MOGL, an Athlete Influencer Marketing platform, launched Athlete Paid Social last month, an offering that enables brands to run ad campaigns through athletes’ Instagram and TikTok handles rather than a brand’s own account. The first campaign built on it, for athlete platform ProStyl Sports, produced ad clicks at roughly a quarter of the industry’s average cost.

That result reflects years of work by Ayden Syal, who founded MOGL in 2019, anticipating the NCAA’s coming name, image, and likeness (NIL) rule changes, and took the platform to market commercially in July 2021. A former Morgan Stanley analyst who has since been named to the Sports Business Journal New Voices Under 30, Ayden built MOGL in New York to facilitate the Influencer Marketing process between brands and athletes by automating search, discovery, content creation, fulfillment, and paid amplification. 

Athlete Paid Social, MOGL’s newest product, answers a specific need for brands: changing athlete marketing to behave like a channel that can be bought, targeted and measured like any other media buy. 

“People often think of athletes just as sponsorship vehicles, which is not the case whatsoever,” Ayden says. “These athlete social handles are distribution channels.”

ProStyl Sports founder and CEO Derrick Love became the offering’s test case. His platform, launched in late 2024, now spans more than 800 sports categories and lets athletes build a following, compete on leaderboards and get paid regardless of school, sport or follower count. 

“Those platforms extract value from the athlete without giving them anything back,” Derrick says of mainstream social apps like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, which he argues were not built with athlete performance in mind.

Paid Social Got More Expensive While Getting Less Precise

Ayden traces MOGL’s newest product back to what has happened to ordinary paid social. “Paid social is really becoming more expensive,” he says. “Platforms are charging much higher fees and giving advertisers significantly less targeting, measurement, and differentiation capability.”

Part of that, he says, comes down to more advertisers competing for the same inventory. Part of it comes down to privacy rules that have made it harder to reach a specific audience repeatedly and at scale. The result, in Ayden’s account, is that cost per thousand impressions and cost per click have both climbed, often without a matching improvement in whether that spend actually reaches the right customer.

“Ultimately, those CPMs and CPCs that you’re generating may not be within your desired audience and target customer,” he says. That is the problem MOGL is selling against: the issue is not a lack of access to social platforms, but the rising price of reaching the right person on them.

Athletes Are Being Sold As Sponsorships, Not As Media

Ayden argues that most brands still treat athlete deals as an occasional nice-to-have rather than a repeatable, performance-driven line item. “That’s really what our mission at MOGL is to change,” he says. 

Legacy providers and agencies, in his view, compound the problem by charging a high upfront fee while providing little visibility into what a campaign actually delivers.

Derrick reaches a similar conclusion from the other side of the market. He says sports-specific platforms such as Hudl, ESPN and Overtime focus narrowly on broadcast, fitness tracking or a single sport, and none combine the competition mechanics, open monetization and community voting that ProStyl Sports built its product around. “We looked at competition first, not content first,” he says. “How can we help the athlete win, not just post?”

Both describe the same disconnect in the market from opposite sides. Neither general platforms nor niche sports apps, in their telling, convert athlete attention into pay for the athlete or a measurable return for the brand paying to reach that audience.

Athlete-Made Content Beat The Brand’s Own Video

The ProStyl Sports campaign ran on Meta and tested two versions of creative against each other through the same athlete handles. In one, MOGL ran ProStyl’s own branded video through athlete accounts using influencer whitelisting, a technique that makes an ad appear in a feed as an athlete’s own post while it is served and targeted like any other ad. In the other, an athlete produced original content promoting ProStyl Sports, which MOGL then boosted in the same way.