Content Strategy – Page 2 – Digital and Social Media Sports

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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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN FITZSIMMONS

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College, Content Strategy, Social Media

The Evolution of the Creative Operation in Sports and Why It Needs Leadership and Structure

What’s your LinkedIn bio snippet?

You know, most people have their job title and the place they work. Others have something more operative, like what they ‘do.’ Although I don’t love the vague nature of the latter, it’s an instructive way to think about one’s job. The answer to the infamous question from the Bobs in the Office Space: ‘What would you say you do here?’ (look it up, kids, and watch the movie if you haven’t seen it!).

It’s not so aggrandized to characterize the actual day-to-day work as something more grandiose, but to understand how producing that video, writing that email, or building that report is connected to the rest of the organization; how the modular work on the assembly line affects the bottom line success for the company and how it ultimately ties back to your to-do list.

Such is the potential disconnect between the endless demands of the creative team, especially for a sports organization, and the rest of the business. The quantity of content output for the creative team — graphics, videos, and everything in between — continues to increase. This is overall a good thing, as organizations appreciate that engaged attention, and content earning that attention, is the ultimate currency. But as teams grow and the content practice evolves from an arthouse to a well-oiled factory floor, a layer of management is necessary. That transition is taking place now, ensuring the quantity doesn’t drown out the quality and the art finds a way to meet the science.

“When you’re looking at ticket sales and fan engagement, it’s really hard when you only have 1 or 2 graphic designers to support all those (objectives),” said Akshay Ram, a Product Manager at Adobe who has years of experience in sports creative, including during his undergrad at Syracuse. “So then it comes down to who’s making the call for priorities. And in the college space, I don’t think that specific person is established as much, so it makes it a little more challenging, and I think that’s part of what that transition looks like.”

Prioritization. That’s the mechanism through which the art must be balanced. I can remember back in college speeding through video edits while others would spend days tweaking and perfecting a single photo or graphic composition. Software solutions are certainly facilitating the production process now, as Ram can attest sitting at one of the biggest and most ingrained and integral companies at Adobe. The new world in which everyone can at least pose as a creative (think back to the early days of Instagram filters, even) means the role of a full-time skilled and studied creative is evolving. I spoke with Ram about the balance of the creative team with empowering others to complete the last mile of content with only the creative team owning the final export.

“Something I preach all the time [is] are you are you working efficiently by doing what you’re doing? Can you provide some of that trust to someone else by setting yourself up for success and them up for success?” said Ram, who also worked with Bleacher Report during his time studying and working at Syracuse (he likes being busy!) “There are many tools that are going in that direction right now where, as a creative, you can’t just think about being the most creative person and putting in all these flashy effects. What do [colleagues] need in order to communicate the message that they’re trying to send out? And maybe that just requires a simple template and you as a creative setting that up for someone else to go in and just change the parameters that you establish.”

Whether it’s templates that help maintain quality while scaling output and autonomy or more premium content, the creative part of an organization is delivering solutions more than ‘stuff.’ It’s stuff with a purpose that conveys a brand and seeks to accomplish objectives and, ultimately, to move that proverbial needle in the desired way. We’re in an era now (not so much an era, just a before/after new way of the world) in which everything is measured, for better or for worse. Even artistic masterpieces or hit songs are broken down into bits and analyzed. And the creatives in sports have had to become part of the new paradigm — it’s a necessity when there are thousands of pieces going out every season and an insatiable desire for more and better. This is where the creative leader needs to lead, preaches Ram.

“They just give anyone this title of creative director [referring specifically to college athletics in this context] and then they expect them to also create content. So what they’re not doing is actually analyzing what’s going into producing the content and how that translates,” he said. “We talked at the beginning of this about how most schools just want to sell tickets to games or turn viewership up and don’t understand what market size looks like and if the market size is translating to the expected viewership, all these kinds of things. So creatives don’t actually have a KPI that’s embedded with what they do, and they also don’t get the information from the higher-ups. How we solve it is a great question…

Ram continued: “Many times you need to have that chain of influence where someone can tell you, ‘Hey, it’s not just about reaching 6 million impressions or engagement, but it’s: in order for us to get there, we need to deliver in this capacity.’ And that middle ground between the two, I think, should be facilitated at the creative director role, where they know how to filter the numbers from the creative, allow the creative to do the work, and then they kind of dictate what’s our direction to get there.

“That’s where a lot of these titles aren’t actually aligning to fruition with what they say. I think they should be that filter between the people who are actually doing the core functions and the people who are asking for it.”

Everyone has a scoreboard — but even the most sophisticated systems of measurement can’t capture everything. There is dark social through which the reach of content increases exponentially (and content with a higher propensity to get shared via those channels), content that elicits activity or feelings or depth and strength of activity and feelings. It can feel simplistic to juice engagement and reach numbers through more content output, but that’s not always the right answer.

“They’re like, ‘Oh, I need quote tweets, I need retweets and reposts’ and all that kind of stuff,” said Ram. “They don’t think about ‘How do you make good content that people just want to absorb and send to other people?’ And I think that’s where reach comes into play and also plays a role in how you’re thinking about creating at scale. Because all it takes is one platform to really enhance the success of your campaign that you’re working on, the content that you’re creating.”

When they know the outcomes and objectives at play creative leaders can manage all those variables — time, resources, premium output, templates — to achieve maximum results with optimal efficiency. We’ve arrived there, when the creative department of the organization needs to operationalize and the leader isn’t necessarily the most talented designer or producer, but an individual responsible for managing all the moving parts and processes.

“That’s where I’d love to see the community move in that direction, where they are understanding the KPIs, they’re establishing KPIs and there is someone that is heading that creative department who’s translating that to something that makes sense from a creative standpoint,” said Ram, “which is, you know, ‘Let’s spend this much time to execute on this. If we were given one week to get this done, what’s the best piece of content we can create? How do we take that and package it in a way where it’s not just one deliverable, it’s maybe one video, ten stories that can go across these platforms?’ That’s where the social media team plays a role.

“I think the creative director has to be that filter that can communicate with the social media manager and marketing to make that happen.”

The last decade or so has seen the ascent of the creative department within an organization to invaluable and indispensable — an essential part of the team. Such a place requires a more strategic approach to it all and the present and future creative leaders must play a vital role in the maturation and professionalization of creative. The importance of content will only increase from here on out, inspiring a new era of innovation and storytelling that will propel organizations forward and redefine the boundaries of creative potential.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH AKSHAY RAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Make Ads, Make Content

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

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

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

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

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

Fan Activity (or Inactivity) Can Inform Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the Why

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

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

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

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

Engagers are Hand Raisers

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

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

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

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

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

Putting it into Practice

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

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

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

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

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

READ THE SNIPPETS

College, Content Strategy, Digital

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

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

I mean, where does one even begin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH JORDAN MOORE

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Content Strategy, Social Media

The Science and Art of Social Media and Engagement in Sports

Marketing and ‘engagement’ used to be an exercise in faith. Maybe you judged the success of content by word-of-mouth from one’s immediate network, from positive feedback and write-ups by the press and marketing Illuminati, or by an uptick in bottom-line metrics that you surmised came as a result of great content.

Then digital media came along, followed a decade later by the more engaging (there’s that word again) social media and all of a sudden there was a tangible measure of success, a scoreboard that told you whether that fire content was also deemed great by the consuming audience.

The leaders in social media were, and largely remain, the stat stuffers. They mastered the system, making game plans that would light up the scoreboard, creating the foundation for what defines successful social media strategy and results today. Aaron Eisman was young in his career when he got to witness, and became part of, one of those early leading organizations — Bleacher Report. There, Eisman picked up lessons that still serve him today. In a recent conversation, he reflected on how, with every sports account activating around the same major sports storylines, B/R stood out.

“The Social Moments team [at Bleacher Report] was the viral meme team, I guess you could say,” said Eisman, who also worked with Turner Sports and the NFL Network before starting his agency, Eisman Digital Consulting. “It was a team of 10-12 people literally sitting in a room a couple of times a week and they would just think of viral moments or they would create an idea before it happened. Like, if the Cubs are going to win the World Series, what are we going to do social media-wise to make it look really exciting and dope?

“We were playing chess and we were always steps ahead of the competition. We were always getting ready to do checkmate while they were just starting their chessboard.”

So much of social media strategy is being ready for anything and everything. Planning to be extemporaneous. There’s a place for timeless content, to be sure, alongside the real-time, reactive, opportunistic content. As the industry matured over the years, everybody began to think more like chess, trying their best to anticipate two or three moves ahead, the circumstances that would play out — all while keeping in mind the ultimate goals and mini objectives to achieve along the way.

“Ultimately when you think proactive, reactive, evergreen, breaking news — any of these other creative metrics and things that you think of in your head about how the content should be or what it should be, then you’re going to really advance as a social media team, and just think ahead of the curve,” said Eisman.

The final destination — the definition of success — is not the same for everyone. But the scoreboards on the platforms all read the same, we’re all reviewing the same box score, context notwithstanding. The metrics do serve as a feedback mechanism; is great content really great if not enough people see it? As long as the dominant social media channels continue to dominate, you’re largely playing by their rules. And, what hits on those channels tends to influence user behavior, consumption patterns, and preferences in general.

All that’s to say that social media strategy, while not slave to the metrics, is certainly influenced by them. It’s a feedback loop that leads a strategy to success.

“If the strategy is building out the right content, then the content should hit, and if the content should hit, then the numbers should prove it,” said Eisman, who has run Eisman Digital Consulting for nearly five years now. “The numbers don’t lie, so the analytics should tell you… the analytics should reaffirm or adjust the overall strategy. So it kind of works in a cycle almost between those three aspects.”

It’s tempting to get swayed in the silo of individual posts, to be seduced by the serotonin of a post’s objective performance. But it’s important to appreciate the forest for the trees, too (a cliche, but it’s apt here!). The success or failure of individual posts, of a day in the life of a social media strategy is fleeting. The half-life for the majority of these things is so short. That’s why it’s integral to understand what we’re doing all this for — what are the goals, what should the short-term strive to add up to in the long-term?

In an evolving world where overnight success is possible, where a single TikTok video can catapult an account from 1000 to 100,000 followers, it’s important to articulate the actual goals. Sometimes it is more followers, sometimes it isn’t. Eisman and his team encounter a diversity of stated goals working across clients for Eisman Digital and strategize accordingly.

“People want different things: to help grow their social media account or grow other goals they have. So how we get there is you want to figure out the goals of the person or the client you’re working with then you figure out the strategy of how to get to those goals,” Eisman explains. “And some of it’s not overnight. I mean, one of my biggest clients right now is a golf training app and they more care about the process of what the content looks like.

“If it takes time for us to create the great content, it’ll take time, but we don’t need to push out a great post every day because sometimes it leads to more followers, sometimes it doesn’t and we’re accepting of that.”

As social media has matured over the years and long ago transcended the remit of the archetypal ‘intern,’ social media strategy is now part of the bigger picture, expected to deliver against the organization’s true, bottom-line goals. So social media cannot and does not exist in a silo. It often works in tandem with all of the organization’s other marketing and engagement channels — there’s, umm, synergy (sorry, had to use that word). So whether you’re leading an in-house social and digital media team or running a social/digital media agency like Eisman, it’s critical to step out of those siloes.

Eisman expounded on the subject: “There are different forms of marketing, social media is one of them, but do you want to do a newsletter or do you want to do ad placements on Google? Do you want to do paid social or does your organic post that does well numbers-wise deserve to be boosted and put money behind it? And influencer marketing, there are just so many forms of marketing these days when five, ten years ago, probably more ten years ago, it was your general marketing people, your public relations people, and maybe you had 1 or 2 social media people ten years ago, and now it’s completely changed into social media needs to be a beast for organizations.”

While we marvel at the exponential growth in importance and power of social media in the last 10-15 years, it’s just as necessary to understand that social media is not the answer to everything. It’s not a magic pill. So as Eisman, or any social media leader, works to set and execute against goals for a given company, part of that is understanding where social media has less influence on the ultimate outcomes. There are plenty of precision holes to pick, but, generally, the promises that we want social media to proselytize need to be kept on the other side.

“There are some KPIs and metrics that social media can hit very easily and we can go after those growth metrics and stuff and those engagement metrics and those impression metrics and all that stuff, reach metrics, whatever you want to call it,” Eisman explained,” but sometimes we can only accomplish so much on social media. It’s got to be the product that has to sell…it has to be good.”

It’s true that we now have a better understanding than ever of what works and what doesn’t work. But with that greater insight comes more complexity as the new challenge is connecting all those disparate dots that comprise the bigger picture.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH AARON EISMAN

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Content Strategy

What You Should Know About the LA Chargers’ Social Media and How They’ve Built an Exceptional Culture and Content Strategy

The LA Chargers have really good social media.

You may have heard that before. Whether you’ve followed their content and channels closely or just caught a few viral posts, you can see that the reputation is earned. The content, the copy, the vibes, the cleverness, the originality — it’s all there.

But reputations aren’t bestowed, they’re earned. To channel the recently retired college football legend Nick Saban, the process takes care of the results. When you build the right culture, hire the right people, and foster creativity, alignment, and the right instincts — that’s how teams achieve greatness.

I recently spoke with Jason Lavine, Vice President of Content and Production for the Los Angeles Chargers, the chief gardener (to invoke a metaphor that came up in the interview), tending to a team that bears such fruit. While I typically try to focus in on a key theme or two in these podcast write-ups, there was so much good stuff I couldn’t decide, so we’re gonna look at several of the key factors that drive the Chargers’ social and content success. There’s much more in the full interview, but read on to learn about the fuel of the 🔥. Settle in, take notes, and share the magnificent lessons and insights below:

Building the Team

Constructing a content and social team is an under-discussed part of the industry. One could scan org charts across sports and see different sizes, titles, and structures (let alone the stuff you can’t see — like budgets, resources, cross-team shared staff, external agencies, etc.) and see variance across the board. I asked Lavine about how he thinks about the make-up and construction of his team:

“How we hired five years ago is very different than how we hire now. How we hired five years ago was you had to be able to do everything because we didn’t have enough people. My focus at that time was video. Now, you know, we have an entire social team, a rather large one, but we didn’t before. But when you’re hiring social people, we’re hiring people who understand social first. We’ll hire a video team to make video and we need people on that video team who understand how to make what the social team needs to be successful, that are not running in silos. They run together. There’s an incredible amount of overlap in having success.

“You want that person to obviously be able to know how to edit in some capacity because everyone on video on the social team in some ways has to write because of how it is, but we don’t expect them to sit down and cut a hype video, right? We’ll have people who can do that. Your talents dictate where you go.

“You trust the people you hire to do their jobs find the people they need and cultivate the right talent…

“But I don’t believe in generalists overall. Like, in our department, that wouldn’t be helpful. If you’re good at a lot of things, you’re probably good at nothing; at a young age, you can’t be, it’s impossible. I think when you’re hired here, we’ve identified a specific skill set and trait in someone that we think can help us, that they possess that someone doesn’t possess. That’s what we’re identifying in someone at this point, when you have 30 people in content.

“And then it depends. [For] social, we certainly are looking for a specific type of brain, and then depending on what they’re doing in video depends on what we’re looking for. If they’re being hired for storytelling then we’re looking for a specific sentimental type of edit. We’re looking for someone who has really good sound design qualities [and] can pace…we’re definitely not platform-specific in any way. We typically look at it as create the best possible content, which we have a plan for, which we understand, and we’ll figure out where it goes based upon where it needs to go, and it all adapts from there.”

Content Distribution

There are so many channels to serve and so much content to create. Figuring out content packaging and distribution is an increasingly important part of an effective, efficient strategy. Amazing content is only half the battle, getting it in the right places with the right presentation is equally important. Take note of the last line in this excerpt, too, it’s vital.

“If it’s a hype video, it’s going everywhere. If it’s, a customizable branded piece of content, like camping out where we build a set and we sell that set to Toyota, and we build this really cool set and we put players on it, we’re doing interviews — we know that’s for YouTube to start, but we know it’s going to be cut up into smaller pieces, creating a social, engaging way for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Then we know that little parts of it, far smaller parts of something like a branded content that are just really funny, unique parts of it could go to TikTok, but TikTok is its own typically UGC style…

“You kind of just understand what works. But we also know based upon what something is, if something’s a good piece of content it should go everywhere, but how it’s distributed and what it looks like when it goes to those platforms is why we hire a social team and why they’re so good at what they do. How you package something…you can have a good idea, but a good idea doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know how you’re going to package it and you don’t have the team members you have to package it properly. Copy, if you don’t have good copy, you have nothing, then it’s not going to get engaged with.”

Content Strategy — Planning, Calculated Creativity, and Reactive Instincts

It looks easy to the fans that see the finished products. But the process and project management to produce content is anything but easy. There’s the important balance of working through bigger, more time and resource-intensive projects alongside daily content, while also capitalizing on ephemeral reactive opportunities, strategic pivots and risk-taking, and saving headspace for the key tentpoles that pepper the calendar. The reality is that you can only plan so much, part of the process is creating the circumstances that allow for creativity to strike in the moments that come.

“We build a frame of everything and typically throw that frame out pretty quickly depending on what’s working, what’s not. [For] training camp, draft whatever it is, you have to come in with a frame; otherwise, people are not going to know what to do with their time. They’re going to be sitting there, right? So they’ve got to know where we’re going. The rest of it, the reactionary content, the stuff that you can’t plan for, that’s why you pay people well and try to cultivate the right place because it’s the instinctual content, the instincts in human beings that create a certain type of product, knowing in the moment what to create, that we try to teach and adapt and learn so we can make the stuff that’s going to go viral. Now, if it’s a meme postgame, we plan all those scenarios out obviously in advance, but you never know what’s going to come up that you’re going to try to create in the moment based upon what happened. So you gotta have the right people in the right mindsets and not expect everyone to come up with everything to be able to have the best product for the best possible situation…

“We’ve cultivated a certain culture I believe in, that we believe in. So, depending on what it is, yeah, there’s a rather thorough evaluation process if we think something’s going to work or not, but we typically give people the freedom to find out what’s going to happen. You know, we might think something’s not going to work, but we still want them to try it, especially if they’re young. We want them to learn; just because we might think something’s going to fail, maybe it’s better if it does go on the platforms and in a way, quote-unquote, fails, whatever fails means. I mean, if someone tries something and they’re able to take something they thought of from conceptualization to the finished product and it posts and it doesn’t do well, so what? But at least they tried it, right? So there’s a time and a place for everything.”

Brand and Voice

The Chargers don’t have meetings to discuss their ‘voice.’ That’s not to say the team isn’t thoughtful about the tone and nature of the brand that so many fans love. The brand transcends any individual person and any platform. It’s also important to understand a strong brand is that it’s not just copy, not just videos or photos, not just presentation — it’s all those things, and it’s all for a greater purpose.

“You don’t create a culture by talking about culture. You create a culture by having people that are like-minded, and then you have an organization that supports creativity — that creates culture. Then from there, like I said, it’s watering the plant and giving it sunlight, meaning you’re making sure that your department heads understand what they’re responsible for and what they’re expected to do. They’re given the tools to be successful at it and that you’re cultivating talent because you have to be able to hire people to do a job and then when you’re trying to manifest a voiceover video or younger people in a social department, so Megan isn’t the one doing it every day so she can have a life at some point, you have to be able to identify what of your voice is repeatable and how to repeat it, and then find people who can create the product for it. It’s not a matter of sitting in a room and telling people, ‘This is the voice;’ I don’t think we’ve ever once had an open discussion about that…

“We are here to humanize a brand, to connect a brand and its players to this audience, to this city, to cultivate a fan base, to create generational fandom. That is what we talk about. The actions to accomplish those goals come from creating really good content, from understanding your audience, from understanding data, and having really smart people who know how to make really diverse content, right? And of course, our voice is funny. It’s personable. We tweet very serious things in no capitalization, right? We try to be as if, you know us. We want our brand to be attainable, to feel like you know who we are as the Chargers…

The other thing I’d say to that quickly is you can have a voice and you can have a plan on social, but if you don’t have a video team that can support it then it dies because it’s not consistent.”

Fan Development — Why We’re Doing This

In an era when millions of users can view the same TikTok, and then scroll on to the next TikTok in their feed, virality is not a marketing strategy. Engagement is valuable, followers are meaningful, but the Chargers ultimately want to build fans. That doesn’t mean everyone is gonna want to dive into the x’s and o’s, there are multiple ways to be a fan and to drive authentic brand affinity.

“What we are trying to do is create the best product that can stand out so people can see who we are. You’re going to become a fan of our team if you’re a football fan, hopefully. Or maybe Justin Herbert’s on your fantasy team or the other way you’re going to become a fan of this team is through engaging, creative content and having a voice that relates to the person next door to you, to someone who’s on Reddit who might think, man, they get it. That’s cool. I respect that and I’m going to follow them. And maybe someone who’s ten years or 12 years old who sees a meme or sees anything, he’s like, I like that, that’s cool. And then they start looking at our players and they go, oh, I like these players because they’ve been humanized on our platforms, right? And then they come to a game and they have a great experience. And then you become a fan…

“There’s a variety of different ways you can be introduced to a brand. Our belief is the more we can do that’s going to stand out above the rest is going to help us be introduced to people who don’t know who we are…

“In our mind, we prefer to focus on finding the audience that does want to see that at a higher level, because typically — now, bear in mind this isn’t true for everyone, but football content has a ceiling, other content does not. So if you’re trying to reach more people and get outside of your ecosystem, you’re going to have to create non-football content, a lot of it which we do. Then your football content, if you want to not have a ceiling and you want to reach a broader audience, then you have to find the right people to partner up with to make sure it does get consumed.”

Reputation, Rankings, and Earning the Trust of Players and Partners

Everyone is not destined to aim for the #1 ranking on any of those Complex lists of best social media teams in sports or the like (to say nothing of the substance of those lists in the first place). Every team has a different set of variables, resources, objectives, and situations. That’s not to say reputations don’t matter and don’t help, Lavine recognizes that the Chargers’ earned reputation of their social media helps create positive feedback loops and self-perpetuating benefits. It also means players and partners are happy to work with them because they trust the team will do right by them and that fans look at the Chargers content with the expectation that it’s good, even before seeing it. So, yes, reputations

“[Teams having different goals and resources and situations] is why I don’t like when people say we’re the best, because I think we’re the best in our situation. I just I think this is product-driven, situation-driven, context-driven — like, yes, we’re good at what we do, but I bet you if you put a lot of people in our situation they’d also be good at what they do. Everyone does the best they possibly can. We’re not special. We’re lucky, we’re fortunate to be able to keep a group together for a long time. And certainly, you know, we come up with some good ideas. I don’t like those Twitter rankings that come out that say, you know, we’re number one on Twitter. I don’t like those things because I don’t think that’s fair to the 32nd team on there because you don’t know their situation. You don’t know what that person’s going through. We want to make the best possible product for our fans, and we are fortunate enough to be in a situation where this organization appreciates what we do. That’s not everywhere. Some places don’t get it, and I feel bad for them. And I tell anyone who’s super creative, come work here. We are super fortunate to be in a place that allows us to expand what creativity means and work in an organization that allows us to try different things.

“I don’t believe in rankings, but I want people to perceive us as the best. And the reason why you want that, first, is we need to cultivate the right voice and create a really good product that people would respect, and we do that because if you have two stand up comedians, one’s Kevin Hart and one’s a no name and they both say the same joke, who’s going to elicit a better response? It’s going to be Kevin Hart. We want to be the Kevin Hart in the space, we want to create the product that we want to have a reputation so good that we can make something that we don’t even believe in and people are still going to think it’s great because it’s us and that we do get nowadays. That is very helpful to building something that can maintain no matter what happens. The audience trusts you, the people around you in this space trust that what you’re making is the right thing when we’re not even sure what we’re making is the right thing, but they believe it is because that’s the person who said it because Kevin Hart made the joke…

“Our reputation, once it’s validated, it’s validated and it’s remains validated because we don’t make a lot of mistakes when it comes to what we do. But we don’t make a lot of mistakes because people trust us. So that’s why you fight so hard to have a certain reputation, not because we want a ranking above anyone else, but because of what it means to validate the product and then help you monetize it…”

The Science and the Art

Reputation may be more about intangibles and how others ‘feel’ about a given team’s execution, but data tells an important story for each team internally when it comes to evaluating and measuring success. ‘Going viral’ is not a KPI, it’s typically a welcomed outcome that can affect other KPIs, but there are more tangible goals that get analyzed and that affect planning. Fandom and revenue trump virality and reputation (not to say they’re all mutually exclusive), and there are a lot of data points that fuel strategy and views of performance.

“We take in our own data, and this is not only impression tracking as it relates to revenue driven opportunities, but also just we track and price everything so we have an understanding of the value of our product. Then if it’s not sold, we have an idea of what we think it should be doing in impressions. And then we look at weekly, we have goals that we set ourselves and across digital we have goals. Social following goals, audience goals, engagement goals, demo goals — 12 to 24 is a significant audience for us, so we try to understand how people are consuming that product if you’re 12 to 24 and we look at like, okay, this YouTube Short did 50% retention over a minute for 18 to 36. Why did it do that? And you got to understand those things. It all depends on the piece of content and what you’re trying to achieve.

“When we think about digital and posting on our site our focus is editorial and photo, not video. So we’re going to have very different goals. We’re going to try to understand those barometers based upon what we think can be successful and we’re going to change what we do and adapt what we do based upon what people are consuming and what the data is telling us.”

The Meaning of Work-Life Balance

There are going to be long days working in sports. It’s the nature of the work one has chosen. That doesn’t mean everyone should be on a path to imminent burnout, it’s just that any conversation of work-life balance needs to come with the understanding that, some days and some weeks, you’re gonna have long days. Work-life balance doesn’t mean a certain set of work hours and non-work hours it’s more about life having balance, that there are things and times one can spend time and headspace on and enjoy that is not their work. Lavine provided his thoughts on work-life balance, from his own experience working in sports for over ten years and being a leader in it for years, as well.

“I would tell others to figure out what makes their balance be their balance, because that doesn’t mean you have to leave at 5 p.m. every day for work life balance. Work life balance comes in what you find peacefulness in, what makes you happy and doing those things no matter what they are is important. I always make the joke with my parents, but like during the Mets season, the staff knows this, the baseball game is going on every day. 4 p.m. that the Mets game is on. You can come in, we’ll talk, but I’m watching the Mets at work, it’s happening because it makes me happy. That’s work life balance to me. Doing the things that make you happy either at work or not at work. And as long as you do whatever is important to you, then that’s great. I would highly recommend anyone getting into this business to work their ass off if they want to accomplish anything, and if they think they can get anywhere in life working 9 to 5, they got something else coming to them. You got to bust your ass if you want to get somewhere in this world, doesn’t mean you got to work 9 to 7 p.m., 8 to 7 p.m., 8 to 8 p.m., 8 to 10 p.m., seven days a week. It means you got to find what works for you as an individual, as a human that makes you happy and do those things. And then if you do that, it will all work out…And take your breaks” (Jason discussed the value of taking breaks, too)

Players Owning Their Content

We’re coming to an inflection point for sports content, where a rising proportion of players don’t need the platforms of the teams and leagues as much as the other way around. A player could spend an hour on an off-day filming behind-the-scenes content for a sponsored series with the team’s production staff or they could spend that hour with their own staff or agency producing content that they own for their channels with their sponsors. Lavine and I could have done another full episode on exploring this subject and he offered some initial thoughrts, including where the talented internal team resources fit with potential ‘collaborations’ with players.

“I think you’re going to continue to see players own their own content. That’s just going to be what’s going to continue to happen. Players are going to become more independent entities, and how we adapt as content teams to work with them is going to be super important, because, you know, you’re not going to be able to just do a podcast with three guys on the team. They’re not going to go for it. They’re going to do a podcast, they’re going to go work with Wave Sports and do what the Kelces did and get paid a million bucks. They’re not going to work with us. So our content has to adapt at the time so that’s something that’s just going to continue to evolve, I think that’s and that is probably where my focus is now is thinking about how do we fit into the bigger picture? Do we create the content for them in their individual platforms? Can we become big enough as an agency to do that? Those are all things we have to look at…”

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It was a pleasure and a privilege to learn from Jason Lavine on what drives and continues to propel the Chargers to perform so well with their content and social media. While they may not have yet reached the pinnacle on the field, rest assured that Lavine and his team have a winning plan! Ths insights above are just a portion of the full discussion, check out the full interview to hear it all!

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW

READ THE SNIPPETS

Content Strategy, Digital, Fan Development, General Marketing, Social Media, Social Media ROI

Key Themes and Opportunities for Sports Organizations in the Year Ahead

2023 was a great year to be a sports fan. Most of the traditional measures of fan interest increased, more emerging sports rose up, the platforms of sports did some good in culture and society, and it was another year of growing understanding that the future of sports business and fan engagement will be molded, if not led, by those managing the digital and social channels that comprise the majority of time spent and touch points between sport and fan.

There may not have been paradigm shifts in the greater smsports world, but the roots for such massive evolution formed and there’s more recognition than ever that originality wins, meaningful connections matter, and that sports and athletes are the gateway to so much more than the game on the field or court.

With that in mind, something of an annual tradition building off close observation of the space and countless valuable conversations, here are ten areas of interest and themes at the top of my mind in 2024 for the greater sportsbiz industry.

Fan Identity (online and offline)

So much of fandom has been, and continues to be, about identity. One declares themselves a fan of a given athlete or team and therefore does the things that fans do — follow their social, consume content involving them, wear merch showcasing their fandom, and maybe insert it into their avatar or username or profiles. And the notion of identity, in digital and IRL environments, remains paramount. But there’s more competition than ever to own pieces of one’s identity, so the challenge for sports organizations is to foster and reinforce elements of identity, empower fans to showcase it and find emerging and original ways to do it. One more way to tap into fan identity is to align with their other interests and passions, such as our next item…

Creators, Influencers, and UGC

Fandom is contagious and we’re seeing more collaboration and strategy in direct work with online influencers (and ‘traditional’ celebrities) and creators who are already fans themselves. These mutually beneficial relationships benefit all parties when they’re authentic and it’s why you’ve seen teams and leagues in the last couple of years create full-time positions to oversee and execute influencer marketing and relations; others are rolling the remit into social media roles. It’s not uncommon now to see titles like Director of Social Media and Influencers on the staff directories of teams and leagues.

This is not just about direct partnerships, it’s also a larger theme playing out in sports business as the industry begins to appreciate more and more the value of earned media. Earned media — from fans posting about a game, a team, a player — is not new in sports; traditional B2C brands would kill for such organic earned media. But as teams add a strategic layer, that’s where the fun starts. Facilitating creators with content and access, fostering UGC and showcasing to create a positive feedback loop, monetizing it directly and indirectly. The organization of this ecosystem is only just beginning, which leads us to the next theme…

The next phase of Collab

If we had the data, we could probably see a chart showing the growth in the % of Instagram feed posts that are Collabs looking something like 📈 in the last year or so. Mutual relationships are getting mobilized more frequently, whether it’s league and broadcaster, team and player, league and brand. Alongside the Collab posts, the platforms are also productizing the behavior in other ways, testing true collaborative content, with multiple parties each contributing to a single post.

My job often entails ideating around maximizing such organized orders of parties for a given sports or entertainment property. As the fences get more easily traversable and the collaboration being offered by platforms more widespread, it will lead to more frequent, more creative, and even opportunistic collab content taking off. Too often the power of relationships that transcend the field gets taken for granted, which indirectly leads to our next item…

Relationship platform

There are a lot of answers to the ‘Why do we love sports?’ question and a lot of them are correct. But at its core, past the inherent storytelling [and, yes, the wagering] the group dynamics that sports fandom cultivates is the beating heart. Sports fandom offers an opportunity to plan a social night out with friends or family, it can jumpstart a dormant group chat, fuel endless conversation at the bar or the dinner table, and it can lubricate meetings with even total strangers, providing an instant ember of relationship.

So how can sports teams lean into this superpower even more in 2024? We’ve seen the move to smaller group engagement across social platforms, whether it’s on Discord or IG or WhatsApp or elsewhere — sports provides the connective tissue for much of it. Teams and leagues can create more synapses, more opportunities to foster friendships or even initiate new engagements. If sports can master their position as a purveyor of relationships and pastime, there is a helluva opportunity to further enhance the next item…

Direct to Consumer

The trend of leagues and teams developing and prioritizing their owned and operated channels, often with an app and a CRM at the center, is not a new one. But the climate has only hastened these pursuits — the dilution of precise targeting with digital ads is one and more recently the gradual decline of the regional sports network (RSN) business. If all of a sudden teams had to rely on monetizing their live broadcasts one fan at a time, many realized it sure would help to have a direct line to more of them, especially those not already in the database because they’ve attended a game [but still watched a lot of your games/content].

The apps are getting more competitive — they have to. Teams and leagues are asking themselves (and being pitched by vendors) ‘What can we do to entice more fans to spend time on our owned platforms’ (and what value prop will convince them to register/sign in with their information)?’ There’s the low-hanging fruit of mobile ticket/account integration, but beyond that relatively ‘free space’, there’s a plethora of ideas out there, from interactivity to exclusive content to novel features, and lots more. But one area picking up steam for sports and beyond is our next topic…

More gaming

There was an article recently in Vanity Fair about the New York Times’ big bet on games, facetiously stating the Times is becoming a ‘gaming company that also happens to offer the news.’ Meanwhile, the NBA recently introduced ‘NBA Play’, a collection of games in their league’s app. As the competition for time, attention, and true (registered) membership for fans keeps heating up while simultaneously becoming more important, games represent a sticky, engaging, shareable opportunity to capture all that.

Depending on which stat you stumble upon, something like 90% of Americans regularly play games, whether they’re into Call of Duty, Words with Friends, Immaculate Grid, or even an old-school crossword or Sudoku. So it’s no wonder that investment in games is one with a big TAM for teams and leagues. They can be pretty simple, too (see: Wordle and all its variations). With built-in fandom, the games can simply align to general mechanics — challenging but not too challenging, sticky/consistent, talk-worthy, and, well, fun. Keep an eye on gaming, it may even become a growing direct revenue stream as sports organizations start to realize how much their IP can truly be monetized, which brings us to our next subject area…

Premium content, Passive Monetization, and Content Libraries

There are investors that focus specifically on acquiring YouTube libraries. With just a few tweaks and optimizations, archives of YouTube videos can generate a decent amount of revenue from years-old videos. Meanwhile, that documentary you just watched on Netflix was made in 2018 — and most of the content was pieced together from decades-old archives. That long opening aside, the point is that each piece of content a team publishes, cuts, or produces (or even if they don’t and it’s sitting in the cloud storage) is an asset. And those assets can deliver dividends in direct and indirect ways.

Many conversations you have about sponsored content now bring up that their organization saw the light in the last 1-3 years. The pandemic was a big part of it, but so were tailwinds from marketers across brands diverting more of their marketing spend from linear to digital channels. Sports content, from highlights to documentaries and the reality series that The Last Dance and Drive to Survive accelerated in demand, and while many teams already have the capability in-house to produce great all-access pieces, they’re starting to act more like a media company now, bringing in additional help or hiring more to up their volume. Because it brings in money. It brings in sponsors and can provide lasting value through time spent on an app or lucrative YouTube rabbit holes, or through pre-programmed social media ‘archive’ accounts, and maybe behind a paywall for your in-house RSN subscriber (if that comes to be). The number of permutations and options to piece together reams of old highlights, interviews, and B-roll is virtually endless. Especially if you consider our next item…

Generative AI

Generative AI had already made its way into sports well before ChatGPT launched and introduced the masses to the awe-inducing results; companies like WSC Sports already permitted you to ask for ‘All of Nikola Jokic’s dunks from his rookie season in 2015-2016’ and get a highlight package (assuming the big man dunked at all his rookie year). But the acceleration in 2023 was remarkable and does not seem to be slowing down as 2024 begins. It won’t be long before a video producer can use detailed prompts to significantly reduce the time it takes to produce premium content, optimized for algorithms and viewership. Maybe fans will even be able to create rough cuts of such content themselves (perhaps not in 2024).

The highlights-driven generative AI has been novel, but is mostly packages of a player’s top plays or all the ‘x’ from ‘y.’ As emotion and storytelling gets woven into these creations, the content banks are going to build up more and more so that fans may be consistently flipping between Hulu and their league or team’s app when deciding what to watch before going to bed. The relationships fans can build with their favorite shows or podcasts or creators are hard to truly measure, the metrics models are still catching up to digital interaction that’s so prolonged, invested, and sticky. So let’s talk about the next topic…

The evolving nature of engagement

We’re in the middle of the engagement era. Valuation models are often based on engagements (some include impressions, too), but as metrics and real-life results get more scrutinized, for the first time in a while the industry is reconsidering what really matters and, conversely, what just makes all sides look good to their bosses. As platforms evolve, owned channels get prioritized, and more mediums emerge, the old-school paradigms of engagement and engagement rate will evolve, too. If an impression means they walked by your store (excuse the shopping analogy; it works well here, but team platforms are not ‘storefronts’), engagement could mean they stopped and stared for a moment, they took a peek inside, they came in and browsed for a while, they came in and tried something on, they left with a purchase, they never came in at all but looked it up later, they never came in but after seeing a couple Instagram ads they added something to an online cart, they didn’t buy anything but brought a friend to the store — this list can go on and on with so many more variables and behaviors considered.

The point is that the way we think and talk about engagement is getting smarter and more thoughtful. In an industry like sports, where the longtail is so powerful (but more challenging than ever), sports organizations have to get better at understanding what is not just capturing the casual fan’s attention but what is capturing their heart and mind. The lifetime value of a fan is immeasurable, especially when their fan evangelism is accounted for, and as tempting as it is to chase the trees amidst the forest, we have to balance the casual engagements with the deeper fan touches. Expect to see innovation in measurements — not all will stick, nor should they — as we reconsider KPIs like time spent, frequency of engagement, retention, a fan’s connection tree (to other fans) and their potential k-factor, their propensity for high LTV curves, the number of platforms they engage on, and so much more. While we all love the idea of a Joe DiMaggio-like hitting streak when it comes to repeated social media success, moneyball is making its way into the industry as we consider slugging percentage and game-winning plays. That brings us to our final topic…

Eventizing across digital/social

Routine and its less-appealing stepsibling monotony are an inherent part of sports. Especially for sports with longer seasons and vast quantities of games and star players taking maintenance days, it’s hard to make every game matter. (see: The NBA In-Season Tournament as an effort to alleviate that) And that’s okay; in fact, it invites innovation. Teams and leagues are finding more ways, through brand and creator collabs, through theme nights that echo across content and social, through gamification, and more avenues to give fans a reason to consume and care — whether that means attending, watching, or just paying attention on social and digital channels.

These manufactured ‘events’ that try to break up what could otherwise feel routine are also opportunities to capture casual audiences. If you not only accept but embrace that not every piece of content and every campaign and event and game needs to try to reach your total addressable audience, organizations can hone in on specific audience cohorts. (See the appreciating engagement section). Your Hispanic Heritage activations and creative on social don’t need to go viral, but if that content can be really cool for a certain audience, that’s a win.

At the more macro level, it doesn’t take a genius to see the increase in tentpoles produced and propagated by leagues, with the NFL and their schedule release content jumpstarting the practice. What are all the opportunities for a team, whether through organic parts of the league calendar or manufactured events by teams/leagues themselves, to make it feel like a big deal to fans? Get the right partners involved to justify the investment and make the campaigns feel big and exciting, and that slugging % can go up. Other trends in this piece will make activating and executing such ‘events’ on digital/social and beyond more feasible and valuable, too.

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A common refrain for years posits that all brands are media companies, and vice-versa. Sports organizations embody this duality more than ever, with generational brands and an endless fount of valuable IP. Developing new avenues to monetize and actualize it all is top of mind for the year ahead. The pluripotency of sports is unmatched and we’re just starting to realize what that means.

Content Strategy, Digital, Social Media

Why Social Media Needs a Voice at the Table in Sports: ‘Magic can happen when you listen to your social folks’

Social media was once the province of the intern. Heck, that an intern was running the team’s or brand’s social accounts became a running trope, even as years passed and organizations recognized the increasing power of the platforms.

Even today, while social media channels are integral platforms for the team — for marketing, for brand building, for fan development, for revenue — the primary leaders behind these channels are rarely given a seat at the proverbial table.

The disruption to the paradigms that prevailed in sports for so many decades elevated social channels more quickly than organizations could (or cared to) evolve, but the way Millennials and certainly Gen Z and younger want to interact with their favorite teams and consume content has necessitated a new mindset, and forward-thinking leaders are starting to adapt. Bill Voth didn’t and doesn’t run away from change, quite the contrary, he embraces the new and novel (and ‘scary’ things he may not be expert in). So as he straddled the line between the old and new worlds of sports media and content, he recognized the key role he could play as he was brought on to the Carolina Panthers to usher in that evolution of fan engagement. For Voth, it meant providing leadership, but mostly getting out of the way.

“One of our jobs as creative leaders is to let the creatives below us, the real creators, the ones who are doers — I’m not a doer anymore, I used to be…to empower them,” said Voth, who was the young disruptor himself as he adopted social media before many of his older sports broadcasting colleagues and counterparts logged on. “There’s all this red tape above them in these organizations, there’s all these meetings and all this other stuff, and it’s your job to deal with all that stuff, to figure it out and to not micromanage them, and to let them go create and be. I think that that’s going to continue to be that way in this business for quite a while.”

To embrace emerging channels was just logical and, by the time Voth got to the Panthers, social media and team-produced original content was already a growing part of sports team operations. But there was much more evolution to come, even if meant challenging decades-old conventions about what content teams should spend their scarce time and resources to produce. Everything became more measurable in the digital and social era and that made it impossible to hide from the stark truth the numbers often told — that the ‘traditional’ content inherent to sports team coverage wasn’t what a lot of fans, especially younger fans, wanted.

It could feel like blasphemy to uproot the typical content mix, with discussions of X’s and O’s and game previews and recaps. Producing such content requires time and resources (remember those are scarce) and it may not be what a growing portion of your fan base wants. Voth noted these realities, recognizing that not all sports teams and markets are the same. The content strategy for every NFL team doesn’t have to be the same, and that shouldn’t be a divisive stance.

“In Charlotte, I did not believe there was a big enough market or a place for 30-minute coaches shows or 30-minute highlight shows,” said Voth, who was the Carolina Panthers Director of Content and Broadcasting until departing in early 2023 to start Bill Voth Digital. “If I was doing content in a Cleveland or a Pittsburgh or a Green Bay or in Dallas there is absolutely a market for that type of content. It’s specifically to the Panthers fan base…

“I didn’t think that X’s and O’s content, by and large, really hit all that great with this fan base; I think being different and funny and fun — we leaned more on that stuff than, ‘Okay, the Panthers won this weekend, let’s break down what happened.’ You get a few people reading, a few people clicking, a few people watching, but the fan base isn’t big enough to draw on those numbers that you really want if you’re going to spend the time to make content like that.”

The numbers mattered. They may be imperfect at times, but they’re a signal for what fans actually want and, in turn, content that does good numbers represents an opportunity to drive considerable revenue. As social media evolved and quickly became THE most prolific channels on which teams could reach, develop, and engage fans, organizations sought to create a content flywheel. And quality content is the fulcrum of that flywheel. Voth saw this play out first-hand, and indeed had a role in it, as the Panthers grew their content operation and saw their partnerships operation extend into digital, driving more revenue, which begat more content.

“The more you can monetize, the more staff you can bring in, the more staff you can bring in, the better content you can do, the better content you can do, the better sponsored content you can do. And it goes around and around and around and it feeds itself,” said Voth, who also talked about the value of having a digital-focused partnerships person, to serve as a bridge between departments. “So I am a big believer in if you can do really great content and you can make a lot of that branded or sponsored content, and you can really build up your numbers, you can do even more branded and sponsored content, [and] you can make money. The content people are happy because they’re doing good content; you can actually do good sponsored content, not just check the box sponsored content.”

The culture of not defaulting to convention permeated the Panthers. It had to. They couldn’t just do what other NFL teams or what standard operating procedure had been for years; they had to iterate and figure out what worked for their fans and their market. This is easier said than done and requires a bit of risk taking and, as Voth emphasized, a willingness — heck, even a desire — to fail sometimes. This extended to the team’s voice on its social channels and its general approach to content strategy. If they wanted to be an exceptional NFL club, to stand out from their counterparts across the league and even in other sports, they had to, well, stand out.

“I think it’s having an ecosystem of try stupid things, try fun things,” said Voth. “And when you have people like (former Panthers Social Media Manager) Amie Kiehn and (Panthers Social Media Coordinator) Angela (Denogean) who are like, ‘Okay, let’s go play in the sandbox and let’s try this, let’s try that’, a lot of times that content is going to hit and you can set trends. And that is definitely one of the things we tried to do for years with the Panthers.

“It was, okay, if a team is doing something, like, I automatically didn’t want to do it,. So I didn’t have a hard and fast rule — don’t use The Office, don’t use SpongeBob, don’t use talking heads like Max Kellerman and all this stuff, don’t use L’s, but was very much like, ‘Hey, can you try and not do content with that stuff because everyone else is doing it?'”

There’s a little bit of ‘get comfortable being uncomfortable’ ethos to such a strategy, doing things no one else is doing, testing the untested. It’s not easy for leaders to adopt this mindset, let alone to hand over the reins to employees who may not have several decades of experience, but instead have years of experience in newer platforms and culture that their more senior supervisors do not. It takes humility to recognize that, yes, there is still a lot of sagacity to pass down and guidance to provide, but no one ever did anything extraordinary while held back on a tight leash. There IS disparity in knowledge and experience and skills — but the point is that the disparity and asymmetry goes both ways. And it’s when leaders have the foresight and courage to humble themselves that the extraordinary can be achieved.

“I think social folks, social media managers in particular, still need to be in the room more. I think it’s come a long way where, as you and I started getting into this digital and social, we were never included in conversations,” said Voth who then alluded to a viral, secondary schedule release video produced by the Tennessee Titans in 2023. “…[The Titans] posted two videos during schedule release. The main video they dropped at 8:00 was a wonderfully produced video. I’m sure whether they did it internally, whether they used an agency to do it, I’m not sure, I think they probably did it internally, but it was wonderful.

“But then of course they posted the ‘Man on the Street’ video that was just a couple of social people saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we try this?’ And that’s the magic that can happen when you listen to your social folks.”

No one will question the power and importance of social media these days, let alone leave the reins of the platforms solely in the hands of an untested intern. Some of the first full-time dedicated social media pros at sports teams now bear titles like VP or SVP, so the evolution is happening. But it’s about more than job titles and a decade of experience earning a seat at the table and a voice. It’s recognizing that those in the trenches every day, consuming, engaging, and creating with and alongside fans have valuable, esoteric insights that decades of experience and advanced degrees can’t match. All you have to do is invite their input and listen.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH BILL VOTH (a lot more!)

READ THE SNIPPETS

Brand, Content Strategy, Social Media

The Anatomy of Brand Building in Sports — Why It Matters, What It Means, and How It Looks in Action

Too much of social media looks and sounds the same. Brands and individuals exhibiting the same personality, trolling with the same memes, and trying to shout the loudest in hopes of standing out in increasingly cacophonous, homogenous platforms and feeds.

But what is a brand if its primary distinguishing factor is simply the volume? When every team repeatedly tries to out-savage the other or invokes the same well-worn tactics, all of a sudden it’s the black and white cow that stands out amidst the herd of purple cows.

This is not a call for blandness, merely one for purpose, for values, and for giving fans a reason to believe in you, not only to be entertained by you. Jess Smith has been enmeshed with distinctive sports brands throughout her career, appreciating the balance of amusement and aura that the most powerful, lasting brands exhibit. Everybody will say that maximizing engagement is the goal, but that’s oversimplifying things. A couple of slices of pizza may get you the same calories, and more quickly, than a plate of lentils and vegetables, but overdoing either of those meals, regardless of your macros, is a recipe for bloating or blandness. Jess says it better than my nutritional meandering:

“I think not all engagement is created equal,” said Smith, who is Vice President of Brand and Digital Strategy for the Stewart-Haas Racing NASCAR team. “…I always tell the team there are certain things that we’re going to have to tell the story about or initiatives that we’re going to have to talk about. It’s probably not going to be the most engaging, but our job is to figure out how we take it and improve engagement, and build upon it…

“There are some things that are core to the organization, core to our partners, core to values and we have to do them…So I think just understanding that from a team standpoint and I always tell the team, as long as we take care of the foundation, then those fun things that we know are going to pop and are kind of silly and maybe are more of a fan engagement [play], then we can do that.

“But I think it’s just making sure that the team understands what the purpose of it is, and even though it doesn’t hit those engagements, there’s still a ton of value to it.”

Teams would do well to do their meal prep and allow for cheat meals — okay, we’ll skip more food talk, but Smith did discuss the structure and organization it takes to manage a brand and content strategy these days. There are too many demands, too many channels, and miles of monotony interrupted by unexpected detours of urgency and opportunity. One of the more unique characteristics of planning and strategy in sports is that so much of it can end up being all for naught. In a split second, a triumphant victory can turn into an agonizing defeat — but you better be ready to capitalize on the potential win because those are the fleeting moments when outsized returns and results happen. Such preparation is why just about everyone who has worked in sports will know what it means to have a folder of tears (what I called it), a virtual graveyard where the best-laid plans and content remain, having never seen the light of day.

But you still have to be ready. And there are ways teams can be ready for the big moments and also ready for the times when strategy has to be pivoted or executed more quickly than a NASCAR pit stop.

“I feel like in sports you actually have to plan for the unexpected,” said Smith, who spent time with the New York Yankees and New York Rangers prior to heading to Stewart-Haas. “So you know when trade [season] starts to happen, you have to build all the templates and think of all the different scenarios that could happen. I feel like you have to be anticipatory and plan for the things that might not happen. That’s hard because sometimes you might put in work on something and it might not ever see the light of day, but if you don’t plan for it, the team’s going to be in not a good spot. So it’s all about planning for what you can plan for and being prepared for the unexpected.”

It’s easier to be ready in real time when the team knows its brand and knows its identity. Decisions aren’t made in silos, but instead backed by collectively recognized frameworks that keep everyone driving in the same direction (left turns only — NASCAR joke for you). But brands and frameworks can’t be constrained or overly rigid, lest they remain tethered to patterns that shut them out of conversations or even entire platforms where their presence could be relevant and where their existing or potential fans want to engage. There’s a level of flexibility inherent in the most successful brands now, appreciating that their fans want them to color outside a set of lines, at times, as long as they remain true to distinctive guiding principles. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary, to keep relationships burning hot and growing.

“My perspective on what fits within a brand box has evolved over the years,” said Smith, who also writes wonderfully on her blog Social ‘n Sport. “I feel like early on I was overly strict, it was brand above all else…I do believe there’s a brand foundation and you have to do the work that matters.

“So you have to understand who you are. You have to understand your tone. You have to understand what you won’t do. I think that’s really important. Always outline what you won’t do. But the media landscape has changed so much. People, I feel like, consume to take a break, it’s entertainment [and] every brand needs to loosen up a little bit. You have to figure out what that line is for you.”

Stewart-Haas Racing knows who they are and what they stand for. Smith helped tease it out and bring it to life more than ever before, and it was remarkable to hear her articulate the SHR brand, how organic it feels, and how it guides what they do and don’t do, who they seek to engage and not, and, well, everything. This is where conceptual meets practical, where the dreamers must also be doers. It can be easy to put up a few PowerPoint slides outlining a brand, but it takes the next level to translate that brand into everyday execution. But once you can identify the north star, it illuminates and enlightens, making where, when, and how to be active across platforms feel relatively simple.

For Smith and SHR, one of their most important content pillars is the fact that their team is, as she put simply, ‘a bunch of racers.’ Racing is in their blood, across the organization, and it’s that passion for the racing that they want to instill in their content, their passion, and their fans.

“While that seems like just basic marketing speak,” Smith explained,” everyone across the organization — like our fabricators are spending their weekends at Millbridge local dirt track, racing a dirt [race]. It’s true to our DNA. So ‘bunch of racers’ is one of our pillars. We want to show how all of our drivers, most of them race outside of NASCAR. They’ll do dirt racing, they’ll do modified. Kevin [Harvick] tonight is doing SRX, like they love racing. So that’s going to show up.

“That pillar is never going to change; if it changes and it’s not core to our DNA, but how we tell that story needs to change year to year.”

The guiding principle for SHR also helps them stay in the right lanes in their marketing and digital strategies. Brands that try to be everything to everyone often end up so convoluted or confused, with nothing for fans to latch onto or hold dear; they’re inconsistent. Smith articulated how SHR knowing who they are ensures its brand is strong and distinct, recognizable from the rest.

“When you think about that pie [of all potential sports fans], you think about NASCAR, I think we have to be really intentional about who we are or we’ll dilute ourselves and then we’re competing against a bunch of noise and almost don’t stand for anything,” she said. “Of course we want to bring in casual fans, but I think that where we do our brand a service is focusing on those casual racing fans and trying to bring them into the fold.”

As more brands succumb to the temptation to be whatever helps them achieve the biggest engagement numbers and viral growth, it’ll be those that remain distinct that stand the test of time. Everybody loves the jokester, people pay attention to the troll dropping savage lines and memes, they can’t help but look at the absurd and unhinged — but real relationships, backed by emotional investment require something more than surface-level gambits meant for a quick laugh. Well-rounded exposure and engagement matters. You can aim to attract attention for a day or strive to gain unconditional love for a lifetime.

One more thing…

Jess offered tremendous advice for people in leadership roles and I wanted to include an excerpt of that because it’s too dang good to leave out of this post. Listen (or read) the full interview below!

“One piece of advice — I think that you owe it to your team to give feedback and [to give] feedback often. When I first stepped into a management role, it felt like feedback sometimes was not, I don’t want to say a negative thing, but I was uncomfortable giving it. And as I learned, if you don’t give feedback, no one can read your mind. So it’s important for you to make sure that you give feedback, you give it often, you’re direct, and you also have candid conversations about your style. Like I’m going to give feedback, it’s not a negative, it’s a positive because I’m trying to help you. So I think the first time you step into management, just learning to give feedback, learning your style is super important because it helps your team and I feel like if you’re not giving it, you’re just doing a disservice to everyone.”

*******

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH JESS SMITH

READ THE SNIPPETS

Brand, Content Strategy, Social Media

How the Seattle Kraken Found Their Voice and Formed a Social Media Strategy Their Fans Can Feel Good About

Brand building used to be a one-way street. Something cooked up by the Don Drapers of the world. And, sure, brands were conceived and conveyed such that they’d appeal to consumers, but it was much more of an ‘at’ thing than a ‘with.’

And then social media came along and didn’t just disrupt the paradigm, it reinvented it.

Brand development is increasingly common in pro sports, as league expansion introduces new teams seemingly every few years. And the changed nature of relationships between consumers and businesses, between fans and teams — compounded by the increased demands from fans that the teams they support uphold certain values — has made the process all the more complex, but potentially powerful.

It was into this dynamic environment that Savannah Hollis stepped when she joined the Seattle Kraken to lead the initiatives on the front lines of fan relations — social media. The most recent National Hockey League (NHL) expansion team, the Kraken didn’t even have their name when Hollis came on board, let alone a voice, personality, and point of view. Amidst COVID and the widespread Black Lives Matter movement, the team had to confront important questions and issues long before they had a roster, let alone games or a logo.

“We started really thinking about as an organization, like, who do we want to be? “Who are we and what do we stand for?” said Hollis, who spent time with the Nashville Predators, Texas Stars (AHL), and Florida Panthers before joining Seattle. “I think one of the coolest things about us is from the very beginning, even prior to a lot of that, we wanted to be a little different. We wanted to make the game more accessible. We wanted to show that it doesn’t matter who you are or what your background is, what color your skin is — we want you to feel like this is a place that you could be and you could relate to and you could succeed in…

“One of the things that gave me hope to kind of go through was how we grew as an organization and some of the stuff that we did within the community and the storytelling and that engagement and the awareness and it’s just it’s been really cool and it set a really strong precedent for us…”

Championing approachability and accessibility carried through to the Kraken as a hockey team, too. Because if the team is truly a part of the community, that means just that — they’re a collaborator, not a dictator. So as the team tried to figure out where they should put their resources and who they should become, they asked questions and then sat back and listened.

“We really did want to engage the community,” said Hollis, whose role for the Kraken is Senior Manager of Social Media. “The amount of fan listening groups that our CEO and (also) at that point our head of hockey ops, who was Dave Tippet [did] — they would sit down and they’d do these fan focus groups. They’d talk to people, like, ‘What do you think about this? What do you care about? What do you want to learn?’…

“You’ll see we actually are getting ready to do this here in a couple of weeks, but once a year we try to do these fan content polls; we want our fans to help dictate what we’re doing because they’re the ones engaging with it. Like if you pay attention you’re going to see that stuff, but you also want to empower your fans to build a positive community, because I think the worst thing any brand can do is just be like, ‘No, we know what’s best’ and turn into that really corporate account who doesn’t actually engage or listen to their audience and then becomes irrelevant.

“The more you engage, the more you listen, the more you work with them, the more positive of an experience it’s going to be for everyone.”

That dedication to open communication continued on for the Kraken, too. Because the best thing a brand or business can do when they make important decisions that affect their customers (their fans) is to let them in on the process and explain their thinking. Noticing a theme here, yet? It’s one thing to say the organization is committed to being accessible, but while many preach it, fewer practice it.

So on the big day when the Kraken officially unveiled their name and brand, following months of speculation, focus groups, polls, and stories, the next step seemed obvious — invite the fans in.

“We were [thinking] like, okay, once we do the name, then what? And I was kind of like, ‘What if we did like virtual breakout sessions?'” Hollis described. “And our marketing team, our comms team took that, ran with it, and we had this really cool thing where we did deep dives with Adidas and the designers, we had our community team join on, we had hockey [ops] join on — it was so cool, all of these things that went into it that made it so successful.

“Because not only were we announcing this thing, but then we are offering people this really intense look into why we did it, what to expect, and really we showed them why they should care.”

So what does all this mean for social media? How does that philosophy extend to the club’s strategy on its social channels? For Hollis and her team, it meant thinking about how fans could feel represented within the team’s social media content, too. There’s still plenty of room for the heavily produced content featuring effects and sick dangles, but sometimes the best content instead zooms in on the fans experiencing the intensity and emotion. It’s palpable, it’s contagious, and it’s real. Hollis offered perspective on the content strategy framework.

“I mean, gosh, you could have this beautifully polished video that you’ve spent years working on and the concepts are awesome and it performs okay,” she said. “But then you have this raw video of like someone just screaming after an amazing goal and that outperforms anything you do the entire year. And it’s because it feels real. It feels raw and in the moment and it allows fans to to really connect with it. The other stuff, there’s still a place for it, it is still impactful, it still matters, but you’re starting to see a shift in what people care about, and a lot of times it’s authenticity.”

Authenticity is a buzzword, but there’s a difference between paying lip service to it and actually embracing it. That’s not to say teams should follow the lead of some of their more vehement fans lamenting a loss, but it does mean exuding optimism while at the same time acknowledging realities. Expansion teams aren’t supposed to be big winners right out of the gates. And while the Vegas Golden Knights broke the mold in their inaugural NHL season, the Kraken experienced a bit more of a typical debut, with losses more common than wins. Many teams still today, for better or for worse, will just type out ‘Final’ after a loss along with a score graphic, and then shut the proverbial laptop and walk away. The Kraken were determined to do it differently, though, to stay there alongside their fans, offering a positive outlook while still empathizing in addition to emphasizing the desire to win.

“I told [my social/digital coordinators], I was like let’s never just say ‘final’ [after a loss],” said Hollis, who noted the team leaned into humor that first season, too. “Let’s find a way to do something else. Like, if we have a bad game, is there something that we can do to still build up a player who performed well? It’s just something to do to poke fun at ourselves or to acknowledge that it sucks, right? Losing sucks. No one likes it and the team shouldn’t pretend like it’s okay.”

The honeymoon, and expected struggles, of that first season faded away as the Kraken began their second season, though. Hollis and her team recognized they couldn’t just run it back, that their fans, while still as excited as ever to have an NHL team in their town, would become more competitive and expect more. Year two for the Kraken’s social media would represent an evolution, too — still being the fun, lovable presence they were as newborns, but with an added edge that left no doubt — they expect to compete and to win.

“Going into year two we were kind of like, I don’t know if that’s going to fly for two years in a row,” Hollis recounted. “You kind of have to think about fan response because now fans are starting to get it. We made some moves in the offseason and we had (highly touted rookie) Matty Beniers coming in for his first season. The pressure was a little higher, the stakes were a little higher. So we still wanted to incorporate the tone and the lightness, but we wanted to also have fans recognize that we do have high expectations for ourselves, too. We’re not okay with being at the bottom of the standings. And I think we did a really good balancing that.”

And the team did start to win. The Kraken went on to make the playoffs and even took out the defending Stanley Cup champs when they defeated the Colorado Avalanche. As teams start to win nowadays, they often evolve their social media voice in a similar way, trending toward snark and savagery, putting more effort into highlighting their opponent’s loss than celebrating their own team’s win. But while Hollis and the Kraken recognize there is room for such snark in the strategy, they prefer to default to positive vibes, focusing on cheering the victory instead of highlighting the other team’s defeat. Such behavior conveys an example for fans, setting the tone for how this fan base wants to be in general and especially when they’re winning.

“There’s a time and a place for [savage and snark] for sure, but I think our big thing was we would rather build ourselves up instead of tear others down,” said Hollis. “There are certain teams where maybe we have good relationships with the [social media] admin so we can plan some fun back and forth or some fun banter. But at the same time, we want to focus on building our team up.

“Again, there’s always a place for the spicy comment here and there, but it’s not the focal point of our strategy.”

Hollis continued, explaining the long-term thinking that went into setting that strategy.

“So when we’re talking through this, we’re planning all this stuff, that was one of the big things that was kind of at the forefront,” she said. “Like, let’s find a way to keep building this up because this team is special and, you know, we’ve got it now, we don’t know if we’re going to get it again…So a lot of it was just let’s focus on building it up now, building these relationships now, building the goodwill now so that we have that kind of there [and] we can start forming those connections with our fans and really continue to grow them in an environment that is really positive.”

There’s no one way to build a brand, no one-size-fits-all for every team in every market. But certain relationship principles tend to prevail for the teams that drive lasting, unconditional connections with their fans. There’s symbiosis, a feeling of unity and community that makes fans feel they’re part of something, that their relationship with the team gives them positive energy, that life just feels a bit more lively because they’re together.

The Kraken may not have won the Cup (yet), but they went from an unnamed idea to a team and a distinct brand with a distinct fan base. They won something bigger, they won over a community, building connections that can last for generations to come.

LISTEN TO MY FULL INTERVIEW WITH SAVANNAH HOLLIS

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