From $8 Highlight Videos to Adidas Campaigns: How Mack Media Started

In the summer of 2017, a 13-year-old in Franklin, Indiana started filming his brothers’ AAU basketball games on a phone and posting the highlights. He charged $8 a video. The goal was $50 a weekend. He couldn’t drive, so his first hire was basically a ride to tournaments.

That was the start of Mack Media. Today we’re a 12+ person production company creating content for Adidas, Gatorade, ESPN, the Big Ten Conference, and the College Football Playoff. This is the honest version of how that happened — not because the story is unusual for its drama, but because every step is repeatable by someone willing to do it.

Lesson 1: Start where the demand already is

The first customers weren’t found through marketing. They were standing courtside — parents who watched their kid drop 20 and wanted proof. The product ($8 highlight clips) was priced so low that saying yes required no thought, and every delivered video was watched by other parents. The content was its own advertising.

The takeaway for anyone starting a media company: your first niche should have buyers who are already gathered in one place, emotionally invested, and able to see your work in the wild. AAU basketball was all three.

Lesson 2: Constraints build the style

No driver’s license meant working local tournaments exhaustively rather than chasing bigger events. Cheap gear meant learning to anticipate plays instead of relying on equipment to save bad positioning. Editing on borrowed time meant developing fast instincts about which plays matter.

Years later, those constraints turned out to be the training that national brands pay for: sports fluency, speed, and documentary instincts. When Gatorade needs a Player of the Year surprise captured in one unrepeatable take, they need a crew raised on one-take moments.

Lesson 3: The compounding ladder

The jumps look dramatic in a timeline — 2017 backyard videos, 2019 first real camera and a documentary project, 2022 Gatorade, 2023 the Indy 500 and a wedding division, 2024–25 Adidas, the Big Ten, Stanley’s Notre Dame campaign, the CFB National Championship. But no single jump was dramatic. Every level was won by over-delivering at the level below it, and every client became footage, and every piece of footage became the pitch for the next client.

That’s the actual mechanic of a media company: your portfolio is your sales team. We still operate that way — it’s why our work page does more selling than any ad we could run.

Lesson 4: Diversify into what you already are

When we added wedding films in 2023, people asked why a sports company was filming weddings. But the skill is identical: unrepeatable moments, no second takes, emotion over choreography. Same when brands started hiring us for commercial and corporate work — a crew that can follow a fast break can follow a product launch.

The diversification rule we follow: only expand into work where your existing muscle is the advantage, not where you’d be starting over.

Lesson 5: Stay in the gyms

The easiest mistake after landing national brands would be dropping the grassroots work that built the company. We never did. We still film AAU tournaments, still cut single-athlete recruiting reels, still shoot senior portraits. Partly because it keeps the pipeline of talent and relationships alive — the high schooler in this year’s highlight film is next cycle’s NIL athlete. And partly because the day a sports media company stops caring about the gym is the day it loses the fluency brands hire it for.

Where it goes from here

The company is still run by its founder, still Indianapolis-based, still filming nationwide. If the story resonates — whether you’re a brand that wants storytellers with this DNA, or an athlete at the start of your own version of it — we’re easy to reach. We reply within 24 hours, a habit from the $8 days when every customer was the whole business.