We’re in a golden age of content in the sports world.
Think about all the new categories of content that have sprung up in and around sports in the last decade. It feels normal today, but fans didn’t always get to consume content about athletes’ fashion choices. They didn’t get to learn about what went into landscaping the field’s grass or get an inside look at the planes and hotels that are part of the athlete experience. It’s hard to remember a time before fans knew about players’ tastes in music, food, and pop culture, let alone their takes on the controversies of the day, like whether the dress is blue or a hot dog is a sandwich.
It’s still sports content. But it’s so much more.
The evolution is not limited to subject matter outside of gameplay. Incredible plays and magic moments still generate massive engagement and exposure, but they’re often just the starting point to richer storytelling. Today, moments get magnified. The live broadcast remains paramount (for now), but as sports fans increasingly consume clips and feeds more than live broadcasts, the opportunities that this new golden era of content presents feel limitless.
Russell Simon saw it happen in real-time. He and his colleagues at the National Football League (NFL) realized that fans couldn’t get enough content. The infinite scroll of the social feeds meant the engagement to earn from fans’ insatiable appetittes was limited only by the volume of quality content the leagues and teams could produce from their weekly live events (aka games). Thus was born the live content correspondent program (LCC), which today is a staple of major leagues around the world.
“We had creators in every market shooting mainly video content on a mix of DSLR and phone, primarily in the beginning, and we realized pretty early on that we had accidentally created a new rights category of real-time, social-first content from every game,” said Simon, who today is a partner at Zero Blitz Media, which works with brands, athletes, and creators to produce premium social-first content. “We had the best moments from the minute the first player walks in the door for arrivals until the game ends, and you get a player signing off, speaking directly to the fans 20 seconds after the game ends. It started to very quickly open up a world of possibilities just on game day.”
It wasn’t that the LCC program was capturing solely never-before-seen content. Game broadcasts had evolved across sports, driven by innovations in the 1990s and the influence of NFL Films, to show the players walking in the arena before games (so-called ‘arrivals’), amplifying increasingly ostentatious celebrations, and showcasing unique pregame player routines, among other elements. But where broadcast directors saw quick shots to intersperse or bumpers heading into breaks, Simon and the producers and leaders behind the LCC program saw the potential for something more. The otherwise afterthought shots and sights and sounds could be elevated and, in many of the social feeds today, are the main event, garnering more engagement and reaching more diverse audiences than even the most incredible catches, dunks, or hits ever could.
“I would say it was really about presenting [the content] in more of a social first native experience was really what the LCC program did,” said Simon. “We were able to take a shot, a really cool entrance shot of Patrick Mahomes or a really well-dressed player, and we were able to take that literally seven second moment from just something that flashes across the pregame show to a really elevated moment that can live across social, across the player channels, across this whole distribution network.”
The program continued to get even better because the LCCs (live content correspondents) stationed at each game brought their own ideas and vision to the content. (One of those talented LCCs, David Kushner, is Simon’s partner at Zero Blitz Media today.) They got the basics down pretty quickly, ensuring they were in place to capture all the big plays. But give creatives time and agency, and let them also bring their own flair to the production process. Simon and his team saw these LCCs evolve the content over time. And, before long, the program had not just the trust of the league and its teams, but also the interest in this unique cache of content.
“You can teach people how to shoot a football game, you know, where to stand, the best spots to be to maximize your chances of getting the best moments,” Simon explained. “I would say that the LCC program became a place where your skills and experience and the work that you had put in to get to that point put you in a place to shine and grow in terms of being able to capture the best moments as they happen very quickly became just table stakes where everyone is going to be very solid and have sort of this the level that we would expect. And then it was how you go beyond that and that, you know, all of our creators were able to sort of make their own in a different way…”
Simon continued: “On Sunday, we were there with them for 15 hours managing all of our creators, making sure that we captured everything we needed to capture, beyond just the moments, if there were special sponsor asks, special player asks, you know, really being cognizant of how we could be helpful to this ecosystem that we built out. And that’s really what made it effective. People trusted us…”
The value produced from the LCC program was magnified exponentially when that NFL ecosystem was activated. When one thinks of ‘social-first’ content, it conjures ideas of content in the social feeds, naturally. But this content isn’t just for followers of the team and league accounts. It’s not even just for the social networks. That’s just the start. When you take that content and throw gas in the distribution engine, the ceiling for reach, engagement, and value grows higher. When you take that content and utilize it as ingredients for more substantial stories, the radius of the content’s effects spreads wider and deeper.
“So Justin Jefferson scores a touchdown and does The Griddy [to celebrate a score], and then he’s got that video from an LCC ready to post right when he gets to the locker room,” said Simon about the dance that the Minnesota Vikings wide receiver made popular among NFL players. “It was Hey NFL fantasy, when people draft Patrick Mahomes, can they see all of the content that we’ve captured from him during a game and get that alert to be like, Oh wow, he just did something cool, let’s put it on fantasy. It was, Hey, [to] our college partners, Justin Jefferson’s got a big following at LSU, LSU, Here you go. Take this footage and make it something that will reach your audience. People are creating GIFs and sending GIFs in their text chat with their friends. Let’s take this Griddy dance that Justin Jefferson just did that we just shot and put it on Giphy. Hey, let’s tell a story about the dance on the NFL’s TikTok channel. Let’s bring in an influencer to do the Griddy with Justin Jefferson and make a viral moment out of that. Let’s, of course, give that footage to ESPN, NBC.
“The program worked because we were able to take one moment or something that happened in a game and make it so much more by building out our, I’ll call it the creator ecosystem.”
Stick some compelling, social-first content into the flywheel and that’s how you develop new fans while also giving existing fans more avenues to engage and content. That insight drove Simon and his NFL colleagues to dive in deeper (and guides him at Zero Blitz Media today). And the upside of producing content in AND around the fringes of sport, combined with the interest-driven algorithms of social and creator distribution engines, and you have the recipe to reach more messaes than ever.
Simon elaborated: “There’s definitely an element of any good strategy right now in terms of how you reach and grow beyond your core fans,” he said. “I think a lot of that, frankly, is stuff that is not just the highlight, but talking to the doctor, talking to the equipment manager. We worked on a show when I was at the league on the [business development] side, ‘Most Interesting Jobs’. That’s a show that my fiancé will sit down and watch, and think is really interesting, and they’re barely showing a highlight at all. Like, the stories around the game, there’s only going to be more opportunity in there.”
Early in Simon’s career, he worked on Snapchat’s live stories. Fans on the ground at live events (Simons focused on sports) submitted content to Snapchat and Simon and his colleagues took those submissions (sometimes supplemented by Snapchat producers onsite at events) and curated them, sometimes adding in graphical and post-production elements, for users to enjoy on the Snapchat app. These were decidedly social-first and mobile-first videos, clearly captured by fans using their phones, giving the content a cinéma vérité feel. Users tapping through live stories felt like they were there. It was cool.
It didn’t take long for ‘Stories’ (even if not ‘live’) to become a new content format across platforms. (Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel jokingly calls himself ‘Meta’s VP of Product for a reason.) But there’s a next level to social-first content now, to not rest on the engagement it captures in real-time, but to build on it. Content is currency as much as it ever was, and in this golden era of content, organizations — and potential sponsors — appreciate the value of quality content. The ROI picture is developed, we’ve arrived. As Simon and his partner build Zero Blitz Media, they know that when good content is the north star, everything else follows from there.
“If you make really engaging content, good things will happen; if you make good stuff, good things will happen,” he said. “It may take some time, but even when there’s a brand integration in it, we’re focusing on making quality work, and the monetization is going to follow. Obviously it’s a balance, but we see brand dollars and ad dollars flowing towards our world for a reason, and it’s because people are spending their time there, and good things are going to stand out.”
