College – Digital and Social Media Sports

The Challenges for College Athletics Social Media Strategy and How USC Athletics Manages to Fight On Across Sports

Consider how daunting the social media operation is for a college athletics program. A couple dozen sports or more, multiplied by however many platforms, all unified under a single brand and trying to reach and engage a diversity of demos and age ranges of fans, donors, and recruits while the roster of athletes turns over every few years.

I mean, where does one even begin?

There’s no template to follow and there are different structures across schools, each with its different resources and set of programs. But they’re all facing those challenges noted above, with the complexities of NIL and realignment only increasing in recent years with no signs of abatement.

Jordan Moore has been there for all of it. Moore, who leads social media for one of the country’s most storied institutions, the University of Southern California (USC), was there for the early days — before Instagram existed, let alone TikTok and Snapchat. Platforms, staff sizes, and needs grew, which necessitated a new way to organize content production for the Trojans. There was too much communication needed, and too many demands that a constant conveyor built couldn’t hope to sustain with high standards in the long term. So Moore and his team changed things up in recent years to maximize alignment and collaboration.

“What we’ve done here over the last couple years and how things have changed, we went from what I would call a production-based model to an individual sport model,” said Moore who has been with USC Athletics since 2010 and is also an undergrad alumnus of the school. “The way it used to be, we were like a production house, so you would say like, ‘Oh, hey, we need a lacrosse video’ and then it would just go in through the video team and somebody would do it, and spit it back out. And then the next time you need a lacrosse video, somebody else would do it.

“What we’ve changed now in the sort of individual sport model, teams, pods, whatever you want to call it — every single sport knows who their social media person is, who their SID is, who their graphic designer is, who their video person is, so you have that little mini team within your larger creative team. Those groups are meeting and they’re coming up with their content calendars and their ideas, and they’re working hand in hand with the coaching staffs and the players, and so what you create is not just having SIDs embedded in programs, but everybody is.”

A college athletics program is the sum of parts creating a powerful collective whole. Each team is comprised of countless stories, each student-athlete a source of inspiration for fans to glom on to. Breaking records and winning championships are always a welcomed avenue for engagement, but, just like in team sports, it’s the human stories that drive the strongest connections. So while the official, catch-all USC Athletics social accounts serve as a ‘central hub’ for all the happenings of USC sports, celebrating the big wins and conference titles, Moore and his team know the path to fans’ hearts comes from fostering connections with the humans at the heart of it all, the student-athletes wearing Trojans colors.

“On the individual sport accounts we’re really focused on telling the stories of our student-athletes in multiple ways,” said Moore, who is also a seasoned broadcaster calling the USC men’s basketball games, among other assignments. “We obviously want to celebrate excellence, we want to celebrate winning — those things are very important to USC. And honestly, those are the things that that perform the best.

“But we also have a belief that if you make someone passionate about an athlete, or interested in an athlete, that you’re more likely to participate in social media, coming to games, supporting that team. The student-athletes are always going to be what drives the machine around here.”

The student-athletes are the consistent factor that can appeal to all of USC Athletics’ target audiences. Even those who don’t (yet) bleed cardinal and gold connect with the kids, which is a big reason why the individual sport accounts are so important even if the ‘main’ athletics accounts trump the majority when it comes to followers and reach. With lower scale comes more targeted, higher engagement, too, which Moore and his colleagues take into account for content production and strategic messaging. There’s no magic formula to accomplishing all those aforementioned diverse goals (let’s not even go into all the digital content and messaging the public does not see, often meant just for recruits via private channels), so USC has to prioritize and execute accordingly.

“Social media is a shotgun, it’s not a sniper rifle,” said Moore. “Sometimes I try to explain that to people [and] we’ll get somebody that says, ‘Oh, I want to get this message to students, let’s put it on the athletics account.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, that’s a really small percentage of the athletics account. How many students actually follow it? And then of that, what percentage is that of our total following?’ I don’t want to alienate 95% of our followers with any post. Obviously, when you run something like an athletics account, not everyone’s going to be interested in everything and that’s just the way it is. The sport accounts are going to have a little bit of a higher interaction rate.”

Those sport accounts, big and small, are really important. But the overall USC Athletics ‘brand’ is still the sun around which all others orbit. That dichotomy is inherent in college athletics and, without guidelines in place, there is risk of individual team accounts deviating from certain brand uniformity standards, rendering incoherence and confusion across accounts that nevertheless represent the same institution. There’s a careful balance — not being so strict as to denude every team of its distinct character, history, and culture while not losing that common throughline. Moore and USC take such a balanced approach, empowering individual sport accounts with the ability to riff while not losing what makes them USC Trojans.

“With that said, we also want the individual creativity of the designers and the creative teams around the individual teams, and then also the voice of the programs are just going to be different in so many ways,” Moore explained. “I mean, our football program, as an example, is such a legacy brand. [It’s] been around for 100 years and has national championships and Heisman Trophy winners, so there’s a certain voice that comes out of that account that is just different than our men’s basketball brand, which has kind of always been the second team in town to UCLA and never historically has won anything, so we take a little bit of a chippier, edgier tone to our content. You know, we are much more likely to poke at UCLA. On the football side, there would be no reason to sort of stoop down to it kind of thing. So those are the ways that you that you look at it.”

Each team stands on its own under the USC umbrella; each team with its coach setting the culture, a voice and point of view, and a unique set of student-athletes that come through every year. The dynamic nature of the roster is perhaps the most challenging aspect of all when it comes to college sports, and it’s only getting tougher in the age of NIL. Professional sports long ago made its marketing start-driven, it’s “[Superstar player] and the [team]” messaging, using the power of stardom and intimacy of human connections to bring fans into the fold for years. But in college, the best players on the team are on the marquee for maybe a year or two.

Many fans will gladly fall in love with a student-athlete, celebrate them, and then move on to the next batch. That equation doesn’t always work so smoothly, though, especially when a transcendent individual comes along. While a professional team will have several years to leverage a player’s star power to win over a fan, that timeline is significantly constricted in college. There are lessons to be learned from the pros, with their roster movement becoming more common, but the challenge remains greater for college. As NIL makes these stars shine even brighter, the risk and opportunity of fleeting phenoms donning the school colors is palpable. USC has enjoyed star players passing through Pasadena for generations. So while modern times may magnify it all, the circumstances are not new for Moore and his team.

“We’re still trying to stay tapped into that relationship and hopefully those fans too,” he said, reflecting on one of college sports’ biggest names playing for USC this year in Bronny James. “So we’ll create a lot of content around those kind of things to stay tapped into those people. But ultimately you are using their platform to sell your program. And we constantly have conversations about, ‘Hey, if you have an opportunity like a Bronny, you have to capitalize on it, because a year from now you might have 12 guys that no one’s ever really heard of and then are you back to square one or did you accomplish something?”

Moore also spoke about the Golden State Warriors as a real-life example, as they seek to maintain generations of fans beyond the day the Steph-Klay-Draymond dynasty ends. “That’s a good example of like, ‘Hey, we’ve got this moment right now with Steph and Draymond and Klay and we’re winning titles, okay, what are we going to do with it? You’re always going to be popular in San Francisco, but they found a way to extend their audience.”

There are so many avenues for fandom in college sports. Someone may come into the fold because they want to watch Bronny or heard about the exploits of women’s basketball phenom JuJu Watkins or women’s golf wunderkind Amari Avery, their parents or grandparents may be alums, perhaps they went to a sports camp at the school when they were kids, or they watched a Trojans team win a title. No matter the entry point it all ladders back to the brand, to the university. To manage all of the teams and content and social media is no small feat, but it’s both a challenge and an opportunity because having so much to wrangle means there are also so many chances to earn engagement and win over a fan for life.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH JORDAN MOORE

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College, General Marketing, General Sports Business

How to Create a Distinct Entity around a Sports Partnership: The Duke’s Mayo Bowl Story

Pick a college football bowl game. Any will do. What is the ‘brand’ of the bowl game? Does it have a distinctiveness that colors the perception, even a personality, that’s consistent over time?

The Rose Bowl has its pageantry and the Sugar Bowl has its New Orleans location, but for most of the decades-long history of the dozens of bowl games and their various sponsors over the years, there wasn’t much distinctiveness to speak of. But when Miller Yoho rejoined the Charlotte Sports Foundation (following a stint earlier in his career), he and the team there had a hunch a strong brand could help them stand out and, in doing so, set a foundation to raise all KPIs for the bowl game they ran in Charlotte — today known as the Duke’s Mayo Bowl (previously the Belk Bowl, among others). Because while bowl games are by definition an annual ephemeral entity, creating something distinct can be lasting.

“We’ve taken the long approach in understanding brand building is important,” said Yoho, Director of Marketing and Communications for the Charlotte Sports Foundation, which runs the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, Jumpan Invitational, and other Charlotte-based sports events. “People have seen our strategy for the Duke’s Mayo Bowl — [that] started in 2014 when it was the Belk Bowl, understanding that no one was going to buy a bowl game ticket in October, so why not just be a part of the college football ecosystem? Why not have fun? Why not make jokes? And by doing that, people developed an affinity for the game and it became a destination rather than being matchup-dependent.

“Now we’re still very matchup-dependent, but TV tune-in, things like that — people see the Duke’s Mayo Bowl as something they want to see. And we do have fans coming because of how much fun we are, how we wink at the camera and do all that.”

There are so many bowl games crammed together in December that they can start to blend together, so Yoho and his team sought to be a purple cow amidst the herd. To put the game on the map — which would attract attention, drive more value for the eponymous partner, and increase the platform of the bowl game and the organization behind it overall.

There’s a delicate dance, however, in developing a brand for the bowl game that necessarily comingles with the title sponsor. Because while title sponsors don’t hold those spots in perpetuity (see the history of most any bowl game and the shifts in sponsors over the years), they are right there on the marquee of any and all bowl game brand accounts. The trick is finding those intersections, the north star for any good partnership, and building a relationship of trust and collaboration.

“[The Duke’s Mayo team] is aligned in what we’re trying to do,” said Yoho, who noted that Duke’s Mayo already has strong brand recognition in the south while they aim to increase their growing platform as a national brand. “They understand our mission, we understand theirs. It’s aligned. They push us…There is that constant healthy pushing to be the best possible. They understand and we understand [that] we want our games to stand alone. We want in the crowded bowl season marketplace of 40 other sponsors, we want Duke’s Mayo to be unique, and we want the Duke’s Mayo Bowl to be unique.”

Yoho continued, addressing the harmonious coexistence but distinctiveness of the Duke’s Mayo and Duke’s Mayo Bowl brands.

“Now, you do have two different brands,” he said. “You have the Duke’s Mayo brand and the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. There are places they intersect and there’s places where they probably are not on the same train track — but the train tracks run parallel. I shouldn’t be doing something that they deem inappropriate in the same way that they’re not going to speak about the game in a way that isn’t going to relate.

“So there’s a lot of healthy conversations and dialogue. We meet year-round weekly just to talk through things and activations. And we’re blessed in that they’re like rocket fuel to everything we do, they provide the substance to make all the marketing fun.”

At the most basic level, both entities seek to reach and engage college football fans. That’s who the Duke’s Mayo Bowl wants to attract to buy tickets, tune in to watch, and consume their ancillary content; and to meaningfully reach that audience is why a brand like Duke’s Mayo invests in a bowl game sponsorship in the first place. As Yoho noted earlier, the Duke’s Mayo Bowl is just the name of an annual game until the opponents get announced. Yoho and his team can’t affect those teams, but they can create a brand that gets fans and players of any team excited to get selected for the Duke’s Mayo Bowl by building an appealing brand and reputation. It all works together, too, in that creating a valuable and distinct brand produces a valuable platform for a partner like Duke’s Mayo.

It starts to sound pretty simple and logical in those terms, and Yoho’s remit is clear in that the best thing he can do is create a distinct brand that’s attractive to the broad college football fan base.

“There’s a lot of trial and error and discovery and now it’s become secondhand in terms of understanding, like, all we have to do is understand what college football is, which is probably the most chaotic and flawed of all sports and constantly changing, but lean into that and have fun and understand that it’s also because of that it’s beautiful,” said Yoho, articulating the thinking behind the Duke’s Mayo Bowl’s approach to personality, content, and social media. “I would argue college sports is probably the closest you come to religion in terms of just how you feel in a stadium — so lean into that. A

“And by doing that, it’s the long term payoff of you create a brand that people relate to. And then if you have a brand people relate to…[and then] out of left field [it gets announced that] you’re playing in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl [fans are] excited because they know that it’s a brand that’s fun, it doesn’t take itself too seriously and they’re going to show up and have the time of their lives. So that’s the payoff. It’s a ten-year bet, but it’s paying off.”

The beauty of building a sweeping brand, too, is that it transcends social media and makes all the other elements of the game, and its activations, come together organically. It’s all too common for ‘brand’ and ‘personality’ these days to get narrowly defined as social media copy and content; heck, sometimes ‘voice’ merely considers the tone of your tweets. But look around the Duke’s Mayo Bowl — what you see on the broadcast, the fan experience, the interactive activities around the game — and the consistency stands out, compounding the effectiveness of everything they’re trying to do.

And make no mistake, this all looks like fun and games (and it IS fun and games), but there’s a point to it all. It’s the synergy of putting all the elements together in harmony that leads to outsized results for the Charlotte Sports Foundation, its Duke’s Mayo Bowl, and the title sponsor with a twang (Duke’s Mayo, iykyk).

“There is the sponsorship fulfillment and we’re crushing it in that,” said Yoho, discussing the core objectives for his efforts. “Like, I think everyone sees Duke’s Mayo as a household name — and it was before in the South, but it’s expanded, and in the South it’s penetrated even more, and that’s due to their trust and awesome and incredible team.

“But also the payoff is the people going to the games, the engagement, what they’re doing, and creating a spectacle where the football game is still the most important thing, the people are suiting up and going — but we also created an environment where it is fun to go to. It’s different, it’s unique; it starts with social, but in the end, if you go in and people are chugging mayo and whatnot, it’s part of what we’re doing all the way and everything’s aligned.”

The terms ‘sponsorship’ and ‘partnership’ often get used interchangeably. But make no mistake, the best outcomes come from partnerships. From relationships that aren’t a transaction that results in an agreed-upon activation, but a collaboration that starts with a foundation, but builds upon it — through teamwork, through exchange of ideas, through reacting and evolving activations — working together to achieve results that benefit all sides. Look closely enough and you can start to tell them apart — the Duke’s Mayo and Duke’s Mayo Bowl is undoubtedly a partnership. That truth comes out in the way Yoho describes the year-round meetings for two games all year (the Duke’s Mayo Classic and Duke’s Mayo Bowl), the mutual trust and alignment of goals, and the results fans see culminate each year with the famous ‘mayo dump’ that serves as a symbol of all those conversations, strategies, and elements coming together.

Said Yoho: “I think everyone has seen this is, I would say, the epitome of what brand marketing via sponsorship should be. And what’s happened for them and what’s happened for the game.

“That’s what happens when you work in harmony together.”

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH MILLER YOHO

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Athlete Social Media, College

NIL Through the Eyes of an Athlete: Creating and Receiving Value that Transcends Dollars

For decades, star student-athletes enjoyed an elevated local or even national status. But besides maybe a generous portion in their Chipotle bowl or skipping the line at the club, there wasn’t much (legal) remuneration for being ‘big man on campus.’

And then name-image-likeness regulations were blown wide open and the student-athlete opportunity was potentially more lucrative than ever. If the amateur athletes seized that opportunity, built their brands, and became attractive to individuals and businesses willing to pay for access to their NIL.

But athletes pitching themselves is nothing new. Most college athletes on scholarships were building up and selling a product years before they stepped foot on campus — they were marketing themselves. As future leaders for a program, as strong ambassadors for the school, and as individuals that coaches would want to invest in. A star high school quarterback in the football-mad state of Texas, Chase Griffin, went through that recruiting process, and he recognized that student-athletes, working for college athletic programs that take in millions of dollars, are well-positioned for the new era of NIL activation.

“I’ve always thought athletes were built for NIL for two reasons,” said Griffin, who ended up going to UCLA to join a historic athletics program and institution. “One, we already generate so much revenue and value for the companies and in industries that are set up around collegiate sports. And then two, we’re by nature content creators. Every single person who’s in college right now either produced their own Hudl or had a coach or guardian who created their Hudl of content that they were doing on the field and they had to create their profile and put grades and put good works in there. Every single person who’s gotten to college has been recruited off of a highlight tape off of some type of reel.”

Griffin came into UCLA already having experience doing interviews, representing himself, and even engaging with brands at various events for awards. He was more than ready for the opportunities that the opening of NIL regulations afforded student-athletes like himself. It was those media engagements and self-awareness just as much as anything he could do on the field, though. NIL activities aren’t some inherent part of being a high-level student-athlete, Griffin said, and it’s not something that every athlete needs to or even can do well. It takes work, as any traditional ‘influencer’ or celebrity or creator can attest. And while student-athletes can now legally monetize their NIL, it doesn’t mean it’s automatic riches and deals for every athlete.

“I think not everybody has to participate in NIL. And the ones that do, it’s completely up to them how much time and effort that they put into it,” said Griffin, who has become a leader in the NIL space, particularly among active athletes. “But it is very much getting what you get out of as far as the time commitment. And the thing is, it’s less reliant on sport than people realize. There are folks who are extremely good content creators who are in gymnastics or who are in soccer, or who are in rowing that are getting deals because they know how to create a follower base and create content that is engagement-worthy, and brands recognize that.”

All of this is easier said than done. While some may have expected that the NIL floodgates would open with the loosening of the laws, that hasn’t been the case. There are plenty of headlines about student-athletes driving complementary cars, working with national brands, or booking six-figure deals — but those are much more the exception than the norm. Because it’s not that easy. Even if an athlete nails the content creator game — no easy feat, as Griffin described — there remains the challenge of attracting brands, securing deals, and somehow managing it all alongside a full academic and athletic schedule (and hopefully some of the more traditional ‘fun’ part of the college experience, too). It might as well be another curriculum for athletes hoping to participate in NIL (indeed, some universities now have classes related to the creator industry). There is another level of education available to student-athletes now, Griffin explained, and it will serve them well as students and athletes.

“I think a lot of athletes they see maybe teammates of theirs or people at other schools who play the same position or same sport succeeding and the thing is, they have no idea how it happens or they think there’s some trick to it,” said Griffin, who has done several brand deals, content collaborations, and also has a charitable foundation bearing his name. “And bottom line, the majority of college athletes haven’t done any cash deals, have earned zero $0 through name, image, and likeness.

“Those who are starting their own businesses in college, or learning through internships or work experience are getting arguably the best part of college during those college years and able to network. And athletes were [previously] barred from that…”It is no surprise that athletes who were getting these maximum contracts in the professional world were going broke because they were barred from participating in any type of business and then you give them the lottery. So now that NIL is here I think it adds to the cumulative nature of student athletes’ education while they’re still in school.”

Griffin is taking full advantage of that education and the opportunities he has as a UCLA student-athlete. And he’s doing so with intentionality about his brand and what makes his NIL stand out among all the other athletes, and individuals in general, that brands could work with. Griffin’s cultivation of his brand in the professional world has led to unique opportunities with businesses like Chase Bank, with whom he co-hosted the Zone In Podcast (alongside NFL player Kavyon Thibodeaux). It all aligns with Griffin’s aspirations of building a career in in the present and future with helping athletes to manage and create generational wealth. He started carving out such a path for his NIL and his brand fro day one, embracing a social network that isn’t the first that comes to mind for the creator economy.

“As soon as I got to UCLA, I built out my LinkedIn, which is really been a hidden moneymaker for me throughout NIL,” said Griffin, who went on to recommend that student-athletes get on the professional-focused platform, “just because I’ve connected with the right people, I’ve built a good following on there, and it adds a dynamic that a lot of other not just athlete creators, but creators in general don’t have.”

Griffin was also articulate in explaining how he wanted to represent himself. And those principles have continued to guide him as a creator, a student-athlete, a brand partner, and a human. Such an understanding and appreciation of his personal brand has clearly been a valuable asset for Griffin, as he described how it guides him and his endeavors.

“It’s really based off three things,” he said. “It’s my personal values. I consider myself a believer, a winner, a provider, and I look for other brands that mimic those values. Then two is the economic value — is the price and deliverables that they’re asking for on par with my market price? Then three is community value, where I find ways to parlay what the brand is about and their expertise and reach, as well as the money that’s coming in because of the deal, and then find ways to create community value.”

As Griffin continues to hone his brand and create value for himself and others, he recognizes how beneficial the holistic experience is for him. A lot of learning in college happens in the classroom, but there’s also a whole lot of education and growth that happens outside the classroom. For student-athletes, the new age for NIL is about much more than making a few bucks, it’s equipping them with skills that will serve them in life for years to come. And isn’t that what the college experience is all about?

“I have earned a good amount of money that I’m extremely grateful for, and have earned the ability to give money away,” said Griffin, who will have both a Master’s degree in education and another in legal studies by the time he’s finished. “But at the same time, it’s the experience that I’m most excited about because I’m creating, I think, a workable template for life that as long as I stay true to myself I’ll be able to continue growing as far as wealth creation.”

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH CHASE GRIFFIN

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College, Social Media

Inside /r/CFB — the Subreddit where College Football Fan Engagement Thrives and a Community is Sown

There’s unbelievable breaking news or a crazy game just ended — if you’re a sports fan, what do you do?

There are a number of options and many larger platforms have come and gone over the years (remember Facebook Stadium?). Some will go to their intimate group chat on iMessage or maybe Insta, some fans will tweet into the noisy timeline, maybe you’ll go and comment on the Instagram post from a news outlet or comment in the Bleacher Report feed — but some of the most engaged sports fans reside on Reddit.

This article is not a recommendation to drop everything and prioritize Reddit for a social media strategy; it’s a look at one of the most engaged sports communities everywhere, a subreddit that is just outside the top 250 subreddits in terms of subscribers but is often right near the top in average comments per day — /r/CFB, the college football community on Reddit.

In such a tribal sport, why do over 2 million fans subscribe to ‘The Internet’s Tailgate’ (as the subreddit calls itself) and what’s it like to manage and moderate such a vibrant, vehement community? Bobak Ha’Eri is part of the team behind r/CFB and has been there since the early days of the subreddit, helping to oversee the community as its growth has made things more fun, but more complicated. The result today is a thriving subreddit (and a brand that has extended to a Twitter account with hundreds of thousands of followers) that has had to professionalize, in some ways, but remains as irreverent and funny and entertaining as ever.

So what does happen when news breaks? When it does, Ha’Eri and his r/CFB co-moderators have to be ready for the tsunami coming.

“If you don’t moderate a website at all, you have total chaos,” said Ha’Eri, who had experience in message board moderation before /r/CFB, but on a much smaller scale in comparison. “With a college football section, one of the weird things that we get, which isn’t involving offensive material, is everybody’s going to try and post the same story as soon as it happens…”

The criteria for the /r/CFB when it comes to managing the deluge of content that 2.1M+ subscribers can bring, Ha’Eri explained, is: “Does it add to the conversation? Then maybe we’ll allow another one in. But it’s to also manage what I know most users would like. What we learn, because we sometimes will churn out surveys [asking] users what they want to have, and what they like about r/CFB is a variety of stories, including kind of the squirrely ones that people hadn’t thought of or heard of, is either a wacky thing at a minor school or just some kind of aspect…”

With a subreddit that big, it becomes necessary to have a more formalized approach to moderation, a framework that can guide the decision-making of the team of moderators that ultimately direct the traffic on /r/CFB. Ha’Eri has a legal background, so his mind sometimes thinks in such terms when considering moderation choices. The team behind /r/CFB has also organically developed an approach to leading the community and the brand. Because when you’re that big, there is power to wield. And, as someone once said, with great power comes great responsibility.

“[You] kind of trust [Reddit’s upvote/downvote] system, but at the same time, we have to play a more parental role,” said Ha’Eri, who fell in love with college football as an undergrad at USC. “And again, I’m really belaboring this, making it academic, but from a legal analogy, you know, that’s what the judge’s role is. The judge has to say, is this case enough to move forward to a jury? Is this enough where we’ve stated something that is a question that the law provides a remedy, so it isn’t quite that mind-intensive to be a moderator.

“We’ve always had that level of trying to keep some sort of level of equality between all of us with some respect for seniority and understanding. So then we created an executive committee of more senior moderators who always end up making the bigger decisions like should we move forward and make an LLC? Should we move forward and make that? So we’re not forcing [things] because I mean, you know, you might have up to 20 or 30 moderators [and] that can be onerous to try and get everyone on the same page. And also sometimes you need to move quickly.”

Even with a soft layer of oversight, it’s primarily the users and their upvotes and engagement that drive r/CFB. It is quite the cosmopolitan community; spend a few minutes browsing the threads and you’ll quickly have counted dozens of different college programs represented. Fans that make their way to sports bars IRL to watch the Saturday games will often go to the ‘Michigan’ bar or an ‘Ohio State’ bar, where they can be surrounded by fellow fans all sporting the same colors. And online, there are plenty of team-specific message boards and communities for college football fans, so why do so many eschew those more insular places in favor of the mixed town square on /r/CFB? It’s an interesting question posed to Ha’Eri, because college football is so tribal; it’s that passionate patriotism that makes the sport so special. But r/CFB has thrived because of, not in spite of, the melting pot.

Ha’Eri once found himself on USC message boards, but he’s come to recognize why so many fans flock to /r/CFB, often leaving their segregated communities behind. And it’s that intermingling that has made r/CFB so special.

“They have their own peculiarities oftentimes,” said Ha’Eri of the more team-specific platforms and message boards. “it’s a very concentrated community and they sometimes see feedback loops…Sometimes you get irrational views and it becomes an echo chamber, and that echo chamber feedback loop can be an issue. And frankly, sometimes you’re like, these people, I’m a fan, but you all sound crazy….

“r/CFB did something that’s hard to do,” he continued, “which is have a college football website that caters to all fans and can keep the peace…I think people like hearing from other fan bases. They like hearing news…”

As Ha’Eri noted in discussing the vastness of the /r/CFB community, there are over 130 FBS teams in college football, each with their own dedicated fan bases. Some fan bases are bigger than others, rivalries can get fierce, and power users can dominate the conversation if left unchecked. Ha’Eri and his colleagues know what makes r/CFB so special, though, and to hear him tell it is to understand that there’s, well, at least something of a method to the madness — underlying objectives that guide how they want to govern the community.

“Our official mission statement is ‘We’re a welcoming community that celebrates fun, camaraderie and creativity in all of college football,’” he said. “Because that is what we’re really about…r/CFB offers that kind of like, here’s all the news items that are kind of hot right now. Oh, but the fun thing is, here’s a community of people that love to make, usually jokes or interesting commentary and sometimes worthless commentary. But that’s what the the voting arrows are for…”

Beyond the mission statement, the alternative moniker of r/CFB feels so spot on for anyone familiar with the community. Because if Twitter once proclaimed itself as ‘the biggest virtual sports bar in the world,‘ /r/CFB really does feel like ‘The Internet’s Tailgate.’ A place where this plenty of passion and shouting, to be sure, but also the jokes and witty commentary to which Ha’Eri alluded.

To keep the analogy going, and to try and understand why so many fans go to Reddit, of all places, to expound and vent, there’s something special about the communal nature of r/CFB that stands in stark contrast to the noisy nature of shouting into the void on Twitter. Comment trees sprout branches upon branches on /r/CFB, conversation builds with others more so than the hordes of individuals ratio’ing the tweet of a team or reporter. Fans aren’t just seeking an outlet to scream, they’re seeking other fans. I’ve noticed, at eventful times, fans going to Instagram and commenting en masse on the team’s most recent post, even if it’s from several hours ago like a photo of the team in warm-ups. That’s the pull that Reddit offers. Because whether it’s the game thread or the postgame thread, the r/CFB ‘tailgaters’ go to their college football town square to say their piece, knowing others are waiting to do the same — and react and engage with others.

“Some people, I swear, have been sitting back as the game is going on and [thinking] like, I know what I’m going to write in the post game,” said Ha’Eri, who has helped grow the @RedditCFB Twitter account to over 330,000 follows, partly by sharing some of the best /r/CFB posts and comments. “They’ll write something and happily hit F5 [to refresh] over and over again the moment it appears…Sometimes it’s serious, sometimes it’s hilarious, sometimes it’s a lot of frustration. But it provokes conversation because the way the comment section works is they’re all comment trees based off a top level comment.”

As fans come back week after week, game after game, day after day, something starts to happen — community forms. Ha’Eri and his moderator team mostly sit back and let fans start conversations and go back and forth with each other. It’s seeing that play out which is so heartening to Ha’Eri and why all the (unpaid) work that goes into keeping it going is worthwhile. Because while there may be biting jokes, maybe even some name-calling — it’s all fun at the end of the day and it’s a community that transcends any differences in team colors, accents, and borders. There’s something life-reinforcing about that, at the risk of hyperbole, reminds us about the inherent power of community that sports embodies. That’s the magic one can see in r/CFB.

“It’s a part of the [college football] culture. We’re used to ranting at each other or making funny comments,” said Ha’Eri. “We found our strength is a community and the users that come to us and what makes them useful is that people bond over the sport.

“Sport is is beyond politics. It’s beyond [this or that]. It’s joyous, it’s fun, and if you hopefully have a healthy relationship with it, you know, ultimately it’s silly and frivolous.”

*********

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH BOBAK HA’ERI

READ THE SNIPPETS

College, Digital, Sponsorships

How Putting Fans First Guides Georgia Athletics Social Media Strategy and the Lessons from That Philosophy

At its heart, sports marketing and fan engagement is about the fans. Putting oneself in the fan’s shoes, serving them what they want, and remembering why fans are fans in the first place. The north star doesn’t need to be overcomplicated.

So while sitting at the helm of a historic, beloved institution like the Georgia Bulldogs, the athletic programs covering 21 teams for the University of Georgia, is a daily challenge, Jen Galas keeps the main things the main things — and that’s the fans and student-athletes. It sounds pretty simple listening to Galas explain the program’s social media philosophy.

“From a strictly social side, I think at the heart of it is we want to make sure that we give our student-athletes the best experience that we can and we want to make sure our fans get the best experience that they can get,” said Galas, the Assistant Athletic Director – Social Media and Digital Strategy for The University of Georgia Athletics. “So a lot of the stuff we do is driven to promote our student-athletes and our coaching staff and also make sure that we provide a top-notch experience for our fans. Not only the fans who come to Athens and come to games and are here in person, but also the ones who aren’t or can’t and making sure they know that they are also important to us because they very much are.”

Fans want to feel valued. Student-athletes expect to earn an education while making lifelong memories. But we are a goals-obsessed professional culture, chasing tangible outcomes. In sports that often means revenue — ticket sales, merchandise, donations (for college athletics), and sponsorship. While those are an important part of any sports business (more on that later), all of those revenue streams are fueled by genuine fandom. Without emotional investment, there is no financial investment.

So, for Galas and her colleagues, they know their first objective is to foster the fans. Everything else stems from that.

“Our job is to give somebody a bit of entertainment, a bit of joy when they’re scrolling through their phone or whatever,” said Galas, who has been at Georgia since 2011. “So I don’t know that you can draw a direct line [of fan ascendance] — I think it’s great to say you want somebody to follow you and then come to a game and then buy a mini plan and then buy a season ticket and think that in a dream world, sure, I think everybody would want that track, but that’s not reality. It’s just not. So I hope that happens sometimes.

“But I also think treating our fans very equally and putting ourselves in [fan’s shoes]. You’re like, ‘Well, what would I like to see? What would entertain me? What would make me happy? What do I want to know?’”

The focus on intuiting what fans want doesn’t mean Georgia Athletics doesn’t establish strategic goals that guide their execution. But it’s that focus that serves as the north star, the one unchanging philosophy; virtually everything else is subject to change, evolve, improve, or adjust in service to that powerful proposition. It’s easy to get sucked into pleasing the platforms, but it shouldn’t be done at the expense of having the fans at the center of it all. Goals that are too rigid can lead to a chilling effect on creativity and the ability to continue focusing on fans.

“Goals can change in the beginning of and throughout the year,” explained Galas. “They can and they should, especially in a medium that’s new and changes all the time — and when I say new like relatively — but that changes every day and something changes and happens every day, so your goals should change.

“Personally speaking, if I set and said this is the one thing we want to accomplish all year and if that’s the only thing I focus on, that means we’re probably slacking off somewhere else. Something else is suffering because of that.”

There are some things at a generationally important institution like Georgia Athletics for which change and evolution must be treated with care. And the growth of social media, with each of those 21 teams having its own Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, only made looking after the history and brand more challenging and important. Because while the fans and the feel of Georgia baseball, for example, may be different from that of Georgia women’s basketball or Georgia football, they are all their own entity but part of a powerful collective whole that is the Georgia Bulldogs.

If that all sounds a bit complex or even convoluted, that’s because it’s not easy. Fans are multi-generational. Platforms evolve. Programs evolve. And for Galas and her colleagues, the responsibility of keeping Georgia looking like Georgia while allowing for necessary evolution is a tough job.

The big puzzle is the identity of Georgia Athletics, and each one of our sports is a piece of that puzzle. So we have 21 sports, so there are 21 pieces to this puzzle that makes up everything,” said Galas, who oversees the Bulldogs’ ‘digital identity,’ among her other remits. “In an ideal situation, all of those fit perfectly together. So when you look at it as a whole, you’re like, ‘Oh shit, yeah, that’s Georgia.’

“Especially on social graphics, it’s the square with the G in it and that’s pretty much on every single thing that we do, and making sure that we don’t go nuts with every team having 27 fonts that they use…making sure that when we go into a process it’s number one, what’s the reasoning? And number two, how can we make this as Georgia as it can be? And I think especially in the last couple of years we’ve done a really nice job of giving people some identities but also saying we know how far to push it and then we know how to bring it back and I think we’ve done [that]

“I think for a while it was very one size fits all, which I think can work, but I also think there’s a couple of different approaches you can take to it. And we just sort of said ‘Wait a second, let’s have some fun with it, and let’s play around with some things.’”

The way the puzzle pieces, across the board, is starting to become clear, isn’t it? When the north star stays in place, everything else is easier to decipher and execute. That includes the increasingly integral way that sponsorships get activated on digital and social media. Georgia Athletics ensures the fan experience and value prop is at the center of sponsored social, too. It makes sense for all parties — the fans get a great experience (always the primary objective) and the partners see a better performance of their activation.

It all sounds good to say out loud, but what separates the best ideas from the most successful are thoughtful, laid-out plans. For the Bulldogs, that takes the form of a consistent, reliable ‘menu’ of activations — content they can be confident their fans want and will enjoy that can be tailored for sponsors. Galas was articulate in describing their sponsored social strategy, which aligns with the overarching philosophy that has been the motif of this article.

“I think we try to do kind of the menu of [sponsorship opportunities on social] saying, ‘Hey, these are the things that are tried and true that work. Sell these first.’ If somebody has an idea, let’s talk about it. Let’s not just blindly agree to it because sometimes it may not be possible, but I think we try to say like, here’s the menu, pick from the menu, this is available inventory,” Galas explained. “We have an inventory sheet for season-wide things, we save some things for one-offs that we oftentimes don’t sell for like a season-long campaign in case somebody wants to jump in the middle of the year we kind of hold some back for a couple of different reasons.

“But if there’s really great ideas — I mean we’re not opposed to any great idea, but we also want to make sure that — nobody wants to see a million ads on a channel that you like. Nobody wants to see it.

“So how can we incorporate our partners in something that’s going to resonate with our fans and make them click or make them watch through for the whole thing or make them engage in some way.”

When every idea starts with the fan at the center, everything else just falls correctly into place. There are often competing incentives and a lot of noise in devising and executing social media strategy, but even as one gazes up at a sky crowded with lights, there’s always that one shines a bit brighter, that always guides the way — that’s the north star, and in sports the north star is the fan.

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH JEN GALAS

Athlete Social Media, College, Sponsorships

Why Athletes Were and Still Are the Original Influencers — If They Want to Be

There’s this notion that athletes have to build their brands. If they’re not making the most of their time in the sports spotlight and growing their brands (in the form of social media clout), they’re deficient, missing out, or even negligent.

But it’s not so black and white. It’s like the 7-foot teenager whom everyone expects to try and make it big in basketball or the Rookie of the Year that bursts onto the national radar — if they’re not maximizing that opportunity, they’re doing it wrong.

But the thing about sports, and what differentiates athletes from professional influencers and creators who literally make their living from social media clout, is that it’s largely gravy for the most elite athletes. The marketing and branding opportunity, however, can be transformative helping to create value for universities, leagues, teams, and, yes, the athletes themselves and their families.

Dakota Crawford, Head of Marketing for athlete influencer marketplace platform MarketPryce, has encountered just about every variation of athlete in his career. He worked with IndyCar drivers whose livelihood was directly affected by their attractiveness to potential team sponsors. He helped National Hockey League (NHL) players build their brands, an ancillary goal for many who already had millions guaranteed thanks to years-long contracts. And now at MarketPryce, Crawford works with athletes of all sorts, particularly college athletes at all levels, many of whom have a brief time in the spotlight to capitalize on that athlete advantage.

Crawford has come to appreciate that the different circumstances in which athletes find themselves affect the sense of urgency they feel to build up a brand that’s all their own.

“There are a couple of ways I think of it,” said Crawford, who helped the NHL launch and grow its Player Social Development Program before joining MarketPryce. “One is like this graph of an x-axis and a y-axis where one [axis] is how good are you at your sport and how influential are you on the field or on the ice or what have you. The other is how much do I need to put my personality out there? And they’re inverted lines, right? So if you’re Alex Ovechkin, you don’t necessarily ever need to do anything that shows off your personality. You’re good enough at hockey that you have a built-in following and they’re gonna be excited if you post anything…

“If you are a rookie playing in Anaheim, you have a slightly different challenge and I think you have to come in ready to put yourself out there, build your brand. And that’s even more so the case for the athletes we’re working with now at MarketPryce, who are D1, D2 volleyball players — your performance on the court isn’t gonna carry you to stardom on social…”

Athletes have so many built-in advantages that those others, the professional social media influencers, do not. First, they arrive with [and live] stories that are appealing to followers and to brands. No athlete reaches the pinnacle of their sport without a lot of sacrifice, hard work, and aspirational talent. Second, while creators find themselves on a perpetual hamster wheel of content creation, athletes often have photos, highlights, and stories flowing by nature of their occupation, coming from leagues, agents, teams, and media. Crawford called out this valuable benefit for athletes but noted that for the non-Ovechkin-like athletes to go to that next level, they need to do a little more.

“We would tell players [at the NHL] we can only do so much for you, first of all, but what we can cover is the base that is your on-ice performance. I can help you celebrate your biggest moments on the ice, I can help you have great assets to share, to support NHL campaigns like Hockey Fights Cancer or something to post during pride month or whatever it might be,” he said. “But the most engaging thing you can put out is what you are willing to do yourself.

“I think I would tell any college athlete who we work with now ‘Figure out how to put your personality out there. Tell your story, do it authentically. If you get a hype video from the team that you play for, great; post that. But it can’t be the only thing that you post.”’

Crawford and his colleagues saw that promise come to fruition during the height of the pandemic in 2020, as players had nothing but time and TikTok took the world by storm. That enthusiasm and activity dissipated, however, as Crawford said many NHL players largely went back to the perhaps excessive humility once things went back to (kind of) normal. But something else magical started to happen as Crawford and his team found a young, willing group of up-and-coming star players.

Working in collaboration with the league, Anaheim Ducks rookie Trevor Zegras became the ‘poster child’ for what it could look like to mix the spoon-fed sports highlights with the ‘put yourself out there’ mentality. And that took it to the next level, for Zegras and for the league.

“We equipped him to post around [his viral] moments and that’s great. And it’s kind of like we talked about — because he was doing awesome things he’s getting more engagement so he didn’t have to lean into it with his personality to keep those numbers going up,” Crawford described of Zegras’s ascendance in his 2021-22 rookie season, highlighted by a viral video the league made for Zegras representing his anti-highlights, a ‘lowlights’ video of Zegras messing up at times.

“Not every player was willing to laugh at themselves in that way, but Trevor was, and we learned that, after six months, a year of working with him through the first stages of his career…”To me, that was the moment where I was like, ‘We did this.’ We really got a player excited, bought in, and posting something that moves the needle for his brand and for the league.”

A new generation of athlete is here. One that recognizes the opportunity to be more than an athlete, that the combination of being a superstar athlete and a human is powerful. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Athletes were always the original influencers, anyway, and they’re starting to realize the opportunity that offers.

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH DAKOTA CRAWFORD

Athlete Social Media, College

How NIL Has Transformed College Athletes into Businesses and Brand Builders — and How Schools Can and Should Help Them

Brands used to have all the power. This was true in just about every industry. That’s not to say individuals didn’t matter — there were celebrity spokespeople and other ‘stars’ that received acclaim, often in third-party media. But that all began to change, gradually, as the creator economy arose and social media was more about individuals than brands.

And even in college athletics, where we’re not all that far removed from team-wide social media “bans,” the convergence of the power of the individual was always an inevitability.

And, just like that, decades-old paradigms in college athletics were transformed — student-athletes on social media wasn’t a distraction or a risk, but the next big thing in the arms race we call recruiting.

“Texas (Longhorns Athletics) really got behind the opportunity for athletes to make the most of their time there and be representatives of the university,” said Marc Jordan, who worked in social media at the University of Texas Athletics before joining NIL platform INFLCR. “I think as soon as the recruiting part of it caught up where they recognized that recruits were following their athletes and that the more active and the more available and the more that their athletes were on social, the better it was for recruiting.”

There was a positive correlation between athletes posting on social media and schools getting exposure for their programs to the audience that matters most to coaches — recruits. Even while athletes were barred from monetizing their burgeoning social media brands, there was still value in growing their followers and accounts for a potential future payoff. The mutual benefits meant future recruits could be enticed by seeing not just cool content on athletes’ Stories, but also by the prospect of getting access to such cool content themselves when they played there. Water slides and barber shops only go so far for a generation that virtually worships top social media creators.

Then NIL monetization came and the floodgates appeared ready to open. For Jordan and his Texas colleagues at the time, they knew many student-athletes would be ready to dive in. But these were just kids; 18-21 year-olds that had spent their lives mastering their sport and their bodies, but with little to no experience managing a potentially professional social media presence.

“We would work with different teams and we would work with different departments to prepare their athletes, get them onto a better posting cadence, have them understand what’s good and what’s bad, the difference between editorial and commercial content, and reasons why you focus more on that editorial,” said Jordan, who now works with schools across the country that utilize the INFLCR platform. “[We were] making sure that they didn’t just become the NASCAR of Instagram where there are just logos everywhere and there’s no value behind it.”

It’s all easier said than done. There may be colleges with decades or centuries of experience teaching kids traditional academics and decades of time in teaching student-athletes about sports performance — but they never had to worry much about teaching a diverse set of hundreds of athletes of different backgrounds and experience what it meant to build, monetize, and manage their name, image, and likeness. That’s why many have turned to a number of technology and services platforms that have rapidly arisen to serve this need, most notably INFLCR and Opendorse, which together work with hundreds of colleges across the US to help athletes monetize and build their NILs. For Jordan at INFLCR, he’s found an important part of helping athletes is to create a learning system that will actually work for them.

“I think in the past I’ve been naive to think that we could give athletes, you know, here are 20 steps to NIL success. No one’s gonna go through 20 steps. No athlete is going to go through and do that,” said Jordan. “We’ve offered some online courses that are quick, that have allowed athletes to learn very quickly — but breaking it down to here are four steps that you can do, here are the things that you could do in the next five minutes that will help you down the road, and then letting them learn as they go; adding more as they do the initial steps, but not trying to overload them too quickly, because there’s one thing these athletes don’t have [is] time.”

Athletes (and, well, students in general) may not get too excited about their chemistry or English lit class (some do!), but when you start to talk about making money from their NIL, ears perk up. This is when the fun starts, when athletes go from potential pitchmen for their sports programs to start-up businesses in their own right — the business of being them. Just like they work with a team dietitian to break down their nutrition, a strength coach for muscle, and a position coach for their sport — it only makes sense for athletes to get down to the food-log and film-study level of developing a strategy to make their NIL the best it can be. This is the kind of analytical work athletes can get behind, because success can be life-changing. But it’s not easy. Jordan starts at the foundation, discussing who the athlete’s social media audience is and how that changes the day they commit to the school and step on campus.

“We talk to [the athletes] about [brand] and we also break down kind of their audience because we [approach it] for what [their audience] is that day,” Jordan explained. “So let’s say they want to build their brand in a certain area, we talk to them a little bit about, ‘Okay, well, think about your social media now.”

Jordan went on to explain the different segments that often comprise an athlete’s audience, from their childhood communities to fans of their high school team, fans of their college team, and everyone in between and beyond. But as athletes get more intentional about their soon-to-be professional brands and who they want to be, it can be a challenging balance to serve the various buckets of their social media audience while also evolving themselves as a person and a brand.

“As you are figuring out content and as you’re figuring out brand building, [you need to understand] that when you post things and when you want to get interaction, you have to at least satisfy one of those buckets or groups,” said Jordan. “But the more of them that you can get interested in that type of content, the better and higher engagement it’s gonna have.

“So as you’re adding in different things — like, if you’re interested in music in fashion — understand that those are gonna be harder things to build early on because you’re adding a new type of audience into your current following…We want to make sure that they are setting up their audience to care about them for when they aren’t competing anymore, and for when they do go in [and] enter the workforce or they retire and sail off into the sunset — we just wanna make sure that that audience sticks with them.”

As these NIL initiatives evolve — and boy are they evolving quickly — they will gain more tentacles. A water slide or a lazy lagoon or other quirky amenities constructed to woo recruits requires little upkeep, let alone department-wide integration, compared to NIL programs. There are parts of college football programs, for example, that exist in a virtual silo, almost completely removed from the rest of athletics. But NIL practices — they work best when everybody is on board, focusing on making the flowery promises of their press releases come to fruition.

“The only way for these programs and these things to work is for them to have substance,” said Jordan. “The recruit will be able to see right through any cute announcement or any branded program if there isn’t any substance behind it…

“We need this symbiosis between [INFLCR] and the athletics department.”

College athletics programs are no longer just fostering student-athletes. There’s an influencer-like, brand-building, NIL developing practice that’s part of the program, as well. And it’s only getting bigger. The recruiting pitch will be less about the novel amenities the program has and more about case studies on how they’ve helped student-athletes make money and build a valuable brand. For many student-athletes, their four years of college sports could be among the most lucrative of their lives, monetarily and otherwise. That time presents an opportunity — it’s the responsibility of their institutions to ensure they’re able to make the most of it.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH MARC JORDAN

College, Social Media

How Creative Teams in Sports Can Execute Thoughtful, Effective Strategy

It sometimes feels like magic. All of our favorite sports teams — college, pro, US, international — produce and post incredible content every day. There are graphics and GIFs, videos and memes, and they all activate the brand, convey information, and oftentimes tell a story.

But it’s not magic spells that conjure all this creative, it’s teams of producers and designers that execute a strategy, serve a purpose, represent the brand, and aim to keep up with the insatiable demand of teams and fans. It’s a lot for even the most seasoned creatives to take on, who must balance that volume with their artistic desires and the purpose of each piece. Oh, and at best, they may earn a second or two of fans’ time. Kennon Pearson, who works in Duke Athletics, talked about what’s in mind for him and his team as they begin a new piece.

“Even though we have our baseline look, a lot of times there still is creative freedom. [So] it’s like, what do I want to do with this? Or what’s the focal point?” said Pearson, who is Assistant Director of Creative Services and Graphic Design for the Blue Devils [Duke Athletics’s name]. “Like with records or number of wins, usually we like to highlight the number in big [font], and then it’ ‘Alright, do we have cutouts for this? Do we want them to be smaller? Do we want them to cover it up? Do we want them to be inside of it?’…

“Usually when we’re creating, we look at the two things we start with — is there a focal point text or person, and then how do we want to color it?…“My philosophy is always whatever that focal point is, it needs to be pronounced enough to where [users] don’t get banner blindness and they just keep scrolling. They see a number, they see a word, they see a person and they’re like, oh, who is this? What is this? And they stop.”

Stopping the scroll is the challenge, and beautiful pieces like those Pearson and his colleagues produce are the solution. But while they want to indeed exercise that creative freedom, they are still all creating for the same team, so to speak, the same brand — Duke Athletics. So it now becomes cutting through the clutter that fans see fill their feeds every day, creating something that stands out, but that still looks like Duke. But Pearson takes that responsibility seriously, especially for the special occasions he enumerated like milestones and historic achievements. Those moments, and the creative marking them, shouldn’t look like everything else, and it’s worth the extra effort to make something unique within the Duke palette.

“It’s really just artistic interpretation where we’re making something unique for every single [moment],” said Pearson, who noted that the football and men’s and women’s basketball teams have dedicated creative staff. “And that can sound like a lot — it is if you think about it — but we’ve gotten so used to doing it, that it’s just kinda like we want those pieces to stand out because I think that no matter what, they’ll still look, and feel like a Duke piece and they’ll always try to keep it to looking like it is part of that team. You don’t want it to look exactly like the last landmark that another team did.”

Here’s where it’s instructive to get a peek behind the magician’s curtain. There is at least something of a method to the madness, tips for the trade that help to scale creative by controlling (and streamlining) the controllables. Creative teams have to seek out any efficiencies they can because producing graphics and videos and art requires time built-in for, well, the creative part. It was informative and interesting to hear Pearson talk about how he manages the creative production process.

“One thing for example is we use a lot of the same sizes,” said Pearson, “something that’s a 4×5, 16×9 — so I have a folder on our Box [cloud storage]…where I have a 4×5 PSD, a 16×9 PSD. Or if it’s something where I know I need to use multiple artboards, I’ve got that set up, so that way I’m not having to open it up, add a color and add guides every single time; it’s already set up…

“Currently I’ve been using my own library where I have logos saved, any common textures that I use for all sports or even for some sports — colors, because we do have different blues…“But basically everything is starred. I have templates saved, I have folders in Box that have textures I might need. So everything is accessible as quickly as possible.”

Even the most streamlined operation does not mean creative teams become factories, content for the sake of content. There is no quenching the thirst of fans for quality content, but the asks add up and time and resources are never endless. Every digital, social, and marketing team must be inclined to ask why. Why do we need to post this, create this, ask for this, to dedicate some of those scarce time and resources for this?

“In general, everything we design…we try to make sure that it has a purpose and we have an outcome we wanna reach instead of just making it for the sake of making it,” said Pearson…It would be cool to do some more fun stuff like [memes], but I think that in general, we try to make everything as purposeful as possible, and it works really well for us.”

There is a temptation nowadays to measure everything in raw numbers. When the success of a given social media operation, for example, is judged in its end-of-season report by impressions, engagements, views, and engagement rate, it seems perfectly sensible to say each piece of creative should be judged the same way. There can be value in that. But it may be missing the forest for the trees.

Pearson noted that, yes, analytics are important. They do tell part of the story as to how much the creative resonated with fans and followers. But Pearson does see the forest, too, talking about impact and value that goes beyond double-taps and hearts. When the creative team is charged with producing vast volumes of content that most fans will see for a split-second as they scroll or tap through their feeds, it comes down to making those moments matter and setting up the operation for scale.

“It becomes kind of a gut feeling,” said Pearson, mulling over the notion of success of creative. “Like, when we’re putting something together [we ask] what is going to be impactful? And if even just a few people like it and see it, that’s still successful. Of course, you want it to be big numbers and huge shares; you want your analytics to be insane. Sometimes it doesn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean that something was a failure.

“I think that a lot of times what you might consider a failure is is it something that we created, like a template, that didn’t get used or used enough or didn’t make sense? I think that’s probably more I would say is a success is — is it something that we made that is used frequently if it’s a template? Or if it’s not a template, is it something that caught somebody’s eye?”

The bar is only getting higher for content to stand out and to have impact. There is more competition for attention, ever-more ephemeral trends and aesthetics, and a rising demand for creative (because we’ve gotten better at extracting revenue from creative efforts, too). The creative teams of the future will be even more efficient, removing any friction in the production process so that they can focus on what they do best — create.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH KENNON PEARSON

Athlete Social Media, College, Social Media

If Everything Matters in the Process for Coaches and Athletes, Social Media Does Too

It wasn’t that long ago that social media was anathema for college athletics.

For high-level college coaches, social media was at best a distraction for their student-athletes and at worst was a place the athletes could get themselves or their school in trouble; let alone be exposed to toxic vitriol from fans. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Slowly but surely, coaches realized the power of those platforms and how a new era had arrived for not just their student-athletes, but themselves, too. Alex Cervasio was among the early sherpas showing many high-level coaches the way. He helped them see the opportunity this new era presented for them.

“I think before the internet and social media really, coaches were at the mercy, so to speak, of the gatekeepers; and a lot of those gatekeepers were beat writers and the newspaper people before them, or the SIDs at the university,” said Cervasio, who heads up CVAS Consulting and co-founded The Daily Coach. “I think first and foremost, it was controlling that message. Not letting the gatekeepers dictate what is said about you and what you’re saying or what people think about you.”

Outsized coach personalities of decades past were ultimately built through beat writer stories, postgame interviews, and press conferences. So now, more than ever, coaches, athletes, executives — all these public individuals — already had the notoriety; now they get to frame it. Cervasio said it’s authentic intention that forms the core of an effective approach. Find what makes you naturally stand out and activate it.

“(It’s) really leaning into every coach’s uniqueness,” Cervasio explained. “What is different about [them]? What is that coach’s niche that differentiates them that no one else can copy? That is something that’s going to appeal to the decision-maker, whether it’s the student-athlete themselves or in their family or in their circle to get them on campus.

“The coaches that are successful are the ones that are authentic, that do not try to imitate or copy someone else.”

That authenticity is so key because if a coach portrays themselves one way publicly and acts another way privately, well, word gets out. It’s too easy these days — word always gets out. And all of a sudden the story coaches are telling to recruits and donors isn’t so credible. Those stakes are everything for coaches, trustworthiness is everything for any leader.

“If you make it your own, just like any creator, any person out there — if you’re putting something out there, you have to own it. (Otherwise) people see through that, especially nowadays,” Cervasio asserted. “It has to be raw and it has to be true, and it has to be the same person that they see on social media that they’re going to see if you’re sitting in the living room and you’re offering [recruits] scholarships to come play for you.”

Coaches now appreciate more than ever the power, benevolent or not, of social media platforms. And they see what it can mean for their student-athletes, too. Whether the players have professional careers ahead of them or (more likely) have four years to spend in the spotlight sports presents — coaches have a responsibility to help them make the most of those four years. Now with athletes able to monetize their name-image-likeness (NIL). And while there are risks to regularly engaging on social media, the mindset is shifting from abstinence to responsible use.

“I think coaches — you’re seeing it now — there’s educational components in the offseason, making sure [players] know the do’s and the don’ts the best practices of how to leverage that,” said Cervasio. “Some are better than others. Some athletic departments and schools are better than others, but I think everyone’s cognizant that this thing is not going anywhere.

“Let’s embrace it. Let’s educate everyone on how to best utilize it. And let’s be honest with ourselves that if we do it correctly, there are going to be some wins and, you know, unfortunately, there’s always going to be a negative connotation in the shadow and you just have to ignore those focus on what you can control.”

The positives outweigh the negatives by a country mile. Many players can change their lives through their notoriety as student-athletes. For some, it’ll mean spending money for food and leisure or rent money for families; for others, proactively building a brand can set them up for life well beyond the playing field. Because it’s not just about followers, it’s about taking advantage of that limited time when perhaps more doors are open than they ever will be for the rest of their lives, Cervasio posited.

“(Student-athletes) are building a brand on campus,” he said. “I say it all the time — when you’re on, let’s just say University of Oregon’s campus for four years, you can pick up the phone…and a major booster, a major donor will take your phone call because you are playing football for Oregon or basketball for Oregon. The minute you step off campus, unless you have that relationship or that one-to-one or maybe you won the national title or whatnot, it’s a lot harder for you to get in those doors and those phone calls and meetings.”

For athletes, for coaches, for executives — for anyone, really — the low-hanging fruit may be to just lean into what earned the notoriety in the first place. But this goes back to Cervasio’s earlier point about being different. If everyone is a football player, everyone is the same. Cervasio said each student-athlete, or whomever, should figure out what they love outside of their primary occupation/sport. Because it’s not about ‘constructing’ a brand or persona, it’s just being yourself and indulging it. Remember, people don’t engage with ‘brands’ quite so much, they engage with people.

“I always go back to what is your passion? You know, what gets you up in the morning besides when you’re playing (your sport)?” Cervasio said. “Do you read books, do you play video games, do you want to design golf courses in your free time? Whatever it might be, everyone has something unique that is maybe a little quirky or that they don’t share enough, but you got to lean into what makes you [different].

“So you need to be strategic about what you’re doing and what you’re trying to shape and who you are because at the end day — I always go back to you gotta be honest; what they see out there they need to see on social media, in person, on the playing field, in the interviews, all that. Otherwise, the engagement won’t be there.”

It’s easier to be honest and genuine when you’re in control. And if there is one thing that unites all these individuals that have achieved to an elite level in their chosen occupation or sport, it’s that they seek to control what they can control, give 110%, and insert your other favorite sports cliches. Social media and personal brand are part of that. For coaches, mastering social media is one more ingredient for a successful recruiting recipe. Cervasio hammers home to those he works with that it’s all important to the process.

“Everything matters,” he said. “If you don’t treat everything as the most important thing to success, then you’re going to miss something that could have helped you do something. People always say I don’t have time for social media, I don’t have time to do this video, I don’t have time to do all of that. You make the time…Everything matters.”

If you’re gonna do something, do it right. Because it’s all connected. The best coaches and the best athletes tend to be the best at building their brand. That’s no coincidence. Many adhere to their ‘process,’ and social media is now part of it. And we’re all better for it.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH ALEX CERVASIO

College, Fan Development, General Marketing

How to Maximize Resources in Sports Marketing at Any Level

Not enough time, not enough people, not enough budget and resources.

No matter the size and scale, pro or college, American or abroad — the next department that says they wouldn’t love to have more time, budget, resources, and people will be the first (okay, there are some exceptions).

But bigger isn’t always better — except when it is. And smaller and more agile isn’t always better — except when it is. That’s why it was so enlightening to learn from Michael Murtaugh, who has spent time in college athletics marketing at a number of levels, most recently at Iowa (a B1G school with a relatively massive budget and department) and today at Montana (a Big Sky school with a relatively smaller budget and department, compared to its FBS counterparts). Both schools are D-I, both have passionate fanbases, and both have talented student-athletes that achieve in their sport and their studies. But when it comes to marketing programs and resources, Murtaugh and his team at Montana must be more mindful of how they spend their time and use their resources. The team is leaner and the initiatives perhaps a bit more scrutinized. However, both school A and school B face challenges; they’re just — different.

“I’m glad that I’ve been at both levels…I think there’s a lot of value in each [experience]. I don’t think one’s better or worse than the other. They’re just different and you just have to figure out what’s important to you and what matters to you,” said Murtaugh, who also spent time at Arkansas State, Western Kentucky, SUNY Brockport, and even an internship at Clemson. “You talked about having a lot of people at Iowa — .the department is probably two and a half times the size of the one here in Montana — so sometimes things might take a little bit longer to get implemented just because of the layers, where here you talk to one or two people.

“Now there’s good and bad to that because on the way up you’re like, well, did you think about this, this and this? And you’re like, oh, I guess I didn’t. Whereas if you’d had less people you might make some errors because things hadn’t been thoroughly checked through, so then you have to say oops, won’t do that again.”

There are the pluses and minuses of the bigger departments and budgets. But one truth is that more resources means the athletic department gets to take more swings. When you shrink the ledger, each investment becomes that much more of a big deal. And therefore each decision must stand up to more scrutiny. If everything’s important, then nothing’s important. And if you try to execute every idea, well, nothing gets done. For college athletics marketers, there is a constant balance at play. Because there are so many sports, so many fan segments to reach and engage, and a mandate to make every sport and event the best possible. For Murtaugh and his colleagues, it means they have to identify and focus on what matters most.

“It’s really trying to figure out what is important. What should we be focusing our energy on? Because if we’re focusing our energy on like ten different things, we’re not really doing anything. And so what good is that?…,” he said. “And so it’s like, what are some of the things that are fads that it might be nice to know this now, but six months from now, it’s going to be nothing again. Do we spend our time on that?…You just have to kind of try to figure it out along the way, see industry trends, see what other people are doing, see what other people are having success with.”

Murtaugh also discussed how that mindset permeates their strategy 24/7/365. It’s not just about each game, each season, and each academic year. The volume and the speed of college sports necessitates always staying (or trying to stay) a couple steps ahead.

“What are some of things that we just cannot do without?,” Murtaugh asked rhetorically, reinforcing the equation of economy. “But what are some of the things that we want to do in the future?…Let’s start putting a plan together so when we’re talking in March and April of next year we’re hitting the ground running. So [come] summer we’ll be ready to go and we won’t have any downtime because we’re already going to have our kind of our marching orders because we already know where we want to go.”

Regardless of size, resources, or any number of variables, all organizations could benefit from the scrutiny and planning Murtaugh preaches. Plans, preparation, and certainly execution cannot happen in a silo, however. Cross-team coordination is becoming more valuable and expected than ever. Part of it is aligning goals, to be sure, but something else is at play here, too — a convergence around content. While there are different skillsets and tactics that permeate each aspect of a college athletics department, content is currency for most — telling their story, conveying their messages, and winning over their customers — content amplifies and is often the foundation of those efforts. Murtaugh talked about the various hats college sports pros have to wear, regardless of department. It’s not always ideal, but it’s often out of necessity (and increasingly so).

“Marketing departments are kind of becoming game operations/content creators. In my opinion that’s a different person…it’s a different brain [and] mindset,” Murtaugh explained. “So to be hopping back and forth from one to the other — I think that can be a little bit taxing and I think that’s why you’re starting to see some people [specialize]…

“I don’t think that we’ll ever be at a point where we’ll be able to have you just do [one thing], because I do think that there is some benefit to having multiple positions, but who’s the one that’s saying enough is enough? Like, alright, I’m already doing this and this and this. I don’t want to do this either, but it has to get done and you’re the only person that can do it.”

Back to the main idea at hand — that ubiquitous challenge of always wanting for more resources — because many of Murtaugh’s notions come together here. It’s about making each other better, the whole ‘sum of the parts is greater than the whole’ principle. There sure will be times when we have to wear the less familiar hats, but when we work together, align goals, and maximize the skills and resources at disposal as a group — that’s how an athletic department (or any organization) operates at beyond 100%. Murtaugh summed it up perfectly:

“You get so much more accomplished when you’re a bunch of we’s instead of a bunch of me’s.”

LISTEN TO MY FULL INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL MURTAUGH

Category: College

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