 2011 as a producer at Fox Sports Radio with the dream of hosting his own sports talk radio show. “I thought I should have my own afternoon show,” he said. “My program director thought differently.” Shut down by the higher-ups, Brickey became an entrepreneur by necessity. He used Fox Sports AV equipment and studio space after hours to launch his own YouTube channel. At the time, original sports content on the platform was scarce. His content regularly made it on YouTube’s front page, which grew his profile enough for him to start working directly with professional athletes, eventually landing Bryant as a client in 2013. In an exclusive interview, Brickley spoke with Fast Company about his evolution into a digital maven, sharing his insights on how social audience habits have changed, how he sees them evolving in the future, and how any company can build a social content strategy that works. The interview has been edited and condensed. How did you land Kobe Bryant as a client when you were just getting started as a small shop? It started with good karma. I did a ton of favors for the publicist of Matt Barnes, who was a Lakers player at the time, and as a favor, I interviewed his twins after they got on the honor roll at their elementary school. In exchange, I got a 10-minute one-on-one with Matt. Then one day I was at a boxing class and I ran into his publicist. She mentioned she was working with Kobe, so I asked if I could send over some ideas. Because of all those favors I’d done, she let me pitch Kobe the concept of the “Kobe Minute”—a 60-second weekly video about his on-court and off-court successes. They loved it because we could highlight his charitable work without it feeling self-promotional. How did creating content for Kobe and his team open your eyes to the idea of creating a social marketing agency? The Kobe opportunity was the epiphany moment. I had just reached out to my childhood hero about working together, and he said yes. So I realized if I could land Kobe, I could reach other athletes and teams too. We built an Excel sheet with all 32 NFL teams, found every email, and reached out. Seven hopped on calls, three wanted proposals, and the Minnesota Vikings were willing to try us out as a partner. It was pure bootstrapped cold outreach. Being able to create your own destiny without relying on someone else for opportunity was intoxicating. You started STN Digital basically from scratch. What struggles were your clients having when creating original content—specifically for social—and how did you position yourself as the solution? Back in 2013, every sports entity had social channels—the Facebooks and Twitters. But they weren’t posting original content. They had these audiences but didn’t know how to engage them. Social was just a PR dump of press releases and super boring, non-fan-centric content. So my message was, “We understand fans, we understand what the sports fan wants, and we can curate content specifically on social that speaks to them.” You gotta understand that at that time, a fan-first approach of speaking authentically about topics fans cared about didn’t exist. Now, as we transition to 2025, every CEO, president, CMO in the world is starting to think about a social-first approach, which is awesome to see. How does the agency work? In what ways do partners deploy your services and expertise on a given social marketing campaign or initiative? Our clients use us in one of two ways. Usually, they’ll either hire us as a world-class social media department and we run everything A to Z—copywriting, content, analytics, everything—or they’ll bolt us on as a world-class content house. In that case, they have an incredible team already, but they add us on top because their team doesn’t have three and a half hours to dream up a bunch of dope ideas in a whiteboard session or simply need more engaging content for all their initiative