Category: Fan Development

College, Esports, Fan Development, Social Media

What You Need to Know about Esports and Fan Development: The Challenges, the Opportunities, and the Promising Paths Forward

There aren’t many casual esports fans. There are loads of casual video game fans, but esports fans are avid, fanatical, and extremely engaged.

That oversimplified reality is both a challenge and an opportunity for the present and future of esports.

Esports haven’t had time yet to build generational fandom (even though fandom spans age ranges). It’s not as easy to attract find ‘casual’ fans who may flip through a broadcast network on a weekend, get exposed at a sports bar, or see some incredible highlights on ESPN or other sports media. And esports isn’t like other ‘sports’ — that’s obvious, but not in the way you think; it’s like trying to bucket all stick-and-ball sports into a single catch-all category. ‘Esports’ spans tons of ‘titles.’ The collection of popular esports titles like League of Legends, CS:GO, Valorant, Fortnite might as well be basketball, football, baseball, soccer, etc. And yet far more people have played a video game than have played in a football game. Some of the most popular global individual figures are gamers. Some of the biggest live events in the world are esports events.

So what’s stopping esports from emerging from the burst bubble of esports in recent years and what caused the so-called ‘esports winter’ in the first place?

Brendan Hall has a unique lens into esports. Prior to trading in grass fields for massive monitors, Hall covered ‘traditional’ sports for years, covering Super Bowls and Stanley Cups before making his way into esports. He witnessed the rise — as investment money poured in and teams were being sold for millions — and the subsequent regression. He watched as leaders trie to copy and paste the prevailing paradigms from stick-and-ball sports into the esports world. And it didn’t work. But every esports event he attends is a reminder to Hall of the high ceiling for esports, if they can nail the right business models.

“Live events are freaking special. It’s where the casual fan becomes the loyalist,” said Hall, who worked Oxygen Esports, part of the Kraft Entertainment Group, parent owner of the New England Patriots, among other entities, before he became Esports Coordinator at Endicott College. “But [live events] are also expensive to put on. And I don’t think the model should be totally predicated on selling a bunch of sponsorships either. So I think it’s hard to make money.

“I think, for whatever reason, you sometimes see, orgs leaning too early into the merch thing, like, Oh, let’s be 100 Thieves and we’ll do random drops around Southern California. We’ll do these FOMO events, when you show up and when they’re gone, they’re gone. [100 Thieves] has been working two decades on building that…It takes a long time to build that kind of community. The one thing that this industry could use more of probably is patience with seeing things out.”

Hall noted the discord between investors anticipating massive returns and the need for esports organizations and teams to build up community over time. As he made his way into esports, he took the community-building to heart, understanding that loyal fans can’t be taken for granted. Esports fandom IS still developing and IS a relatively new part of culture, so creating that sense of community and belonging and feeling part of something bigger is paramount, Hall explained.

“Every month or so, we’d have watch parties, free to attend, just show up,” said Hall, recalling his days with teams like the Boston Breach, “and any fan that showed up, I would just give him my cell phone number and say, ‘Hey, text me anytime.’ And sometimes they’d text me at 1:00 in the morning [about] roster movement. ‘Why did you drop this guy? What’d you think?’ ‘Oh, I’ll ask Murph when I get in in the morning, but I don’t know.’ I think they thought it was so cool that a director-level guy was willing to open the book for them and be transparent with them, and let them feel like they have a seat at the table, let them feel like this was their home.

“I think the reality is you have to be willing to meet your community where they are, and for me that includes face to face, text me anytime, you might piss off my wife, but so be it. Because it makes them feel like they have a place where they can be themselves and they have a place where they really actually have an outcome in a thing.”

The star player nature of sports has been part of esports virtually since the start. While more stable rosters and hereditary, geography-based fandom has led many traditional sports fans to ‘root for laundry,’ as comedian Jerry Seinfeld famously put it, esports fandom has always been player-centered. Such fandom can be iether a feature or a bug, depending on perspective. It means fans from all over the world will watch and attend events to catch a glimpse of their favorite players in action, regardless of which team they’re on. But it also means trying to recreate the franchise models in other sports is a bit more challenging.

But Hall sees such fandom and sees opportunity. Traditional sports see player-driven fandom more than ever now, whether it’s Messi bringing millions of fans to Inter Miami CF or LeBron taking his legion of fans from Cleveland to Miami to LA. The vital next step is to capitalize on the influx of fans, capturing them with content and storytelling that enhance affinity and avidity at all levels.

“At Boston Breach, like the amount of fans we had from all over the country, not just Boston, so to say we’re Boston’s team, well, this guy’s a fan of the Breach because they signed a certain player,” said Hall. “With the Uprising, we had fans in Omaha, Nebraska, because of players that we signed that they had followed when they played Overwatch. That’s also difficult to understand. That’s why I’m not so bullish on the franchise scene.”

He continued: “When I would ask people at our watch parties like, ‘Dude, you could watch this from your home on Twitch, why’d you drive three hours from Maine to come to Foxborough?’ And [they’d] say, ‘Well, yeah, but you guys have Methodz (Anthony Zinni) here and I like watching him play Call of Duty on Twitch.’ That’s a real thing. So the more you can establish relationships with those fans who might not meet you in person, through content, through the storytelling, that’s going to go a long ways.”

It’s those relationships and that community of esports fans that can transform the millions of video game-playing individuals into esports enthusiasts and fans. That’s part of the calculus at play, and the opportunity Hall sees for esports to reach the heights once envisioned. Playing video games is such a universal pasttime and the esports community is so welcoming and open, so it doesn’t require squinting to see the possibilities on the horizon.

“I’ve worked in the NFL. I’ve worked in sports media. I’ve worked in tech. I’ve never met a community like esports that’s been as inclusive and open-sourced. It’s incredible”, said Hall, who in addition to running Endicott’s esports programs also teaches courses in marketing and esports. “So I just think if you believe in that community, you’re going to thrive in the long term because the numbers are pointing away. My friend Chris Postell, esports founder, does a lot of really good research on the college scene. 90%, or close to it, of students entering college are gamers, whether they want to admit it out loud or not. 77% of of millennial parents play with their kids at least once a week. I play Super Smash Bros with my daughters every night, and it’s it’s awesome. This stuff is not going away.

“But one of the other problems I see, go back to the basketball logic. No one owns basketball, right? Somebody owns Fortnite, and they can change the rules, pull the plug, whatever, whenever they want, and that’s terrifying for a lot of third parties trying to work within the esports ecosystem.”

Several different ‘sports,’ or gaming titles, came up throughout the conversation with Hall, so the latter point about who owns and runs these games, is a particularly salient part of the picture. Esports organizations often compete in several titles, but that’s not exactly how fandom works. A diehard Rocket League fan may not care to watch Call of Duty, a CS:GO fan may not give two rips about League of Legends.

Hall faces this conundrum head-on in building the esports program at Endicott. The biggest esports organizations face such choices, too. The way Hall sees it for the esports world at-large, they’re best off cultivating superfans around a title or two than trying to reach and claw for the attention of casual fans in hopes they’ll convert. The desire to grow the overall number, even at the expense of avidity, is admirable, sure, but it’s not the path to sustainability for the industry.

“I love this concept that Kevin Kelly, the great entrepreneur, wrote years ago about 1000 true fans,” explained Hall. “One of his all-time most read blog posts is about this idea that if you have 1000 fans that spend $100 a year on your work, that’s six figures in your pocket. So it’s more worth it to focus in on those loyalists because they’re going to end up spending more money with you over the long run.

“So, similar concept, right? Again, you talk about micro communities. I think you’re better off really focusing on a couple titles, and that’s where they have a lot of success.”

The avid players, the loyalists — that’s the goal. But you do have to start somewhere, of course. The underlying opportunity for esports is that casual fans already exist in spades. The path from casual gamer to esports fan isn’t linear, but the participation and organic exposure to the titles within esports cultivate a natural potential interest. If part of the magic of traditional sports is that any kid can grow up envisioning themselves hitting the game-winning home run or knocking down the buzzer-beater shot, that same sense of accessibility can last well past grade school for esports.

Hall reflected on those natural pathways, offering his real-life experience building up Endicott’s program — through coffee shop encounters.

“Where the Overwatch Championship Series, I think, has a chance, it feels more holistic, like it’s going to feel like almost a Premier League relegation-promotion kind of system, like, anybody can kind of come from the top,” said Hall, alluding to the meritocratic nature of pure esports. “That’s a system that feels like you can get behind, it comes from a place of more common sense, more aligned with how esports fans behave.”

Hall went on, describing the organic but opportunistic growth of his teams at Endicott: “All the Starbucks kids are on our Fortnite team now, because they were working at the Starbucks [near Endicott’s esports lab]. I’d come by every day, get a coffee, they’d come down here to their lunch break and they’re playing on the PCs between classes, and one of them, Sam, just got a Victory Royale last night for the first time all season. Six months ago, I was just bumping into him every day, buying a coffee from him at Starbucks.

“So the casuals, as they enjoy this place more, they’re going to want to learn how they can take the next step.”

Esports doesn’t need to mimic traditional sports to succeed, it needs to embrace what makes it different. The passion is already there. The player-first fandom, the global accessibility, the embedded community culture — all of it is fertile ground for something lasting.

It won’t happen overnight. Esports isn’t built to amass a cadre of casuals. The future of esports won’t be decided by flashy moments or headline deals, it’ll be built fan by fan, event by event, and through rich storytelling and deep connections. Video gaming isn’t going anywhere, so the potential for esports remains as bright as ever.

Content Strategy, Fan Development, General Marketing, Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LISTEN TO THE FULL (EXCELLENT) INTERVIEW WITH TOM HALLS

READ THE SNIPPETS

Content Strategy, Fan Development, Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH ZACH GALIA

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Fan Development, Social Media, Social Media ROI

Building Brands Through Social Media: Lessons from Sports Marketing

It’s been a while since anybody really bought the whole ‘the intern runs the social media’ trope. It retreated into obsolescence long ago (ed note: But hell yeah, milk the intern for insights about young people’s habits and trending topics and behaviors).

Social media has become far too important to the organization, a font of value and insights. Sure, it can be annoying at times when a coworker who scrolls TikTok or has an Instagram page has constant constructive criticism of strategy and execution (they mean well!), but it’s only because the power of these channels is unquestioned. It’s a direct line to customers, an opportunity to develop a brand and cultivate evangelists, it’s the one constant touchpoint with the majority of fans/customers and potential future fans and customers.

Jared Harding was there for the genesis of such strategic importance of social media, before many began to connect the dots (a work in progress, still, for many organizations). But he understood early on that the increased attention by colleagues, the friendly ideas, the unending asks (editor’s words, not his!) — all of this was a clear signal: social media mattered more than anyone had fully realized yet.

“When I started observing the scrutiny that myself and our team was under, at first it felt like all of a sudden everyone started to care about what we were doing,” said Harding, who was with Kroenke Sports and Entertainment (aka KSE: Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Mammoth, among other properties), eventually coming to lead digital and content for the group. “But that was actually a sign that what we were doing was impactful for the business, and other people were starting to see it.

“Ultimately, businesses want to build revenue opportunities. There are a lot of other things that matter, but for a business to stay in business, it needs to produce revenue. So when I started finding ways to help other departments see the value and see how it could increase sales, could become an asset for our partners that previously wasn’t there, it didn’t exist, and now it’s a whole new realm of assets that could be monetized in that way.”

There’s no single paradigm for governing social media within an organization, whether for a unique entity like a sports property or an everyday b2c or b2b brand. For some it’s an extension of a communications or PR team, others have a dedicated digital practice, for some it may ladder up to a senior creative or content leader, while still others place social media within marketing. But no matter where social media sits, the impact of social isn’t confined to a single department — the new era that social media ushered in forced everybody to adopt a new way of thinking.

In discussing how social media got infused into every aspect of marketing, Harding invoked a phrase from Jason Mitchell, a co-founder of social media marketing agency Movement Strategy, ‘social-centric marketing.’

“That’s how I’ve seen it for years and that’s how I see it now, that the smartest marketers are looking at all marketing through the lens of social,” said Harding, who earlier this year left his post at Kroenke to found brand and marketing strategy company Tewdilly. “It doesn’t mean what are we producing on social, but how can every aspect of our marketing become something that our customers might share on social, and live in that way.”

With social sitting in such a centric role, the voice and brand of the business have become orbited in alignment with the organization’s social channels, and vice-versa. It’s not easy to develop a brand that’s consistent and authentic across a business, let alone a sports team. Multiply that challenge for Harding and his colleagues within Kroenke, overseeing numerous teams concurrently. He talked about the challenge of developing distinct voices for KSE’s diverse teams, and I loved the way he articulated extracting ideas from ‘micro-moments.’

“I think the best we did over time at nailing it in terms of voice, style, and tone was when our content team was closely connected to the front office and to team ops and to the players, and was at the training facility and at the practices and on the road and really got to know what the vibe was like and what the culture was like and what words were being used,” he said, “and being able to extract some of those micro-moments and the feelings and use that as a foundation for how we communicated publicly on these channels.”

There’s rhyme and reason to it all. It can be tempting to conform to the mean, to adopt a voice and brand strategy that appears to win on social media, sometimes at the expense of what actually resonates with and represents your fans. To get the most out of social media requires a two-way street. It’s part art, part science, part trial-and-error, and part thoughtful understanding of your fan base, customer base, and/or desired audience.

Harding had a front-row seat, and indeed active role, in managing the sometimes subtle and sometimes salient differences between fans across the KSE family. A lot of Nuggets fans and Avalanche fans, for example, share a connection to the state of Colorado, but to generalize across a cohort across any singular trait falls short. Harding and his team came to study the similarities and differences, and even found strategic opportunities of intersection to collaborate.

“The organizations are different, they just are, so embracing that is important,” said Harding. “I think it would be a mistake to treat all Denver fans or all Colorado fans in the same way and market to them in the same way, but there is opportunity for some crossover organically; some of that just happens organically. So I think the fine line is doing the things that make sense and finding crossover opportunities that unfold for you without forcing it.”

As my conversation with Harding progressed, it became clear how many of the principles and insights gleaned from all the years in sports translated to everyday brands. Even as the seasons changed (and the team performances) and as platforms evolved (and multiplied), the foundations Harding had learned became more solidified.

It’s not easy to go from leading digital and social for major pro sports teams to working with ‘normal’ brands and businesses, whether within the sports industry or not. It’s easy to wonder if the strategies and tactics honed over years of working on properties where the majority of customers are fanatics (fans!) and the brand is proudly worn on apparel, showed off on posters, and often (insistently) passed on to one’s kids. Harding reflected on his years with Kroenke and what he’s taken away as he works with clients at Tewdilly today.

“What I’ve learned is that the mechanisms can change, but the connection to customers is what’s most important, and then being true to your brand,” he said.

Harding continued, emphasizing how honest we must be with ourselves. It’s a rite of passage for a social media marketer to post something that they either don’t like or don-t understand — but their fans do.

“One thing I think is underrated or maybe not talked about as enough is just listening as a sales tactic,” he said. “Like, I hate — some of these words I actually have a reaction to, but it’s actually just listening to what your customers are saying and then genuinely trying to do what you can to give them what they’re asking for. It sounds really simple, but to me this means tapping into what is holding so many of us back at work, and maybe in other ways, but that’s the noise that’s in our heads.

“The fear, the insecurity, the comparison — and instead just truly listening to what we know to be true.”

Social media has become the gravitational center of how businesses connect, communicate, and grow—a lens through which every aspect of marketing, branding, and customer experience is refracted. It holds the answers to what customers want, how they behave, and what truly resonates. But those insights are only actionable when we approach them with curiosity and humility, allowing our own notions and assumptions to be challenged. The answers are all there—waiting to guide us, if we’re ready to listen.

LISTEN TO MY FULL INTERVIEW WITH JARED HARDING

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Check out Jared’s business Tewdilly

Fan Development

The Future of Fandom: How Teaching Kids the Game Will Create Lifelong Sports Fans

A common storyline around the Taylor Swift effect on the NFL was how the pop star’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce brought in a deluge of new, especially female fans. Many brands even capitalized on the idea, showing fathers and daughters bonding while watching an NFL game together.

Football bringing families together. While the Swift effect is a recent phenomenon, sports have been strengthening bonds between families and friends for generations. But for Gen Z, and certainly for Gen Alpha, developing a fandom of America’s favorite pastimes is not a given. Not with a plethora of other screens, apps, and feeds competing for their attention. Parents can plop their youngsters next to them while they watch the big game, but good luck getting them to understand what 3rd and 8 after an offsides call means. Let alone getting them to care to find out.

Look around the sports industry and there’s plenty of angst about missing out on a generation of sports fans. Teams, leagues, and partners spend millions on clinics, camps, and other initiatives in hopes of driving participation and, ultimately, consumption.

But are they missing the forest for the trees? Most of the tens of millions of avid NFL fans have never played the sport. However, they will debate a 4th down decision or an iffy DPI call for days. This is the trail the folks at Future Fans are blazing. It’s great to have endless YouTube videos and games to teach their kids letters, numbers, and virtuous lessons. But, seriously, who’s teaching them why the Tush Push gaining half a yard on 4th and short is a play worth celebrating?

“Our core hypothesis is [that] the primary ingredient to create long-term fandom, not just wearing the gear, not just paying attention to the mascot — all those things are fine — but real long-term fandom, requires understanding whatever is going on on the field or on the court or on the TV,” said Michael Gold, Co-Founder of Future Fans, whose product teaches sports like football and soccer through a combination of a storybook and interactive play.

I spoke with Gold recently about the problem that Future Fans is looking to solve — teaching little kids the basic rules of the game so they can cheer and chat with mom and dad. He’s seen the alternative pathways major pro sports teams and leagues and media have taken to reach kids. And while it’s cool to see the slime cannons after a touchdown and Big City Greens characters tearing up the ice, Gold and Future Fans take a different route going direct-to-kid in a way that’ll help create more moments between mom and dad and kid as they cheer on their favorite players and teams. “It’s all about connection, it’s all about creating memories together,” he said.

Gold explained the Future Fans perspective alongside the existing efforts from leagues and media rights holders.

“There are teams and leagues out there and all of them are looking to engage fans in any number of ways. Be it at the league level, like novel presentations of the game, [such as] the NFL Toy Story simulcast or their partnership with Nickelodeon and SpongeBob Squarepants and the NHL has a version, MLB has a version. So that’s one path that the leagues are taking.

“Then participation is another primary path. When you talk to league and team executives, the first place that people go to is, well, if they play street hockey or if they play NFL flag, then these kids have a much higher likelihood of becoming fans and getting the whole family engaged. And there is absolutely truth to that. We just think that there is another complementary path to what leagues and teams are doing, and that’s where we focused our time.”

For Gold and Future Fans it’s not an either/or equation. All of the efforts together present the highest likelihood of turning ‘little kids into big fans’ (as the Future Fans slogan says). It’s just that amidst all the kids’ brand activations, family-friendly ticket pricing and broadcasts, and drives for participation in the flag version — they can’t forget to learn how the beloved game works on the field.

“They’re all pushing participation, and you see that in a variety of ways,” said Gold, whose background was in health care and startups before founding Future Fans. “Then from there you’ve got teams that invest in different things. Some are oriented around the experience on game day and providing family ticket packages. You’ve got the kids clubs and you’ve got those types of activities. You’ve got kids-oriented activities at kids-specific tailgates within the stadium, so you’ve got activities for kids to do. That would be kind of a second bucket.

“Then a third bucket is around community programming, where teams are going into schools either with something from NFL Play 60 or their own programs. Where we fit in with teams today is when they take their own programs into communities, specifically around schools. What we did is we took our football activity box and we shrunk it down to the highlights such that it can be done as a 30-minute activation with a player in a first or second-grade classroom.”

It’s not at all mutually exclusive, either, as Gold noted. Learning the rules drives more interest in participation — and vice-versa. The goal is not necessarily to create more football players — remember, the majority of fans screaming at their TVs on any given Sunday have likely never played a snap of 11-on-11 — but participation is a nice ‘side effect’ of the Future Fans solution and another element fomenting fandom.

But at the end of the day, for Gold and so many of the Future Fans customers, the vision of success doesn’t focus on lining up on the gridiron in Pop Warner or Peewee, it’s seeing parents connecting with their kids. Sharing a mutual enjoyment of something that can last a lifetime. (I can attest, having texted with my parents more than once in the past few days, even, about our teams). That social, communal, and familial glue has always been the most powerful part of sports.

“It’s about having something to connect with,” he said Gold, who discussed connecting with his daughter around football. “Sometimes that means watching it together, sometimes it means watching highlights together, and sometimes it just means talking about it, and she’s conversant enough in what’s going on that we can have that connection and whatever else is going on in her world, we can always go back to that.

“That is priceless and I cannot emphasize that enough.”

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL GOLD

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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

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Fan Development, General Marketing, General Sports Business

Turning Casual Into Lifelong Fans: The Opportunity and Challenge for F1

The rise of Formula 1 in the US has been remarkable. And the sport’s path to primetime — their media rights deal went from $5 million per year in the US to nearly $100 million when the next deal was signed — is an illustration of how sports can develop fandom.

It’s perhaps a bit reductionist to say ‘Drive to Survive’ in summing up the league’s explosion in popularity in the States. The Netflix docuseries had a significant effect, to be sure, but it’s what happened before and after that created fans of the sport, not just fans of the show.

A milestone that preceded Drive to Survive was Liberty Media’s acquisition of F1, completed officially in early 2017, which took a sport with an air of luxury and a fanbase mostly in their 50s and older and instilled a culture and sense of urgency to reach a younger and more diverse demographic. Drive to Survive may have felt like a culmination of that increased openness and focus on content, but it was the confluence of factors that arose alongside the Netflix show that put the growth into full throttle.

“What really kickstarted a lot of this content creation and testing out new formats was around 2020 when we had free time essentially to do whatever we wanted to do, and we had time to think,” said Nirupam Singh, who has spent years working with motorsports and today helps motorsports teams and business with sponsorship development. “That gave a lot of content creators and new people who wanted to binge that show the perfect opportunity to speak about a new topic that they had no clue about, but they were interested in, and they went and created new content around it on TikTok, Instagram, all these platforms.”

The pandemic and Netflix for days, the rapid rise of TikTok, the onslaught of creators in every interest area in the world — the elements were all there for fans to discover and then dive deeper into whatever caught their fancy. And for many that meant consuming more F1 content and more creators serving that demand. The teams inside Formula 1 also seized the opportunity, emulating some of the best practices of American sports leagues that had been crushing the social and content game for years.

“Now that F1 saw what the NBA and the NFL are doing, a lot of that stuff was then copied over and translated to what we can do in motorsports,” said Singh, who also works with tech companies on their marketing and email campaigns. “So the teams will look at it, the social media admins will look at it and they’re going to try and replicate something similar.”

The F1 teams are doing their thing, too — the content is hitting and the fan engagement is growing — they’re in that upper part of the hockey stick growth. And the American way is kicking in in more ways than just content, it’s also coming in the form of monetization. It’s all flying high now, but F1 also faces a challenge that all sports leagues face, maximizing the revenue today without sacrificing the fans and opportunities of tomorrow.

“Now everyone is seeing this amazing sport, and the sport has a lot of reach and level of success that every single sponsor and everyone involved wants to capitalize on. But that’s the problem,” said Singh. “They want to capitalize on it, not maintain it. So as soon as they got the fan now all bets are off and [it’s like] ‘Okay, we made as much money from you as possible, [now] ‘Bye’.

“That’s what I want to really avoid; how can we maintain and keep these fans over a longer period of time, because you don’t just become a fan by watching one thing, you become a fan over time, seeing it multiple times, and then you start finding like-minded people…

“There needs to be better strategies and better systems in place to nurture these fans over a longer period of time. These fans, if you talk about demographics, are much younger now. The age of the fan base has shifted from being 50+ to much lower, 18-35, so these fans are going to grow up with this sport over a longer period of time. So how can we maintain that so that as these fans grow up, they can pass down this passion of theirs to their kids and to their peers?”

There’s a lot to unpack there in the impassioned plea from Singh, who can recall days growing up when being a motorsports fan put him squarely in the minority. And if fandom isn’t cultivated, it can disappear as quickly as it came. Pull out the key factors Singh alluded to — repeat exposure and reliability, finding like-minded fans — community building, and passing that fandom from parents to kids and from old to young — generational fandom. Some of that the sports leagues and teams can affect directly, but things like community building, creators and personalities leading such community, parents plopping their kid in front of a grand prix, water cooler conversations — that’s in the hands of others and all the leagues and teams can and should do is set them up for success.

The new sports fan is different, too. While those of us who came of age in the ’90s or earlier mostly came to sports from, well, the sport, there are so many more avenues to elicit interest and fandom now. Many sports leagues have embraced all these tangential interests that emanate from the platform they have — fashion, gaming, music, and even just the drama and intrigue that surrounds the sports and athletes themselves. There are more fan segments than ever and such diversity of affinities and interests can be both a blessing and a curse.

“Because the fan base is now so large, there are so many different levels of interest and personalities and people that find certain things interesting and certain things they don’t find interesting,” said Singh. “So it’s a unique challenge, that’s for sure. And I’m sure the NBA and the NFL have the same issues and they’re all tackling the main issue there — how do we keep these fans and attract more fans down the road?”

There are more types of fans and pathways to fandom than ever before, and that’s great. It’s also a challenge for sports organizations to try and wrap their head around all these unique fan segments, communities, and sub-communities — there is no single or linear fan journey. There is no single story to tell or content to create and it can be intimidating to concede that we don’t have all the answers and don’t understand the factors behind every fan’s affinity. The sports that thrive moving forward will be those that foster open frameworks, that provide a platform for an ecosystem to develop and thrive. The factors that coalesce to drive fandom will continue to evolve in the future, but what keeps fans engaged — the community, the connections, the conversations — will stand the test of time.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH NIRUPAM SINGH

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Brand, Fan Development

Why the Arizona Diamondbacks Got Swaggy in their run to the World Series Last Year and How a Brand Gets Activated Across Platforms

Blame Wendy’s. Somewhere along the way in this early social media epoch, ‘brand’ was largely defined by social media presence. The copy, the comments, the tone, the personality — it added up to a sizable (perhaps too big) portion of a brand.

The elements of a brand for a sports team do include all that social media, sure, but brand is something that transcends a single department, let alone an individual on the keys, and the path to brand development does not follow a linear path. So it was illustrative to learn from Kyle Payne, who, as Senior Manager for Social Media and Content with the Arizona Diamondbacks MLB team, has seen the brand evolve, the fan touchpoints multiply — and the need for alignment throughout every part of the organization to make it all resonate.

Every sports team has its windows of opportunity, when messaging will hit and travel further and more deeply. Look at any season, but especially in the 162-game marathon of a Major League Baseball year, and even the best teams and best players are a series of peaks and valleys, spikes and flatlines (the old adage is that if you fail about 7 out of every 10 plate appearances, you’re an All-Star). That’s not to say teams can’t drive significant interaction and fan connection during the troughs, just that the surface area for success and transformative engagement increases when the team is winning. And that’s when you have to be ready to swing.

“Especially with the baseball season, which is 162 games, you’re going to have win streaks, you’re going to have losing streaks, and you’re going to have good home stands, bad home stands, road trips — all these things that I feel like you have to really kind of learn when and how to capitalize when things are good and learning how to either make the best out of a bad situation,” said Payne, who started out with the Diamondbacks as an intern and has been there ever since. “I mean, we’ve had some really rough seasons while I’ve been here, and so I think that teaches you just as much about when and how to message certain things to fans as a winning season does.”

The Diamondbacks have had their up-and-down years during Payne’s tenure with the team, with platforms and people coming and going and evolving as much as the players on the roster. But talk to Payne, and there are undeniably foundational values the DBacks hold dear and a social media philosophy that is fungible but has a baseline that everyone on the team understands. It’s tempting to swing for the fences with every post and piece of content, but it’s important to know about the team you’re playing for before stepping up to the plate (yes, I love sports analogies). A common talking point integral to club cohesion is the process of onboarding new hires, especially those who will be speaking and creating on behalf of the brand that’ll be around longer than any one employee or player on the team.

“When we hire new people, we have a coordinator come in or an intern even, there is a gradual learning process of trial and error of, yep, that does sound like us or, you know, we might have to peel that back a little bit, or maybe we sound a little more excited for this play or this sort of moment,” described Payne, who gave hgih praise to his former boss, John Prewitt. “I would say it’s really critical for us to just still, I think, sound professional. I think that we’re we’re not someone that’s going to have a bunch of typos and grammatical mistakes and so casual that, you know, we might be alienating certain fans. I understand that that might also appeal to certain demographics, but I think we’ve just decided that we’re going to use proper grammar. We’re still going to try to use complete sentences when possible…

Payne continued: “We definitely take what I would call calculated risks from time to time, and there have been a lot over the years that I’ll either reach out to approval or bounce off of my counterparts or my trusted group of people that I really value their opinions around the organization and things like that or my bosses, whoever it is and kind of go, Hey, what do you think? Does this sound like us? Does this make sense? And sometimes we get the sign off and it goes great.”

What do you imagine when you think of risk taking in marketing, brand, and social media? It may be something of the ‘savage’ category, whether a snarky reply or trollish creative. It could be a tweak in copy and word choice, or decisions on elements of the game to feature. But what we’ve seen more in recent years are intentional, relatively omnichannel activations of ‘risks,’ activities that can redefine a brand and alter the way fans perceive the official personality of the team.

The ‘calculated’ part is meaningful, too. It just feels right — listening to fans, hearing the players and coaches — the vibes point you in the right direction. So as the Diamondbacks kept winning during the 2023 season, Payne and his colleagues and everybody around the team could feel something sizzling.

“I think [our authenticity] was what [drove] our success in the postseason with some of our videos that were definitely more out there in terms of what we had put out in the past,” said Payne, referencing the attitude-filled videos that broke through so well during the postseason. “They were a lot more aggressive, but it was authentic to us and the team. It was how the players were feeling, it was how the coaches were feeling; like they felt like, ‘Hey, we’re kind of being slighted here. People are underestimating us.’

“So the videos weren’t us creating some imaginary storyline that didn’t exist that we just thought would be funny, it was stuff that was actually being said, and it was hopefully portraying how our fan base felt, how our players felt, how our coaches felt, how our whole front office felt and I think that was why they ended up working.”

It was the videos that caught my eye more than anything. More than some trolling meme or some all lower-case snarky retort. That cohesiveness between what the social media team was seeing, what was coming from the players, and what made its way to the video producers working the cameras and the Premiere timelines culminated in content that made baseball fans realize the vibes the Diamondbacks are putting out there. This alignment and execution is worth examining and appreciating — because that attitude and those brand statements are so powerful when they’re consistent across fan touch points. There’s no magic to achieving such continuity, but you know it when you have it.

“We’re really fortunate to have developed a strong working relationship where it’s give and take and [the video production team] is contributing ideas for us, we’re contributing ideas for them,” said Payne. “So that’s how those videos for us, I think, all kind of started; it wasn’t necessarily we sat down one day and went like, we need to like create a video with this kind of thing. It was just, as we’re talking about projects over the course of a season, as the personalities for each of them shine through on different things trying to kind of just highlight that and play into it and not kind of run away from it or not try to sterilize the content that we’re doing.”

Things reached a pinnacle when the Diamondbacks took on their division rival the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers were the perennial winner, the team at the top everyone was always chasing, or so the narrative went. The DBacks could hear it, their players felt it, fans talked about it — and instead of retreating from the perceived inferiority syndrome, the ‘act like you’ve been there before’ aura — this generation of Diamondbacks players had not been there before, had not vanquished the empire in LA. So they leaned right into the conversations and, as Payne wonderfully put it, let the Diamondbacks ‘personality shine through our content.’

“There’s like a rivalry there,” said Payne of the matchup with the Dodgers. “It’s a little bit, you know, there’s that big brother-little brother syndrome that people like to talk about or whatever you call it. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t personally agree with it, but let’s talk about it, let’s have those conversations and then I think naturally your content kind of shines through with that.

“And our voice in terms of copy will be impacted by those conversations that we’re having. The videos will come through with maybe a little bit more of that edge or that kind of back and forth, the suspense — we acknowledge that there had been disappointments in the past in LA leading into that series. We didn’t run from the history, but then we had that history kind of helping us guide how we were going to continue creating stuff throughout that series. And then it paid off.”

While the long MLB season referenced earlier often means every emotion-fueled win streak is met by an equally emotional streak of losses, there is, for all intents and purposes, no tomorrow in the postseason, no lazy Wednesday afternoon getaway game against an East Coast cellar dweller. It’s a time to fire every bullet because that window of opportunity is open every day. Payne and his team recognized the moment, league championship runs don’t come very often. What the team did during those weeks could define the DBacks for a generation of lifelong fans.

“We kind of just were like every single day let’s just try to do the absolute best that we can highlighting today and if we run out of ideas down the road, then we’ll worry about that at that point…I think for us, we got we got kind of back to our basics a little bit by that time. But in the postseason it was just like, go all in all the time and we’ll rest when the season’s over.”

There are special times in sports when a team captures fans with rapt attention, emotions open and eyeballs on everything the team is putting out. Those are the moments when everybody on the team must be ready, operating with the same signals, because that’s where the biggest wins originate, the statements that can resonate with fans for years to come.

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH KYLE PAYNE

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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.

Fan Development, General Sports Business, Sports Media, Sports Technology, Streaming and Video

The Infusion of Intellectual and Financial Capital is Transforming Sports Business But Developing and Reaching Fans Remains the Key KPI

Picture the stereotypical owner of a sports team. Back when you were growing up, it’s probably an oil tycoon, maybe wearing a cowboy hat, glad-handing in a private box at the stadium, with plans to pass on the team to their children some day. It was either buy a couple of yachts and a fleet of sports cars or buy a sports team.

But that has largely changed in the last decade or so. Sports teams are now multi-billion dollar entities that attract some of the most sophisticated moneymakers and moneymaking institutions in the world. And with the new equation, stuffed with more zeroes and commas than ever, the level of innovation, analysis, and disruptive investment is more accelerated than ever.

It’s in this dynamic new era that JohnWallStreet resides, analyzing the biggest questions, trends, and themes that are driving the greater sports business industry forward and are on the minds of the industry leaders shaping this evolution. Corey Leff, the founder and editor of JohnWallStreet, articulated the new normal in sports, in which teams and leagues are investment assets that demand the same level of innovation that has shaped the other multi-billion dollar businesses in the world.

“Forever sports was just like a hobby that rich people did,” said Leff, who worked in equity research prior to starting the newsletter and sports business advisory resource JohnWallStreet. “And these weren’t investments, these were largely teams that were passed down. But as the valuations, which corresponded with media rights [deals], have skyrocketed over the last 15 years, you’ve had a different class of owner come in because who can afford to buy $2 billion teams.

“With these enormous purchase prices, you get this different class of owner that’s taking a different approach and making sports business a lot smarter and are thinking about things like the fan experience and how to improve and integrate sports tech. So that’s opened up this whole world of venture and investment and all the things that we write about now.”

And then the million, nee, billion dollar question becomes, Leff noted, “To generate any semblance of return on them, we have to monetize them. So we need to do a better job than we have in the past. I think it all goes together.”

While the massive valuations have largely been driven by increases in live television rights (more on that later), a variable area ripe for growth in the tech-infused, increasingly connected and mobile world, is fan experience and fan engagement. While your parents and grandparents may mostly recognize the game on the field or the court, there is so much more new and novel about going to a game. Sure, you can get still get a hot dog and peanuts, but now you can also get a signature dish from a local restaurant favorite from a renowned chef — and order and receive it without leaving your seat. Forgetting the tickets on the kitchen counter is a relic of the past, it’s all mobile now. The game listed on the ticket is still the ‘main event’ (don’t worry, Red Zone is on in the sports book on the concourse) but you might really be going for the postgame concert or the pregame beer-tasting event. Needless to say, some things have changed since those halcyon days of years past. Things had to change, fans have too many other options on which they could spend their discretionary dollar or enjoy a night out.

“There’s a broader trend of fans going less and spending more on those experiences and looking for that premium experience,” said Leff, whose daily JohnWallStreet newsletter involves deep dives analysis and interviews on sports business stories, topics, and developments. “So that’s not where this conversation or even the trend we’re talking about started about why they initially started trying to improve the fan experience, but it’s all on the same kind of wavelength.

“Right now that’s what fans are looking for. They’re looking for that one night [to be] memorable, this is the night of the year type of experience. And that’s why they’re spending a couple grand to go to Taylor Swift. It’s all about memories, Instagram, social, creating experiences that stand out and are not just one of a million.”

The competition to attract fans to come to the games is just one battle, however. The greater challenge at hand is the rapid evolution of the heretofore endless spigot of cash coming through media rights deals. It used to be so easy — just about every household spent their entertainment hours consuming programming one of a few cable bundles and both leagues and networks enjoyed virtually unfettered, lucrative access to every fan.

But now that built-in audience can no longer be taken for granted. The number of households in the traditional cable bundle is only going down from here on out. Those regional media rights deals are increasingly being replaced by direct-to-consumer platforms or smaller deals. But this paradigm shift can be both a feature and a bug. Because while broad reach may get a little tougher, many teams will have more direct relationships with more fans than ever before.

“I think reach has become an increasing focus for sports properties, recognizing that the everybody’s not in the cable bundle anymore,” said Leff, who recently published a piece on the possible rise of FAST (Free ad-supported television) platforms for games. “There’s like 35 million people that now are outside the pay TV bundle. So I think there’s just an industrywide focus on reach.

He contnued: “I think there’s an increasing shift to understanding or trying to understand who fans are, and if you can understand who fans are, then you could start focusing on what’s the lifetime value and increasing the lifetime value of those fans.

“So we’ve seen these integrations, an increased focus on data and data insights over the last couple of years, but we’re still in our infancy; it’s still at the data aggregation and understanding data part of the process. Like, I don’t know that we’ve actually gotten to the part of the process yet where it’s actionable and driving new revenues.”

Driving new revenues is the end destination, of course, even if we’re still charting the path there. Because while massive reach it’s still available, it’s increasingly happening across different platforms. The fragmentation is part of the new normal, a side effect of the dilution of the cable bundle. Teams and leagues are reaching more fans than ever, all across the globe, but that doesn’t mean making money off all those fans will be easy. Leff and I talked about the unparalleled volume of fans of European football clubs, for example, who may have more individuals in the fans identified as fans — but, for a number of reasons, don’t drive anywhere near the revenue per fan of what, say, the NFL does (playing a sport that is largely confined to two countries in the world).

There is no prebaked paradigm for maximizing the revenue of each fan for a truly global sports team. As NFL and NBA teams increasingly seek global brand status, the Premier League clubs are just about there — but don’t quite have the revenue to show for it yet. There’s latent value for each fan, though, even more so with more direct, more increasingly necessary relationships. Leff noted the importance of being able to direct identify and engage fans.

“Especially these teams with global followings,” he said, “if you could put a per dollar value on what each of those fans are [their valuations would be much higher]. The problem right now is that, say, you got a gazillion fans, but you don’t know who any of them are, how do you go about monetizing them? The answer is you can’t.”

The backbone of monetization, as you’ve read (or already knew), has been the games, and It will continue to be that way for the foreseeable future. But it’s obvious the models by which games are monetized are evolving. There are still lucrative linear rights deals for many, but there are also streaming deals, direct-to-consumer offerings, a la carte purchases, and more. And there’s a generation of potential and emerging fans not accustomed to plopping themselves in front of the boob tube for three hours to watch the full game. They’re still fans, but it’d be naive to think the business models that have prevailed for decades won’t have to evolve along with the changing nature of fan engagement.

Leff addressed the narratives around the coveted and sometimes misdiagnosed young fan cohorts. “I think that younger generations will watch longer form content if the content is good. I don’t necessarily just believe that…,” said Leff, who has a six-year-old daughter himself. “There’s no doubt that it’s hard to fit [long live games] into people’s schedules these days. Everything’s more competitive, so you have to make it more attractive…I certainly do not subscribe to the idea that Gen Z’s are not sports fans; that’s a ludicrous idea. There are certainly sports fans, they just consume media in a different way…”

While traditional TV ratings seem to (remarkably) keep going up for live sports, most survey and behavioral data about Gen Z and Gen Alpha sports fans indicate they tend to prefer and consume more highlights and social media versus the traditional live broadcast. Herein lies another challenge, monetizing sports fans in the same ways when their consumption patterns change. There’s no magic formula that says one sports fan of your team = ‘x’ dollars per year in revenue, let alone lifetime value. But all the questions are moot without new ideas, experimentation, and flipping the innovator’s dilemma on its head, and being unafraid to disrupt paradigms that were so lucrative (and still are) for so long.

“Even if we put the monetization to the side, isn’t it about building that [fan]?” said Leff of the monetization of highlights and non-live consumption. “At least as I see it, for a six-year-old girl, it’s building the next generation of fans and fan engagement. [My daughter] doesn’t watch Sports Center like I did. I’m not sure that the ten-year-old or 12-year-olds are watching Sports Center, but they’re flipping on Roblox, so why not have the highlights airing inside the Roblox game?…

“in the context that I’m talking about, at least, it’s about talking to the next generation of fans. You’re not thinking about how to make the most money off of them today.

“You want to make sure that in 20 years, your team valuations are still going up because you still have a fan base.”

The reward for winning in sports (business) is as lucrative as it’s ever been. At the same time, the competition for discretionary dollars from fans and brands is only getting more fierce. The one constant has been, and will be, the fan. The fan is the sun around which everything else orbits. Without the fan, none of all this talk of innovation, experience, media models, and paradigm shifts matters. So while we continue to chase the almighty dollar today, nothing is more important than ensuring we’re cultivating the fans of tomorrow. It’s that emotional investment that will pay off on the fiscal investment in the long run.

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