Category: Content Strategy

Content Strategy

Content as Currency: How the LA Kings Put Strategy to Content to Drive Fandom, Brand, and Business

What does it mean to have a content strategy in sports?

For some, the question may conjure ideas of content pillars or buckets. Others may think in fan development, segmentation, and player marketing. Another notion would consider the most common key performance indicators (KPIs) like reach and engagement. Still others may cite business objectives like brand building and revenue generation.

The thing is, it’s all of the above, and then some. Content serves many masters in 2025, more than ever before. Because it can. Thoughtful content strategy can and should accomplish all those aforementioned objectives. But it’s a strategy, not a catch-all goal for every post and piece of content. Creators create, producers produce, and managers manage. Well, duh. But speak to somebody like Alec Palmer, the Senior Manager of Social Content for the LA Kings, and you’ll appreciate how content strategy is an organizational strategy, transcending the tweets and TikToks that populate fans’ feeds.

Palmer came up as a content producer, picking up skills in college that kick-started his career path. His background, now coupled with years of experience managing content, makes him particularly well-suited to balance the never-ending content needs for a sports team in 2025, while still making the producers feel they have the agency and freedom to be creative.

“There’s an understanding of, Oh, he does know what goes into shooting this video,” said Palmer, who joined the Kings in late 2021. “And maybe he doesn’t know the entirety of like, what all goes into a red camera and a whole studio and production setup, but there’s enough where they know where, if I’m pressuring them to get something done or asking them to do something, it’s something I would ask myself to do as well. That’s what I hope comes through to my team, and even cross-departmentally, is I know what it takes, and I know I can step in at any time, and that trust that builds…

“We want the producers to have an innate green light,” Palmer explained. “That obviously can get you in some muddy waters when you need to rein someone in and be like, ‘I need you to do this thing,’ but we look at it as, like, the risk is worth the reward of like, Hey, we might lose a producer or two on a tangential project that doesn’t play out, but most of the time it’s going to work out in some fashion. That’s where we really hone it, like [harping] on communication…”

Palmer looks after the big picture while helping the content team to bring to life creative projects that fit with organizational goals. Such alignment is essential to getting buy-in and resources to take ambitious, creative swings in content, and tell stories that can drive convertible KPIs and create meaningful engagement that drives lifelong fandom.

That’s how Palmer and the content team found themselves in Switzerland this past summer. The team saw some other teams producing similar content, all-access content series, and remote shoots in player hometowns, and the Kings knew they wanted to tell their players’ stories with such a rich tapestry. Requesting to fly thousands of miles with a content team is not an insignificant ask, but when you have a plan and can connect the initiative to important objectives for the organization, the picture becomes pretty clear.

“We pitched [the idea], it was going to be expensive, we didn’t have the money,” said Palmer in describing the pitch to profile players in their hometowns. “In that pitching process, we said, ‘Here’s the content we would pull from these. Here’s roughly the amount of deliverables. Here’s the crew and the staff that would go; here’s the rough budget. And also here’s the story we’re telling and why this story is important.’…”

It’s understanding the why behind content that gets at the heart of strategy. Too often, reports and KPIs are reduced to a few surface-level numbers that, left unchecked, can lead to perverse incentives. If it’s just about hitting a certain number of engagements, impressions, and views, that leaves out a whole lot of substance. The goal isn’t to hit certain metrics, it’s to hit certain metrics that can tie to the actual goals. Hitting big numbers alone isn’t a strategy. Palmer talked about the blend of art and science in presenting reports and defining success in his position with the Kings.

“People learn in all different ways; people understand performance and success in all different ways,” he said. “So when you’re presenting something back, you need to be able to tell the anecdotal and the qualitative successes or failures, and the quantitative and the analytical successes and failures, and sometimes they may be in contention with each other. That’s something where you are the expert, you have to explain why and why that might be okay, or why it might not be okay…”

Palmer continued, also later noting that within the content strategy are nods to marketing, ticket-buying, and other revenue-generating elements: “So what we look at is, yes, we’re always looking at analytics. We have our paces, we have our KPIs, and generally we’re hitting them. But there are also things we are accepting where it’s like we’re taking a risk that this might not perform or it might perform, or it performs to average, but it’s important to tell the story about our team, or about the game, or about this player, because that is what helps drive fandom. And it’s also the age-old question of how are you driving revenue?”

The approach to content strategy is also a massive part of the picture, alongside the marketing-driven elements. In the best of conditions, they all work together. So while storytelling is inherently integral, the way content is presented, the copy used, the tone and voice that emanate, it’s absolutely critical in driving fandom and partnerships.

For years, the Kings had a distinct brand. As Palmer recounted in our interview, the Kings are often credited with starting a pivot for brand communication on social. A new era that welcomed comedy, snark, and sometimes savage or even self-deprecating, instead of the overly formal, official-sounding brand representations and tone of years past. But the LA Kings team that Palmer joined was different from the dominant team of the 2010s, which captured multiple Cups and grew over a massive fan base that loved the Kings’ distinct voice across social (and all fan touch points, really; the in-arena presentation also echoed those LA Kings vibes). It felt like there was a disconnect, as Palmer explained.

“They were going through a rebuild,” he said. “And what was happening was the sarcasm, the poke fun at ourselves wasn’t landing with fans as much. And it started not to land internally as well. Without getting into too many specifics, it was okay, well, we need to change this without losing this thing that got us here. It’s the same thing with the Kings, like the Kings have been known forever as this ‘we’re going to beat the living hell out of you’ on the ice. Our guys are bigger, faster, stronger than everyone, and we’re going to play great defense, and we’re going to just grind you till you can’t go anymore. That’s how they won their Cups. And that has changed and will change, but there’s always this mindset.

Palmer discussed the way the Kings evolved the brand, while remaining authentic and credible for fans.

“So that’s kind of how we approached it. It was, okay, we can’t lose this entire funny sarcastic, fun personality, but we have to make some changes to better suit what’s happening on the ice,” he said, later emphasizing the Kings’ approach to proudly wearing their Kings fandom and leaning into the ups and the downs. “We overcorrected right away to kind of peel so much back, and I was like, Let’s just start fresh, almost. Let’s pull back. And it’s going to be kind of uncomfortable to start, it’s going to be frustrating. Let’s pull back right away to just like a cookie-cutter, let’s start getting back to the team, and let’s reintroduce things, because we had no idea where that line was anymore. We had no idea where the line was that was too much or too little. So we had to reintroduce and kind of build and build and refit that boundary, and we hit that line…

“Over the years, we stripped that back and we started adding it in…As the team got better, we were able to do more and more, and we’ve now developed this kind of voice of we are the best and this idea of we’re going to beat you up. We’re not arrogant. We’re confident in what we do. We’re going to grind you out on the ice, we’re going to be able to just, you know, push through you, and we’re bigger, better, faster, stronger. So this mindset of being that on the ice, we thought, how can we relate that to our social presence?

“We kind of operate, and this is more internally, it’s not quote-unquote our written social strategy on the wall, but we operate as: Be a fan, be intentional, and be excellent…”

The optimal content strategy compounds. All of the elements explored in this article work together, enabling the sum of the whole to be greater. That’s a bigger story than any surface-level metrics can tell.

So, consider all the dots to connect for a content strategy. Create platforms that showcase to fans what the brand is all about, build avenues for connections, develop fans for life. Content is the most valuable currency we have; make the most of it.

WATCH/LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH ALEC PALMER OF THE LA KINGS (TREMENDOUS)

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Content Strategy, Fan Development

Brand Building and Cultural Creativity: How Animation is Used to Fuel Fandom in Sports

The goalposts keep moving for content in sports.

All-access and mic’d-up players are now a part of every team and league’s arsenal. 360-degree replays, video game-like mirrorless cameras, drone shots, aerial cams, POV views, net cameras, cinematic hype videos that could be mistaken for Hollywood trailers — the acceleration in content quality, diversity, and innovation is remarkable.

So how the hell is a team’s content expected to cut through, stand out, and grab a fan’s attention away from the screens and feeds vying for their eyeballs, minds, and hearts?

There’s no single right answer to the challenge (sorry!), but by breaking from expectations, telling deeper stories that feel made for you and command attention, and embracing novelty, there’s a chance to get fans to stop and engage.

Greg Walter and his team at 2Tall Animation aren’t trying to replace the incredible highlights and photos that sports produce. Those continue to play a major role in fan acquisition and engagement, fueled by the daily renewal of more eye-popping plays and moments. But there’s a reason animation is such a powerful complement for sports and sports fans. It can embellish the inherent mythology in sports and bring to life the legends with which fans already identify in sports. And animation can allow teams and leagues to explore and exploit unique places in storytelling, creating and capturing fan passion in the process.

“The way we think about sports media is 99% of it is photo and footage based, and it should be, because people want to see their heroes, they want to see the games,” said Walter, the Owner and Creative Director of 2Tall Animation, the animation production studio specializing in sports. “But what’s the other 1%? We feel like we’re the other 1% that somebody might grab onto if they want to do something completely different, or if they want to create some media where they can control it and go anywhere they want to, because you can go into any storytelling space, you can go into any visual space with animation.”

The versatility of animation means it can serve many masters and aim to achieve diverse goals. But the often-exaggerated nature of animated projects is more conducive to enhancing the avidity of existing fans. Consider those illustrations that leagues such as the NFL and NBA will put out around holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, full of exacting details that only the biggest fans will recognize and appreciate. It’s those types of ‘if you know you know’ elements that strengthen fan identities and lead casual fans to want to enhance their own immersion into the property.

Walter discussed how thoughtful 2Tall is with its clients in identifying those brand elements and esoterica, which bring to life that community and identity.

“Usually it’s to take the current audience and take them to a new place. Like, it’s not necessarily to gain a new audience. It’s to double down on what the audience is already excited about,” Walter said about the nature of 2Tall’s objectives with clients. “Especially if we’re doing something in venue or we’re doing something on social media, what we really want to do is we want to create a piece that looks like it was made by a local for that team.

“And what I mean by that is we’ll dig into all the local Easter eggs. We’ll have a lot of creative meetings to figure out, Okay, where is the team? Who are the heroes? And more importantly, who are the fans? What is the culture around the team? And even more importantly, why do these fans love following this team? Besides geography, what about this team do they put their hopes and dreams in so that they would stick with this team when they’re good, when they’re bad? Is it a blue-collar city where it’s [about] grit and hard work? Is it a flashy city where you want to go big and lights and all that stuff? What’s drawing the moths to the flame?

“And then how do we show something interesting and new to this audience to get it even more excited and to see the team, the city, the franchise in an interesting new way?”

As Walter described the depth of exploration in their animation projects, it became apparent how powerful the animations can be to foment the brand — its messages, totems, tokens, and traits. One may not instantly think of a cool video board hype reel or an illustrative storytelling vehicle on social media to create a brand platform, but the degree of familiarity and fidelity built into the animations, combined with the unique visual appeal, can open (or create) new worlds to explore across mediums and touch points.

“More and more as we approach teams, and we’re creating videos for them, we’re also packaging up still assets for them, and we’re writing into the contracts we’ll also get you some still assets you can use over some looping assets that you can use on your boards any way you want, or in your merch,” said Walter. “And you can cross-purpose this stuff, so you’re not paying for something that’s going to show once or even once before each game. You’re paying for a package of other things that you can then give to your video team, to your merch team, and then they can recompile them in interesting ways.”

Whether animated or not, teams and leagues produce countless videos of varying forms that aim to stir emotion in their fans — at games in the arena or stadium, on social and mobile in the feeds and stories, and on countless other platforms. But while the social feeds may give you some semblance of performance through likes, comments, and shares, it remains difficult to understand when this content truly breaks through. The best content doesn’t inspire tapping a heart; it touches the heart, making the fan feel something, enhancing what it means to them to be a fan.

In evaluating the success of their projects, Walter and his colleagues and clients recognize there are variables they can and cannot control. If the team is mired in a slump or losing situation, that’s bound to affect how any content is received, animated or otherwise. At the same time, when the content does hit with its full intended effect, especially in-venue, there’s no easily quantifiable way to know it. So, for Walter and 2Tall, it’s part-art, part-science.

“You can’t measure ‘Did the audience get a little bit louder when they saw this thing?'” said Walter. “I will say that we did a couple of things for the Super Bowl this year. We did one for the Eagles and one for the Chiefs. The one for the Eagles played when the Eagles were really at their peak, and the crowd went wild for it. The one the Chiefs, unfortunately, played right as the crowd started realizing that this one was really getting out of hand, and it was a dead room, apparently. So it’s little bits of data like that that we can go on.”

Not all animation is meant to serve the same purpose or elicit the same feeling, either. If you haven’t yet gone and looked up any of 2Tall’s work, there’s no telling what you’re picturing as you read about ‘animation.’ Maybe it’s something akin to anime, or perhaps something resembling the Nickelodeon cartoons of the ’90s and ’00s; animation represents a vast spectrum, and to put animation in a single box is inaccurate. So, this whole conversation about animation in sports is multifarious, a menu within the medium that organizations should navigate with intentionality.

“There’s kind of a choice point,” explained Walter, who founded 2Tall in 2012. “Do I want to go into a lane that people already know and work within that, or do I want to use animation? That can be anything. You can go collage, you can go rotoscope animation, which is traced animation, you can do trippy, you can do photorealistic, you can do graphic novel, you can do street art. You can do a whole bunch of different things. You know, what satisfies the assignment the best?

“If you want to do street art, there’s a materiality about street art. You expect pavement, you expect walls. There’s a tangibility to it that we can work with to give something that’s got kind of a solid feel, where your feet are on the ground and you feel like you’re at ground level, or we can do something crazy and trippy that’s got lots of colors and it’s out in space.”

This article started out by lamenting the Sisyphean quest to produce content that stands out. There’s a perpetual arms race in content, not just in sports, but on every screen and frame vying for sustained attention. The velocity and volume may be greater than ever, but the cyclical, one-upsmanship nature of creative is simply part of the game. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Creative is a field that compounds. The evolution and innovation will continue because new ideas build upon existing ones. The roots of just about any creative field can be traced back centuries, so it’s not about eschewing convention, but veering just a bit, taking chances, and playing outside the lines of expectation. As Walter has survived and thrived amidst the accelerated timelines of creative trends and techniques, he welcomes the challenge of giving fans something different. Something that’ll make them stop, notice, and digest.

“People’s relationship with social media is very problematic, but it exists and we are existing to create content for that,” he said. “And people are comfortable with the thing that they like to go on and slide through. But I think people are hungry to be surprised. And anytime that you can give somebody a good surprise, there are bad surprises too, but a good surprise, that’s a little victory. That’s like a breadcrumb that can lead to other things as well.

“And that’s kind of how a lot of this churn happens. It’s like somebody does something interesting, you know, and then someone else sees it and they’re like, I can take that a little bit further, and then it churns into something bigger.”

WATCH OR LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH GREG WALTER

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Conferences, Content Strategy, Fan Development, General Sports Business, Social Media, Working In Sports

What I Learned in a Room Full of the Smartest People in Sports Social

Some of the earliest social media hires in sports are now VPs and SVPs. Social media and content have always been inextricably tied to the underlying business and brand for sports organizations, but for years their impact was mostly acknowledged by vibes. Then likes, impressions, and views added a more data-driven and analytical bent.

Today, an organization’s social media and content strategy isn’t expected to deliver likes and comments, the expectation is to drive direct impact on key business objectives.

With such a lofty ascension, there are better questions being asked, more operationalized workflows, more documented guidelines and guardrails, and more thoughtfulness behind every post, piece of creative, and word that gets in front of fans. The ever-increasing fan touchpoints, an insatiable demand for content, and the realization that social media is where organizations can learn about their fans, grow the fan base and brand, and create new marketing funnels and revenue streams — the level of sophistication and discourse has never been higher.

These were among the key themes at this year’s second annual Gondola Sports Summit, which brought together the leaders and producers who bring sports fans all the content, copy, memes, and more that drive such engagement and earned media — and further key organizational objectives.

I was fortunate to attend the conference, which took place in Denver, May 19-21, and featured speakers from several of the biggest teams and leagues in sports, agencies that work with these organizations, and representatives from many of the platforms where fans consume and converse around all that content. There were countless insights and examples, inspirational stories, revelatory ideas, and warm camaraderie. What follows are a few actionable insights from the panels, which built on the theme of social media and sports growing up. We’ve raced well past the tropes of interns, the power of content and social being recognized and appreciated for all the value it can deliver.

What the sports world needs to know about Reddit

Reddit has kind of been having a moment, and not just in sports. It’s increasingly one of the last true large ‘social’ broadcast platforms left, a place where businesses and brands can get unfettered insight into what fans are saying, and more tied into the information users get, whether querying AI or Google.

Sports are not new to Reddit; there have been tons of engagement and conversation happening on various subreddits for years. But now the teams and leagues themselves are taking notice. Reddit’s Sports Partnerships Lead Christine Wixted Wixted sat on a panel alongside MLB’s Vice President, Social Media & Innovation Cameron Gidari , and they discussed some of the use cases and value props for the platform.

  • Reddit is a text-heavy platform, because it’s about conversations. But that doesn’t mean photos and videos don’t have a place, multimedia can start and lead those conversations.
  • Anyone (including brands) can be welcomed when they provide value. For teams and leagues, that can mean content they’re not getting elsewhere. Don’t just post the highlight, post a unique camera angle or clips that’ll elicit conversation.
  • Niche down. This will come up again later with TikTok, but with the specific, interest-based nature of subreddits, there is opportunity to engage with non-sports communities. MLB mentioned their success posting in the weather subreddit, for example. AMAs (Ask Me Anything) can also be compelling ways to serve different niches; for example, could your head groundskeeper interact with the landscaping subreddit about caring for the grass at an MLB or NFL stadium? (my example!)
  • AMAs were brought up multiple times by both Wixted and Gidari, and Wixted mentioned ongoing development of the platform’s AMA product. That’s a telling sign! Gidari talked about the success of having AMAs with MLB’s team-specific beat writers, offering deep engagement and conversation when, for example, the Cubs beat writer does an AMA with the Cubs subreddit (again, my example). This is an easy but effective way to get started on Reddit.
  • You can get value from Reddit even if you never post. Wixted echoed what many marketers will say, characterizing Reddit as your free focus group. Lurk and listen, and, as Wixted recommended, leverage Reddit Pro — which is free, to set up listening flows to keep track of your brand and sport, and spot opportunities for engagement or pick up insights about your fans or potential fans.
  • You don’t need to worry about constantly feeding Reddit. It’s not as algorithm-driven as other platforms (posts primarily gain visibility through comments and upvotes), so you can pick and choose opportunities instead of stressing about a 24/7/365 presence
  • If you’re anxious or uneasy about treading into Reddit, where it’s true that brands are not always a welcomed presence, work through the subreddit moderators (or connect with the mods through the Reddit partnerships team)
  • Wixted talked through some of Reddit’s near-term priorities and roadmap, so pay attention. She mentioned: Continued devleopment and evolution of their video product, improving their mobile app UX, further development of their AMA product (such as scheduling, RSVPs, video answers, activation within AMAs), building more publisher tools and verifications, and enhancing the live event experience with features like live stats, polls, custom flair, and game highlights (my note: just check out the r/CFB subreddit on a college football Saturday, for example!).
  • My personal Reddit experience (from running Slyke) — the organic opportunity (and paid) is very real. Definitely be mindful of posting as a brand, you may share the same content under a non-brand handle. Think about posts that will start conversations, and note that users are willing to click off to a link to consume content that’ll funnel back into the conversation on the thread; I’ve had posts reach millions and drive considerable clicks. I’ve also found cost-effective ads (but be mindful of objectives). And do your research — Reddit Pro and Gummy Search can be helpful, jumping into subreddits and searching them or filtering by Best/Hot/Top over different time periods, and test different posting formats (link, text-only, carousel, video, etc.). I’ll also note, for a verrrry small marketer like myself, the Reddit ads team is extremely help and hands-on

Learning from the SMSports OGs

Depending on when you mark the unofficial start of the social media x sports era, the field as a profession is about 10-15 years old. It really did start with entry-level staff and, yes, some interns. The first pros whose job it was to write tweets, hit publish on Facebook, and navigate the early days of social media have grown up in the space, many in senior leadership or still hanging around the industry otherwise, continuing to evolve with it.

A few of these ‘OGs’ hit the stage to reflect on the past, analyze the present, and lend insight and inspiration to those coming up and molding the next era now.

  • “Likes don’t pay the bills.” Justin Karp , an OG now at NBC Universal, isn’t the first to utter that phrase, but it captures the elevated place of social media in any business now. Counting engagements is fine, but now we have to ask ‘so what?’ multiple times in planning add measurement to ensure those engagements and that reach is connected to business goals. That could mean reaching certain audience, driving home messaging, gaining actionable insights and feedback from fan engagement and comments, tying to sales, affecting recruiting outcomes and interest (for college sports), and driving tune-in, subscriptions, sign-ups, etc.
  • Platforms and what content and packaging work on said platforms change. So audiences. The point is you always have to be mindful of evolving, an insight elucidated by the Las Vegas Raiders’ Gavin Rivera. Learn to love the space as a science to continually study.
  • There are still only 24 hours in a day and yet an ever-growing supply of content and options competing for that attention. So everything has to start with a compelling story. Regardless of mediums, platforms, and presentation, the story must be one worth telling.
  • Rivera demonstrated decisiveness, explaining that we must fully comprehend the brand of the organization and know how to implement it across the board. You should be able to articulate the ‘why’ behind every post, heck, every word, and edit. The industry has grown up.
  • Karp has spent a lot of time and effort to drive tune-in with live sports broadcast by NBC and its platforms. And a key insight, with broad implications for sports pros, is that sports fans have passions and interests beyond sports. They follow whatever stories, memes, and trends are popping in areas beyond sports. So how can you ensure your game feels culturally relevant, significant enough to command engagement and attention by the biggest audience?

Lessons and ROI with Losing Teams

“Don’t read the comments” was never a good idea. Sure, there is bound to be vitriol and salty language, especially in the lean times for teams, but there is no better way to hear from your fans at scale than social media. It’s a constant source of feedback and vibes, in general and for specific content and campaigns.

If you sift through riff-raff, there is gold in all those fan voices and finding those insights is another way the social media team can deliver meaningful value up to the c-suite. This was one of themes at the conference overall and in a discussion featuring social media and content leaders from the Chicago White Sox (Tim Brogdon ), Carolina Panthers (Alex Grant), and Diana Smith (Charlotte Hornets), three teams from three different leagues who share this one thing in common — their teams have suffered a spate of losing seasons, of varying degrees, in recent years.

  • Remind yourself that the fan sentiment expressed on social media is often unrelated to your performance as a content and social media team, it’s the team performance they’re peeved about. Don’t get down about all the aspersions, but do look for patterns and opportunities within it. When you do something, creating content or commenting, for example, that shows fans you’re listening and addresses a common sore spot, that goes a long way.
  • What do you do when the season is shot? It’s tough when fans can all recognize that this team just ain’t going to win much, let alone contend this season. The advice for this issue included maximizing the effort around things that fans are excited and feeling positively about. That could mean schedule release, the draft, free agency, training camp, fan traditions and community. You may recognize storylines that fans are interested in; if so, build on that.
  • If it’s driving behavior, the content is valuable. Fans may not want to hear from you as much amidst losing, but don’t necessarily take negative sentiment or even lower engagement to automatically mean the content didn’t work. Pay attention to other metrics like sends/shares, watch time, and reach, too.
  • Coaching up is an important skill. You need to be able to communicate and explain strategic decisions to senior leaders and execs in various departments. If you post less, those preseason engagement and growth goals are not gonna be reached. If we want our social media to be among the best amongst our peers, here’s what that’s going to take and why it makes sense. The White Sox’s Brogdon also spoke about high-level conversations about how the team’s self-awareness and even use of memes would help shift the public narrative a bit, and deflect negative attention on the team to more positive attention on the social media team’s approach.
  • ‘Some ideas are worth waiting for.’ This paraphrase, via another paraphrase from the Hornets’ Smith was about not tossing aside ideas when fan sentiment is low, but saving some of them for when the right time comes. Talk to any staff at losing teams and there’s a good chance they have some ideas for content or even strategic direction for when the team becomes a winning one.
  • Brogdon talked about developing a Whtie Sox fan persona, which guides core strategy and decisions, and enables more thoughtful conversations around the team’s approach. Overall, the panel has a good handle on documenting voice, tone, and brand guidelines, so everyone knows the gospel guiding the strategy and post-to-post decision making.
  • This panel and others discussed non-traditional KPIs. Engagement is great, but there is so much more value to be tracked and framed. The Panthers’ Alex Grant even mentioned how player comments on content and their feedback as a good sign. As noted earlier, using social listening and comments to drive actionable recommendations and insights, whether based around fan experience [a pain point at the game], reaction to an activation or promotion, or an emerging affinity. Consider community development goals, too. When fans are starting their own conversations and conversing (hopefully respectfully!) with each other, that’s a good sign. If it starts to feel like the team and its fans have inside jokes or their own language, that’s pretty cool.
  • STN Digital’s David Brickley went into what we mean when we say ROI. Understand the true objective — there is a difference between a marketing and a sales campaign, he said. Not everything is about sales, the objective could be community growth, reaching a specific demo, etc.

Live Coverage and Content

Content producers and leaders from three very different leagues and sports, NASCAR, MLB, and the PWHL, spoke about covering events/games and getting content to the feeds quickly (and why that matters).

  • Major League Baseball games are full of highlights. They can’t always predict when they’ll be a an incredible defensive play or a monstrous home run, but when it happens they want to own the moment and get it out quickly. MLB’s Brett Blueweiss said the goal is ‘field to feed’ in two minutes, and noted they typically have three different angles to share to make the most of the moments. An over-arching theme was the value of sharing unique content. Plenty of accounts can post the broadcast highlight, but what is the content that only YOU have?
  • While most sports events take place with fields and courts that are circumnavigable, NASCAR’s Alejandro Alvarez knows he and his content producers can’t possibly be everywhere in their massive speedway venues. So it helps them to be a bit more intentional about the content they want to capture and why. The overall goal, he said, is to convey the visceral experience of being at the race and all the energy and atmosphere of the event.
  • Both Blueweiss and Alvarez said that data often shows that mobile content (phone-captured) performs better than more polished content shot with more professional video/photo equipment. It looks more like real life, so it’s more relatable, they surmised. Alvarez said the memorable line that ‘the best camera is the one in your hand,’ whether that’s a DSLR or an iPhone. But also be smart about it, recognize the moments where one device or the other makes more sense. Overall, showing the data can also help destigmatize any qualms about phone-captured content that some may harbor.
  • There’s always risk of montony. Sports are about routine, by design, so content can get stale if every game day looks virtually the same with the live content captured. Some of the recommendations to combat this included giving your on-the-ground content creators some agency to roam around the venue to find unique angles or scenes. And let these talented producers try new things, they can bring good ideas to the table. Even small tweaks, too, can make something feel fresh for fans.

The Perfect Couple: Design and Social

Design and social media are inseparable. The best marriages can make 1+1 > 2, with creative that syncs with the content and copy to enhance fandom and enliven an intentional branding. Every good marriage requires communication, honesty, and compromise, and the discussion among design and social pros from the University of Tennessee’s Athletics and the Atlanta Falcons was full of helpful tips and insights.

  • Distinct creative looks and techniques are ownable, and can augment brand identioty and equity, stated the Falcons’ Director of Social Media and Influencers, Ryan Delgado .
  • Tennessee’s Evan Ford explained how the Vols (Volunteers) have creative boundaries around a sandbox in which colleagues can play. This helps maintain integirty while not stifling creative riffs among the school’s many teams. The Vols’ Kellen Hiser (Assistant AD, Digital and Creative Strategy) said that knowing the why behind creative elements and decisions can help inform playing within the guardrailed sandbox and guide future asks, too.
  • In a nod to the potential for numbness and montony from otherwise awesome creative, there were recommendations about. how small tweaks can mitigate such risks. That could be changing up the font or composition on the creative, or even just the presentation; a new approach to carousels or Reels covers, for example, or a different introductory frame for a Stories post.
  • Game days can move rapidly (of course!), so it helps to prepare and plan from a content and creative perspective, too. That means scenario planning, so all sides are ready for potential moments. It’s also good to know who is supposed to be where and when, so when content happens, someone is in the right place at the right time, and the director leading the content execution knows who to call on for the content.
  • A subtle but important point of discussion was honing the creative process from all sides. It can make a big difference when a request or brief is well-written and an informed, reasonable timeline is provided. Knowing how to give and receive feedback are underrated skills. And don’t forget to ensure all sides know the purpose of the creative, how will it be used and why (and if it goes unused, why was that the case?). Close the loop on performance and feedback, that’s a complete creative cycle.
  • You can win with consistency. Not every post or piece of creative needs to be a home run, consistently hitting singles and doubles can drive consistent impact.
  • I just loved the Falcons’ Jack Ozmer (Graphic Designer) talk about crafting a team identity that’s consistent across visual and voice. That’s the crux of a lot of this synchronization and synergy of design and social, helping to build that cohesive brand.

TikTok Tips

TikTok continues to be a force in social media and no other platform has been more valuable in broadening the scope that sports can penetrate. The discussion on the TikTok panel was centered around March Madness and creators, and was packed with insights for general application, too.

  • Search and intentional discovery remains a big priority for TikTok. The moderator of the panel, Kenny Yansen (TikTok leads for sports broadcast partnerships) showcased the key ways the platform activated around TikTok and the tournaments’ hub and search were front and center. TikTok in general remains a major search platform and it appears they’re continuing to lean into that behavior. When was the last time you searched your brand, team, or partners?
  • Bleacher Report’s Louise Chouinard (Senior Producer, Field Content) articulated their approach to TikTok, embracing a culture of experimentation. And not all good ideas will hit on TikTok the first time you post them. Sometimes posting a second or third time, with or without tweaks, can hit. She also noted the opportunity to experiment and ‘flood the feed’ during those high times, such as during March Madness. Some of that creative spaghetti will stick, reach new audiences, and inform future practices, too.
  • Content creator and former pro basketball player Trey Phils (and Yalie!) advised to not be afraid to flop. You just have to post. Get reps and try stuff. One of the features of TikTok your content doesn’t get automatically served at scale to users, let alone followers. Only the good content does. The bad content barely gets seen by anybody, so don’t sweat the flops. If you trip and fall while walking and nobody’s around to see it, who cares? (my example there, haha)
  • When you work with creators, select creators whose style and content fits what you (and the brand) are seeking, said Chouinard. Then let them cook. If you try to force something that deviates from the creator’s content style, that’s not good for anyone.
  • Lean into niche when you can (and when it’s relevant). TikTok has ‘unmatched discoverability,’ said Chouinard. Oftentimes niche sports or niche topics can over-perform, so look for those opportunities and lean into it. She cited an example of an interview with Stephen Nedoroscik (the bespectacled pommel horse hero for Team USA Olympic men’s gymnastics team) in which his love for the video game Rocket League came up. TikTok did its thing, getting that content to Rocket League aficionados on TikTok and the post took off.

The Growth and Opportunity of Women’s Sports, Athletes, and Content

No sports industry event can take place without a discussion about women’s sports. The growth is undeniable, the athletes influential, and it feels like we’re still just getting started.

  • One of the content motifs that came up as a propellant, with benefits for women’s and men’s sports and cultural relevance was athlete collabs. That could be across teams in the same sport, teams in the same city, teammates together, or no natural connection like that at all. Numerous female athletes have wider reach on social media, and many are just better at social, even if the teams and leagues foir which the male athletes’ have bigger overall fan bases, for the most part, which means both sides stand to gain. Audiences can multiply quickly with collabs.
  • Women’s sports athletes are inviting new brand categories and activations into the fold. Beauty and feminine hygiene brands, for example, now have a natural platform in sports that’s growing in scale, and these athletes are creating new opportunities through content like GRWM (get ready with me). Women are, in general, more willing to be vulnerable on social media, which makes them more relatable to fans, and more effective and authentic brand ambassadors.
  • There is a tangible shift in the way brands play within women’s sports, too. While in the past their activations often came across as patronizing, like an act of charity. Now, it’s more about celebrating women’s sports and the athletes as legit superstars performing impressive athletic achievements.
  • Fans of women’s sports are fans. They’re often more vehement and even tribal, which helps create a valuable platform for women’s sports. When other leagues/teams or brands engage authentically with women’s sports teams and athletes, these tribes often come with them, and bring their passion and devotion.

Understanding, Activating, and Community Building with Fans

It’s easy when you’re the legacy team account. (Okay, not easy, but stay with me) But how do you become a relevant presence for fans when you’re a media outlet, an upstart content and competition company, or even a multi-trillion-dollar corporate brand? There some insights and ideas with broad applications that I picked up in a discussion with the pros helping to engage communities and fans for ALLCITY Network, Overtime, and Microsoft.

  • ALLCITY’s Parker Sperry (VP of Partnership Marketing) spoke about how ALLCITY, the parent company behind localized media companies (DNVR, PHNX, among others) thinks about serving fans throughout their gameday journey. From pregame to in-game to postgame, what can they do to engage their fans and add value?
  • Sperry also spoke about positioning their talent to be brand ambassadors, in addition to how they work with creators. They want to offer fans something unique, so they’ll oftne let their creators try ideas in the moment and overall think about formats that are outside the box. They’re not trying to be traditional media.
  • Overtime’s Mike Kaufman (Director of Social Strategy) appreciates the platform they have and the communities they can create and serve. He discussed the importance of listening to and learning from athletes (and their parents) to better serve them. He also spoke about discovering communities they can help, using their platform to fill programming gaps and serve those communities fans fans.
  • Microsoft’s Joey Maestas , a social media and sports vet who today helps Microsoft market its AI as Social, Influencers & Video Lead for Copilot. In devising strategy, the north star for him is to consider what use cases would their audience care about? That guides the creators they work with (and how), the activations they produce, and the content they create.

A few more

Not everything fit in the sections above, so here are a couple other things that stuck with me.

  • It’s always instructive to pay attention to what the major platforms advise, so we were all at rapt attention when Meta addressed the crowd. Kristen Oh (Sports Partnerships at Meta) shared a breakdown of Instagram’s many products, and how organizations can think about using each. While nothing is absolute, the overview included: Utilize the feed for curated highlights, Stories for ephemeral moments, short and entertainment-focused videos for Reels, go Live and be interactive with fans, and connect with core fans (in general, for specific events, for sub brands, for athletes) in Channels.
  • Meta also reviewed Threads. It’s no secret that adoption and engagement on Threads is a big priority for Meta right now, and it was informative to learn how they speak about Threads and the frameworks for success on the platform. View the linked image for the full slide summing up the big ideas, but in brief they presented 4+ recommendations to build a community and engaging presence on Threads. 1) Post authoritative content like highlights and behind-the-scenes, 2) ‘Own the moment’ by sharing content that makes a statement or echoes what fans are feeling, 3) Tap into creators and commentators by developing ambassadors and elevating community voices, 4) Drive Community engagement by empowering everyday fans. Ultimately, consistently engage with fans and with the community, and that’ll go a long way on Threads.
  • STN Digital’s David Brickley cited the old cliche ‘Your network is your net worth.’ But it wasn’t just about how who you know helps you get hired at your next job. It’s about being able to make things happen, too. He’s right in it, as a founder and leader of an agency, but he added another framing to the old aphorism, if there’s a big activation or content campaign to execute, do you have the rolodex of trusted agencies or freelancers to call into action? Building that network is valuable, particularly as you ascend. to more senior roles.

That’s over 4,000 words above. If you made it all the way here, whether you read this in a single sitting or sections at a time, I hope you feel smarter having learned what I learned. Since there is so much, here are some of the lasting themes and insights to ensure you take with you:

  1. Social has grown up — from “vibes” to a strategic, business-impact engine that drives tune-ins, ticket sales, sponsorships, marketing objectives and deeper fan insights.
  2. The communities for your content are broader than you think — Think beyond sports content and communities, and add value to others. Try sharing relevant content to niche subreddits and TikTok fandoms.
  3. Measure what matters — count engagements and views remain important, but aim to tie posts and performance to business goals (tune-in, brand messaging and pillars, marketing communications, community growth, brand affinity, partner activation).
  4. Empower your creators and colleagues — Formalize guardrails; the goal is not to micromanage, but invite safe experimentation, so creators, freelancers, and coworkers can unearth fresh angles and creative ideas.
  5. Content and Social are Strategic — Articulate the why behind the strategy, content, and creative. Decisions and direction should make sense because they align with the why.
  6. Experiment without fear — on TikTok and beyond, embrace rapid “fail fast” iterations; only the best content surfaces, so don’t sweat the misses. You may even reach communities you never thought about
  7. Lean into under-tapped fandoms — women’s sports, niche athletes and underserved communities hold high-value audiences hungry for genuine curation and context.

Somehow, this barely scratches the surface of all the knowledge to gain and stories to hear from the presentations at Gondola. Not to mention all the conversations on the side and the relationships formed outside of the official sessions.

Thanks to the team at Gondola (led by the legend Jared Kleinstein) for putting together a tremendous event and to all the speakers for being so thoughtful and generous and energetic with their discussions. If you haven’t checked out the Gondola platform, I encourage you to check it out, explore the content and creators, learn about the features, and sign up for an account. Visit Gondola

And shoutout to my employer Greenfly, who got several unsolicited shoutouts from the guest speakers, praising our software and service for being so valuable to their content operations and ability to achieve business goals.

Content Strategy, Social Media

The Content Flywheel: How Strategic Social-First Storytelling Creates Premium Value in Sports

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.”

WATCH OR LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH RUSSELL SIMON

READ THE SNIPPETS

Content Strategy, Fan Development, General Marketing, Social Media

A Modern Approach to Fan Development: Earning Attention, Operationalizing Engagement, and Crafting Reasons to Care

If you’re reading this, it’s a minor miracle.

There is so much competition for attention and mindshare in general, let alone for sports teams and leagues. The established leagues have massive foundations of fans but want unending growth; meanwhile, myriad upstart and emerging leagues are competing to establish their base, often while concurrently growing broad awareness and interest in heretofore relative fringe sports.

It has never been easier to reach masses of people, but it has never been harder to win their hearts and minds.

So how should sports organizations think about earning new fans amidst a cutthroat world where every swipe, click, and second of attention has to clear an increasingly higher bar? And what does ‘fan growth’ even look like in 2025, with endless to ‘engage’ — that oh-so-ubiquitous but nebulous term?

Tom Halls has faced these challenges head-on throughout his career. Today, he and the team at SailGP aim to turn a centuries-old pastime that has persisted for years on the margins of the sports zeitgeist into a sports league that can command the attention of masses around the world. SailGP only had its first season in 2019, born in a perpetually connected world where hundreds of millions of videos get uploaded to platforms every day and social graphs and follower-based feeds were already starting to diminish. SailGP has hit some impressive follower numbers already, but I asked Halls about how meaningful a follower is in 2025 as content consumption and discovery look so different than it did a couple years ago, let alone last decade.

“Our follower growth target is still pretty aggressive for this season, but my point to [SailGP leadership] is if we’re showing an improvement in viewership, if we’re showing an improvement in engagement, if our engagement rate, which is super high, continues to retain at that amount, [that’s most important],” said Halls, who is the SVP of Social for SailGP following a career with stops at several sports organizations. “There are other ways to hook people in now with AI, whether that’s getting smart in how we sign people up top of funnel; at the very purest basis, like email marketing, databases, etc. How do we get them?…

“There’s always an end goal,” Halls continued, after remarking that UGC efforts are another strong signpost of an engaged fan. “A follow is nice, a comment is nice, but in an ideal world you’re watching the broadcast, you’re watching the live stream, you’re engaging, even better if you’re buying a ticket or merchandise. But we’re five seasons in. It takes time, and it takes leagues years to grow these pieces.”

Facebook introduced Pages in 2007. Instagram introduced business profiles in 2014. Those impressive follower numbers many profiles and pages can boast today are comprised of countless users who may not have logged in in a decade, let alone the bevy of bots that have accumulated over the years. That’s not to say one’s followers aren’t meaningful, it’s just that the follower ‘count’ alone falls short, leaving more questions to ask and more substance to (hopefully) uncover.

‘Engagement trumps followers,” said Halls, who spent years on the Meta sports partnerships team. “I’d rather take 150,000 engaged fans than 2 million passive followers,. And I will wager a decent amount of money that if you were to look at the vast majority of follower counts of the big brands, publishers, creators on platform now that have been there for 10-15 years, there is a rather decently-sized stagnant portion of fans.

“I don’t think your follower count opens doors in the same way with sponsors that it used to. I mean, we’ve just re-upped with Rolex for ten years. A brand like Rolex [is] smart, they look beyond follower count, they look at engagement, they look at audience makeup. Sponsors and commercial investors in sports are savvier now than they’ve ever been.”

There’s that word again — engagement. Any engagement is better than no engagement, first of all, but ‘engagement’ in sports can mean a lot of different things. Engagement could mean commenting on a post or creating UGC, it could mean buying some merch or buying a ticket to attend a competition. But no matter where among the engaged segments a user (sure, a ‘fan’) sits, the only way to increase the base of fans overall is to enlarge the surface area of exposure, the addressable audience that even knows you exist.

The key thing to keep in mind is that fan development is not a linear exercise. We can’t grow more diehards without growing more casuals. And we can’t grow more casuals without identifying and converting the curious (Halls discussed a segmenting of curious-casual-core fans). At the same time, the core audience can’t be taken for granted, with all the attention and efforts focused only on the casuals and curious. That’s the challenge and the opportunity — they all matter.

“My point always comes back to that core audience will always be there, and our goal is to increase the size of that core audience and gradually expand each part of that funnel as we go,” said Halls. “It’s okay if you don’t ever come to a race or ever buy merchandise in my eyes; you still have a value to us… When I talk to our commercial and financial teams… I’ll say [those fans are] not as valuable as someone that buys a ticket or a merchandise, but they are still a fan…”

It’s challenging but fun to seek out new fans. It’s easy to target and reach narrow audiences, but when you’re trying to find those potential curious and casuals, developing a broader and more diverse fan base, creativity, diversity of thought, and the willingness to try new things (and at times fail) are critical. The number of interests and trends, the scale of micro-communities, and the avenues of discovery are innumerable; the idea of diverse creative teams and canvassing ideas from everyone is not lip service to some noble ideal — it’s essential if you want a wide, heterogenous, growing fan base. For Halls and SailGP, creativity can come from anyone and anywhere. And in the increasingly algorithm-fueled world of content consumption and discovery, any quality content can find its audience.

“There’s a lot of creativity that flows through that team…So when someone thinks they’ve got a great idea, what we’re trying to do is ensure that that great idea has an audience and it has a fit for it — how do we utilise the fact that so many platforms these days have got A-B testing opportunities? said Halls, who lauded the ability to target unfamiliar audiences explicitly using Instagram’s Trial Reels. “With the ephemeral nature of social, it’s gone and forgotten in 24 hours if it tanks.

“It’s giving social teams that creative freedom and recognizing that what works for senior leadership isn’t going to work for the fan base. We create content based on what we know the platforms want versus what we know we want. And sometimes we have to let go of, you know, being super comfortable around some things, but it works.”

Halls and his team have learned what the platforms want. They know how to ‘go viral’ on TikTok or maximize engagement on Instagram. Sure, senior leaders may want to promulgate the incredible techniques of its athletes and the impressive analytics the competition delivers on its broadcasts — and there’s certainly an audience for all that — but they know that there’s nothing like a capsize or a man overboard if they want to reach millions (expand that surface area) on TikTok. Those viral clips are opportunities, the first touch point on a funnel where some nonzero portion of those millions of viewers will engage and progress along the fan funnel.

All those viral NASCAR crashes or hockey fights or unexpected incidents in SailGP (Halls referenced an innocent ferry interrupting one of their races) — those clips can be catalysts.

“We posted a clip on Instagram [and] we didn’t think anything of it,” said Halls, referencing a clip of a man nearly going overboard. “It did 40 million views in 24 hours. It hit 105 million views [overall]….We know why it went viral because it was eight seconds, you’re watching, you’re waiting to see what happens. When it does happen, you’ve got so many questions.

“And the way we parlayed that into follower growth was everyone that asked a question about that video, we tried to address it either in comment format, or we went and created explainer content around it. So why did he not fall over the boat? Why was he safe? There’s an explainer video and the fact they’re all tethered and they have to run with the tether. What was he even doing on the boat in the first place? Like, why did he fall off the side? It just looks like, because of the angle, it looked like quite a slow turn. Actually, it’s pulling three G’s at that point. Like the guy, you see him, it almost looks like he passes out. So there’s an explainer video on the G forces these guys are going through…

“So how do we introduce all these unique elements to our sport, or how do we introduce it to a new fan?”

There are stories behind every viral clip. And within those stories lie the elements that attracted the casual and the core fans in the first place. Getting the views, those micro-moments of attention, is just the first step. Are you ready when hundreds, thousands, or millions of fans are there sampling what you have to offer with an open mind to find a reason to engage and consume and learn more? Halls called out the alt-casts, so prevalent in sports now, as an example of trying to cater to new, curious or casually interested audiences. Drive to Survive got millions to sample an F1 race, but they’ll only stick around so long if they have no idea what’s going on.

“You have to make that explainer content simple enough that casual fans feel that they can get it,” said Halls, who was admittedly a relative sailing novice before joining SailGP. “And to me, that comes back to that ‘Explain it to me like I’m five’ principle.

“It’s a more subtle way of doing the Nickelodeon broadcast of the Super Bowl, how they break it down. I mean, we’re not at that stage…but that’s the space where we can play with creators.

“I’m still looking for my Snoop [Dogg]-Martha [Stewart] commentary combo. I can’t get Snoop and Martha, I don’t have those kinds of budgets, but can I do something with a KSI or a Kai Cenat; can we get them to commentate alongside?”

In addition to finding entry points and being ready to cultivate and educate the noobs when they do enter, it helps to give fans a reason to care. A sense of affinity and partiality, something and/or someone to root for as the boats compete for victory. It’s why SailGP produces their ‘Racing on the Edge‘ series (their version of Drive to Survive, essentially). The competition also take advantage of the natural patriotic inclination anyone, fan or not, to cheer on their country in any race.

“To me there’s a natural affinity to root for,” said Halls. “There’s a Canadian team, an American team. There are nationality minimum requirements for each of the teams, they’re nationalistic…”

But don’t mistake the fervent nationalism for jingoism. SailGP knows the best way for the competition to grow, the team valuations to rise, and everyone’s boats to rise (had to do it) is to work together. There are cross-team collabs, democratized sharing of data, and an overall collective that they’re building something special together.

Said Halls: “We have the rivalries and they can be really spicy, but I think everyone across the league and the teams and leadership at the moment recognizes that we have to grow as one unit.”

Fan growth isn’t about waiting for people to come to you—it’s about meeting them where they are, creating sparks of interest and curiosity, and steering them into easy entry points. The signals are everywhere, the bait is working—so cast wide, experiment boldly, and recognize every moment of attention as an invitation. The future fanbase is out there, a light breeze at your back. Come equipped with a plan, catch the right wind, and it’ll be smooth sailing ahead.

LISTEN TO THE FULL (EXCELLENT) INTERVIEW WITH TOM HALLS

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Content Strategy, Fan Development, Social Media

Know Your Fan, Know Your Market: Creating Social Strategy That Fits Your Team

There is no social media strategy that’ll please everybody. There is no social media strategy that’s perfect for every brand.

It’s easy to get lost in a sea of best practices, adopt tactics that’ll drive any engagement, and try to be everything to everyone. But especially in sports, where dozens of local (though concurrently regional/national/global) brands are all marketing very similar products. They have fans who fell in love with the brand before color TV existed and fans who weren’t alive in a world without Instagram. There are teams with rich histories and those just getting started, some are perennial winners while others seem to be perpetually rebuilding.

Zach Galia has navigated all parts of this challenging world across NASCAR, NFL, and now MLB, and, through it all he’s learned the importance of understanding audience, platforms, and creative, intentional strategy and execution.

It was — relatively — in the beginning. When Galia started his career at Michigan International Speedway, a track that hosts NASCAR races, their goal was to reach, well, demographics and psychographs that basically lined up with Galia himself. So if the content appealed to him personally, that was a good sign that it’d appeal to their target audience. It was largely similar when he started with the Pittsburgh Steelers, a team he’s been a fan of for life. But when he got to Arizona, to lead the Cardinals’ social media, he faced a new challenge.

“I think with the Steelers it was similar to NASCAR. I was marketing to me, like a Steelers fan. I knew the lingo. I knew what the Steelers stood for because I had a lifetime of following along and understanding and knowing the history and knowing the players,” said Galia who was the Steelers’ first full-time social media hire before moving to the Cardinals right after the NFL Draft.

“Going from there to the Cardinals, where I wasn’t a fan and I didn’t know the history, I didn’t know the fan base…I picked up what I was planning to do for the Steelers [during the offseason camps and training] and dropped it in Arizona and said, here’s what we’re going to do. And it didn’t work. It didn’t have the same impact. It wasn’t the same…

“That was the first kind of, Oh, I’m not marketing to me anymore. Like, I need to learn the fan that I am marketing to. Different markets, different teams, different fan bases, you had to learn and figure out what they wanted to see and who they were and what they cared about…”

Galia didn’t grow up a Cardinals fan and didn’t know the Arizona market, nor did he come in on day one with a deeply rooted understanding of the history and brand of the Cardinals. But he learned. And through the process Galia was able to grow his acumen in strategy and social, gaining thoughtful understanding of who they were trying to reach with what messaging and why.

“That was a great exercise to like how social is grown,” said Galia of balancing tactics to reach and engage various fan segments. “You obviously want to do right by those diehard fans, but the more people out there that are talking about the Arizona Cardinals, the better.

“So you want to find casual fans, you want to find Suns fans who are looking for something to do on a Sunday, you want to find NFL fans who are like, Oh, that’s a funny video by the Cardinals, maybe I’ll follow along. So it’s like you want to create content that’s kind of accessible across the board, but also doesn’t — not offend, but it doesn’t patronize your diehard fans. So it’s a much more wide range of content.”

Leaders like Galia can (and do) research and learn about fan bases and teams over time, just as any marketer does for their respective brand and industry. But in an increasingly diverse and fragmented cultural and media landscape, with trends, tactics, and platforms that evolve so rapidly, it sure helps to have a diverse team that can contribute perspectives and help keep up with it all. Galia is smart and humble enough to know that it’s more effective and efficient to help others help him than to dictate with omniscience and omnipotence. So as Millennials gave way to Gen Z for that ‘young’ demo, Galia worked to empower and entrust his team to keep up with the kids.

“It started with me marketing to me, but now I’m 38 years old and I need to make videos for 16-year-olds on TikTok to make them interested in the Pirates,” said Galia, recalling the difference in perspective as he progressed through his career and the years passed. “That’s clearly not marketing to me anymore.

“So how do you do that? How do you empower your team, the people on your team that are closer to that age group to do that?… You have to build that trust with the people on your team because [they’re] going to know so much more about who we should be talking to in that age group than I do…So it’s always great to have people like that, and I have them on my team now, where it’s like, tell me what’s cool, and if you think it’s right, let’s go with it and let’s see what happens.”

Understanding the platforms and cultural zeitgeist unique to fan segments and demographics is but a piece of the pie, however. The NFL has 32 teams with 32 distinct brands and fan bases. The shift from a historic organization like the Steelers, for which fans across generations can close their eyes and see NFL Films montages of 1970s glory, to the Cardinals, which has only been in Arizona since the late ’80s and lacks a similar legacy, is a good illustration of the diversity across the league. The same cross-team distinctiveness prevails in most sports leagues around the world. For every Hollywood LA Lakers, there’s a grit and grind Memphis Grizzlies — and a plethora of others. The way fans look at their teams, and experience the seasons, aren’t just for media-driven narratives and social media debates — it affects how teams present themselves and market to their fans. Galia articulated this insight and described how it played out for him at the teams where he worked.

“I think you go back to the Browns when they were just awful, like 0-17, but [former Browns Social Media Manager] Allie Raymond, one of the best in this business with the Chargers now, everything they did was amazing. They had this lovable loser persona, and it just took on a mind of its own,” said Galia, who has had experience with winning and losing teams alike. “Whether you like the [Browns] or not, you loved their content and who they were. That wouldn’t work with the Pirates or with the Steelers, because the fan base is not going to be humorous about losing and performance like that. So it’s knowing and understanding and learning that.

“Same with the Cardinals,” Galia continued. “Like, you couldn’t be the lovable losers with the Cardinals because if the team wasn’t good, people had other things going on [and] just didn’t care. They would go to Suns games, they would watch the D-backs; like, it wasn’t a big deal. Whereas Pittsburgh, for better or worse, our fans care like crazy and they will let you know when you’re not doing well or when you are doing well and you’re still not doing well enough. Like, Pittsburgh fans care. The Cardinals fans, when they weren’t good, it was like, Oh, just let us know when you’re good and we’ll follow along again. So there are little kind of things that you have to learn, and the only way to learn is to be a part of it…

“So you can’t just be tone-deaf and be like, Oh, well, here’s a bunch of memes and it’s really funny because we’re losing and other teams do it so our fans will like it too. I don’t know if that’s the case.”

After spending the first several years of his career in the NFL, Galia made the move to Major League Baseball, going back home to the Pittsburgh Pirates — and going from 16 or 17 regular-season games to about 10x as much in baseball. So while a big win or a big loss in the NFL can color an entire ensuing week, and represent ~ 6% of the entire season, an incredible victory or devastating loss in MLB is a paltry 0.6%, for better or worse. It was a stark change for Galia, who recognizes the condensed windows for celebrations in baseball means they have to capitalize quickly when moments hit.

“In football it’s like you win on Sunday, you have until next Sunday to tell the story of every single thing that happened in the entire history of that game, you can highlight it in every way you want,” said Galia, who is the Director of Social Media and Content Strategy for the 100+-year-old Pirates franchise. “In baseball it’s like, okay, well, how do we do this effectively and quickly because as soon as the lineup goes up for the next game, no one cares what happened the night before.

“So I think it’s not necessarily a blessing and a curse, but like that’s the good and the bad about the baseball schedule is you get to turn the page really quickly, but sometimes you wish you didn’t have to turn the page so quickly. It’s tough.”

The packed MLB season also ups the ante to keep fans engaged and interested game after game, with the specter of monotony looming each day. Fans will scroll right by when daily content starts to become predictable and blends together from one day to the next. It’s not feasible to produce some masterpiece every day, but Galia and his team know that even small tweaks and little surprises and flair can capture attention consistently and ensure fans don’t fly by or tune out while being ready for unexpected opportunities.

“One, you got to keep things fresh,” said Galia, who has been with the Pirates since 2022. “Our creative team does an amazing job. We talk and plan on every template that could possibly be imaginable, we try and make [them] before the season starts just so we have it just in case something happens, because making graphics from scratch is going to take a long time and we might not have enough time.

“Even a starting lineup graphic — if you see the same starting lineup graphic 162 times, by the fifth time, no one’s paying attention to it. So again, our creative team has done a great job, we have 5 or 6 different versions of that, and we’ll make special versions for special weekends. Visually, the information is the same, still the nine players plus our starting pitcher — it’s exactly the same information, the same experience, but it’s packaged differently that at least catches your eye for an extra second instead of just zipping right past it because you already know what it is…

“Don’t let consistency be the enemy of creativity, he said. “Just because you have a plan in place and your brand is set and you know what content is going out; like, celebrate wins in different ways, use content in different ways, post content in different places and make the experience unique and keep people guessing — because as soon as they know what to expect from you, you’re done.”

Galia and his team know the Pirates will have their opportunities to capitalize on during the season, so they have a balance of proactive planning and extemporaneous creativity to make the most of special moments. Any baseball fan, heck any sports fan, was well-aware of some special times for the Pirates during the 2024 season, as rookie starting pitcher sensation Paul Skenes made his much-hyped debut. Skenes is one of many prospects to have made anticipated debuts for Pittsburgh the last couple of years. Galia knows each has a story to tell and can move the needle in varying ways. These are thoughtful, strategic conversations and plans that come together — again, with a healthy combo of preactive and reactive, so that no opportunity gets missed.

“We had so many guys debut and it was like, Okay, well, when Paul debuts or when Jared [Jones] debuts, or when person X debuts, where do they fall into kind of the zeitgeist of our players and who have been called up in the past?” Galia explained. “So you then try and figure out like, well then do we need to crank it up a notch and do even more or do we crank it down a notch and do a little bit, like just keep it kind of normal?…

“You kind of talk about it and make sure that you have a general plan and then, you know, three months later when it finally happens, it’s like, Oh, well, I came up with three other things, let’s do these instead. So it kind of works in both ways…You plan for what you can and then you react to everything else.”

A lot of this is about storytelling and brand building, creative execution and insight. And while certain key principles remain the same over time, constant change and adaptation is just as consistent a part of the game. Just consider in Galia’s career how many platforms have come and gone, product features that have arisen, and new opportunities and challenges to evolve the definition of good, effective, successful content.

Defining success is paramount for those working in social media. The reports and rankings, perhaps too often, showcase overall stats like engagement, reach, and views. The reality is more nuanced — you can feed the feeds to prioritize engagement, and most pros keep a close eye on what each platform is pushing in their recommendation engines at any given time, but achieving success is less about engagement bait and more about adapting your great content and brand activations to favor the forms that the fans and apps expect and want.

“If your plan is to do the same thing on every platform, you’re going to be okay on one of those platforms, but you’re going to fail on the other ones. Like, when you’re creating content, you’re creating these strategies to engage with your fans, but you also want to create content that the platforms value as well,” said Galia.

He continued: “If you’re not bringing in what the platforms value into your strategy, you’re going to miss the mark in some form or fashion… it’s a battle for every four seconds. You want to give someone what they’re looking for on the platform that they’re on…

“Keep your business goals in mind and what you’re trying to achieve, but put it in the packages and in the places that people are going to see it more clearly. So no matter what the goal is, you’re still not necessarily leaning into, like, ‘whatever Instagram’s goal is, is now my goal.’ It’s like now I know what Instagram’s goal is, so I can kind of tweak our strategy to make sure that more people see what my goal and our goals as an organization are.”

Toward the end of the interview with Galia, he recounted some of the more ‘viral’ posts from his time behind social media accounts in Pittsburgh and Arizona, specifically some that came together quickly. To the casual observer, such spur-of-the-moment success may feel like dumb luck with a dash of creative artistry — and there can be elements of that, sure. But it’s kind of kike the anecdote about famed artist Pablo Picasso being asked to draw a quick sketch, which took him minutes, but the price he charged was $1M francs. “The lady was shocked: ‘How can you ask for so much? It took you five minutes to draw this!’ ‘No,’ Picasso replied, ‘It took me 40 years to draw this in five minutes.'”

Where Galia has arrived after over a decade in sports and social is not too different from Picasso, in a sense. He and his team make thousands of micro-decisions every week, but they’re not made in a vacuum. Galia is informed by thinking about audiences, markets, goals, platforms, mediums, markets, strategies — those executions and ideas that take form in seconds in the hyper-paced nature of sports and social media are only possible because of years of experience and robust preparation.

In MLB, where Galia currently works, every swing, every pitch, every game is an opportunity to learn and get better. The same is true for the pros off the field — get better and get smarter with every post, every day. That’s the foundation for a Hall-of-Fame career.

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH ZACH GALIA

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College, Content Strategy

From Websites to AI: The Evolution and Arms Race in Sports Creative

Look across a dozen creative departments in sports and you’ll find a dozen different organizational structures — no two teams or college programs approach it quite the same way.

There are varied levels of investment (and internal buy-in), some collaborate more or less frequently with external agencies and freelancers, and others boast massive teams of specialists. The creative talent in the sports world is more impressive than ever, rivaling any other industry. Even as the creative field gets disrupted by generative AI, the appreciation for the value of strong graphics, video production, social media branding, and digital experiences is stronger than ever.

Bob McKamey can remember a time when the digital presence for major sports organizations and athletes were relative afterthoughts. When he co-founded digital studio UnCommon Thinking, having a dynamic, polished website was a burgeoning opportunity to engage and develop fans online. Then came social media, and multimedia social media — it was mainly just text in the earliest days, kids, so the onslaught of photos and then video and all of the derivative formats and form factor-driven creativity brought us to the current day where creative execution is a key concern for any sports team or college program. In a recent interview, McKamey reflected on the evolution of internal creative teams and what he saw as some leaned into studios like UnCommon Thinking, while others built up in-house capabilities.

“As social media grew, all of a sudden we started seeing the teams that we worked with started hiring their own designers, their own photographers, their own video people,” said McKamey, who co-founded UnCommon Thinking in 2003. “In some cases, you’re exactly right, it completely pushed us out 100%. In other cases, it was maybe 50-50, and to be honest with you, right now, a lot of our clients and a lot of the work we do is behind-the-scenes recruiting work [such as recruiting in college athletics]…

“So, now it’s really more like just a straight partnership. A lot of times they’ll do the front end stuff, game day as an example, and they’ll farm out all of the extra recruiting stuff to us on the back end.”

It’s hard for the public to comprehend how much creative output some of these massive sports teams, and especially college programs produce. It’s that often unseen volume of work, still just as necessary in the NIL and transfer portal era, that separates the big budget programs from their smaller counterparts. It’s not uncommon to see incredible work from the smallest schools, creative talent is thriving all over. The difference is the bigger programs can produce more of it, whether that means availing themselves of a resource like UnCommon Thinking or from beefed-up in-house teams. McKamey described what he sees, as he has worked with college programs up and down the spectrum in terms of budgets ad resources.

“The big difference is,” he explained, “I think if you gave the lead designer at a big school and the lead designer at a small school, and you said, ‘Hey, you got two hours to come up with a great idea’, I think in today’s marketplace, the quality would actually look pretty close.

“The problem is when you need to come up with designs for 50 recruits, [you] need game day content, NIL content — that person that’s only got 1 or 2 people and no access to someone like me to help them out, they really can’t play in the same type of field. So the quality of the quantity of graphics doesn’t really match up to the bigger programs now.”

There’s an infinite demand for creative output in sports, even when time, resources, and budget are finite and often insufficient. The ability to activate and attract corporate partners (and the sponsorship revenue) has been one driver in recent years of increased buy-in and budgets. But especially in college athletics, the biggest needle movers remain the CEO of the college programs (aka head coach) and the student-athletes with their continually increased bargaining power. With creative leaders frequently seeking ways to get more buy-in and budget, McKamey said it’s those two parties that hold the cards more than any other factors.

“I think it has to be coach-driven, number one, they have to understand the value of it, the creative that they get and how it affects recruiting, how it affects the brand impression people have,” said McKamey whose studio has worked with major college athletics program for years. “If they get it, then I think the money comes.”

He continued: “And it’ll be interesting, the whole thing with NIL, one of the things we’re seeing now is, more than ever, the individual recruits are wanting more and more of a say in their own graphics. It’s like the graphics are no longer sent back to the program for approval, they’re sent to them and then sent to the kid and his parents for approval. [It’s like] they’re directing us on creative. You’re seeing more and more of that now.”

No matter who’s making the asks and giving the approvals, all creative teams are reckoning, for better or for worse, with the arrival of generative AI. Veterans will recognize that generative AI isn’t that new (content-aware fill has been around), but no one can deny the ever-improving capabilities of generative AI to produce and edit images, graphics, objects, and even video will transform the industry. McKamey is not running away from these new tools, which some perhaps naively see as a threat to livelihoods, instead recognizing what they can do to empower others, enhance communication, and allow creatives to work better. For McKamey, who concedes that actually producing the creative is not his area of expertise, he noted how tools like Midjourney helps him work better with clients and his team of creative producers.

“A lot of times what I try to do with our team — this is more on how our process works — like, if we get a new project, I’ll try to give the designers as much information as possible about what it is. So as many samples, as many ideas, as many adjectives and things that they can handle,” said McKamey, who commented that savvy gen AI prompters seem to be able to get good enough to pass as legit creators. “So for me, it’s helped; like, I’ll go in and I’ll do samples through Midjourney and then as part of the creative brief include that for the actual designers themselves to go off of.”

Even as these generative AI tools continue to get better and better, there is little for existential crises within the creative field. But the field is changing. Whether one is starting with a blank canvas in an Adobe application or a blank text field on Open AI’s platform — there remains a need for creativity, originality, and the ability to go from something in your head to speaking and producing it into reality. For those who don’t consider themselves professional creatives (this author included), generative AI tools force us to appreciate the details that go into creative production, the minuscule but meaningful elements that the pros hone over several years and projects. McKamey has produced creative briefs for years and he’s continuing to educate himself by practicing and watching the words that can lead to the foundations of creative masterpieces.

“A lot of times I’ll just sit there in Midjourney and I’ll watch all the other prompts that are coming through, and I’ll pick up ideas just based on that to see what they’re doing,” he said. “A lot of times it has nothing to do with sports, but it’s like you said, the right angle, the sizing, the lighting, whether you want it to be an illustration type of thing, a cartoon type of thing, a portrait. It’s opening a lot of windows, but I think if you just learn how to control it and use it in the proper way, it can really help out what you’re doing on the end result.”

The creative landscape in sports continues to evolve, presenting both challenges and opportunities for creative leaders. The pressure to serve multiple masters – from coaches and athletes to sponsors and fans – while maintaining creative excellence requires adaptability and strategic thinking. 

Successful creative leaders in sports will be those who can navigate this complex terrain, leveraging both internal talent and external resources to produce innovative, impactful content that drives engagement and supports organizational goals. As the industry moves forward, the ability to blend creativity with strategic vision and embrace new technologies will be crucial for those at the helm of sports creative teams.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH BOB MCKAMEY

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Athlete Social Media, Content Strategy, Digital, General Sports Business, Sports Media, Streaming and Video

Beyond the Playbook: Bold, Trend-Driven Considerations for Sports Business in 2025

There are a myriad of reasons that make social media in sports unique.

The schedule and routine nature of sports can create predictability — but well-laid plans can also go up in smoke in an instant due to sports’ inherent unpredictability. Customers are fanatical about your brand (‘fans’) but that emotion can also turn negative by factors outside your control. Sports are perhaps one of the last (potentially) monocultures left — sports teams and leagues, and the fans, can relate to nearly every rabbit hole and trend.

All this to say that while leaders in sport may be able to count on a certain routine part of their jobs, there’s a whole lot more nobody can see coming. The exciting uncertainty gets compounded for social and digital media, where just when you think the pace of change is slowing, new opportunities, features, and platforms arise; all the while the half-life of trends and fads is shorter than ever. And while teams and leagues remain influential brands and retain massive platforms, they’ll find their fans gravitating more and more to creators and individual athletes.

So as the calendar turns from 2024 to 2025, it’s time for our annual column on what to have in mind for the year to come. It’s a part behavioral analysis and part reading the tea leaves of where the platforms are going. We can rest assured that certain principles of fandom and human psychology remain the same, while also embracing the untapped potential of what may lie ahead.

Re-Imagining In-Game Social Strategies

There’s no doubt Twitter isn’t what it once was. The platform still has a sizable, engaged sports audience, to be sure, but its ebbing numbers and diminishing value cannot be denied.

Sports teams and leagues will not abandon Twitter in 2025, but should it remain a top priority during games, with one or more team staff dedicated to filling the feed?

Combined with the dilution of Twitter is the increased homogeneity in in-game coverage. It’s game highlights (sometimes with unique angles), a stream of templated graphics and GIFs, and attempts at clever copy—often culminating in a ‘savage’ post after a win.

Could we see teams start to lean into the formulaic nature of in-game tweeting, let a combination of AI and semi-automated processes feed the feed with clips and graphics, leaving manpower to focus on more original and higher-value content? What is the role of a social media manager if they’re not hovering over the keys for the whole game?

Supported by a consistent feed of clips, could the social media team focus on curating the best fan and journalist content? Will there be a focus to push fans into owned and operated channels for a superior in-game experience (and could fans be more willing to go as more abandon Twitter and find alternatives like Bluesky and Threads to be lacking)? Or should social media managers treat their role more like hosts, checking in from the game like your creator friend on site at the event?

I can’t imagine going anywhere but Twitter when a big game is on, but substantive change will eventually come and 2025 may be the start.

The Evolving Social Media Role: Community Management vs. Content Creation and Strategy

For years, and largely still today, ‘social media manager’ was a catch-all term. It’s actually a bit of a joke that the job title can encompass a plethora of responsibilities like content creation, graphic design, video production, paid social, project management, analytics, and this list could go on. Community management was just kind of a given and still is, at least in the sports world.

But in the year ahead could we see an appreciation for the role of community management, even a separate dedicated role that accounts for the importance and full-time nature of such a responsibility? Community is becoming increasingly important as social platforms fragment, and engagement shifts toward interactions between fans and friends rather than big brands or scaled broadcast feeds of traditional social. Community management is a specialized role — discovering, developing, participating, listening, moderating, and monitoring.

Communities exist everywhere, which require a deep understanding of the language, culture, interests, memes, influencers, and angles. How many different communities thrive on TikTok? How many different places could a team or league be a central or tangential part of conversation and engagement? In 2025, let’s give community the attention and importance it deserves. Which relates to the next topic…

Micro Communities 

The emergence of micro communities is not new, it has been happening across industries for years, but really picked up in 2024 and expect to continue growing in the year to come. Reddit has seen substantial engagement growth—highlighted by recent PR efforts focused on sports—and community-based strategies are becoming more prevalent across platforms and industries. With some exceptions, social media is becoming less, well, ‘social,’ with algorithms that favor engagement, regardless of who it’s from, and the interest graph leading the way.

Look at the way the platforms are evolving to serve this need, too. TikTok touts its micro communities, whether BookTok or RushTok or the like, Facebook Groups are keeping big blue relevant for younger users, and Instagram is encouraging its biggest brands to carve their audiences with broadcast channels.

What could micro community strategy look like for sports organizations? Thinking about fan cohorts became common several years ago, largely driven by socioeconomic, demographic, and avidity measures. And every year sees plenty of theme nights and promotions targeted to specific, sometimes very small communities. But what can this look like on digital and social media? How can teams and leagues seek out and serve (or learn from) existing micro communities, or perhaps even cultivate their own? As users (and fans) seek more authentic connections and genuine conversations, micro communities will continue to grow.

Even More Niche Content

This could’ve been addressed in the previous section, but there’s value in considering niche content, as well. Social media pros once lamented (and some still do) that organically reaching one’s followers was a thing of the past. But consider the possibilities that have opened up in the last few years, as more social media users stick on the For You feed over the Following alternative. There is so much good (and bad) content, it’s easier to let an algorithm surface the best content as it gets to know us better than we know ourselves.

So while your followers may not all see your content, the users that are likely to enjoy the content you put out will see it (if it’s good). Brands and teams can unleash their content and let the algorithm show it to the right audience (while avoiding the the wrong one). Instagram may even find that a certain tile in a carousel post is more attractive to a certain audience.

Embrace it and don’t be afraid to try content that’s specifically not meant to appeal to the masses, but will be welcomed (and engaged with) by an intended audience. The goal of every post and piece of content isn’t to reach millions—that’s the wrong way to think about it. Embrace the increasingly savvy algorithms and lean into niches that may make no sense to certain segments of your fans (and even yourself) but will be epic for others.

Platforms to Enhance Small Group Chats and Communities

Where does most of the sports dialogue take place? Actual back-and-forth conversations, with darn near 100% open and read rate? Dark social channels like DMs, group chats, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It’s old news now that Instagram acknowledged there’s a heck of a lot of engagement and sharing happening in the direct messages. WhatsApp continues to grow, particularly in the US, and even Snap remains strong among Gen Z for chatting.

Can teams and leagues create a platform so good that it can take those intimate direct communications away from texts and DMs to an owned platform? It’s tough to compete with your device’s built-in messenger or the ubiquity of WhatsApp, the convenience of IG, the fun and habit of Snap — but what could sports organizations try in order to capture all this valuable engagement and these users?

Leagues may provide a feed of clips from games to insert into a chat with one frictionless click. Perhaps fans can access photos and screenshots along with a simple meme-making tool. Or fans could earn points to redeem for merch simply by sending messages to each other during a game. Teams could even provide trained LLMs via chatbots who could discuss the game (with personalities and dispositions to choose from) and answer questions. Maybe there’s no solution—these platforms are too sticky—but as conversations keep becoming less public and sports dialogue continues on dark channels, the opportunity persists.

The Full Embrace of Creators

Sports leagues and teams have been working in some capacity with creators for years now. An increasing number even have job titles that include, and some are centered around, influencer/creator marketing or relations. But if the state of influencer x sports integration were measured on a scale of 1-10, what would ’10’ look like?

While not tens, the industry saw some 7’s or 8’s in the last few years. NBC Olympics and the IOC gave a select group of creators access to events (though with limitations on the content they could capture). The NFL gives some creators access to gameday clips and archival footage, while the NBA has a similar initiative that expanded this season.

In 2025, more teams, leagues, and media partners could not only welcome creators but also collaborate with them even further. Give them access to content AND have them co-create content (for organic and paid). Let them remix highlights or host their own highlights recap show during the week. Invite them to make shows or skits for their own channels at team practices and games. Invite more creators to put on their own ‘ManningCasts’ — as more games shift away from the cable bundle, providing an abundance of alternate streams becomes more feasible and viable. help them activate their communities or fans at games. (JohnWallStreet wrote about this earlier this year)

There’s a greater (and lucrative) opportunity to figure out what a partnership with sports and creators should look like in its most optimized state. Hopefully, we’ll see some swings in the year to come.

(Here’s a solid SBJ article discussing several leagues’ creator initiatives)

Athlete-led Multi-Channel Networks and Content Franchises

By the time you’re done reading this, another athlete will have started a podcast. Athletes (and their management teams) are increasingly realizing the relative ease and significant benefits going on the mic for an hour a week, give or take, can provide them. It’s a platform to build their brand, of course, and control their narrative. It’s an asset on which to activate partners or promote their own causes and businesses. And it’s a lightweight way to seed an engaging presence on YouTube, in particular, as well as TikTok (and Instagram).

Athletes entering the pro ranks now are even more invested, with some colleges even providing studios and training for their student-athletes. In the year ahead, the teams and leagues will begin to realize the opportunity in front of them — and the urgency.

We’ll see more teams provide studios and equipment for their players to produce podcasts. True collaboration could take place, with teams building something akin to a multi-channel network, activating diverse athletes with their unique interests. One athlete might focus on mental health, another on spirituality and religion, a third on interviewing comedians and actors, and yet another on re-watching famous games. The possibilities are endless and can align with players’ interests. Packaged together (or not), these could form a significant platform to attract new partners or extend existing ones. Some athletes are so big they’d rather do their own thing or work with a platform like Wave or Blue Wire. But plenty would jump at the chance to get this kind of access and audience (and revenue sharing) a team could provide.

With more teams closely tied, if not owning, their RSNs or DTC solution for games, such content can fill those coffers with new programming, in addition to the feeds of YouTube and TikTok. Which leads to…

The Team (or RSN) App as the AVOD or SVOD for Fans

While regional sports networks have survived longer than many expected, some teams are taking things over or working closely with a partner, and many teams are prioritizing first-party relationships with fans, often through apps. The productions that teams create rival anything fans will see on Netflix, Max, or Peacock. The training camp all-access content and game recap mini-movies are incredible. More colleges are building robust content-based DTC apps, with livestreams of coaches shows and extensive catalogs of content.

Many teams have impressive serialized series (and podcasts) on YouTube (and even TikTok) playlists, some are sitting on decades worth of content newly digitized (or some still sitting on old VHS tapes and DVDs). All of them boast impressive production teams. In the year to come, teams and leagues will envision their fans flipping to their app the same way they would Netflix to watch on-demand content. Not just for an hour a week, but consistently—even during the offseason.

The bigger opportunity may even be in licensing proven content and creators. Look at how ESPN licensed distribution rights to the Pat McAfee show as an example. Now, sports teams and leagues won’t lay out tens of millions of dollars like ESPN did for McAfee, but what’s to stop them from acquiring emerging talents and properties. Or perhaps they could go the route of Colin Cowherd’s The Volume or Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network and create mini media empires that can benefit from their distribution and advertiser relations.

Perhaps there will even be membership tiers, similar to those offered by major players, with options for ads or ad-free viewing/listening. It’s exciting to imagine, which coincides with…

+ Experiences for Fans

Over a decade ago, I learned that sports teams in Australia didn’t have season ticket holders—they had ‘members.’ Being a member was about more than having tickets to games, it was an identity and a connection to the team. Many American teams started calling their season ticket holders ‘members,’ but it was mostly an exercise in nomenclature. When tickets to games became moot during the worst days of the pandemic, there was more experimentation with what paid ‘memberships’ could mean, but nothing really took off beyond a few teams launching more inspired loyalty programs.

The + is now ubiquitous across consumer products and services, as are subscriptions in general. However, beyond ticket subscriptions (like season tickets or mini plans), there hasn’t been much of a membership model in sports. There is NFL+, which offers access to audio streams and archives and college athletics (including NIL collectives and booster clubs) are innovating in the space, but what could + programs look like for sports, in much the same way Amazon Prime feels for its millions of members?

In the coming year, teams and leagues around the world can continue to imagine memberships — premium memberships — for fans local and remote. There is more data being collected than ever, which can enable personalized benefits and partner co-promotions. Experiences are more valued, and more diverse and amenable to unbundling, whether in-person (separate entries) or remote (like early access to limited merch drops). As the previous section noted, too, with teams able to build ever-increasing catalogs of content, a + experience could also mean something akin to Prime Video — content…

Get Bold with Generative AI

It’s been over two years since ChatGPT launched to the public, and generative AI continues to improve (insert a cynical take about the rate of acceleration slowing). The arms race keeps going and tools like NotebookLM reset the goalposts on what can be created from source materials. And you know who’s sitting on decades’ worth of brand content? Yep, sports teams and leagues, who also have fans with insatiable appetites for content about their team, with nostalgia often irresistible.

Even as questions persist about how consumers will tolerate AI-generated content, these factors point to opportunity. Could the archives of thousands of interviews turn into binge-worthy podcasts and documentary-dramatizations or page-turning oral histories? Or how could terabytes of game notes and stats be put into action through diverse generative AI packages, from compelling content to endless games and trivia?

We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of generative AI, in all its multimodal forms. There’s a treasure trove of latent content (and sponsorable assets) just waiting to be mined for fans.

Leaning into Novelty and Micro Culture for Games and Live Events

For decades, ‘gimmicks’ were seen as beneath pro sports, novelty was the domain of minor league sports. Major pro sports are beginning to embrace fun, recognizing the value in ephemeral and sometimes esoteric online trends and cultures as lucrative opportunities.

There have been monoculture themes present in pro sports for years — Star Wars Nights are omnipresent across major and minor (and college) sports. But culture is now more fragmented and trends come and go quickly; few viral moments or movements resonate with the majority of fans in a packed stadium or arena.

In the year ahead, teams will embrace the countless microtrends and communities that form and proliferate across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. They’ll capitalize on trends within niches as much as, if not more than, the well-worn monocultural motifs. How can teams make every game an event and inspire FOMO for some cohort[s] of fans who want to be there for it? Gone are the years of forced formality and pompous self-importance — there will be more fun ahead in the future.

Strategy Around Condensed Games

Younger generations don’t watch full games. Some may say that narrative has become so widespread that it’s become overhyped — but it’s largely true. This trend coincides with the continued rise of condensed games. Go on the NBA YouTube page, for example, and you’ll find a playlist of ‘full game highlights’—10-minute videos that summarize the game and showcase key plays, often garnering hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. So while the dream of getting Gen Z and Gen Alpha to sit in front of a TV and give their mostly undivided attention for 2-3 hours seems naive, getting them to watch condensed games feels more plausible.

In the year to come, leagues and teams can operationalize condensed games, experimenting with formats and activations, and building them into valuable assets rather than YouTube afterthoughts. They could license condensed games to creators, allowing them to relive and recap games (while sharing in the revenue). Sponsors could help deliver condensed games to the masses, allowing fans and wannabe creators to remix and put their own spin on highlights and game stories. Broadcasters and leagues can experiment with unique angles and POVs for condensed games. For instance, iso-cams have already been part of the NBA on TNT’s strategy, as well as the ‘Caitlin Clark’ cam during her last season at Iowa.

There’s an interesting future to consider for condensed games, but even while the future remains uncertain for full games, nothing can truly replace live content…

More Live

2025 will mark ten years since Live entered the social media picture, when Meerkat and Periscope launched and allowed anyone anywhere with a mobile device and a decent connection to go live to the world. In my recent interview with World Wide Wob (Rob Perez), he remarked about the continued value of live, content where anything could happen and anything could go unexpectedly go wrong. Even mundane content becomes more compelling when it’s live. Many prognosticators assert that 2025 will be the year live shopping takes off in the US, with platforms like TikTok reimagining QVC for younger generations.

In the year ahead, sports teams and leagues will continue to innovate and try new things with live (and that includes games!). As more fans get on DTC and streaming apps to find their team’s content, that’ll compound the already ever-present platforms like YouTube to find fans who will tune in to see it live. For games, streaming parts of games live will be a key tactic to drive sign-ups and perhaps even open the opportunity for PPV or micro-transactions to watch an exciting finish (the NBA talked about this years ago, Buzzer had a strong go at it, too). But there’s even more.

There are plenty of narratives about the oncoming onslaught of AI slop filling feeds today and moving forward. But you can ‘t AI-ize ‘live.’ Stretching and warming up before practice is boring and monotonous — but what if it’s live? (I’d watch a livestream of an NHL team playing sewer ball before a game!) The dance team preparing a routine can be great live content. Who wouldn’t watch a live stream of a hockey equipment manager sharpening skates or an NFL clubhouse attendant setting up players’ lockers. Or how about a livestream of a producer editing a hype video?

We’re starting to see more games-based content, so perhaps there’s a future of livestreams featuring players competing in beer pong (with water — or some sponsors’ sports drink). Live trivia games with fans or players would fit in that mold, too. An always-on livestream of a stadium’s VIP entrance or an arena’s transformation from hockey to basketball could be content gold (time lapses are cool, but they’re not live!). And, yes, the drops culture has already come to sports, so live reveals of exclusive merch and collectibles would seem to work, too. (Including ‘breaks’ performed by a player/alum/mascot/broadcasters).

Short-form, long-form; Stories and Feed — live is one format that’ll always offer unique value and the creativity, originality, innovation, and value creation is just getting started.

Retail Media and Commerce-Driven Sponsorships

Over the last couple of years, it seems every major corporation with a sizable database of users, detailed information about them, and a steady flow of traffic has created retail media networks where advertisers can bid for inventory. Sports has forever been an industry built on brand partnerships, with some performance-driven marketing baked in (e.g., ‘the team won, so get a discounted pizza’). And while there is a step back to brand marketing, after an overcorrection, partnerships and advertising with trackable, countable results are still gaining priority.

Even the biggest leagues or college conferences may not be able to, nor does it make sense to, support actual retail networks. But this industry trend could creep its way into the sports world as organizations continue to collect more first-party data, have increasingly robust user profiles, and establish more connected touchpoints with fans. For the most part, teams and leagues have operationalized fan data to sell them more of the stuff they produce or license themselves — tickets, merchandise, collectibles, etc. — but how could they start to more effectively segment their fans so that the offers and products, and even the advertisers, are the right ones for each fan and in each context. And as the data infrastructure continues to mature, there could be valuable, increasingly smarter and high-converting ads (for b2c and even b2b businesses).

I’m not smart or informed enough to know how quickly or whether such a vision could materialize, but sports apps—especially those supported by content and live games—will likely remain among the few apps where users spend significant time, creating a world of opportunities.

Novelty Merch Drops and Collectibles: Beyond Game Giveaways

2024 was the year of the novelty popcorn bucket. Movie theaters capitalized on the surprisingly intense fan interest to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. The Carolina Hurricanes introduced a Zamboni popcorn bucket, while the Detroit Red Wings have gone viral the last couple of years around Thanksgiving for their Zamboni gravy boats (and even had a design contest for this year’s version).

Novelty items are not new to sports. Heck, some teams even produce giveaways teaser videos with the same excitement as schedule release videos (see this example from the San Diego Padres). But sponsored giveaways largely exist to a) Activate sponsorships (duh) and b) Boost attendance — you have to go to the game to get that exclusive bobblehead! But so many teams boast so many fans who cannot (or will not) go to games, they either too far away, can’t afford to go to many games or mainly express their fandom digitally. The importance of the remote fan grew during the pandemic, when in-person attendance was impossible.

So why are these sponsored giveaway items still positioned mostly as attendance boosters? Combine the novelty, the ‘drops’ culture, the surge of collectibles in recent years, the rise of live and creator-driven shopping — and creative, original novelty merch drops could be a big boon for teams, leagues, and their partners. Fwiw, we have seen more teams in recent years do apparel collabs, which seem to be successful. But take that to the nth degree with tchotchkes and collectibles that fans around the world can’t resist.

There could be millions in revenue on the table, whether through direct sales or through sponsor-driven models where fans ‘pay’ by purchasing a sponsor’s product, providing contact information, or completing a branded game—earning them these items shipped directly to their door. The gate still matters, ticket sales are still a very meaningful revenue stream — but instead of subsidizing gravy boats for 20,000 fans (or up to 60-70-80,000 fans), open up these valuable engagement (and earned media/display) opportunities to the millions of fans around the globe.

Mini Serialized Episodes

It was about a year ago that noted social media consultant and Link in Bio newsletter author Rachel Karten wrote that we should ‘treat your social video channels like you would a TV show’ (read the full piece here). And if you work in social media, you’ve no doubt come across the viral Mohawk Chevrolet content on TikTok. Meanwhile, in Japan (and China), short dramas, with ‘episodes’ typically lasting 1-3 minutes are becoming increasingly popular (read about it).

So, with all that, how can sports teams and leagues create entertainment for their fans that transcends the typical content related to their games, players, and training, and even the ‘lifestyle’ content becoming more prevalent? Could a team (with or without a team sponsor) bankroll an emerging creator to produce a short-form sitcom or sketch show featuring some storylines or ‘product placement’ involving the team? Could there be a meta (lowercase m) series that imagines days in the life of team staff? Perhaps a few characters find themselves in a rom-com that plays at or around games? Teams don’t have to collaborate with creators; they could instead build capabilities in-house or work with agencies and freelancers.

I’m no creator or creative producer, but the point is that even the biggest fans are still consuming a lot of media that is not content produced by their favorite teams (or media talking about the teams), a lot of pure entertainment, much of which is created by TikTokers and YouTubers. In the coming year, teams and leagues could leverage their expertise, channels, brand affinity, and credibility to engage fans in creative, original ways that transcend their sport.

All these topics are not meant to be predictions; the world changes far too rapidly to prognosticate—though plenty of prediction columns try each year. But the only certainty is change, innovation, and advancement. All we can do is watch user behavior change, see how the world around us evolves, and take calculated risks and audacious shots. The only failure is standing pat and leaning into only what works today. Eschew the comfort and complacency of the status quo and don’t be afraid to do what hasn’t yet been done. The only way to realize an exciting future is to create it ourselves.

Content Strategy, Social Media

Top Rank Boxing’s Knockout Strategy for Finding Followers and Developing Fans

The fans are out there. Your fans are out there. More fans than you even realize. There are communities, conversations, and creators engaging with the sport, the athletes, the media and the organizations that comprise the sport’s universe.

You just have to meet them where they are and do so in a way that’s genuine and valued.

It was easier in the halcyon days when ‘social media’ mostly meant Facebook and Twitter (and eventually Instagram). But now fans are more fragmented, different segments engaging on different platforms and divvying up their engagement pie and timeshare.

Most sports organizations fall into one of two camps — either you’re the type to sit back and watch others try out the new platforms first, perhaps just securing a page or handle while you wait OR you’re the early mover, jumping in and figuring stuff out as you go. You either play offense, trying new playbooks and platforms or you focus on perfecting your existing scheme, improving and enhancing the plays you know you can execute well. Convoluted sports analogies aside, it was insightful to learn about the success Joe Setley has seen at the organizations where he’s worked, where the rewards potential greatly outweighed the risks.

“I’ve been blessed to work with organizations that have really been willing to be on the forefront of apps where it’s like, ‘Oh, TikTok’s come out, like, let’s try it,’ said Setley, the Senior Director of Social Media and Content Strategy for Top Rank Boxing. “Top Rank has built a giant audience on WhatsApp now, that launched last year. We’ve been willing to kind of just jump on these trends.

“I think there is probably a graveyard of accounts that I’ve launched over my time at different places that are in that little part of the Excel sheet that just say account no longer in use. But I think that’s really where I’ve had a lot of buy-in from executives and my bosses in the past, and now where it’s really given us the opportunity to say What’s the worst thing that happens? The app’s not going to succeed.

“Going back to that WhatsApp example for Top Rank, we have over 4 million followers on WhatsApp. That’s 20% of our audience that we now have.. That account has been active since June last year, so there’s no reason not to take that risk. Same with the UFC (where Setley previously worked). We launched the TikTok account and I think it was in the first 50 days we had a million followers on it. Like, there’s no real reason not to embrace the kind of new apps because again, worst case, you discard it. But take that chance and hopefully you’re going to get lucky a couple times.”

Everyone who’s worked in social media can likely cite one or more platforms that came and went (Google+ was gonna be huge! Until it wasn’t. What about Peach or Ello or Yo!?). Setley noted that taking the shots isn’t as daunting when you can mostly repurpose existing content (TikTok was an exception, he noted). Meeting fans where they are is job number one. The next arena where that matters, especially for a sport and organization with a global fanbase (or realistic ambitions to have one) is language and culture.

A massive unlock for Setley and his team at Top Rank was to look at diversity of language and culture across their social media accounts. There are fans celebrating the sport and individual boxers hailing from different countries around the world waiting for an opportunity to come together and engage with platforms, pages, and posts that are made for them. It’s a chance to properly serve those fan segments, deepening engagement and connections, and enhancing fan avidity among them.

“All of our content was in English except for a Twitter account, so we really decided to dedicate a lot more effort into meeting these fans,” said Setley, who has been at Top Rank since late 2021. “Potentially another language will come down the pipeline in 2024 or 25, but we’ve seen a massive success in reaching these fans, using language as the main component.

“That was actually a really large reason why we launched the Spanish Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram pages;, especially for that market, we wanted to have an account that could be more dedicated and focused to them. So we have a large Puerto Rican audience, we do a boxing event at MSG every Puerto Rican Day weekend, so we wanted to create an account that was more dedicated to promoting our Hispanic champions, our Mexican champions, our Puerto Rican champions, and really making sure that like where the main account can’t do 30 posts about them a day, this account could. So hopefully the Spanish account is a start of a larger, more global and regionalized. “

Every team and league (and boxing promoter) would do well to look within the existing fans of their sport and figure out how to turn those casual account ‘followers’ into engaged avids. While we spend time living post to post, aiming to reach higher levels of engagement and engagement metrics, there’s another framework worthy of consideration — moving fans up the funnel, ascending them up the spectrum, no matter where they reside today.

Everyone’s chasing new fans, especially the sports leagues whose three-letter abbreviations aren’t universally known, but what is the experience like for these new fans upon their arrival? What does the track look like to welcome these relative noobs, coming across the team or sport or league from different entry points, to continue growing in their fandom, moving up the spectrum? While boxing is one of the world’s oldest sports, Setley and Top Rank strategize with intent to bring new fans into the fold.

“We did audience surveys over the last year and really tried to identify what a fan of Top Rank is, and we learned that tons of people love boxing, but they don’t all know the rules of boxing,” he said. “Inside the ring and outside there are things like purse bids or co-promotions or what makes a ten-eight round and things like that; it’s not the easiest to find resources of how to learn these things. So we’re spending an effort this year to launch a series called Boxing 101 that provides these educational points for everyone.

“From a casual fan to a hardcore fan, we want to be able to provide a resource even just for the hardcore fans. They are arguing with their friend, they want to be like, ‘See on Top Rank’s website, they define this as that.’ So we’re trying to really help educate the fans.”

Top Rank can be a valuable resource for fans — showcasing the fighters, informing fans, and providing entertainment and access beyond the televised fights (which air most often on ESPN in the US). But it’s not as simple a relationship as fan-to-team or even fan-to-league. Top Rank supports fighters, promotes fights, and has been a beacon of the sport for decades. But the brand of a boxing promotion like Top Rank is not as simple as that of the laundry we cheer for in stick and ball sports. But Top Rank, like its peers, wants to stand out in the quality and stardom of the fighters they work with and a brand that is as sterling as the 50+ years the promotion has been around (founded in 1966).

Any sports brand, particularly in sports with rich, celebrated histories and historic rewatchable events, would do well to learn from Setley and Top Rank. This writer is personally bullish on the opportunity for organizations activate their archive, and Top Rank knows one of their key differentiating factors against other boxing promotions or even boxing media outlets, is their history. Setley talked about the value of their vault.

“Something that [Top Rank] really does well is we have boxing footage since 1966, so something that we made a very strong push and effort on is showcasing that vault,” said Setley, who also mentioned that 92-year-old Top Rank founder Bob Arum remains an active part of the promotion today. “We now have a Facebook page that’s called ‘Top Rank The Vault’ that has over 600,000 followers. It’s not dedicated to promoting upcoming fights, it’s just you want to watch an old Muhammad Ali fight, you come here. You want to watch an old Marvin Hagler fight, you can come here…

“It’s bringing back that kind of content that separates us, because none of these other promoters have that deep of a library. We have Floyd [Mayweather], we have Manny [Pacquiao], we have Hagler, Hearns, Ali — like anyone that has ever been a legend in boxing at some point has come through the Top Rank doors.”

Backdropping Top Rank’s ability to seek out swings worth taking and value yet to be realized is the buy-in from the top on down. Setley knows that social media strategy doesn’t happen in a silo, it can’t; positive feedback loops buttressed by numbers help keep the train moving, but even before that it takes investment in the vision and the evidence-backed and educated belief that these punches will land.

Said Setley: “At the end of the day we have an amazing president of our organization, Todd duBoef who, revenue or not, has really been a massive supporter of our content overall…He’s been able to give us that belief, that expertise and the resources to make it happen. So over the last two and a half years, our numbers have gone through the roof, and it’s really all thanks to him being able to just be an advocate for us when he’s speaking with other members of the executives, when he’s talking to us, working with him to really build out what our social strategy is.”

Your next mass of fans is already out there, you just have to attract them. Embrace the unknown, take risks, and meet your fans with authenticity. In this ever-evolving digital landscape, understanding your diverse fanbase and innovating will turn casual followers into lifelong fanatics. As Joe Setley and Top Rank have shown, success lies in the connections we build, the stories we tell, and the communities we nurture. By strategically engaging with new platforms and thoughtfully curating content, you can drive deeper engagement and build a thriving, loyal fanbase, and stay on top for years to come.

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH JOE SETLEY

READ THE SNIPPETS

Content Strategy, General Sports Business, Social Media ROI

How Barstool Sports is Innovating the Media Business, Leveraging their IP into New, ‘Obvious’ Revenue Streams

It’s no secret that the media industry has been in a state of flux. That’s pretty much been the case since we were all firing up those America Online CDs back in the ’90s (man, I’m old).

But flux doesn’t mean the sky is falling. It’s just that in an age of endless content and aggressive aggregation, it’s the ‘brands’ — and that includes individuals — that have a leg up as the old paradigms of interruptive advertising, of borrowed attention, are not necessarily the primary revenue stream for media companies.

When you list media businesses that are innovating new models and monetizing audiences and communities in diverse ways, Barstool Sports is among those, not just surviving but thriving in this new world. Barstool isn’t just a media company — they’re into licensing, live events, partnerships, and products. There is still advertising, but that’s just a piece of the pie, and it’s that diversity of revenue that characterizes the next era of content and media.

“I got to spend a lot of time learning and a lot of time executing on various strategic products that helped Barstool Sports scale from a content and social perspective, from a merch perspective, from a licensing perspective, and from a live events perspective,” said Barstool Sports Director of Licensing and Business Development Brian Fitzsimmons in a recent interview with me, “to the point where, over time, our top of funnel had grown so vast that people started to get into the Barstool Sports ecosystem by a lot of different unrelated things.”

Fitzsimmons could rattle off myriad Barstool franchises and creators through which fans touch the business — from the longtime popular ‘Pardon My Take’ sports podcast to the more pop culture-focused and uber-popular ‘Chicks in the Office,’ amid several other entry points. “We started building around [Barstool’s creators and thinking of them as their own individual companies; thinking of Barstool Sports as their own IP house in a way,” said Fitzsimmons, who joined Barstool Sports in 2018.

Just like your favorite athlete eschewing an endorsement deal that would feature a fitness brand in their workout content on Instagram, creators understand their own brand can carry more weight than those that have filled consumer’s carts for decades. It starts to seem downright logical to create brands and activations that come out of creators’ natural content and conversations. So the athlete may activate around their recovery content and the creators at Barstool may do the same amidst their conversations of food they’re ordering for the game (Pardon My Cheesesteak), the sports bar debates and viewing parties they stream (Barstool bars), the drink concoctions they discuss on the podcast (Pink Whitney), the golf outings and professional golf chatter (Barstool Golf Time app) — and so many other examples. Fitzsimmons elaborated, saying the secret is just doing stuff that makes sense.

“I think that when we’re looking to see where there’s opportunity, we simply use our common sense…,” said Fitzsimmons, who started in journalism and content earlier in his career. “For instance, one of my favorite partnerships that we currently have is with our Barstool bars. So we have bars in Scottsdale, Chicago, Philadelphia and Nashville. And when you think about it, [Barstool Sports’s] DNA is how we relate to people who love watching sports and we talk about sports in a way that you would with your friend at a bar. Us being able to have a physical presence that reflects our brand, it just makes so much sense.

“And it doesn’t even have to be from a sports perspective, I think any licensing deal where the end user sees it and says, ‘Man, that makes so much sense and that is so brilliant’ — that’s how you know you have the home run.”

Fitzsimmons knows what a powerful flywheel the Barstool Sports machine supports. Success compounds as more content gets produced and creators continue to create and more seemingly obvious opportunities present themselves. Then it’s up to Fitzsimmons and his team to go to work, recognizing opportunities and executing.

“I help our commerce team identify new opportunities in the licensing and business development realms and try to figure out how we can build and layer on to the great things that we have started here,” Fitzsimmons explained to me. “Like, what is the thing that we can tack on to and scale for Pardon My Take? For that, we created the Pardon My Cheesesteak virtual dining brand. We created the Stella Blue Coffee DTC (direct-to-consumer) coffee brand under Big Cat (Dan Katz). We created the bars. For Fore Play, what is the thing that would speak to the Fore Play golf audience and it would be genuine to the talent involved, and it would make sense for everyone? We forged a partnership with Supreme Golf and created a tee time booking app called the Barstool Golf Time app.

“So it’s things like that that I look after to try to figure out how can we grow our business, how can we keep our commerce business healthy, and how can we help the big brands that help steer the ship for us — how can we help them continue to grow?”

The neverending content machine of Barstool Sports means Fitzsimmons and his team just need to keep a watchful eye because things just ‘happen.’ There’s still advertising within the Barstool Sports system, to be sure — that revenue stream is still a part of the mix for any media company. But when the Barstool commerce team can see a creator organically producing one of those ‘that makes so much sense’ opportunities within their everyday conversation and content — that’s when they’re ready to activate. That’s the magic of this new media model, this new era.

“There’s always a catalyst. And we are incredibly reactionary,” said Fitzsimmons, who also noted they’re “maniacal” about data in identifying opportunities, too. “I would like to think that our licensing business was more strategic and less opportunistic, but it’s just the way that we operate and the brilliance of this company is how we react. And to your point, a lot of it comes from very organic sparks. Like you mentioned, Big Cat posting these coffee memes just because he thinks it’s funny to make fun of old people that just put coffee memes on their Facebook every morning. It transpired from there, you hit the nail on the head. And same thing with Ryan Whitney discussing the pink lemonade and all that.

“It was like the light bulb went off and it was like, man, we have something here, right?”

Fitzsimmons and Barstool know they’re part of that new paradigm. One in which content isn’t just a means to monetize attention with ads, but an opportunity to create IP, develop powerful relationships, and utilize all the time spent with these creators and their content to do something more. The thesis for The Chernin Group, one of the early major backers of Barstool Sports, was around media companies building and becoming commercial brands. Barstool is a living example of such a thesis and they’re continuing to evolve and develop it further, starting out with apparel, as Fitzsimmons recalls, and expanding into so many of the products, events, and partnerships, only a fraction of which were mentioned in this article.

“This goes far beyond licensing,” he said. “The template of We’re going to change the game around how media companies can make money [Barstool founder Dave Portnoy] had was so brilliant so many years ago to be able to pair merch with content in a way that has never been done before…

“We still carry that formula with us today. It’s like when a big moment breaks out, Barstool is going to end up having a shirt that goes along with it. And whenever you go into read someone’s blog you’re going to have a link to a merch product that correlates with that person’s point of view. There’s something special about the marriage between content and merch that Barstool has had for the longest time, and we’ve been able to obviously keep up with that.”

Looking ahead, the connections fans have with the faces of Barstool (as opposed to relatively faceless content producers in other media) along with the ‘obvious’ activations the Barstool business team executes that serve the fans bode well for the future of Barstool. The media industry will continue to evolve, and not all the upstarts, let alone the legacy companies, will survive. But the brands that find ways to align their output with fan expectations, wants, and needs will prevail and last. They’ll continue to stand out from the sea of content because their fans feel respected and because those fans care — when there’s no shortage of places to go for an article or a ‘take’, there’s a select few that fans actively choose to go to before, during, and after the big game. And that’s a powerful moat to have.

Said Fitzsimmons: “It’s something special when you have an audience that connects with the content creators and the personalities in the way that ours do. I think that it’s a testament to how Barstool, over the years, has done such a great job of keeping the user first, keeping the audience first, and I think that’s why you see people over the years continue to stick with us and continue to grow with us.”

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