Late-Round Perspectives: Nick Ercolano

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Nick Ercolano is the owner and creator of BDGE Media, the first fantasy football lifestyle media brand. He's a fantasy football analyst, a creative content marketer, and he probably plays more NFL trivia related games than you do.

These are his late-round perspectives.

Hey guys, two things before getting to this week's interview. First, I know this podcast feed doesn't always have swearing in it, but there is some of that language in this episode. If you're listening with young kids, you don't want them to hear it, hit pause, come back later. Second, remember to check out Underdog Fantasy. You can play tons of best ball contests over there right now, and you can do so with a very special offer. Just head to underdogfantasy.com or download the app. Sign up with promo code LATEROUND, that's one word, and then make a deposit. When you do, you'll get a deposit bonus offer, as well as a free Late-Round Draft Guide that'll get delivered to your email inbox on July 1st when it drops. That's underdogfantasy.com, promo code LATEROUND. Now back to the show.

Nick Ercolano (1:14)

I am so excited for this cold open. When I saw it on the show sheet, I was immediately like, man, when I see a good creative idea, I always want to steal it. It's just where my mind goes, and I feel like I want to take this from now on. So the cold opening is probably one of my favorite things I've done in a podcast episode.

JJ Zachariason (1:29)

Dude, I mean, you guys have semi-cold open type stuff when you're doing, especially the vlog type stuff that you've done, right?

It's not just like, hey, welcome to today's episode. Today, we're going to be talking about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not like that usually.

Nick Ercolano (1:44)

Yeah, I mean, any of the documenting stuff is more storyline told, so we never have any hard openings. It's just like, what's going to be the best for the overall video? And even in my individual fantasy videos, I kind of hate the idea of introducing the video and be like, hey, this is what we're going to talk about. I still do it, but I like to just start talking about things that are a little bit random, because it does catch people off guard. But if you have a good soothing communication style, I feel like it kind of hooks you in. And then you're like, I'm in now. I'm in for 30 seconds. I might as well be in for 60 minutes.

JJ Zachariason (2:20)

Well, I started my Becoming a Best Ball Bro series in the podcast feed over the last month or so.

And on the show earlier this week that dropped, I intro-ed it, the cold open was me talking about the movie Homeward Bound. So there's no better intro and grabber than talking about a movie from the early 90s that everyone forgot about.

Nick Ercolano (2:39)

Yeah, and it gets your energy level really high from the rip, because you're adrenaline's up and then you're high energy for the rest of the episode.

JJ Zachariason (2:50)

Yeah, for sure. I get really annoyed by the same old stuff in the fantasy space. I think that you're the perfect person to talk to this about, because you've done some crazy stuff with BDGE and I want to get into that. But even the Late-Round Podcast, the reason the podcast exists is because I got so annoyed and tired of all the hour-long shows that was the same thing, talking about NFC North Preview and all these things. Anyone can come up with that content. Not to say that the people who are doing that content are bad and wrong and should stop doing it and quit their jobs. Mostly that if you want to really differentiate what you're doing, I'm trying to dig into these really particular topics in 20 minutes as opposed to, hey, let's talk about Caleb Williams and the Bears offense and kind of go team preview, you know, by team preview.

But you guys at BDGE, man, I want to get into this a little bit because I feel like you're probably the least, and don't take this the wrong way, you're the least Twitter person that I've brought on the late-round perspective so far, right? Like, you understand, you know, back whenever I started doing the fantasy stuff, this was back in like 2011, right? And Twitter was really like the vehicle and the platform for a lot of sports discussion, and like, if you wanted to build a brand, especially an individual brand, you know, you were on Twitter, and that's really where you wanted your follower counts to be up. But obviously, things have changed, things have shifted, and you know, you've focused your energy and your efforts on things like YouTube. You guys are big on TikTok as well.