Podcasts

Episode 270: Nirupam Singh on the Evolving Social Media Strategy of Formula 1 and Creating Lifelong Fans and Evangelists

Listen to episode 270 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Nirupam Singh, Creative Director, Ghostwriter, Strategic Consultant — motorsports and sports tech businesses.

In this episode, we discuss the growth of Formula One, the evolution of social media strategy and fan development for F1, where motorsports go from here, and more

101 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube

Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287   Check out my LinkedIn articles

Content Strategy, Digital, General Marketing, General Sports Business, Social Media ROI

The Art and Science of Winning Fans: Strategies for Driving Engagement, Growth, and Revenue in Sports Marketing

There was a pivotal moment early in Dan Gadd‘s career when he was with the Chicago Bears. Social media emerged and the Bears had content crushing on its website that presumably would also crush on social. But then it didn’t.

“We had to take a step back and go, wait a minute, what’s going on here?” said Gadd, who today is the SVP of Growth for the Atlanta Dream of the WNBA. “There’s a different audience out here. This is not the avid group [visiting the website], this is just people who have followed the account because they’re a fan of the team, but they’re not paying attention to us on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. They may be tuning in on Sundays, but that’s about it. And all of a sudden, a group of us kind of went, ‘Hey, there’s a bigger opportunity here because these people don’t come to our events, they’re not on our email lists, they’re not coming to our website — we don’t really have contact with these people and if we can get them thinking about the team more we have a chance to actually strengthen the fan base here.’ So we went hard at work at basically building out content buckets and just testing a bunch of stuff…”

There was a different audience out there. One that paid attention to the team, but in a different way than the existing diehards who regularly visited the official team website. And that appreciation of understanding the audience first — what moves them and why, what commands their attention within the crowded feeds and why — has served as a throughline for much of Gadd’s career, from multiple NFL teams and work with big brands to his post today with one of the most successful teams in the continually rising WNBA.

Marketing is about evoking something from consumers/fans/audiences — a feeling, a desire, an action. The fan journey is not necessarily linear, but the formula for fan development and activation involves a set of feelings, desires, and actions. And over nearly two decades, Gadd has led teams to understand the big picture, the forest among the trees. I recently spoke with him in a wide-ranging conversation chock full of insights, articulating the models that best prevail in today’s competitive, part art, part science-driven environment.

Don’t Make Ads, Make Content

There was another epiphany in Gadd’s career — not so much an epiphany, but a determination to not blindly follow the status quo (the dreaded ‘the way things have always been done’) and challenge long-existing paradigms. When Gadd was at Taylor Strategy, after previously working with the Jacksonville Jaguars and Chicago Bears where the content, really, was the marketing (the beauty of sports), he realized the Mad Men era of advertising was still the way brands functioned in the 21st century, focusing more on the brand than the audience they were trying to reach. Gadd tells it beautifully, so let him take it away:

“The creative agencies, and I still think there’s a lot of this in the industry, were using processes built for TV advertising that go back to the 50s, and they were using them as content processes. So it was like, ‘What is our brand messaging? What is our brand equity? What is our product differentiation?’ And that was the start of the creative process. Then they basically were producing ads and then they would post them on Facebook and Twitter, and then all the brands were saying, ‘Oh, organic reach is dead.’ No, the content’s not content, it’s advertising…

“It kind of hit me. I was like, ‘Well, if I’m going to go down, I’m going to go down telling clients what I think they need to hear instead of what they want to hear.’ So I came back from [a holiday break] and, I don’t know if this was a coincidence or not, but there was a brainstorm on a brand that I wasn’t on yet, Tide, who was just getting into the NFL sponsorship space that year. And I threw out an idea around the Draft and I wrote it out exactly the way I would have done it if I was in the NFL. I mean, this is what you need to do. They bought it and we signed the top 40 prospects going into that NFL Draft and the deal was the contract went into effect if they were the first pick for a team. So we got their first post and that thing went absolutely haywire.

“It was the start of the ‘Our Colors’ campaign (for Tide) in the NFL. And we dominated the other brands in that Draft and that kind of turned everything around for me. Like, okay, I’m now going to go in and I’m going to put the best things I can [in front of clients], I’m going to sell the things that are going to work in this space. I’m not going to keep putting things in front of clients that I don’t believe in. But I had to build out a communication model on how are you going to now tell people that are built on these other processes that you have to flip all this?

So I started building out models like the creative process has to start with research and insights. You can’t jump right into brainstorming and it can’t start with questions like ‘What is our brand equity’ and ‘What is our brand message?’ It has to start with ‘What are people interested in?’ Otherwise, it’s not going to work in this space.”

Fan Activity (or Inactivity) Can Inform Everything

There are constant feedback loops from the countless fan touchpoints (and data) in today’s age. Every content piece that pops can inform another phase of the fan journey and department in the organization — and vice-versa. In Gadd’s time with the Atlanta Falcons, there was a culture of collaboration that realized such a utopian view of execution, which Gadd has now brought to the Atlanta Dream. Each anecdote Gadd told in our conversation carried pragmatic insights and principles that can guide the best teams and leaders moving forward. Take it away, Dan:

“We had to go from just creating great content and trying to grow the fan base and do all these great digital executions to how can we drive as much revenue as possible?,” said Gadd, recounting his time with the Falcons (part of AMBSE, which included Atlanta United and Mercedes-Benz Stadium) “The couple of us rolled up our sleeves and said, ‘Well, we know we can crush these cost per view metrics with paid social, let’s see how good we can get on the lead gen side and drive people through a funnel essentially and help the ticket team out’…

“I was in collaboration with (UX Manager) Austin Klubenspies and [Digital Strategist] Greg Urbano looking at our UI/UX, and I talked to Greg about, you know, ‘Hey, what is Google saying in terms of what’s happening on our site when they get to these pages?’ And then I would be talking to Eric about, Hey, we need to either tweak this on this page, or I need another graphic, this one popped and we got 30 leads in two hours, I need another graphic that hits on the same nerve. Then we’d get reports back from Warren Parr the ticket sales director, about, Hey, how this batch of leads is doing this or this batch of leads is doing that; okay, we need to get a little more information on the page because they don’t know what they’re getting into. So the back and forth on that stuff was just unbelievable…”

It’s pretty cool when silos are truly broken down and each team member — it is a team — knows how their efforts affect other team members across the array of fan journeys and touchpoints. Content and fan experiences connects to marketing and community which connects to fan development and sales and partnerships.

“There’s a system to this where we’re looking very much at how much reach and entertainment can we provide and attention can we have people spend with our content?” said Gadd, speaking about the principles that guided him with the Falcons and today with the Dream. “We want our content team to push the best content they can, but then we’re using paid ads to come behind and retarget and do all the intentional ticket sales or retail sales pieces.

“We’ve got it basically as a four-part engine. We’ve got to have the best content possible that goes out and earns people’s attention. Then we got to get the retargeting. We got to find the hand-raisers who watch these videos for ten seconds, who interacted with something, who came to our website, and then create all these and get as many of those people as possible — if the content’s doing its work, we should have huge retargeting audiences, which we generally do, and then we push as hard as we can on the paid social side to use those retargeting audiences and drive them through the ticket sales funnel. And our ticket team is in love with it. And then we look at like, what are the conversion rates on the sales calls? And we keep tweaking products until we get it right.”

Finding the Why

There’s an old analysis technique (which originated with Toyota) called The Five Whys. While it initially existed to solve problems, the framework is useful in many scenarios. It’s also a close relative of the typical toddler whose repetitive ‘Why’ questions can often lead to meaningful revelations. When you employ the Whys for a given piece of content or a marketing execution or a partnership activation — it ends up leading to some constructive conversations and insights. Gadd didn’t necessarily preach The Five Whys, but the understanding of how each piece fits together, how each decision should be based on some true belief, and the importance of a common goal — these are key tenets to what continues to drive Gadd’s success as a leader.

“I think the biggest thing is you can’t have a team if you don’t have a common purpose. One of the things we’ve talked about, between ticket sales and marketing, is we are absolutely driving ticket sales, but the bigger brand goal is to drive demand, and that’s something both ticket sales and marketing can do…

“I think one of the key things when I got to the Falcons was we did a couple things to make sure that everybody had the same goals. So we did a thing called Finding the Why, where it was an approach to content, and we made sure every content creator went through finding the why. And it had four key factors…The number one factor was to be a people expert, not a platform or technology expert. Every one of our content producers — and we still talk about this, everywhere I go this will be part of it — to create consistently good content, you have to understand what moves people. That is the magic of being consistently good in the content space. So we make all of our content producers responsible for what is happening. And we’re looking at metrics not to be data geeks, we’re looking at it to understand what’s happening with people when they view our content. But they’re all responsible for trying to build things that earn people’s time and attention.

“So those kinds of things to ground the team and have a common purpose…we want to have as many creative differences and creative ideas, but we want them all going in the same place. We want them going to the same goals of how are we moving people? We’re not producing content because we like it, we’re producing it because we want these people. So we have to understand these people to like it and we have to understand what moves them.”

Engagers are Hand Raisers

There’s an old saying that a salesperson is so good they can ‘sell ice to an Eskimo.’ This is meant as a show of praise, but look at it from a different perspective and you may ask why the marketing team is delivering Eskimos as leads to the sales team in the first place or whether the ice company needs to look at its content or events to not focus so much on individuals for whom getting ice is not an interest.

Okay, it’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s instructive to think about what we can learn about someone when they engage with content, or who we have in mind when developing the marketing or themes of game presentations and promotions. How can we identify and serve fans and give them what they want, rather than convincing them that what we come up with is what they want? Gadd walks through this wonderfully:

“I think one of the things that we’re having the most success with is [to] generate as much attention and interest as we can with the social content and find those hand-raisers but then come behind it — and one of the best things that we’ve done is started to build out these really great game experiences. So it’s not just single-game tickets. We’re now building experiences around them.

“The one that we’ve had the most success with right now is a product we created called Daughter Date Night. It has been a great seller for us, now this is year two. And when we create those retargeting audiences and find all those hand-raisers and put this in front of them, it’s magic in terms of the sales. And it’s been something that we can really leverage, especially in games where we would otherwise have a hard time selling. Now all of a sudden we’ve got an experience…

“It’s always what is the value prop that is not going to just bring people in to the database, but is actually going to get us people that come to that game? Then the next year, Adam Boliek and his team are calling those buyers and trying to see if they can buy a five-game package or a ten or whatever. We talk a lot about what is the value that we’re putting in front of people to make them take behaviors that we want, and I think experiences is one of them. But also really attractive five game and ten game partial plans; we have a lot of discussion about that. Our theme games, our halftimes, our giveaways — all of those things we’re trying to really build out. We have a matrix for every game and it’s like, okay, what is everything that’s going into this game? And how do we make sure that every game is a very sellable game?”

Putting it into Practice

All of the above articulated a clear framework to understand your audience, create demand with that audience through content and engagement opportunities, and produce a compelling product for that audience. But how do you know where to start? It’s easy to say everybody within a given radius of the arena is a potential game goer and everybody in the world with an Internet connection could become a fan of the team. But that content-to-conversion pipeline benefits from a greater understanding of the target audiences; sure, it’d be great to catch all the fish in the sea, but it sure helps to know the fish you’re after and the best bait for them (an oversimplification, but, hey, it’s an analogy). All that to say, and to reiterate a key tenet espoused by Gadd — be an expert in your audiences. And, therefore, know who you gotta study up on (and why that audience is one worth going after). Gadd does a wonderful job of tying many of the aforementioned ideas together, referencing some of the early work he and his team did with the Dream.

“We did a big market research piece when I first got here and the whole thing was aimed at who are our potential fans? Who are the people that are willing to either change allegiances or adopt an allegiance to our team? Who is willing to come in? We looked at questions like, ‘Would you be willing to come to an Atlanta Dream game?’ And then kind of dug into who those people were, what their interests were, what their background was, and what other behaviors they’re taking.

“So, long story short, we’re kind of looking at this inside-out strategy of the next group out from our current fans is, okay, who are the other basketball fans in Atlanta? And then I think the next ring out from there, and we have some really good data on this, is anybody involved in the youth athletics space. So everything that we’re doing from an organization, even in the community is ratcheted up towards like, Hey, gotta we’ve got to have a value to these audiences and we got to build out a value prop across the board… if we’re doing it right, we can look at what are the conversations that those communities are into, and we can start a tailored content [plan] and get in front of them pretty quick.”

Remember the show Seinfeld? (I hope you do, if not — get to Netflix and binge it ASAP!). Well, one of the neat parts about the show was the moment at the end when all the plot elements would come together and the viewer experiences a magic moment of clarity, when things meet together. While it’s not a perfect analogy here, there’s a similar feeling of something like nirvana, when all the dots connect and the full picture reveals itself. Chase that feeling in developing strategy. Define the sun of the solar system and mix the art and the science to make magic.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH DAN GADD (tons more good stuff not covered in this piece!)

READ THE SNIPPETS

Podcast Snippets

Atlanta Dream Exec Dan Gadd on Driving Fan Engagement and Growth, Serving the Audience First, and Connecting the Dots

On episode 269 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Dan Gadd, SVP of Growth for the Atlanta Dream. He discusses insights and experiences from his career with the Jacksonville Jaguars, Chicago Bears, Taylor Strategy, Atlanta Falcons, and now the Atlanta Dream. What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast.

Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

Podcasts

Episode 269: Dan Gadd on Creating What Audiences Want and Building a Cohesive Fan Growth and Engagement Strategy

Listen to episode 269 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Dan Gadd, SVP of Growth for the Atlanta Dream WNBA team.

101 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube

Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287   Check out my LinkedIn articles

Podcasts

Episode 268: Best Of The Podcast — Community, Innovation, NHL, NBA, Digital and Social Strategy, Sponsored Social Content, and More

Listen to episode 268 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, a best of, featuring parts of conversations with:

Listen below or on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.

110 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify or Stitcher.

Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287   Connect on LinkedIn

General Sports Business, Social Media, Sports Media

Insights: How Ben Koo and Awful Announcing Navigate the Changing World of Sports Media (and Media in General)

It’s a tough time for the media business. You may have heard. Headlines of layoffs and closures or consolidations in the greater media industry appear way too often. Amidst the ebbs and flows of news and media brands over the years, Awful Announcing has continued on, serving a sports media and business niche, even as competition for attention and the whims of social platforms change the game.

I recently interviewed Ben Koo, CEO, Editor-in-Chief, and primary owner of Awful Announcing and its sister site The Comeback. I often hone in on a theme or two in podcast interviews in these posts, but Koo covered so many interesting topics, let’s touch on a handful of big subjects:

  • Surviving as Social Media Platforms Discouraged Outbound Traffic
  • The Polarization and Hot Takes that Social Media Encourages
  • Understanding Public Sentiment When a Minority Drives Internet/Social Content
  • Measuring Success in the Multi-Platform Media World
  • Content Aggregators and Mooches
  • The Present and Future of the Media Industry

Surviving as Social Media Platforms Discouraged Outbound Traffic

Social media was a boon in the early days, a significant source of referral traffic (I’m old enough to remember going to ESPN.com and browsing for the best stories to read). Then the platforms realized the best way to drive revenue was to keep users on their sites or apps as much as possible. The trend has only gotten worse for publishers and now some algorithms even penalize posts with outbound links.

For sites like Awful Announcing, each algorithm tweak and drop in referral traffic can have a meaningful effect on their business. Koo and his team have to figure out how to balance feeding the platforms with content that’ll drive engagement while still giving fans a reason to click through to the site.

“We’re trying to do more in video,” he said. “We’re trying to be smarter about headlines where we get people interested, but we don’t give away the full story; we’re putting out the most interesting thing about what it is [while] hoping that people want to see more…

“Since Awful Announcing is creating content for a specific audience who’s thirsty for more details it’s not as big of a problem. But it’s still kind of discouraging because we think more people want to [discover] our content, and when it’s being throttled down, just because of new initiatives algorithmically, I don’t think it’s serving the users of those social platforms who have opted in to see our content but are randomly seeing, like, the For You page for Twitter [full] of crypto bots and what have you and Facebook meme pages. I hope it’s a trend that reverses.”

Awful Announcing knows they produce unique content and there’s an audience out there that wants to consume it. It may be more difficult for that audience to discover them and their content, but AA knows if you reach them, they will come (a bastardization of the old Field of Dreams quote, eh?). Koo said their originality, cultivating relationships between the writers and readers, and dedication to expanding their platforms are all key to continued survival in this new era.

Here’s Koo: “I think original content and original voices and being accessible on more platforms, which is something that we’re slowly kind of prioritizing more and more, really good quality voices, and being on more platforms, whether that’s a TikTok, Instagram, we’ve been promoting our content a lot more on Reddit, because I think some people have kind of moved from Twitter to Reddit in terms of content discovery…

“We’re putting in a lot more energy into trying to be at the places where people are because the existing traffic mix has decided that it’s not good for them for other people to drift away from those social media platforms. So we need to be on more platforms. We need to have more original voices. We need to have direct relationships, not only from the site to people, but also writer to readers — so more people following their personal accounts. It’s a major effort and it’s going to affect everyone in media, so we’re trying to figure out the best we can.”

The Polarization and Hot Takes that Social Media Encourages

Social platforms and their prioritization of engagement to reach users have also profoundly affected media across all mediums. Content that elicits a reaction tends to get amplified, and we’ve seen that theme translate to countless debate shows and the rise of hot take artists, with some viewers/readers questioning the authenticity of such dedicated devil’s advocates. It would be easy for Awful Announcing to lean into it, but taking polarizing stances just for the sake of ‘engagement’ is not something Koo and his team want to be about.

“I think it would probably be long-term negative if we were just trying to be dishonest with our opinions for the sake of chasing it…,” he said. “People like to kind of chirp a little bit that we have favorites or this and that, but I just don’t see that. I think our reputation is generally neutral to positive with some nitpicks here and there.

“But we write so much content it’s impossible [to avoid]. I mean, we pissed off Stephen A Smith at South by Southwest. He said last night we should kiss his ass. And then he says Awful Announcing, first off they do good work most of the time, and then he went into [it]. But it’s the first time I’ve ever heard him complain, and it just comes with the territory. I think we do a pretty good job having opinions, covering the space, but not succumbing to the temptation of just hot takes for clicks.”

Understanding Public Sentiment When a Minority Drives Internet/Social Content

Awful Announcing still does lots of work related to its eponymous theme — identifying the bad and good (and otherwise notable) in announcing and sports broadcasting. But talk to any social/digital media professional and they’ll remind you that the vocal minority on Twitter and other social platforms and forums are just that — a loud minority. So while we may get seduced to think a couple dozen comments, let alone a single anonymous commenter, represent the opinion of the masses, the vast majority of the public is not expressing their opinion on these platforms. And even those who do speak up are predisposed to a polarizing take (you generally don’t go on Yelp to give a slightly above-average review, it’s either because you loved it or hated it). Awful Announcing can uncover some of the truth by watching trends and having diverse individuals and perspectives within their ranks.

“[Thinking about] where does the real sentiment lie — one thing is it’s good to have a good group and a diverse group in your own newsroom and on Slack. Kind of like, ‘Do we all hate this person? Oh, there are 3 or 4 people who don’t, and seven people who do, that’s interesting.’ So that is always helpful. I think if we were to put a Twitter thread or a Facebook poll or whatever on just about anyone — Tony Romo, Gus Johnson, Joe Buck, you’re going to get a big cluster of people who are fans, a big cluster of people who are some type of neutral and a big group of haters.

“Announcing is super subjective…Having a good newsroom with diverse opinions, being fair when we do write an opinion piece or critical piece, or putting other people’s comments — like people hated how this person called the end of the game. Another thing is just trends. So sometimes we do polls and we get 4000, 5000 replies and we’ll say ‘Rank the four NFL A booths that are not Amazon.’ So ESPN, ABC, CBS, FOX — which one’s your favorite? And if you saw Romo and Nantz a few years ago when that thing was at 40%, where there are four options, and then a few years later they’re in second or third and they’re at like 20% there’s a trend that we can kind of talk about that more people are getting annoyed with Tony Romo.

Measuring Success in the Multi-Platform Media World

Everything gets more data-driven with each passing year. Writers once were (and at some publications still are) beholden to page views and subscriptions from their individual stories. That’s what pays the bills, and paying the bills, at the end of the day, is pretty much all that matters. There is some nuance for Koo and Awful Announcing, and metrics have evolved a bit for them to define successful content. As someone who loves a good long-form Wright Thompson article (and who lives with data in my day job), it’s good to see the value and insights in different types of metrics for Awful Announcing where, yes, page views matter, but it’s not always that simple in the chase for continued success and revenue.

“We are making investments in video and hiring and whatever, but we are probably more locked in to page views because that’s just what keeps us paid,” said Koo. “We do like front page home page traffic as a big indicator where someone either typed into their [browser] AwfulAnnouncing.com, or they read a story and then clicked on the logo or the home to see what else they could find. Pages per visit is always encouraging to see if we’re doing better there. Time on site helps us with advertiser retention and higher programmatic ad bidding. When people see that people are on here, they’re seeing your ad units for 45 seconds or 2 minutes or three minutes as opposed to 17 seconds.

“[On social media], retweets, impressions on Twitter — how much did this tweet about an article or a piece of video get seen? Generally, as long as we’re profitable and growing, we’re happy. And I try to not have our team too focused on a million different statistics, but I think for us, we’re a little bit different because we’re not part of a larger entity.”

Content Aggregators and Mooches

We’re in the age of aggregation. There are lucrative newsletters based on aggregating headlines and summarizing articles. There are countless social media accounts making hay from lifting a notable quote or anecdote from a robust story by a publication (not to mention the Dov Kleimans of the world, mostly just reposting others’ content). News breakers like Adrian Wojnarowski and Adam Schefter are as well-known as ever, but their ‘bombs’ are merely the first spark for a conflagration of derivative articles, columns, podcasts, and posts. Some question the ethics of professional aggregation, but the bigger issue may be how it affects the ROI of putting resources into original reporting. This excerpt represents a small portion of the discussion with Koo about the themes within aggregation (including a great story involving the Bishop Sycamore story and subsequent documentary), as he touched on how the existing paradigm affects his business decisions around original reporting.

From Koo: “I think as long as you’re referencing where the quotes are from, that’s kind of fair. You’d like to see some links if they use it in an article…

“[Original reporting] doesn’t monetize that well. Every once in a while — we did this story about Kevin Brown, the announcer, getting suspended by the Baltimore Orioles. That story was great. We got a lot of traffic, [and] we do have 2 to 5 original reporting stories, where we’re trying to scoop something, per month, I’d say. Some of them get not that much traffic at all…Whenever we think we have something, we go for it, and as long as someone’s interested and wants to do the work, we go for it. But is there a monetary return on that work? You know, that’s where it’s good to have institutional backing, subscriptions, stuff like that. Because from an advertising standpoint, it’s hard to justify. But we do it because it’s important.”

The Present and Future of the Media Industry

Awful Announcing is nearly 20 years old. In this media environment, that might as well make them a gray-haired lady. So Koo and his team have surely been doing something right over the years. Sitting at the helm of the business for most of the site’s lifetime, Koo has seen much of the media crumbling around him while Awful Announcing keeps going. So it was interesting to get his take on where the greater media and publication industry is headed and what will separate the survivors from the rest in the years to come.

“Niche things that have subscriptions and events seem to be doing well. I think what hasn’t done well is scale for the sake of scale, and that’s like BuzzFeed merging with a bunch of things. I think Vox Media got really big. Complex just sold to a new place…you have basically seen all of these jobs that have been taken away and infrastructure at companies chasing scale for people who were not creating content. I look at us and every dollar that comes in, almost every dollar, a huge percentage goes to people creating content.

“I’m not seeing media as a great investment…even the successes in our space, which are few and far between, if you look at the price tag and what they thought they were going to be, they don’t really [turn] out as big successes, to a certain degree. So yeah, content’s going to be in an interesting place because it definitely helps to have money given to you to become something big and notable and influential, but do the economics work for investors to get their money back? A lot of places have come and gone…”

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Thanks to Ben for his thoughtful and articulate conversation on several compelling topics! The media paradigms may be evolving, but there will always be stories to tell, conversations to start, and content to consume, no matter your interest.

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH BEN KOO

READ THE SNIPPETS

Podcast Snippets

Awful Announcing CEO Ben Koo on Sports Media, the State of the Media Industry, Social Media Aggregators, and More

On episode 267 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Neil chatted with Ben Koo, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Awful Announcing and The Comeback..

What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

Podcasts

Episode 267: Ben Koo on Sports Media, The Business of Journalism, Fan Perceptions, and How Awful Announcing Thrives in the Thick of It

Listen to episode 267 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Ben Koo, Editor-in-Chief and CEO of Awful Announcing and The Comeback.

81 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube

Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287   Check out my LinkedIn articles

Sponsorships

Key Considerations in Sports Sponsorships and Why They’re More Valuable than Influencers

Athletes working with brands is nothing new. There are tons of big-name brands that conjure everlasting associations with athletes in the minds of consumers. (which athlete[s] comes to mind when you think of McDonald’s, Nike, State Farm, or Gatorade?) These lucrative partnerships have been lining pockets and moving markets for over a century.

But until recently the athlete sponsorship avenue was relatively limited. Sure, some smaller brands could activate locally, using players on the home team in radio or TV commercial spots between segments on the local news or morning drive show. Now, with social media leveling the playing field, empowering any athlete to reach a national audience with a single post, the supply has grown such that global athlete sponsorships are a feasible and viable tactic for a heck of a lot more brands compared to, say, the 1990s.

There are a lot more individuals worthy of partnership deals now, too — joined by athletes are a huge supply of digital publications and, of course, the ever-growing hordes of influencers and creators reaching enormous audiences. So why do sports and athletes still command a premium? Why, with all else being equal with any marketing-driven variable or metric one can name, do sports and athletes still stand a cut above? As we dove into a deep discussion of athlete sponsorship, that intangible but real incremental value of an athlete partnership amidst the growing influencer economy was the first topic I covered with Ishveen Jolly, Co-Founder and CEO of sports sponsorship platform OpenSponsorship.

“If you’re a product today, whether you’re Walmart or a super small company, having an athlete wear your product, eat your product, use your product, and being able to talk about that is legitimacy, being the official partner of your favorite team,” said Jolly, who has unique insight overseeing a platform that plays matchmaker for a plethora of brands deals with sports organizations and athletes.

There may be thousands of viable influencers with which brands of any size can partner, but having that official sign of endorsement and association with someone famous for what they do outside of online platforms offers a stamp of legitimacy that others cannot. A key difference in the execution is that influencers do this for a living. Creating and distributing quality content to an audience they know intimately is their livelihood. So as these deals come together and matches get made, it’s important to recognize that key distinction and realize all that brands are putting stock into.

“Their everyday job is not to make money through social media,” said Jolly about athletes, many of whom consummate mutually beneficial deals on the OpenSponsorship platform. “A brand doesn’t want to work with someone and then they’re like, ‘Oh shit their last post was six months ago.’ Because at the end of the day, the algorithms are all always changing…

“It’s quite hard because as a brand I’m paying you for content and I’m paying you to be a distribution channel. So it’s a bit annoying if everything changes and, suddenly, I thought I was going to get tens of thousands of views and now I got like 50. So there’s a lot to think about, and some of it is to do with the athlete and some of it’s to do with just the strategy of the platform as well.”

The platform that athletes have transcends social media channels. So while the fickle feeds can dictate the reach of even the best content, the most effective partnerships take advantage of the elevated platform of athletes. Revisiting the math equation and the sizable supply of ‘professional’ influencers, it’s that athlete premium that can take a reach of 200,000 followers across five micro-influencers next to an athlete or two with the same following and tip the scales to the sportsman. IF the brand activates in such a way that puts that premium into practice, that is. Jolly elucidated further, discussing some of the recommendations her company’s services team brings to brand clients.

“As a brand, you’re like, ‘Well, if I spent $20k on this one post, is it going to do anything?'” she said. “But then that goes back to the point which is, well, don’t treat them as an influencer, treat them as an athlete — get PR, get amplification, turn that one piece of content into 50 pieces of content, right? Put that on your website.

“But, again, it’s all strategy. It’s definitely a difficult one and that’s probably the hardest thing for marketplaces like ours is you turn around and you think it’s enough to be a matchmaker and it’s not. We definitely need to make sure that you’re thinking about amplification strategy, and repurposing content in the best way.”

Everyone’s out to maximize the value of these partnerships — but what does that mean? There’s no shortage of metrics (though perhaps not the single ‘perfect’ metric) to determine success, but the correct way to measure results is: it depends (isn’t it always ‘it depends’?). That’s why it’s so essential to know what the objectives are and to know the right metrics that align with a given brand goal. That affects everything down the line — the type of content to produce, the channels to activate, the form of content, and, yes, the metrics. Jolly gets to see all of these deals play out and has instructive insight into what matters.

“Recently we’ve heard a lot more people talking about cost per view, but that’s if you want brand awareness…,” she said, before describing the different nature of reach in this new age of For You feeds. “Your engagement [can be] a percentage of your following. [But] do you care about the virality or do you care about them following [the athlete]? So there’s a lot to think about depending on your strategy.”

Jolly continued, offering a sharp perspective on how brand deals can evolve over the lifespan of a relationship. There can be a funnel framework with partnerships just like the top-down funnels with which internal marketing teams of an organization operate. One phase may be awareness, where views are the KPI, but that may mature to some sort of conversion, the form of which would depend on the nature of the business. Jolly explained the different ways brand deals can be activated to serve the right part of the funnel.

“I do think for a lot of brands it kind of changes; like they might care about this, they tick that one off, then they care about this, tick that one off and then they probably go more lower funnel. So their top-of-funnel awareness then they’re like, alright, convert, then they’re like okay we need sales. So it’s a bit of a journey funnel.”

She described the funnel further, offering examples and insights that guide how brands and sports organizations/athletes can think about strategic partner activations.

“Top of funnel still really matters because people like [to see] how many people viewed your brand? How many people interacted with your brand? That’s really important…That’s where it works best with influencers and athletes. As you go bottom funnel, you can do giveaways, right? Like, you could drive to a website landing page, sign up for this competition, put in your email and you might win something, tag some friends, etc.

“Then of course bottom of funnel is literally purchase this product. Put my name in, this coupon code, my name Olympics whatever 2024 and get 20% off. So as I said like brands go up and down in different needs. Sometimes it might be more brand awareness and then sometimes they’re like, well, we’re really pushing sales.”

There is no single ‘best practice’ for a sponsorship activation, in sports or otherwise, because each set of circumstances dictates ‘best.’ From all angles — the audience being sought, the content the athlete (or property) is adept at producing or sharing, the objectives and measures of success — so much more goes into it than followers (and dollars) and cents. But the valuable elements inherent to sports are always there: the air of credibility, the emotional connection, the platform and notoriety to build upon. Put it all together just so and you have a game plan built for victory.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH ISHVEEN JOLLY

READ THE SNIPPETS

Podcast Snippets

Episode 266 Snippets: The Value of Athlete Sponsorships on Social Media and What Maximizes Success

On episode 266 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Neil chatted with Ishveen Jolly, Co-Founder and CEO of OpenSponsorship.

What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.