Category: Digital

Analytics and Data, Digital, Fan Development, General Sports Business, Social Media, Social Media ROI, Sponsorships

From Front Door to Bottom Line: An Insider’s Look at Sports Marketing Leadership and the Power of Fan Identity

The view from a sports team’s social media seat offers a unique perspective. Social touches just about everything. The person at the helm of the social media practice needs to know everything going on with the team, by necessity. From gameday presentations to sponsor activations, community events, and fan development initiatives, ticket promotions, and team transactions — the list goes on. Meanwhile, social has more fan touchpoints than any other part of the organization, is their finger on the pulse of an admittedly small but mighty sample of the fan base, and has a better picture of fans’ psychographics than perhaps any other department or person within the team.

From his early days managing social media with the Carolina Panthers, Dan LaTorraca appreciated the unique position that social media occupied and the diverse ways it could provide value. He eventually ascended to a role overseeing marketing with the Carolina Hurricanes, taking lessons from years of experience to help in building an industry-leading organization at the Canes. Today, he leads marketing at media measurement and tracking platform Zoomph, where he uses learnings from nearly two decades in sports business to continue to help push the industry forward.

I recently sat down with LaTorraca for a wide-ranging interview, packed with insights and anecdotes from throughout his career. Read on for just a few of the key points touched on in our chat. There is so much more in the full interview, and I highly recommend watching or listening! Check it out here

Social Media Is Part of the Larger Organization

It’s easy to become a little myopic in any job function or role. The social media operation wants to nail its KPIs and surpass them, hitting highs in metrics like views, impressions, reach, and engagement rate. But social media is ultimately one cog, an important and arguably the most front-facing cog, of the team and its business. The power of social media lies in its connectivity to every organizational goal, and therefore its ability to play offense, finding opportunities to capitalize on and problems to solve.

LaTorraca talked about his understanding of the pivotal position in which social media sat, and the mindset of weaponizing it, in a good way, to affect the bottom line, while maintaining and developing the long-term brand and connection with fans essential to any sports team.

“Social obviously was a powerful tool for engagement, for revenue driving, but also it’s like, Well, how are we driving [website] traffic with it? How are we driving leads with it? How is it feeding these other pieces here? How does the mobile app fit in with all this other stuff? How does email fit in? Ultimately, it wasn’t just about social; it was about building a strong digital ecosystem. And social may be the most valuable, impactful, and engaging part of that, especially in that era when everything was social…Social has been that front door, that front porch for teams in a lot of ways, so a lot of the resources and strategy started there, but it had to fit together with everything else, and to ultimately drive value and figure out where those value opportunities are.

“In the Panthers’ case, they were doing really well with ticket sales. They didn’t have a lot [of tickets] to offer because of the PSL [personal seat license] system they had there. So it was like, where are we going to make money elsewhere? Where are we going to drive value elsewhere? And is it with driving tune in for our broadcast network? Is it with retail and merchandise sales? Sponsorship integration ended up being the biggest piece for us. So, really having that perspective of, we have to see how this fits together with everything else, and also understand compromise. A lot of times it’s tough, and it was tough for me at first, too; it was almost like, you have to maintain the purity of social. Like, there’s a way to do this, and we can’t have other departments influencing or implementing our strategy and decision making here with another ticket deal or this or that. But I realized early on that, while it is an important marketing tool, it has to fit within the boundaries and the needs and goals of the organization.”

Developing a Voice and Brand That Draw Fans In

When LaTorraca was early in his tenure with the Panthers, the concept of a team with personality was just emerging in sports social media. But he knew that developing intimate relationships with fans was going to be the most effective way to punch above their weight in the Carolina and national sports hierarchy.

“The first thing that I picked up on was just like answering fans a lot more. Remember Zappos? That was one of the focal points of their social strategy was that they actually responded. We were still in an era in 2011 or so where if a brand responded to you on social, you were like, Alright, it’s either an automated customer service thing or it’s a mistake. The responses didn’t have personality or uniqueness. And you know, where we are now, it’s like, Oh man, this brand actually cursed at me. So we’ve evolved a whole lot. But back then, it was new, and that was something the Panthers could do differently.

“So building those 1-to-1 relationships, and I even kept a list of, like, certain things fans were passionate about, and we built authentic relationships there. I think that really helped us not only understand what mattered to them, but also the language they were using and how to craft and build our content strategy. So it was a mix of best practices and understanding what worked and what didn’t, and what we liked and what we were capable of, as well as what was going to resonate with our fans. We didn’t have the creative resources, we didn’t have a lot of other stuff that other teams had, but we were able to at least strategize our way into driving value both internally and externally.”

But, especially during a time when you’re trying to transform the strategy, you have to be able to show why this shift, this personality pivot, is working. Some things are immediately and easily measurable, some aren’t. But LaTorraca sought to prove why and how things were working and resonating. Those transformative moves can have compound effects, too, increasing fan avidity and evangelism, strengthening identities, and creating a fan base whole that’s greater than the sum of its individuals.

“Certain things like those 1-to-1 interactions aren’t measurable; technically, Zoomph can track those, and you can actually see social value if some kind of response actually catches fire. There is a way, but there’s so much more in those particular instances of measuring the sentiment. It’s not measurable in the traditional sense…

“However, the social voice was a key there, and that was something we were able to have data on that I used to validate the direction we wanted to go…This was at the time when you had the LA Kings starting to show a little more personality on social. I started seeing that and I was like, ‘This is what we need to be doing.’ We tried it in the comments a whole lot, and that was the way to test it. But we would occasionally put stuff out there that I felt was more human and had a bit more personality and sass and spunk to it. And what I would do is track the data and performance of that one and start kind of planting those seeds with my boss and his boss and ultimately their boss, who is the owner of, like, Look, this is working and this performs better than the average post, and clearly this type of of language and messaging and approach is resonating with our fans.

“I think it was built on those 1-to-1interactions, warming people up, and then eventually having actual personality and catching people off guard with some of the stuff that we put out there is going to be really good for growing our brand, engaging our fans, creating pride and sentiment there, and we backed it up with data. We were able to show, like, Hey, this is working, and get that buy-in to the point where in 2014 or so, we started having a lot more personality, and then I was able to share a lot more data. Then, 2015 was the Panthers’ Super Bowl season, and that’s when the gloves came off because it was where the team won 15 or 16 games in a row in the regular season, and a lot of people were doubting the team. And they were upset with Cam Newton for dancing in the end zone, and it was a lot of like, Oh, you guys are good, you’re probably the worst 10-0 team though, and everything was just ripe for me to dunk on on social. Almost like every week, we had something else that would go viral, because nothing galvanizes a fan base like when you’re successful, the team is good, the players are good, you’re winning, and the media or other narratives are coming at you. It puts a chip on the shoulder.”

The Value of Fandom

In its most fully developed state, sports fandom seeps deeply into hearts and minds, and it’s contagious throughout a snowballing mass that grows stronger with each addition and display. The strength, appeal, and spread of a brand create immeasurable value in ways both tangible and intangible. It all leads to arrows and trendlines pointing up, making every activation and strategy that much more meaningful and effective. It’s not always easy to measure linearly, because fandom drives success exponentially.

“I firmly believe that sports fandom can be boiled down to a desire for connection and community, and it’s fueled by identity. Those three pillars, to me, are the things that you have to engage in some way, because that’s what we are at the core of our identity or our kind of essence of sports fandom and sports consumerism. And I think finding ways to engage and leverage those, or build some brand pillars that help kind of convey those…In the Canes case, we defined it as fun, bold, and regional, but those were still lenses we could operate through. Like, regional is a great one, because we can talk about local community engagement and building a Canes bar network, or authentic brand positioning campaigns that were like murals or things like that. So, ultimately, the essence of those things, it’s not directly measurable in a traditional sense; it can be in a bunch of different ways of like, alright, how do we attribute this to that? But if you’re seeing certain things in your tracking, how retail sales of certain items are going up and trying to understand the psychology behind that, or certain types of social content or campaign or messaging or email pieces or other activations, whatever it may be, events or or ticket offers or promotional theme nights — all that stuff is measurable in a sense, but you have to also be able to tie it back to that human element in order to kind of have both sides there. You got to have the tactics you can measure, the activations you can measure and then refine and optimize, and you got to have well, this is how we tie it back to affinity or passion or community or belonging, or these other less tangible and measurable things that are really at the core and essence of what it means to be a sports fan…

“We had all these little ways we were going to try to get [the Canes] logo out there authentically. And it was like, alright, high-quality decals in every online order from our e-commerce shop and working with local businesses to distribute flags and all these little ways to influence the visual positioning of our brand, because that creates more passion. People see that and they say, I want to be part of that, or that’s something, or they’re already a fan, they’re like, I love that. This is that piece of their identity hanging on a flag outside their local bar, and that’s an important piece there. Well, yeah, it’s not as measurable, but it’s so important for growing a brand and creating that sense of pride and that regional sort of connection there, that sports really is.”

Making Big Moments Bigger

Sports are unpredictably predictable. There is a whole lot you can plan for (more on that in the next section), and a whole lot of extemporaneous opportunities that’ll present high ceilings of upside, even if you can’t foresee the details. It’s part art, part science, to enlist a well-worn but apt cliche, and a social media sixth sense of sorts to spot an opportunity to seize — provided the preparation and systems are in place to make seizing said opportunity possible in the first place. LaTorraca recounted one of the many examples of the Canes being ready to execute when an unexpected moment struck (and this excerpt doesn’t even capture all the ways the Canes capitalized):

“The last big piece we had with Twitter Amplify was the David Ayres game, which I’m sure you remember, was the emergency backup goalie comes in for an extended period, not just a couple of seconds, and essentially wins the game against the Maple Leafs on Hockey Night in Canada. And he was the team Zamboni driver. It was this whole wild story. And that video, I remember texting our video producer at the time and was like, Dude, you glue yourself to him, get as much as you can, because we didn’t have video people traveling prior to my first season there. But [revenue via] Twitter Amplify helped me make the case of being like, look at all the money we’re making, we need more video. Thank God somebody was there, and it wasn’t just a PR person with their cell phone getting something. We had one of our best video producers there, and he got some iconic footage that was later used in ESPN commercials and all sorts of stuff. But that one video where, if anybody listening goes and Googles David Ayres, of him walking into the locker room after the game, and all the Canes players are spraying him with water and all that, that one video made like $80,000 for us, and it was insane.”

Building and Activating a Well-Oiled Machine

Just like some of the best athletes make impressive plays look easy, some of the sports organizations make agile execution look smooth, too — like they had it planned all along. Both the athlete and the team can make it look easy because they’ve prepared and planned. They’ve been proactive in setting up the systems that need to operate together when the moment comes and have plans ready to go for every scenario, many of which can be anticipated, to whatever degree of precision. One of the most memorable initiatives from LaTorraca’s time with the Canes was when well-known hockey commentator in Canada, Don Cherry, called the Canes ‘A bunch of jerks.’ And the rest is history, as that line was molded into a revenue stream and a galvanizing force for Canes fans everywhere. LaTorraca explained how executing around that campaign and initiative was just one example of the importance of ‘proactive planning.’

“Creating a culture that prioritizes that proactive planning really is the key to being able to have the runway to capitalize when crazy stuff happens. And it always does. Lightning struck us two times in a year at the Canes, and that was great, and then it didn’t strike the same way for a while. But we had that Bunch of Jerks thing, and we were able to capitalize on it and build a shirt. And people are important, too; we had the right relationships. I can still remember sitting in my office after that game, after we sort of concocted this plan, and Mike Foreman is texting Don Waddell and Tom [Dundon], being like, Hey, we’ve talked, we’re making shirts about this. You know, like, I pitched this idea to him and I was like, we can use this company here, because at the time, Breaking T was just kind of getting big, and I was like, I think they can turn it around for us quickly, because I don’t want to wait here for this one. It was also President’s Day weekend, and a lot of other shirt distributors were closed. Mike got the approval and basically was like, Alright, if Dan can show what a shirt model will look like by the next morning, we’ll go…

“If you give yourself more time, it just leads to so much more opportunity for creativity and doing stuff that’s a higher quality. Whether it is planning out the promotional giveaway item or a Star Wars night idea. Our Whalers night is another great example of like, Hey, you really want to plan that out, that was a Super Bowl for us, in a way, to capitalize on that, whether it was retail or activation, it was a a chance for our creative team to flex, and you want to be able to plan that out far away in advance…Whatever you can do, give yourself the runway to do it for the things you can control. It goes back to what I tell my kids all the time, You can’t control what’s going to happen to you, but you can control how you react. And if you have the right system in place and process in place and plan and people and all that, and you can come up with the right ideas and creative solutions, you can really turn a tough situation into a win, or you can turn a win into a bigger win, but you gotta have a lot of things in place to do it. It doesn’t just happen like that, and if you don’t have the runway to do it, it’s not going to happen. So that’s what really separates the good from the great is those cultures that prioritize people first above all else, but process and proactive planning, and that’s how you really win time and time again when these things happen. Because they always will. It might not be as big as every other situation, but even capitalizing on the smaller ones can still drive value in the end.”

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WATCH/LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH DAN LATORRACA

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Analytics and Data, Digital, General Sports Business

The New Revelation in Sports Business: Why the Fanbase Is More Valuable Than the Team

The sports industry is lagging.

Sports may capture an outsized part of the zeitgeist, increasingly prominent in pop culture, but when it comes to understanding and maximizing the lifetime value of their consumers, their peers in other fields are ahead.

That’s starting to change, thanks to an infusion of new leaders, strategic capital, and a convergence of technological developments positioning sports to reach new levels of sophistication and new heights of efficiency and effectiveness.

Shripal Shah has spent years in the sports industry, including a long stint with the then-Washington Redskins, ascending to Chief Strategy Officer. He’s also spent years out of the sports industry, highlighted by his time with shopping rewards platform Shop Your Way. He’s seen the way retail and hospitality analyze and engage customers, and the how those industries govern and operationalize data in ways that the sports industry is just starting to conceive. Shah is well-positioned to understand this inflection point at which sports finds itself, and the lucrative opportunities it presents.

“I think the one area [that] I think sports could adopt towards, is retail is much further ahead in this idea of true personalized marketing, like use of personas, segments, data enrichment,” said Shah, who today is Chief Digital Officer of Next League, a software development and technology solutions company specializing in sports and media. “And in retail, there’s a concept called RFM marketing…It’s an approach and a framework to drive people, based off this idea [of] how recently have they shopped with or interacted with you, how frequently and the monetization. And it really touches on this idea not just going from awareness, consideration to purchase, but this idea of how do you really create higher lifetime value from your customers? How do you create a higher share of wallet or a higher spend?”

The sports industry is built on long-term fandom. When the operation is working as expected, generational customers are cultivated, lifelong fans who aim to pass on their favorite sports and teams to their kids. And yet, while plenty of effort is put forth around season ticket renewals (though the traditional concept of season tickets has diminished appeal for younger generations), sports organizations are more often than not in pursuit of the next fan, the marginal fan and incremental dollar. There is merit in that, no doubt. When media rights deals are dictated by one more fan watching for at least a minute, it makes sense to chase increase the overall pool.

But there’s also untold riches to surface in the deeper end of the pool. There’s more value to mine among the diehard fans and those closer to the bottom of the funnel than the top. And the methods by which organizations learn more about, and activate, those fans compound in value. Shah has seen it play out with customers in the retail space.

“Once you’re at a real scalable retail, because at that point you could have — like at Shop Your Way we had over 50 million users — you don’t actually need to go acquire more users, you already have a lot of their info,” said Shah, whose recently published book, Unlocking Fan Loyalty: From Frequent Flyers to Fanatics in the Age of AI, breaks down how sports organizations transform ordinary customers into passionate fans by harnessing the power of data, personalization, and artificial intelligence. “You could always try to get more people in the funnel, but if you can also retain those users and convert more, [get people to] spend more, that can also drive not only your top line growth, but better bottom line profits. I think that nuance is starting to show up in sports, as you’re seeing the advent of these holding companies that are now cross-team, the insertion of private equity.

“And now with AI democratizing and bringing more of these mature marketing tools to the budget levels of sports teams, I think that’s going to also lend itself to really leverage those tools and those data sets and technology. It lends itself to another marketing approach that I think ultimately could lead to a higher lifetime value for the fan base.”

AI is everyone’s opportunity. As Shah told me, artificial intelligence can have a democratizing effect for marketing teams in sports and beyond. Every conversation about marketing tech stacks and roadmaps now includes myriad mentions of AI. There’s a sense of excitement, amplified by FOMO, as the sports world grapples with understanding how to implement AI into their systems. The interest is higher than ever, but there are some prerequisites for effective implementation of AI. And that’s part of this inflection point, as Shah sees it; more excitement than ever, coupled with a forcing factor requiring organizations to upend their old systems of thinking and do a deep audit, and deep cleaning, of their data.

“I think AI just kind of came and became a thing,” said Shah, whose aforementioned book is part of a three-book series on AI in sports business. “I was talking with the major LLM providers and they said it was almost like what they called an awakening, that demand for an LLM [such as] ChatGPT and Copilot went up 1,000% this summer, which was more than the request to buy enterprise licenses the prior nine months or year combined. So that kind of came over the top.

“Before that, when I first rejoined Next League and I was talking with CMOs, this idea of creating a more mature marketing tech stack for personalization was really everyone’s number one priority…But now I think that some people are waiting to see how AI changes what their plan was for the marketing approach…it is about personalization, propensity, predictability, going from like, 40 personas to 400 to 4000 to to infinite…

“I think that’s going to ultimately lead towards more automation because what existed outside of sports was people already had marketing automation and workflow automation. That was the concept that no one ever invested in in sports, and AI is going to really force that. Because to really have good AI products and workflow, you need to have good data governance and you need to really focus on automation. And I think AI is going to sort of be the forcing mechanism that really should cause this level of maturity, because it’s going to force the data to get better.”

The move towards exponential automation is also disrupting decades-old paradigms in sports business, as org charts and team compositions evolve to make the most of new AI-infused capabilities. The days of armies of inside sales reps and smile and dial at high volumes aren’t completely gone, but they’re waning. When it comes to investing in the sales and marketing operation, the first thought goes to tech before headcount now, Shah explained, and that’s a marked change.

“Earlier on, I think there would have been a question like, ‘Well, why are we spending $400,000 on this tech stack when we could just hire 3 or 4 other ticket people? Alright, let’s go hire three, four ticket people at $35k each, fresh out of school, why are we going to spend half a million dollars [on tech]?’ Like you would run into that type of thinking as recently as a few years ago,” he said.

“I think the AI discussion is now throwing that out the window where it’s saying ‘No, what could be done with AI before you ask for headcount?’ AI is not replacing people, but it’s forcing a new conversation which is now forcing an investment into these other tool sets because the tools are going to help people do better, more impactful work, more deeper work.”

AI, and its forcing mechanisms vis-à-vis data infrastructure is just part of a greater transformation Shah sees taking place in sports business. In the same way that AI is not going to replace humans, but empower them to focus on deeper work, it’s allowing the content operations to maximize the value it gets out of each creator and manager. The future of content operations, he told me, can be likened to a ‘portfolio strategy,’ with some tasks and ‘baseline’ content work largely done by AI and the more complex work being done by humans.

But perhaps the most exciting future, and where the sports industry can most emulate the retail and hospitality industries, is in loyalty programs and more integrated and improved partnerships. As Shah described earlier, bringing in principles from the retail industry, like RFM marketing (recency, frequency, monetary value), coupled with the leap ahead in data governance ushers not just better, more nuanced understanding of fan profiles and consumption behaviors, but also allows them to tell a richer story. A well-oiled loyalty program that directly shows purchase behavior and funnel conversions to partners is among the holy grails in sports — and it’s more attainable than ever, fueled by multi-directional, open-loop loyalty programs.

“It gives the teams the ability to get real data points to then describe and demonstrate that fandom and the value of that to their brand sponsors, which then ultimately should lead to higher revenue,” said Shah. “Because by being able to have that data and the proof to be demonstrated, that’s going to ultimately lead towards more spend, because then the sponsors can look at this versus other media channels and say, ‘This is going to give me a much deeper connection that’s going to help me so that I’m not always having to reacquire my customers. I’m also building long-term customers at a much lower acquisition cost.’ It creates that flywheel effect.”

Shah lights up discussing the promise of open-loop loyalty programs making their way into the sports world. Such programs thrive in the retail and hospitality fields. Among the many examples Shah cited, the Marriott Bonvoy program is a shining beacon, where points are transferable from one partner program to another, where spending with Starbucks, Uber, and BetMGM can be redeemed for rewards with any of the aforementioned programs, and points can be transferred back and forth, including from credit card programs. The intermingling of earning and redeeming presents an incredible value proposition. The opportunity is even greater now, as sports organizations invest in multi-club ownership and retail ecosystems around their venues. Spending on sports remains a non-necessity, a luxury or entertainment expenditure, which only adds to the appeal for sports to more effectively integrate into the everyday purchases and journeys of its fans. Shah explained why open loyalty programs are such an exciting opportunity for sports and why he believes loyalty programs may become among the most valuable assets sports organizations hold, as the programs are for other businesses.

“[Open loop loyalty programs] work beyond just a single retailer or partner. They’re cross-currency,” he explained. “So what that’s done is it has driven more value to the currency because now it has value in multiple places, which then creates higher liquidity because now there are more people who are earning more. But then they’re also redeeming more, so therefore they’re spending more. Now, that drives higher potential frequency. The person who came twice a year somewhere might come three, four times a year without having to pay for acquisition costs. The person who came once a month might come one and a half times a month. And that is what everyone outside of sports is seeing.”

That’s the promise of RFM marketing in action, and why Shah is so excited about bringing those principles to sports. Shah continued, noting the significant value proposition this all represents, broadening the aperture for fan engagement and consumption capture.

“This idea of cross-industry collaboration is happening in industries and verticals that have much higher spend. People spend a lot more with their grocery stores and their gas, because they need it, than they do with their sports tickets,” he said. “People in some places could be spending more on travel, so they’re using it for personal and for work than they are for their sports tickets. So it’s just a matter of understanding market size and TAM, and I think it’s an education.

“I’ve had many conversations…That’s the premise of the book; this is a reality where, for airlines, their loyalty programs are considered more valuable assets than their entire fleet of airplanes. Full stop.”

The sports industry’s long-awaited business evolution is finally here. AI has emerged as the ‘forcing mechanism,’ compelling the data maturity and automation that organizations have long desired but deferred. This new foundation allows sports to adopt the proven playbooks of retail and hospitality, shifting focus from chasing the next marginal fan to maximizing the lifetime value of their most loyal fans through sophisticated, open-loop loyalty programs.

This transformation is more than an operational upgrade, it’s part of a grander vision. The goal is no longer simply to fill a stadium, but to build a powerful economic flywheel effect where a team is embedded in a fan’s daily life, capturing value far beyond the stadium or arena. The organizations that embrace this change are redefining their very identity, marking the final evolution from a sports team that has fans to a fan platform that has a team.

WATCH/LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH SHRIPAL SHAH

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CHECK OUT SHRIPAL’S BOOKS ON SPORTS IN AI AND LOYALTY PROGRAMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-Imagining In-Game Social Strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Micro Communities 

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

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

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

Even More Niche Content

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

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

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

Platforms to Enhance Small Group Chats and Communities

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

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

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

The Full Embrace of Creators

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

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

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

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

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

Athlete-led Multi-Channel Networks and Content Franchises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+ Experiences for Fans

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

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

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

Get Bold with Generative AI

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

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

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

Leaning into Novelty and Micro Culture for Games and Live Events

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

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

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

Strategy Around Condensed Games

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

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

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

More Live

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

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

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

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

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

Retail Media and Commerce-Driven Sponsorships

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

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

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

Novelty Merch Drops and Collectibles: Beyond Game Giveaways

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

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

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

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

Mini Serialized Episodes

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

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

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

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

Digital, Fan Development, Social Media

From Metrics to Meaning: How the Portland Timbers Engage and Recruit Devoted Fans

What is the total addressable market for a sports team?

Depending on who you’re talking to, the answer may be everybody who lives within a certain radius of the team’s home city or venue all the way up to, well, everybody in the world with a pulse.

With seemingly limitless goals, it’s a delicate dance for sports marketers and strategists to try and be everything to everyone while understanding the most effective use of not-limitless time and resources to develop the healthiest, lasting fan base.

The key is to put the fans first. Sure, that sounds like a ‘Duh’ comment, but in the endless chase for numbers and vanity metrics, are fans really at the center of the strategy? That’s not to say virality is bad, far from it — we want to recruit new fans — but that doesn’t mean the bulk of time and resources should be spent thinking about these potential new fans at the expense of those already in the fold. Ruben Dominguez manages these masters in his position at the helm of the Portland Timbers social media and content strategy. The Timbers have a passionate fanbase and Dominguez knows serving and speaking with them is paramount.

“I really use these times to talk to fans and gauge them in that sense because if you read the comments, you can get some stuff out of that of what people want, but when you come up to people and they’re telling you what they like about the channels or what more they want to see I think it’s always the best thing that you can get,” said Dominguez, referencing the real-life conversations he’ll have with fans at Timbers events.

Dominguez continued: “The best example I can give getting to that is press conferences. So when I first got here, I really thought, as a soccer purist, that press conferences and hearing from the manager and players is the best insight that you can give. Win, draws, losses — it just really gave the opportunity for a manager to speak, so I was pretty hell-bent on getting those out. Even if they didn’t do the best numbers, there’s a good chance to just provide people with info about the team and dictate narratives.

“With that being said, a lot of people saw that as low [engagement] numbers, not really any juice for the squeeze. But now that we’ve had a little bit of a higher-profile manager [Phil Neville] come in and people are wanting to hear [from him], I thought it worked out well, and now that’s something that gets a lot of buzz when we put those out.”

Dominguez championed content like the press conferences, which he used as an example of content that would serve fans more than serve metrics, but he also put the strategic lens on the initiative. The team can produce content that’s valuable and desirable for fans and make the most of it for the organization and its business objectives. A coach press conference on its own may not do mega numbers, but the recurring nature and the countless clips they beget produce meaningful opportunities.

“It might not be the greatest piece of content, but I think there’s a lot that you can get out of it for the organization,” said Dominguez, who spent time with the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and the United Soccer League (USL) before making his way to Portland.

“So when you’re looking at these specific things you’re doing, whether it’s training photos or arrival photos or all these things that are recurring and come about, I think you just got to put it in that context. How does it work for the fans? How does it work internally for you all? Is it something that you can get a lot of juice out of the squeeze for, and then how does it work for the business side? And that’s kind of how we make decisions with everything.”

Meeting fan expectations and identifying value within recurring content are key cornerstones, but the Timbers, like any team, want to continue to grow that fanbase and find new ways to develop and engage fans. It can be easy for content teams in sports to get caught up in the routines of the season’s grind, one practice and pregame warm-up and postgame coverage blending into the next. Many fans may count on the routine coverage, resting assured that the team will deliver it day in and day out. But teams need to disrupt themselves, too, take chances, try new things, and find ways to break through the expected to attract new attention in the feed and find new ways to bring in new and existing fans. There’s a calculated strategy to the experimentation and innovation, and it’s a mix of art (creativity) and science (what the numbers say).

“I think when we do take those risks, we ask the same questions,” Dominguez explained. How is this going to affect the brand? What is this going to do for us? Could this be something that lives on? If we do it, what metrics do we need to measure for — and not just numbers-wise, it’s like the pulse of the community. If we do something and we see that a lot of fans like it and they’re like, ‘We want more of this’, but maybe it doesn’t fit our brand, then we’ll look at it and say, ‘Okay, where can we fit this?’ Or we say, hey, maybe this is our brand because this is something our fans like, our players like, and those are the people that we’re speaking for when they go out into their communities and when they get to talk to their people, what do they want to show about their teams?”

The sum of fan touchpoints and engagements makes up the brand of the team. Now, not every encounter and impression is expected to carry the impossible burden of burnishing every brand pillar. There are different fans, different expectations, and different opportunities with each platform, digital and otherwise. For someone in Dominguez’s role, it’s integral to activate each platform with intent and appreciate the expectations, behaviors, and opportunities each presents. Dominguez broke down how he and the Timbers think about the various social media platforms.

“When we look at a social strategy, we’re looking platform to platform of what we want to do,” he said. “I think one thing that we can say about TikTok, for us, is we kind of just want to show the cool aspects of what we do of our life, our players, and just show those kind of aspects of the game; [whereas] you look at something like Twitter or Instagram, it’s going to be totally different.

“I think when we look at Twitter, we want to show that we know ball, because I think that’s the best place where you can kind of display that, where things kind of go and you see things from different platforms, and when you do reach these other audiences, whether they support a team in Europe, South America, we want to show that know what we’re talking about, and we’re not one of those typical American teams or have that stigma.”

Teams are continually trying to serve their fans and create a brand that’s attractive to prospective fans. Oftentimes the simplest path to a spike in fans, or at least supporters, is through the players. Just ask Inter Miami, who saw their fanbase grow exponentially upon the arrival of Lionel Messi, or look at Tottenham Hotspur over in the Premier League, who gained perhaps an entire nation of fans when South Korean football star Son Heung-min joined the club. Such star power can get fans in the door, but it’s on the organizations to foment deeper, lasting connections that transform individuals’ identities to adopt everlasting fandom. Dominguez had a front-row seat to player-driven fans, particularly when he worked with the Portland Thorns, which boast US Women’s National Team star Sophia Smith on their squad. There’s a difference between cultivating fans of the team that ‘x’ player plays on and fans of the team who love both sides of the jersey.

“I think, speaking on the Thorns side, just the dynamic of that and working at the NWSL, the national team players are highly regarded,” he said. “People are going to switch team allegiances with their players going to different sides. So I think that’s one thing in that in a sense sells itself, where I think the difference on the Timbers side is I feel like the brand of the Timbers is almost like the star player and just playing for the Timbers. So we’ve always tried to keep that mantra…

“On [the Timbers] side we have the obligation to tell a lot of stories. And I think, since I’ve gotten here, I’ve really made it a point for us to, no matter the player, their play on the pitch, their status within the team, I think there were stories everywhere to be told. So we really tried to make that a point to get them out into the world and tell their stories.”

Teams want fans to feel connected through the players, but in a way that family members support each other because they’re part of a common group with a shared crest. This type of familiarity and communal support is achieved by telling stories of players all the way up and why Dominguez talked about the team’s content strategy around their Timbers Academy, where fans can get to know the players they’re bound to love, because they play for the Timbers (even if it’s not on their first team yet).

“We have probably the best academy we’ve had in the Timbers’ short history,” said Dominguez, “so really showing those players and getting them accustomed to what we do and ultimately banking on if they make it to the first team that we have archived footage and can tell their story from when they were young up to when they get into the first team.

“I think probably one of the coolest things I’ve been a part of since I’ve been here is we signed a homegrown this year. His name’s Sawyer Jura. He’s Oregon through and through. He’s from Bend. When we were able to do his announcement, he had pictures from when he was like 7 or 8 with [Timbers mascot] Timber Joey coming to games, we were able to recreate some pictures with him and his family from when they were on the field at games when he was younger to now. He’s been on the first-team squad a couple of times this year. So it’s been awesome.

“That’s kind of what we’re striving for from a content side, is just having all of that stuff built up to tell the best possible stories we can, and have players on this team that people feel like they know and can connect with, and then, in turn, you feel like it’s a family and a community that you’re building and you don’t have to depend on X star coming in for you to be a Timbers fan, you’re just a fan of the club.”

Perhaps the best example of generational fandom is in college sports. Dominguez has first-hand experience and perspective having attended and worked at Texas A&M, with a massive fanbase that loves their Aggies across sports and as student-athletes cycle in and out. That type of unconditional devotion transcends one’s understanding of the X’s and O’s, goes beyond any individual player, is bigger than wins and losses, and lasts a lifetime.

“Coming from a [college like Texas A&M] that is very big on tradition, I feel like we’re kind of the same here in Portland,” said Dominguez, who’s in the midst of his third season with the team. “We have a long history, coming up on our 50th year of the club, so those sorts of [traditions] are just things that you can highlight and just show people love and feel a part of something at the end of the day.

“I think any footy fan that you speak to just wants to feel that community and feel something to be a part of while supporting their team.”

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH RUBEN DOMINGUEZ

READ THE SNIPPETS

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!)

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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, 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!)

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Brand, Digital, Fan Development, General Sports Business, Sports Venues

The CMO View: How Fan Engagement Strategy Gets Shaped in Sports

It’s fun to imagine the genesis of modern professional sports. That gradual buildup that started from a handful of individuals taking in an otherwise friendly game played at a high level. From there you get tickets and crowds, ‘fans’, radio broadcasts, TV, social media, and, before you know it, sports teams and leagues that boast billions of fans worldwide.

But for most of that history, the end game was attendance. Heck, it wasn’t all that long ago when some teams battled against broadcasts or pushed for blackouts unless games were already sold out, lest they cannibalize paying fans. And even today, for many, the season ticket holder is still seen as the highest echelon of fandom.

The picture is a lot more complex these days, though. Your team’s most valuable fan may never buy a ticket.

Elisa Padilla saw the evolution, having been in and around sports marketing for decades, including stints overseeing marketing for the Brooklyn Nets, New York Islanders, and Miami Marlins. So as media deals continued to explode and social media took off, she witnessed first-hand that ‘fan engagement’ rapidly evolved and expanded beyond the arena or the ballpark, with new goals to chase beyond attendance.

“[If] you can’t get to a game for whatever reason, it’s the team’s responsibility to be able to ensure that you have access to the team — whether it’s television, radio, digital, so when you think about the KPIs, when you think about social media, it’s about growth,” said Padilla, who now runs Kick It By EP, drawing out leadership, career, and industry insights throughout sports and entertainment and beyond. “How many people are following you? How is your account growing? How are your fans engaging? What is the reshare [rate] like?

“At the end of the day, you have people that are buying your merchandise, that are contributing to your TV ratings, your radio ratings and they’re your ambassador, they’re equally as important as the ones that are spending money to come into the arena.”

Fans are everywhere, they’re engaging everywhere. And no matter how sophisticated our analytics and tracking get, fans are also engaging where we’re blind to it. So when it comes to digesting the fan experience, it’s all more complicated than it was when Padilla was starting out in her career, when one of the primary concerns was how the in-game entertainment and experience resonated with fans in attendance. The never-ending feeds of social media offer a real-time glimpse of fan reactions, though — instantaneous insights.

But I asked Padilla about how leaders look at this vocal minority on social. Even a tweet that gets ratioed is still most often a mere thousand or so replies, a drop in the ocean for a team with tens or hundreds of millions of fans. It’s about understanding the direction of the tide, though, she said, and recognizing when a preponderance of evidence exists across touchpoints that’s resonating.

“I think it’s just having a temperature on what the chatter is,” she said. “And it’s just like if you have 24 comments, I’m taking this as an example, and 12 of them are negative and eight of them are not, it’s like, okay, that’s one view. And if those comments are on Instagram, well, what are they saying on Twitter? What are they saying on TikTok? What are they saying on Facebook? What are they saying on Reddit?

“I think it’s more important to really have your finger on the pulse, and if it’s something where the sentiment is red flags all across, then I think that that’s where you address it.”

It’s only getting harder to even understand how to find the pulse now, with new platforms, behaviors, trends, and tactics popping up seemingly every day. Everybody reaches an age when we can’t quite understand everything ‘the kids’ are doing. Heck, the way that Snapchat’s UX intimidates older users is often described as a feature, not a bug. But the more one moves on up from being in the trenches, creating the content, and pushing the buttons, the more important it is that leaders lead, but know enough to understand the big picture.

Padilla never shies away from new platforms and appreciates the role and responsibility of guiding the doers, managing the forest while experts tend to the trees.

“I approach it where I know enough about the platform, but I lean on others that have the expertise from a user perspective,” said Padilla, reflecting most recently on the emergence of TikTok the last few years. “Like, I know that there’s a generation out there that uses TikTok as research, so it’s like, okay, when we show up on TikTok we need to make sure that, whatever brands you’re working on, you have to show up from a place of knowing that the majority of the people that are going to see your content are potentially using it as research. So what do you want them to know? How are you putting your brand out there?”

TikTok, and social platforms in general, represent enormous opportunities for teams to grow and engage global audiences, well beyond what one could even conceive to fit in an arena. Padilla even spoke about the Brooklyn Nets being among a handful of US teams with a presence on Weibo, the Chinese platform often described as being similar to Twitter. 

Remember earlier on, when the season ticket holder was atop the pedestal, the pinnacle for fandom? Well, when you have thousands of fans in Brazil watching your Instagram Reel or millions of fans in China following on Weibo, the picture gets a lot more complicated, but also a lot more potentially lucrative. The goal isn’t to sell tickets, to drive tune-in, or to necessarily make a sale. Those fiscal investments by fans are all great, sure, but it all starts with the prerequisite of earning emotional investment. Only then can you lead them to conversions and find ways to earn their revenue-producing support, in whatever form that may come.

“The way that I look at it is it’s about evoking emotion, driving action to share of wallet,” Padilla explained. “So if you produce a piece of content and you’re evoking emotion, what is the action that you want that customer or your fan to take? Is it that you want to lead them to your website? Do you want to lead them to a landing page? The brand has to figure that out. 

“Then how once you get them to do that action, then what is the next step to get your wallet? And it may not show up the day that you post the content. It may show up six months later. But as long as you’re evoking that emotion and breaking through the clutter, I think that you can justify it.” 

Once that emotional connection is formed, a fan becomes a fan. And then begins the desire for fans to show they’re a fan — can a fan be a fan if they don’t demonstrate it in some way? Consider the myriad ways to showcase it — going to the games, wearing the merch, watching the broadcasts, following and engaging on social media, messaging friends about the team, customizing one’s avatar — and the avenues to activate fandom only increase.

But even as it all gets more complex, the basics still reign supreme. When the team wins, hundreds or thousands or millions of individuals around the world feel a warmth in their hearts, a compulsion to stand and cheer, a desire to high-five the person next to them. Everything else follows that feeling.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH ELISA PADILLA

College, Digital, Sponsorships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH JEN GALAS