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.
It’s no secret that the media industry has been in a state of flux. That’s pretty much been the case since we were all firing up those America Online CDs back in the ’90s (man, I’m old).
But flux doesn’t mean the sky is falling. It’s just that in an age of endless content and aggressive aggregation, it’s the ‘brands’ — and that includes individuals — that have a leg up as the old paradigms of interruptive advertising, of borrowed attention, are not necessarily the primary revenue stream for media companies.
When you list media businesses that are innovating new models and monetizing audiences and communities in diverse ways, Barstool Sports is among those, not just surviving but thriving in this new world. Barstool isn’t just a media company — they’re into licensing, live events, partnerships, and products. There is still advertising, but that’s just a piece of the pie, and it’s that diversity of revenue that characterizes the next era of content and media.
“I got to spend a lot of time learning and a lot of time executing on various strategic products that helped Barstool Sports scale from a content and social perspective, from a merch perspective, from a licensing perspective, and from a live events perspective,” said Barstool Sports Director of Licensing and Business Development Brian Fitzsimmons in a recent interview with me, “to the point where, over time, our top of funnel had grown so vast that people started to get into the Barstool Sports ecosystem by a lot of different unrelated things.”
Fitzsimmons could rattle off myriad Barstool franchises and creators through which fans touch the business — from the longtime popular ‘Pardon My Take’ sports podcast to the more pop culture-focused and uber-popular ‘Chicks in the Office,’ amid several other entry points. “We started building around [Barstool’s creators and thinking of them as their own individual companies; thinking of Barstool Sports as their own IP house in a way,” said Fitzsimmons, who joined Barstool Sports in 2018.
Just like your favorite athlete eschewing an endorsement deal that would feature a fitness brand in their workout content on Instagram, creators understand their own brand can carry more weight than those that have filled consumer’s carts for decades. It starts to seem downright logical to create brands and activations that come out of creators’ natural content and conversations. So the athlete may activate around their recovery content and the creators at Barstool may do the same amidst their conversations of food they’re ordering for the game (Pardon My Cheesesteak), the sports bar debates and viewing parties they stream (Barstool bars), the drink concoctions they discuss on the podcast (Pink Whitney), the golf outings and professional golf chatter (Barstool Golf Time app) — and so many other examples. Fitzsimmons elaborated, saying the secret is just doing stuff that makes sense.
“I think that when we’re looking to see where there’s opportunity, we simply use our common sense…,” said Fitzsimmons, who started in journalism and content earlier in his career. “For instance, one of my favorite partnerships that we currently have is with our Barstool bars. So we have bars in Scottsdale, Chicago, Philadelphia and Nashville. And when you think about it, [Barstool Sports’s] DNA is how we relate to people who love watching sports and we talk about sports in a way that you would with your friend at a bar. Us being able to have a physical presence that reflects our brand, it just makes so much sense.
“And it doesn’t even have to be from a sports perspective, I think any licensing deal where the end user sees it and says, ‘Man, that makes so much sense and that is so brilliant’ — that’s how you know you have the home run.”
Fitzsimmons knows what a powerful flywheel the Barstool Sports machine supports. Success compounds as more content gets produced and creators continue to create and more seemingly obvious opportunities present themselves. Then it’s up to Fitzsimmons and his team to go to work, recognizing opportunities and executing.
“I help our commerce team identify new opportunities in the licensing and business development realms and try to figure out how we can build and layer on to the great things that we have started here,” Fitzsimmons explained to me. “Like, what is the thing that we can tack on to and scale for Pardon My Take? For that, we created the Pardon My Cheesesteak virtual dining brand. We created the Stella Blue Coffee DTC (direct-to-consumer) coffee brand under Big Cat (Dan Katz). We created the bars. For Fore Play, what is the thing that would speak to the Fore Play golf audience and it would be genuine to the talent involved, and it would make sense for everyone? We forged a partnership with Supreme Golf and created a tee time booking app called the Barstool Golf Time app.
“So it’s things like that that I look after to try to figure out how can we grow our business, how can we keep our commerce business healthy, and how can we help the big brands that help steer the ship for us — how can we help them continue to grow?”
The neverending content machine of Barstool Sports means Fitzsimmons and his team just need to keep a watchful eye because things just ‘happen.’ There’s still advertising within the Barstool Sports system, to be sure — that revenue stream is still a part of the mix for any media company. But when the Barstool commerce team can see a creator organically producing one of those ‘that makes so much sense’ opportunities within their everyday conversation and content — that’s when they’re ready to activate. That’s the magic of this new media model, this new era.
“There’s always a catalyst. And we are incredibly reactionary,” said Fitzsimmons, who also noted they’re “maniacal” about data in identifying opportunities, too. “I would like to think that our licensing business was more strategic and less opportunistic, but it’s just the way that we operate and the brilliance of this company is how we react. And to your point, a lot of it comes from very organic sparks. Like you mentioned, Big Cat posting these coffee memes just because he thinks it’s funny to make fun of old people that just put coffee memes on their Facebook every morning. It transpired from there, you hit the nail on the head. And same thing with Ryan Whitney discussing the pink lemonade and all that.
“It was like the light bulb went off and it was like, man, we have something here, right?”
Fitzsimmons and Barstool know they’re part of that new paradigm. One in which content isn’t just a means to monetize attention with ads, but an opportunity to create IP, develop powerful relationships, and utilize all the time spent with these creators and their content to do something more. The thesis for The Chernin Group, one of the early major backers of Barstool Sports, was around media companies building and becoming commercial brands. Barstool is a living example of such a thesis and they’re continuing to evolve and develop it further, starting out with apparel, as Fitzsimmons recalls, and expanding into so many of the products, events, and partnerships, only a fraction of which were mentioned in this article.
“This goes far beyond licensing,” he said. “The template of We’re going to change the game around how media companies can make money [Barstool founder Dave Portnoy] had was so brilliant so many years ago to be able to pair merch with content in a way that has never been done before…
“We still carry that formula with us today. It’s like when a big moment breaks out, Barstool is going to end up having a shirt that goes along with it. And whenever you go into read someone’s blog you’re going to have a link to a merch product that correlates with that person’s point of view. There’s something special about the marriage between content and merch that Barstool has had for the longest time, and we’ve been able to obviously keep up with that.”
Looking ahead, the connections fans have with the faces of Barstool (as opposed to relatively faceless content producers in other media) along with the ‘obvious’ activations the Barstool business team executes that serve the fans bode well for the future of Barstool. The media industry will continue to evolve, and not all the upstarts, let alone the legacy companies, will survive. But the brands that find ways to align their output with fan expectations, wants, and needs will prevail and last. They’ll continue to stand out from the sea of content because their fans feel respected and because those fans care — when there’s no shortage of places to go for an article or a ‘take’, there’s a select few that fans actively choose to go to before, during, and after the big game. And that’s a powerful moat to have.
Said Fitzsimmons: “It’s something special when you have an audience that connects with the content creators and the personalities in the way that ours do. I think that it’s a testament to how Barstool, over the years, has done such a great job of keeping the user first, keeping the audience first, and I think that’s why you see people over the years continue to stick with us and continue to grow with us.”
On episode 272 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Brian Fitzsimmons, Director, Licensing and Business Development for Barstool Sports.
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.
Listen to episode 272 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Brian Fitzsimmons, Director, Licensing and Business Development for Barstool Sports.
You know, most people have their job title and the place they work. Others have something more operative, like what they ‘do.’ Although I don’t love the vague nature of the latter, it’s an instructive way to think about one’s job. The answer to the infamous question from the Bobs in the Office Space: ‘What would you say you do here?’ (look it up, kids, and watch the movie if you haven’t seen it!).
It’s not so aggrandized to characterize the actual day-to-day work as something more grandiose, but to understand how producing that video, writing that email, or building that report is connected to the rest of the organization; how the modular work on the assembly line affects the bottom line success for the company and how it ultimately ties back to your to-do list.
Such is the potential disconnect between the endless demands of the creative team, especially for a sports organization, and the rest of the business. The quantity of content output for the creative team — graphics, videos, and everything in between — continues to increase. This is overall a good thing, as organizations appreciate that engaged attention, and content earning that attention, is the ultimate currency. But as teams grow and the content practice evolves from an arthouse to a well-oiled factory floor, a layer of management is necessary. That transition is taking place now, ensuring the quantity doesn’t drown out the quality and the art finds a way to meet the science.
“When you’re looking at ticket sales and fan engagement, it’s really hard when you only have 1 or 2 graphic designers to support all those (objectives),” said Akshay Ram, a Product Manager at Adobe who has years of experience in sports creative, including during his undergrad at Syracuse. “So then it comes down to who’s making the call for priorities. And in the college space, I don’t think that specific person is established as much, so it makes it a little more challenging, and I think that’s part of what that transition looks like.”
Prioritization. That’s the mechanism through which the art must be balanced. I can remember back in college speeding through video edits while others would spend days tweaking and perfecting a single photo or graphic composition. Software solutions are certainly facilitating the production process now, as Ram can attest sitting at one of the biggest and most ingrained and integral companies at Adobe. The new world in which everyone can at least pose as a creative (think back to the early days of Instagram filters, even) means the role of a full-time skilled and studied creative is evolving. I spoke with Ram about the balance of the creative team with empowering others to complete the last mile of content with only the creative team owning the final export.
“Something I preach all the time [is] are you are you working efficiently by doing what you’re doing? Can you provide some of that trust to someone else by setting yourself up for success and them up for success?” said Ram, who also worked with Bleacher Report during his time studying and working at Syracuse (he likes being busy!) “There are many tools that are going in that direction right now where, as a creative, you can’t just think about being the most creative person and putting in all these flashy effects. What do [colleagues] need in order to communicate the message that they’re trying to send out? And maybe that just requires a simple template and you as a creative setting that up for someone else to go in and just change the parameters that you establish.”
Whether it’s templates that help maintain quality while scaling output and autonomy or more premium content, the creative part of an organization is delivering solutions more than ‘stuff.’ It’s stuff with a purpose that conveys a brand and seeks to accomplish objectives and, ultimately, to move that proverbial needle in the desired way. We’re in an era now (not so much an era, just a before/after new way of the world) in which everything is measured, for better or for worse. Even artistic masterpieces or hit songs are broken down into bits and analyzed. And the creatives in sports have had to become part of the new paradigm — it’s a necessity when there are thousands of pieces going out every season and an insatiable desire for more and better. This is where the creative leader needs to lead, preaches Ram.
“They just give anyone this title of creative director [referring specifically to college athletics in this context] and then they expect them to also create content. So what they’re not doing is actually analyzing what’s going into producing the content and how that translates,” he said. “We talked at the beginning of this about how most schools just want to sell tickets to games or turn viewership up and don’t understand what market size looks like and if the market size is translating to the expected viewership, all these kinds of things. So creatives don’t actually have a KPI that’s embedded with what they do, and they also don’t get the information from the higher-ups. How we solve it is a great question…
Ram continued: “Many times you need to have that chain of influence where someone can tell you, ‘Hey, it’s not just about reaching 6 million impressions or engagement, but it’s: in order for us to get there, we need to deliver in this capacity.’ And that middle ground between the two, I think, should be facilitated at the creative director role, where they know how to filter the numbers from the creative, allow the creative to do the work, and then they kind of dictate what’s our direction to get there.
“That’s where a lot of these titles aren’t actually aligning to fruition with what they say. I think they should be that filter between the people who are actually doing the core functions and the people who are asking for it.”
Everyone has a scoreboard — but even the most sophisticated systems of measurement can’t capture everything. There is dark social through which the reach of content increases exponentially (and content with a higher propensity to get shared via those channels), content that elicits activity or feelings or depth and strength of activity and feelings. It can feel simplistic to juice engagement and reach numbers through more content output, but that’s not always the right answer.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, I need quote tweets, I need retweets and reposts’ and all that kind of stuff,” said Ram. “They don’t think about ‘How do you make good content that people just want to absorb and send to other people?’ And I think that’s where reach comes into play and also plays a role in how you’re thinking about creating at scale. Because all it takes is one platform to really enhance the success of your campaign that you’re working on, the content that you’re creating.”
When they know the outcomes and objectives at play creative leaders can manage all those variables — time, resources, premium output, templates — to achieve maximum results with optimal efficiency. We’ve arrived there, when the creative department of the organization needs to operationalize and the leader isn’t necessarily the most talented designer or producer, but an individual responsible for managing all the moving parts and processes.
“That’s where I’d love to see the community move in that direction, where they are understanding the KPIs, they’re establishing KPIs and there is someone that is heading that creative department who’s translating that to something that makes sense from a creative standpoint,” said Ram, “which is, you know, ‘Let’s spend this much time to execute on this. If we were given one week to get this done, what’s the best piece of content we can create? How do we take that and package it in a way where it’s not just one deliverable, it’s maybe one video, ten stories that can go across these platforms?’ That’s where the social media team plays a role.
“I think the creative director has to be that filter that can communicate with the social media manager and marketing to make that happen.”
The last decade or so has seen the ascent of the creative department within an organization to invaluable and indispensable — an essential part of the team. Such a place requires a more strategic approach to it all and the present and future creative leaders must play a vital role in the maturation and professionalization of creative. The importance of content will only increase from here on out, inspiring a new era of innovation and storytelling that will propel organizations forward and redefine the boundaries of creative potential.
