Category: Social Media ROI

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

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

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

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

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

Social Media Is Part of the Larger Organization

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

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

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

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

Developing a Voice and Brand That Draw Fans In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Value of Fandom

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

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

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

Making Big Moments Bigger

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

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

Building and Activating a Well-Oiled Machine

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

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

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

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WATCH/LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH DAN LATORRACA

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Fan Development, General Marketing, General Sports Business, Social Media ROI, Sponsorships

How Sports Properties and Their Partners Build for Mutual Success: An Insider’s View

How do you define a good sports sponsorship?

There are plenty of definitions, and no shortage of software tools and measurement businesses to answer that question. But, for the consumers — the actual sports fans — there is a bit of you know it when you see it. Part of it is longevity, with brand-sport associations that have been together so long, it feels like they go together like peanut butter and jelly. The activations aren’t interruptive but additive or complementary.

For the brands, they’re getting the proverbial bang for their buck. But that ‘bang for the buck’ can mean a lot of things, as anyone who has worked on the brand or property side can attest. The roots of sports sponsorships may have been outfield signs and facsimiles of newspaper ads, but the options are more varied and solution-oriented in modern times.

For the teams and leagues, it’s more than just a paycheck. The revenue is key, to be sure, but other elements come into play — brand associations that can elevate their own, better experiences and content for their fans supported by willing partners, and putting their stamp of approval or endorsement on products and services that help them and can help their fans, too.

Nick Kelly has been on all sides of the sponsorship equation. He witnessed the religious-like fealty with which fans treated their favorite drivers’ partners in NASCAR early in his career, he’s walked around a stadium seeing product get poured (usually!) with AB InBev, he was in the middle of deals that saw the sponsor selling service back to the property at Verizon, and he’s been at the helm of a major pro sports league as CEO of then-expansion Major League Soccer club Charlotte FC. He talked about the diversity of sponsorship ‘ROI’ and approaches for different brands, a departure from the ‘cookie-cutter’ paradigms that may have persisted at a less enlightened time.

“On the AB (AB InBev) side, it was very marketing-heavy,” said Kelly, who today has taken his years of experience and insights to help others as CEO of Encore Sports and Entertainment. “Like, we could never really tie it to direct sales: one, because it was super complicated, and two, it was illegal. I could never walk into Yankee Stadium and say, ‘Well, only 70% of the beer you’re selling here is mine, but I’m paying you 100% of the sponsorship revenue. What gives?’

“On the Verizon side, you could be very black and white,” he said. “So a lot of it was very marketing ROI driven, brand lift, social media engagements, a lot of the soft metrics, but they mattered. And look, sports still are probably the number one, if not the biggest marketing pillar or marketing channel you can have to drive brand awareness. On the Verizon side, for us, a lot of it was business back. A lot of it was ‘What is the value I can pass to our 130 million consumers?’ I’ve got 130 million consumers; what do they get as a Verizon customer and a Washington Commanders fan? [For example], is there 10% off the team store? Is there early access to tickets? We didn’t really even take into consideration a lot of the soft metrics. They were there, but that wasn’t really driving the immediate value back to us.”

The sponsorship paradigms have undergone more shifts than ever in the last couple of decades, too, as sports teams have adopted new platforms that allow them to reach more fans than ever, and with often wildly unpredictable swings in audience. New signage and new naming rights were easy enough to adapt, but then Facebook posts and tweets and Stories came along, and, more recently, TikTok, where a post could reach hundreds or millions, with even social media managers not always quite sure which posts will hit.

Kelly provided insight from his perch, as he was right in the thick of this rapid evolution in sponsorships, full of opportunities and uncertainties.

“The bigger challenge became as new assets came online, and we wanted to create them with teams; I think we both struggled to price them,” said Kelly. “It’s like, ‘Hey, we want to come up with a content series for TikTok; well, TikTok just started, we’ve never priced that out’. Or when we signed the deal, they only had 20,000 followers, and when the deal came up, they’ve got 3 million. And it’s fair. So I think it became a little bit more of like we do understand the rate card is a league-informed baseline of what teams charge, but not all teams are created equal. And honestly, the content that teams create isn’t all equal.” [Interesting to note that Kelly called out the Jacksonville Jaguars as being particularly good at content during his time working with AB InBev]

The often-volatile nature of sports teams’ audiences, especially on social platforms where the difference between a winning and a losing season could sometimes vastly inflate or deflate the metrics reached, led Kelly and his colleagues at AB InBev to create a new model, an incentives-laden sponsorship deal. The goal for both sides was for the team to crush it, to hit the highest of highs and receive the highest payout; that’s what AB InBev budgeted for, too. Teams can go on championship runs that deliver better and bigger audiences than expected; they can also find a new groove in content production that captures big numbers on social and digital platforms. The new deal structures ensured they could get rewarded for that success. Kelly explained the how and the why.

“In theory, we probably had 15 to $20 million a year at risk that was based in incentives,” he said,” but we fully expected to pay it. But it was very time-consuming and cumbersome to coach all the teams on how to get to that successful metric. It was based on everything from the social media side — we even did it off of attendance or championships — so they can just get paid their bonus now, so then when the renewal comes up, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re more valuable.’ ‘[Well] I already paid you for that. We already paid you for winning a championship, but if you don’t go to the championship, if all of a sudden you go from winning the NBA Finals to not making the playoffs, it’s not like I have a chance to come back down. So it helped us in forecasting a lot.’”

There’s a sense of fairness and trust cultivated with deals like that. And even the notion of ‘coaching’ teams to those metrics caught my eye. Memories are long in professional relationships, and the sports industry is no exception. The importance of honest and open communication was a consistent throughline during my discussion with Kelly, and is no doubt a big part of how he has cultivated successful partnerships, activations, and initiatives over the years.

While you may walk with your head a little higher after buying a new car and feeling you got one over on the salesperson, the best partnerships are when both sides win. The individual on the brand side driving the sponsorship wants to ensure the company’s decision to invest in the partnership was the right one, while the property side wants to also show they more than justified the cost of the deal, and that renewal is an easy decision when the deal expires.

“Nobody on the brand side ever goes into a deal trying to think ‘I gotta get as much out of this as possible because we’re likely not going to renew’,” said Kelly. “The brand side is overly incentivized because they have probably fought to get this deal, so they need to make it look like it’s the smartest decision they have ever made or recommended to their CMO or CEO by getting a ton of value out of it and then ultimately renewing the deal because it was such a great investment.

“Most times when a partnership doesn’t work, it’s either, one, a change of strategy which the team can’t help, or two, the brand itself didn’t put the right resources to get the most out of the partnership. Very seldom is it that the team has not provided or been flexible enough for the brand to get the value out of it. Because, look, no team wants to take any category back to market. So I think a lot of the communication has to come from the brand and the agencies to get to success, because you having to justify why you spent X amount of dollars on a partnership and why that was a bad decision three years later, it’s tough, because it puts your job at jeopardy.”

Kelly continued, discussing why he understands the frustration that can come from each side, as both brand and property want to do right by the partnership, and can feel pressured to deliver and over-deliver on expectations.

“That’s the one thing that we’re counseling some of our clients on now is like, you fought for this, you fought for, or your CMO handed you this or your CEO, you need to make it work,” said Kelly, referencing the advising and work he and his team do today at Encore. “You’re not in a position, and the teams should know that, like, they’re in a position to make all of these deals work. And when they’re being a pain in the ass and they’re asking you for stuff, it’s not because they’re being selfish, and it’s not because they just are trying to get more than they want, they’re trying to justify the expense they made, period.”

These conversations are often framed around how the property (team/league) delivers sufficient value and results for the brand. But, in recent years, as more emerging sports leagues have entered the ecosystem and women’s sports leagues continue to command and demand attention and investment, the pollyannaish paradigm of partnerships are more viable and visible than ever. These are two-way relationships where the partner helps elevate the league/team as much, if not more, than the other way around.

Big brands, with deep pockets, haven’t just put their money where their mouth is, by betting on the growing women’s sports leagues, especially, they’ve also taken action to ensure the gatekeepers appreciate the consumer demand for women’s sports as much as the sponsors believe in them (and the data often dictates).

“They don’t just write the check and then walk away and hope the partners do it all,” said Kelly, discussing the partners of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), who’ve often been vocal about getting games more exposure on broadcast networks, with whom they’ve also invested. “They’re amplifying on their traditional, social media, above the line, everything; they’re there. They’ve done a great job of connecting the dots.

“They don’t just hand the NWSL a check and then say, I don’t have anything left for you, broadcast partners or players. They’ve been able to close the loop. They’re supporting the broadcast partners. Then they’re making demands in a very responsible way of like, ‘We need to see this more on linear [television]. We need to see this more in the right time slots.’ And it really takes somebody with the right vision and the right brand, with the right vision to pull it forward because the commissioners of these leagues are in a tough spot because they want to drive as much revenue as possible to the league to then disperse out to all the owners. Then obviously they want the teams driving their own revenue, too. But when you get a brand like Ally who does the full flywheel of every point, everybody gets a little piece, and everybody’s getting elevated.”

There’s a perception bump, too, that can come when a big-name brand signs on to partner with an emerging league. Pick your favorite upstart league and its trajectory can often be seen through its sponsor roster. The endemics typically come first; it makes sense for equipment manufacturers and apparel partners, for example, to sign up early and a lot of the early fans are participants in the sports, so fit a sweet spot segment of potential customers for brands endemic to the sport. As the fan base broadens, with more interest and engagement, so, too, does the list of partners.

Before long, well-known brands in the auto, insurance, beverage, quick-service restaurant, and other CPG and B2B brands seeking to reach a wide swath of fans. The day a league signs a blue-chip brand like AB InBev can be a signficant signpost — a big brand believes in the league, and the windfall that comes with such a sponsorship allows for further investment and growth. Kelly reflected on this idea, noting the big brands he represented were cognizant about what their investment could mean to a growing league.

“We weren’t naive to the influence we had when we were at either one of those companies I worked at, because, we knew that if we came on to a league early on, because we believed in it, it helped establish credibility for the league if you have, you know, a Budweiser or Verizon on board early,” he said. “And it was just very much a ‘Do we believe that this is, one, good for us because we’re hitting another audience?’ And two, ‘Do we believe they have the infrastructure in place to actually go and drive even incremental value for us than we actually are investing?’

“We saw hundreds of presentations over the years from esports teams. And, you know, we did Drone Racing League for a while, all these other ones where it was just like, you know, it meant a lot. For us, it became a little bit more we got on the sales tour with them promoting like, well, why did you invest? And they would just say, ‘Hey, can brand X call you and tell you about what you’re doing in our sport?’ And it’s like, sure. So, oftentimes in these emerging sports we became a little bit more of like an evangelist for why did you invest. And look, we felt that it was a privilege and also a responsibility of, if we were investing here, we got to see that it works.”

Sports sponsorships may have started out, decades ago, as advertising transactions and static assets, but they’ve since evolved into integrated relationships. The most successful deals today are no longer about merely buying access, but about engineering a dynamic where every stakeholder wins: the brand justifies its investment, the property elevates its value, the emerging league gains credibility, the fans receive better, more engaging experiences.

The modern sponsorship is a flywheel where both sides, and increasingly the fans, are fully invested in the other’s success. It requires honest communication, the flexibility to account for unpredictable growth, and the vision to see an investment not just as a cost, but as a commitment to the growth of the entire sport. The biggest win isn’t just a renewal, it’s a legacy of impact.

A good sports sponsorship is one that leaves all parties better off for the relationship. It’s not just a line item on the budget, but a statement of shared belief, proving that when partners rise together, everybody wins.

WATCH OR LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH NICK KELLY

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Analytics and Data, Social Media ROI

The Evolution of Content Analytics: Redefining Success in Sports and Beyond

What if your best-performing content isn’t actually your best-performing content?

We’re in the era of big data and analytics, a time of greater appreciation and comprehension of measuring success than ever before. And yet the metrics we use to understand content performance are still evolving, still open to scrutiny, and we continue to chase the meaning of a post or piece of content’s value.

Nick Cicero has spent much of his career leading measurement frameworks and evolving, even revolutionizing, the paradigms we use to measure and analyze media. Along the way, the platforms, packaging, and consumption patterns have necessitated changes in how we consider content; however, the longstanding models, as well as the companies hosting or presenting content themselves, often lag behind their platforms’ own evolution.

Cicero has watched the evolution at the front of the pack, seeing the shifts happen in real-time, and understanding the need for measurement to evolve, too.

“The biggest challenge that we always had was we would have to use engagements as a proxy for interest,” said Cicero, founder and CEO of Mondo Metrics. “But we know that only like the 1% of people are really engaging, for example, relative to everybody. That’s why whenever we look at things like engagement rate and we use followers as the denominator, which a lot of people do, that is outdated and old, right?

“That’s a metric that has now evolved because, one, you can game it, but two, it’s not really relevant if all of your followers don’t have the chance to see all your content, and that’s changing. So we were using all of these proxy metrics to help us understand that…”

Engagement worked well enough in the early days. There weren’t any better options, anyway. But then the form factor for content diversified, making content trickier to measure. Video exploded and each platform decided what constituted a video view. Snapchat came along and disrupted everything, with the 24-hour lifespan and taps forward (and back), completion, and exits entering the picture. Cicero saw all this happening and sought a solution.

“We said, ‘Hey, what is a Story but a compilation of videos that you’re just playing back in a row once again over a 24-hour window of time?’ So if the first frames of the video and the day expire, and I’m missing the point of telling the Story, my Story is incomplete,” said Cicero, whose previous company, Delmondo (later acquired by Conviva), was the first to provide analytics for Stories. “So that’s where it gave us the inspiration to say, ‘Well, maybe we should be measuring completion rate. But how do we do that?’ That’s what caused us to start to blow things apart and look at what are new metrics that we can combine and relationships that haven’t been there before.”

The new models required new ways of thinking. But it was also just the industry, influenced by ideas espoused by leaders like Cicero, catching up to modes of thinking that should’ve been there all along. Does the sum of the views of the first frame or two of a cohesive Stories package really matter as much as those sessions where users actually complete the Story? Does it make sense to celebrate a ‘viral’ 3-minute piece of content that earns over a million views as a massive success if the majority of those views are only watching a minuscule portion of the video? If one team’s content grabs a few seconds at a time while another’s gets a few minutes, but they both display the same number of ‘views,’ is that really an equivalent result?

An oft-referenced remark offered by Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings in 2017 was that the streaming platform’s primary competition was sleep. While that thinking takes things to an extreme, it’s directionally accurate; we’re all competing for the discretionary, finite time people have in their social media sessions, their content consumption time, and the waking hours overall in their days.

“They all want to capture attention; they want to measure the most attention,” said Cicero, referencing Mondo Metrics’s work with podcasters, sports teams and leagues, and other brands and creators. “They want to take the biggest share of your attention from somebody else at the end of the day, and that’s why what we really try to preach is that we need to prioritize for watch time and quality time spent on these platforms, the amount of total consumption that might occur in a day, for example. Because those are the numbers that add up.”

Cicero elaborated further, adding another wrinkle to that ubiquitous term ‘engagement’: “I keep going back to that [idea] of depth of engagement,” he said, “and it’s like when I go into a viewing experience, and this is what we thought with Stories as well, like when I go into this experience of consumption, what am I doing? What are the other options that I have? What are the different paths that I take to continue on and move through that?”

Getting a user to watch the first few frames of a story or the opening part of a video is something to be celebrated. Retention, completion, and overall time spent make up a fuller picture, but you can’t consume content without starting it. You can’t completely view content without watching the middle, and you can’t complete it without watching the end. That’s the point, Cicero explained to me, articulating the anatomical makeup of content into discrete slices that can each be analyzed and optimized.

“I like to think about it in like those three buckets,” Cicero said. “If you look at a video, what metrics are at the beginning, middle, and end? And depending on what my goal is, I’m going to look at stuff differently, right? Like, if I’m struggling to get viewers on my channel, I’m probably going to look at the first [elements] — what is it in the title? What is it in the thumbnail? What is it in the hook that is working or not working? Okay, cool, so what if I’m getting millions and millions of views, but people are only sticking around and watching my YouTube videos for like 7 or 8 seconds? Well, then I might look at the middle to the end metrics, like, okay, well, how long is my video? What’s the retention?

“It’s so crazy sometimes that people will spend all this time and energy to make a 20-minute video and get a million views and have an average watch time of 10 seconds. What you’re basically telling me is that probably 90% of the people left, and you just had a few people who were really invested in it. You’ve got to try something different. It’s cool that it might have gotten a million views because it might have been a viral hook or something , but there’s no substance to it. So, depending on what your goal is, you almost need to look at a different slice of the video in that sense.”

It’s not just social media that’s experiencing a reckoning for measurement. Remember ten years ago, back in 2015, when Yahoo made waves broadcasting the first-ever NFL Game exclusively on a livestream? They reported massive numbers, buttressed by the fact that anybody landing on the Yahoo home page had the livestream autoplay, racking up those ‘views,’ along with the industry grappling with how to define viewership on such a new platform. Recall that traditional TV ratings like Nielsen generally report the average minute audience (AMA), the number of viewers watching, on average, every minute of the broadcast. How many social platforms report a view as a minute of watch time? Yep, none. As content delivery platforms converge, the concept of viewership and performance is evolving by necessity. And as sports teams and leagues, along with other digital-first content creators, mold themselves into media companies in their own right, they need to think less in terms of the old metrics.

“If you’re like a true media executive, you’re going to look at your time spent on YouTube and try to think comparably to television, right?” said Cicero. “Because if you’re ESPN or whomever, you’re like, ‘Okay, these many people spend this much time on television, but then they’re going and watching Pat McAfee live every day, they’re going and watching this. So we can’t not look at the depth. We can’t not look at the total consumption time that they spend with our brand.

“So executives see that, but then content teams see that now too, because they realize that, for the most part, it’s helpful to tell executives big numbers, vanity metrics. But as you start to dig in to look at what’s really effective and what’s not, that’s when you have to really dig into the details.”

Anyone working in content in sports grapples with the daily hamster wheel, the never-ending battle to produce the next piece or post in the battle for eyeballs and attention. The fortunate part of working in sports is the cycle is amenable to such constant output, where there’s always another game. But whether the sport plays over 160 games or fewer than 20, that still leaves a lot of blank space to fill. There are only so many mini mic questions (Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah?) and manufactured tentpoles (hey, schedule release content is fun and awesome).

But, again, as the transformation of sports teams and leagues turning into media companies continues, the opportunity arises for sports to think in catalogs, to consider longer shelf-life content that can capture fan attention (and drive incremental revenue) for weeks, months, and even years to come. Cicero addressed the challenges of the inherent ‘rat race’ nature of the daily battle for attention, as well as the opportunity to appreciate the LTV (lifetime value) of content. It doesn’t mean every piece of content needs to capture engagement for years to come, just that, where it can, that should enter into the strategy and ROI calculus.

“Sure, you’re going to pump out some highlights,” said Cicero, who, in addition to running Mondo Metrics, teaches digital analytics at Syracuse. “And definitely that works for TikTok and Instagram and those short half life platforms. But now as we move into YouTube, well, we need to start thinking about, is that piece of content going to have staying power, years from now?…

“When you go back to the evolution of measurement, I think now people are starting to realize that, yes, I have the churn and burn of the algorithm that I have to fight every single day, that kind of rolls with the flow of the world, the way that the media cycle works, the way that we’re hyper short attention-driven in that sense, because we’re in this rat race of the world that we live in.

“But then at the end of the week, we are here on a Friday afternoon, if you really take a step back when you have some free time to breathe and think of a piece of content that you want to watch, then that’s where people are starting to think about this more. That’s when people really care about average watch time, and the minutes consumed, the quality of the content that’s going out there. And I’m excited by that. Because it means that people who would typically have been making a lot of social content, or maybe never got the chance to get on TV, are bringing really quality storytelling into these platforms and spending more time. So I see this as a really strong evolution.”

Next time you see a video popping off with “views” or a post that racked up impressions, remember that’s not the full story. The era of vanity metrics is fading; depth of engagement is where true value lies. The ways we measure content have changed for the better, and there’s no going back.

We’ve mastered the science of capturing attention; the real challenge now is keeping it.

WATCH/LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH NICK CICERO

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Athlete Social Media, College, Social Media ROI, Sponsorships

Student-Athletes as Influencers: A View from Learfield on How NIL Is Reshaping College Sports Marketing

The onset of NIL has already upended the college athletics world and it’s about to do so again.

With the anticipated official approval of the House Settlement on April 7, the ability for schools, the student-athletes, and corporate sponsors to comingle will expand even further, presenting unprecedented opportunity for a new, more rewarding (in more ways than one) student-athlete experience.

For college sports marketing powerhouse Learfield, their conversations with partners are evolving with the onset of ‘student-athlete influencer marketing,’ creating even better activations and enriching the experience for student-athletes. The interest in creators and influencers continues to grow in and out of sports, marked by the universal truth that people connect with people more than brands (or mascots).

“NIL, in a good way, has really opened things up for the storytelling and created an opportunity for my team to think about when we go into a pitch with a brand or another platform or even an athletic director — putting athletes at the center of that storytelling,” said Grant Jones, Senior Vice President and Head of Content for Learfield. “Which in the content world is way more interesting than us pitching a bunch of concepts around — I mean, I love mascots — [concepts] around a bunch of mascots or, you know, a facilities tour. We’ve done a lot of facilities tours. We had to do a bunch of content that really a lot of times didn’t feature or didn’t focus on student-athletes.

“Now that we can pay the athletes to be in this content when the brands are involved in a big way, it opens up storytelling in a big way. So in the last year, even more so, our content is now storytelling with athletes at the center of it.”

As Learfield has kept up with the opportunities that the changing regulations present, schools have been busy finding ways to funnel more money to student-athletes in various ways leading up to the commencement of revenue sharing expected to start with the House Settlement approval. NIL Collectives sprung up around the country along with dubious dealmaking — but in the new world, there will be more ‘true’ NIL, where companies like Learfield, as Jones noted above, can work with sponsors and schools to include student-athletes in sponsor deals.

Every decade or so of college athletics seems to usher in a new sort of ‘arms race,’ marked in recent years by ballooning staffs and increasingly flashy facilities. The next, as Learfield sees it playing out, will be legit NIL opportunities, that allow student-athletes to earn more money on top of the House Settlement revenue sharing (capped at $20.5 million overall).

“It’ll be on top of the student-athlete compensation revenue share piece. So I do think you’re going to see an arms race develop, a new arms race, developing, which was traditionally in coaches salaries and facilities, transition into authentic NIL dealmaking for student-athletes at the universities prioritized. And they’re going to be leaning on us to be a solution for that,” said Solly Fulp, Executive Director for NIL Growth and Development at Learfield, who noted the unique role Learfield can play with their scale of brand and university partners.

“If you think about it, we have the intellectual property rights, so we’re the ones that can connect brand partners with school IP in these campaigns. We’re the only ones that can do that if we’re representing the university. We have over 12,000 brand partners that we’re contracted with both locally and nationally. We have the people power on the ground to activate these campaigns, which is critical when you’re dealing with 18-to-24-year-olds and making sure that this goes well for the brand partner and the student-athlete and it’s good for their experience.”

Arms races in college athletics ultimately come down to fielding the best teams that can attract fans and media and engagement, win championships and drive all the accompanying revenue streams. Jones, who leads Learfield’s content division, noted that while having sponsored content in their social feeds was once met with mild resistance from college athletics staff, brand presence in the feeds is a welcomed addition.

“[It’s pivoted now where a lot of schools want more brands with athletes on their content because it’s great for recruiting,” said Jones. “That is a huge [change]. It’s just funny how much things have changed just in that simple part of the business because of NIL, not only what it means to revenue generation, but to recruiting.

“If you can prove as a school that you’re bringing in, even if it’s a local content deal, that is a positive thing as recruits are scrolling on Instagram.”

Student-athletes will no doubt be enticed by the opportunities to engage in real NIL while they compete in their sport and work toward a degree (in theory at least). There’s a quiet part some are saying out loud, though, because NIL — real NIL (i.e. not paper bags full of cash) takes time. And that’s on top of a demanding schedule of classes and classwork — education is still an essential part of the student-athlete experience for 99% of the — along with practices, travel, and games. So while it’s exciting to envision endless deals and content, Learfield recognizes the best outcomes will try to balance time demands and to lean more in to deals that make sense organically for the student-athletes.

“They have 168 hours in a week,” said Fulp, a former college athlete himself before getting into the business of college sports. “They already don’t have enough time for commercial dealmaking with their athletic and their academic endeavors, so I think we’re getting really strategic on when we engage the student-athletes, when we capture content, when we bring opportunities to the table to make sure that they can be student-athletes, and working with the schools on that.

Fulp continued: “I think we’re getting much better at that, and what campaigns work, and the storytelling behind it, that is really resonating with the corporate partners, and I think as we get to know our student-athletes outside their sport and major — what their likes and interests are and what they represent in values when they take their jersey off…Once we discover [that] and we’re getting better at discovering their likes and interests, we can pair them up with the right brands. And when you do that, it’s like next-level engagement. You can see it in the campaigns and the storytelling content that Grant and his team bring to the table.”

Even the most thoughtful, spot-on partnerships and deals still have to be activated, and these days that often means content — videos or photos or both, often meant for social and digital media. Content is the name of the game for the creator economy, but student-athletes aren’t professional creators. The value of the name, image, and likeness for the vast majority of student-athletes isn’t from the content they produce, but their influence.

While it’s easy to assume that all of Gen Z are native creators, having grown up in a rich content ecosystem with all the hardware and software in their pocket, Jones and the Learfield team appreciate that it’s not that easy. It can be intimidating to produce content for which a brand is paying, so Learfield is there to ensure everything goes smoothly and to put both sides at ease.

“There are not too many athletes that are fully comfortable, and this is professional [athletes] too, that are fully comfortable taking brand dollars, taking a brand brief, creating something on their own with their cell phone and putting it back to a brand, especially if it’s a national brand, and thinking that they’re good to go,” said Learfield’s content lead Jones. “The idea of creating something on their own is, I think, difficult…

Jones continued: “That might mean they’re setting up an entire production and there’s a couple of cameras and the athlete comes in and does something. It might mean they go over to the practice facility with a cell phone and just shoot something with the athlete real quick and they’re not even taking the footage into a post-production software.

“We are really making sure that the athletes are in a position to succeed, the brand is happy with what they get back and that there’s, obviously, the recognizable intellectual property of the school involved…”

While Learfield is there to lend a helping hand, the sheer volume of deals and number of student-athlete influencers means the organization has to be smart about where they allocate resources. It also means they have massive potential to put together far-reaching, national deals that are lucrative for schools and student-athletes, and effective for brand partners.

“When NIL was first starting…[and] there’s a local pizza shop that wants to give five athletes $1,000 each to create some content, does Learfield get involved in that? Is that a thing that we want to play with?” Jones posed rhetorically. “We quickly learned that the work it takes to do that $5,000 deal on the content and student-athlete and influencer side might not be that much less work than the $500,000 deal from the hospital down the street from the pizza shop.

“So our business is about creating the most value for our brand partners, combining those three things — media assets, IP from the school marks and logos and the student athletes’ NIL. Then how that manifests to bigger deals, like the national deals that I mentioned is, that’s where content is a huge driver of that.”

The ‘content’ portion of the revenue pie for Learfield and its partners continues to grow — while making the overall pie even bigger. Driven by the ever-insatiable appetite from fans for content featuring their favorite teams and student-athletes, Learfield recognizes the underlying paradigm of their business is evolving — and that it presents a heck of an opportunity. Fulp spoke enthusiastically about the increase in content demand, flanked by the opportunity to tell richer student-athletes’ stories with their involvement, and what it means for the present and future of the business.

“We’ve been an event-driven business. We’ve been selling football packages and basketball packages, and it’s been really wrapped around the actual athletic event,” explained Fulp. “This opens up the year-round engagement with the student athletes that these university communities want, so the storytelling and the connections can happen in the off-season.

“And what we’re realizing and appreciating is that these university communities can’t get enough of the content with the student athletes associated with it. They want to consume it, and they’re consuming it. So when you connect it with the right brand partners, it is magic. It’s exciting.”

It all IS exciting. For years, many descried the state of the industry, with student-athletes getting remuneration for all their efforts in the form of scholarships only, while millions of dollars flowed from their labor and NIL. The new era is exciting, but it’s about more than just money exchanging hands. The best outcomes for, again, ‘real’ NIL transcends a paycheck; student-athletes are getting valuable experience that’ll serve them well beyond their athletic careers. They’ll make money, but also learn about business, form invaluable relationships, and get more out of their time in collegiate athletics than ever before. Fulp reflected on the dynamic landscape, speaking forcefully about the need to keep the student-athlete at the center of the conversation going forward. Amidst all the change, the money, and the opportunities, it all goes back to what’s best for the student-athlete.

“The challenge now is we’ve got to reconstruct some of the stuff, incorporate NIL the right way, and prepare these young adults to go out and do really awesome things outside their sport,” said Fulp. “And I think we have the opportunity to do that. I think it’s going to be really additive to the university and align with the university’s mission, values, and purpose.

“But university leaders, when they’re thinking about conference realignment and they’re thinking about the $20.5 million distribution to these student athletes and some really big things, making sure that at the end of the day, when these kids leave these universities, they feel like they’ve gotten just as much or more from the university that they gave.”

WATCH OR LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH LEARFIELD’S SOLLY FULP AND GRANT JONES

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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

Social Media, Social Media ROI, Sports Media

Creating True Fans and Community: Lessons from World Wide Wob

The early winners in social media flourished because they knew, observed, or did something that others didn’t. Sure, there’s an element of luck and timing, execution and sweat, but the innovators didn’t just optimize the status quo — they blazed a new one.

‘Winning’ is more ephemeral than ever, though. A moment in the spotlight, the fleeting flame of virality, is often just that. Even amassing impressive follower counts offers no guarantees in today’s algorithmic feeds when you’re only as good as your next piece of content. So only a small slice of those social media influencers, creators, or talent (whichever moniker you prefer) manage to transcend the inevitable changes in technology and platforms and the deluge of new creators entering the fray.

Rob Perez is an illustration of so many of these concepts in action. The NBA content unicorn better known as World Wide Wob (with Twitter his original and biggest social presence @WorldWideWob) didn’t set out with a plan to become one of the leaders of NBA Twitter, and it was actually his lack of background in traditional media that gave him a different lens and maybe a leg up as he earned audience, engagement, and fans.

It hasn’t even been two decades for the social media and sports paradigm that reinvented the fan experience. Pick your preferred landmark, but there’s little disagreement that the game changed when native video came to Twitter (early on in the form of Vine clips). Nothing was the same after that. Broadcast highlights became (and still are) ubiquitous in fans’ feeds, but what those old-school media companies didn’t get was that the future would not be about transmitting the broadcast experience to social (and, soon, mobile), but reinventing what highlights and coverage could be to fit the new fan experience.

Wob joked about his hackneyed method of recording his TV with his phone to produce ‘highlights’ (which he will often still do today) and how that allowed him to be an early mover on Vine and Twitter for NBA clips. He saw this new technology upending the way fans could engage with sports, especially during live games. Recognizing patterns and new tech capabilities became a hallmark of Wob’s success. In a recent interview with me, he described that differentiator, specifically referencing the emerging ‘mobile view’ that allowed for richer, clearer storytelling.

“Every other account in the world never did that. It was always the broadcast view,” said Perez, who founded and sold a sports ticketing startup [‘Groupon for sports tickets’] called Crowd Seats before starting his path to a career in NBA media. “You would have to watch it ten times before you realize what was going on. I had this competitive advantage, which I never even mentioned publicly or shared, because I’m like, ‘I can see there’s no engagement there because no one knows what are you talking about [in the clip].’

“…I was never going to compete with the already established networks and minds that had built their reputations with NBA audiences. I needed to find a different way in. And by doing a social media strategy of highlights, which, again, is so simple now in the way that I did it, is certainly what differentiated me from the crowd.”

Wob would continue to find ways to differentiate himself, notably by again embracing new technology when live video became part of the social media ecosystem, led by Periscope (acquired by Twitter) and Meerkat (acquired by Meta). While most legacy media geared up to discuss the night’s games the next day on their morning shows, Wob knew fans were eager to engage in the moment, it was all part of Perez’s dedication to being first and recognizing opportunities before others did, or dared to.

“I was just building this community of people that found the only place that you can get postgame stuff for years was on my Periscope,” he said. “SportsCenter sometimes wasn’t even live and they were just showing reruns and highlights. There was no postgame NBA show. And for years, I thrived off being the one guy that you could go to for that type of content.

“Now it’s completely saturated in 2024…identifying these different technologies — being the first to market will afford you opportunities which you didn’t even think were possible.”

His live video and audio remains a key part of his platform today, currently streaming on Sirius XM’s NBA channel. His reliable, engaging presence helped him build a huge following as more fans discovered him and his feed.

But Wob was cognizant and strategic, understanding there was a difference between a consumer, a follower, and a fan. When a tweet goes viral, still today, new potential fans discover you. Wob recognized there was a funnel to this and the key to developing actual fans, not fly-by consumers, was conveying what made him different from all the other sources of NBA highlights fans would encounter.

“I would say one out of ten of people that either retweeted, liked and/or followed the account stuck around,” said Perez, whose approach to converting fans is representative of the successful entrepreneur he is. “If I could have that 10% retention percentage and convert another 50% of those 10% into superfans, that’s an insane number that I would still kill for to this day. If you’re getting five out of 100 people to be superfans, that’s ludicrous, right?…

“So for many years, the strategy was always to give them an easy way to try and learn more and then be prepared for when that person did come in the store that you want to be ready to sell them. So I was always prepared. I was writing articles, I was cutting videos, producing monologues every single day — and anyone who came to the timeline at any given point, I would always make sure that there was something creative and/or proprietary to my own brand than just like, ‘here was the dunk of the night’ Otherwise you would just be a highlight channel…

“As long as there’s one out of ten that are able to give a much more detailed answer about all these various programs that I’ve worked with networks on and stuff like that — that’s all I ask for.”

As Wob built up his audience, he faced the challenge of serving his superfans, the ride-or-die who had been with him for a long time and got to know the inside jokes and tropes — part of a community — while also welcoming new fans and followers in the fold. It’s a unique problem to have—one of those ‘good problems’—that someone could remain relevant for so long while still attracting new followers.. It’s something Wob has taken to heart over the years and has come to recognize is important for any creator to consider — understanding their past-present-future audience, their own intentional brand, and, most importantly, never getting complacent, thinking your old schtick will remain as relevant and engaging as the years pass by. (Just think how different the fan social media experience was just a few years ago, let alone a decade ago).

“It’s always a struggle for me to continue to re-educate followers and people that are just joining social media for the first time in a younger audience that have no clue nor care about your entire history and what you’ve done in ten years,” Perez explained. “They just started following you yesterday, and to get those people through the door and retain them is a massive undertaking of effort…

“But you have to create content which appeals to your long-term base as well as someone who has no clue who you are, which is a massive [challenge] — it flies under the radar for content creators who think they’re just always going to keep doing the same things because [their] fan base has been there since day one. No, you’re going to get new people all the time.”

It’s critical nowadays to build fan bases, not followers; to create community, not consumers. Wob didn’t set out to master Twitter, his approach to content and engagement allowed him to develop fans beyond followers. Fans didn’t want to just to see the highlight clips — those are largely commoditized now — they wanted to see his clips and his takes.

Wob knows how fortunate (but strategically intentional) he is to have a true community. There are countless accounts now boasting millions of followers. But in 2024, particularly for an individual finding jobs with media companies that want his fans along with his talent, how important is the follower count?

“Inflation has hit subscriber counts harder than it has the US dollar,” said Perez, who today has over 1.1 million Twitter followers. “So what I mean by that is a million followers on Twitter in 2015 was worth 3 to 5 times as much as it is now. And the inflation isn’t just Twitter specific, it’s because TikTok became a thing, because YouTube now has eaten up so much market share that having a million followers on one platform is great, but what are you doing in the event that one of these social media networks folds? What are you doing if one of these other places takes off?

“Are these followers following you because you cook the books on an algorithm or are they following you because you have built a community?…”

It’s easier than ever to go viral now. The number of different accounts that were able to reach over a million views in a single post is likely higher in 2024 than in any preceding year. The number of accounts with over a million followers is likewise higher than ever, to Wob’s previous point about follower count inflation. That’s partly why you see creators seeking (and being served) ways to identify their true fans, to ‘own’ them beyond the whims of platforms for algorithm-driven feeds that offer no guarantees day-to-day, whether by creating newsletters with email lists or forms of membership and even paid communities.

And it’s because Wob does have a sizable community that he has been able to thrive over the years, and continues to have media companies vying for his services. Think of all the talent let go by legacy media companies over the past few years, whether ESPN or Sports Illustrated or countless others — only a select few remained nearly as relevant when the corporate identifier left their @ handles. But Wob is on the other side of the spectrum, because so many of his followers are fans and will follow him wherever he goes.

“I think that’s why I certainly get a lot of opportunity in the event there’s a bigger account out there and or a network potentially that would drive more eyeballs,” he explained. “They know, through my experience and all of the content that I’ve created over these decades, that this guy, no matter where he goes, that audience will come with him.

“There’s talent that relies on the network, otherwise they’re on the street…”

Wob is representative of the power shift happening in media. The corporations and brands need the talent more than vice-versa. It’s an uncomfortable situation for executives, many of whom came up assured in the belief that talent grew up dreaming of working for their companies and that individuals were lucky to ride the wake of the platform a brand could give them. Wob has experienced the reversal of that paradigm, and it’s not always comfortable for the power brokers of old.

“My mobility ability has certainly put me in the crosshairs of certain executives in the past that I’ve worked with,” said Perez, whose long list of stops one can see on his LinkedIn page illuminates his mobility. “But I just don’t know what to do other than just be respectful and do my job, so that’s what I’ve always done. And as a result, I’m sure those people don’t have the most sterling things to say about me, but they will say he was here the whole time and he worked and he just left. And I’m absolutely willing to live with that if I know the next opportunity is going to compensate me for that type of relationship fallout…

“I’ve lived it, I’ve breathed it. It has its benefits, but you also better be damn good too…”

Rob Perez stands as a testament to the power of adaptability, authenticity, and community. His journey exemplifies how creators who embrace change, innovate with intention, and build genuine connections can thrive beyond the fleeting flash of viral fame. As followers evolve into fans, they forge bonds that transcend algorithms and platforms. In this new era, it’s not just about reaching millions; it’s about resonating with them. And in that, World Wide Wob and others like him are redefining what it truly means to win in social media.

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH ROB PEREZ AKA WORLD WIDE WOB

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Content Strategy, General Sports Business, Social Media ROI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN FITZSIMMONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Make Ads, Make Content

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

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

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

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

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

Fan Activity (or Inactivity) Can Inform Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the Why

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

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

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

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

Engagers are Hand Raisers

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

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

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

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

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

Putting it into Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Brand, Content Strategy, Social Media, Social Media ROI

How Sports Teams Can Craft a Strong Brand Narrative One Social Media Post at a Time

Think about one of your favorite sports teams to follow on social media. How would you describe them? Which traits do they embody as an overall brand, which adjectives come to mind, what are their values, and what differentiates them from other sports teams?

In a time when consumers care what the brands they patronize and support stand for and how those brands come off, sports fans are also cognizant of whether their favorite teams and athletes mesh with their personal identities. And social media, in all its forms, is the most powerful mechanism teams have to develop and activate an identity. Every one of the hundreds of touchpoints teams have on these platforms with fans each week, every graphic and word — it all coalesces into how fans perceive the personalities and values of the team.

By the time Kurt Gies arrived at the Philadelphia 76ers, the team knew who it was and how to express it on social media. Luckily for Kurt, the brand of the 76ers was ‘Philadelphian’ and Kurt just happened to be a born and bred Philadelphian. So when he took over the keys (the social media posting) for the Sixers, he appreciated what his predecessors had built and sought to grow it further, along with the emerging personality of the team as embodied by its charismatic players.

“That [Sixers] account is not talking in just this plain voice, it’s talking as if it’s a Philadelphian, and Philadelphians appreciate that so much,” said Gies, who today is the Director of Social Media and Influencers for the LA Rams. “You look at the makeup of the team too…Joel Embiid especially in his early days was such a personality and it was like how do you take that huge personality and try and replicate that? Because at the end of the day, if you’re a sports brand account, you probably want to take on the voice of the people on your team…

“So having somebody like Joel Embiid is a huge piece of that and [the Sixers social media managers before me] did a great job emulating that and it just really opened up the doors for me as he started to play and become even more popular of like, ‘Hey, Joel is trolling people, we’re going to troll people too’ or we’re going to take on that similar voice.”

The Sixers were (and still are) one of the more distinct voices in social media and sports, and their originality and success continued, whether it was people named Max, Sandro, Kurt, Alli, Andy, or others behind the keys. It felt so organic for the Sixers when Kurt was there, and having guys like Embiid fueling the fire only made the direction all the more logical, sensible, and almost facile. So it was a new challenge when Gies left the comfy confines of the city of brotherly love to head to the LA Clippers, which had its own distinct brand identity and goals.

The Clippers were in the midst of a reinvigoration. The brand had been ascending, but with the arrival of newly acquired NBA stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George coinciding with Gies’s arrival, there was a salient opportunity to mold the brand and perception of the Clippers and its newly bedazzled roster. But to seize that opportunity meant paying attention to every detail, to ensure those hundreds and thousands of fan touchpoints all furthered an intentional narrative, Gies explained to me.

“When [his Clippers colleagues Sandro Gasparro and Charlie Widdoes] started they didn’t have Kawhi and PG [Paul George], but they did an incredible job of crafting that narrative and sticking to that narrative to help build that brand up from what it used to be,” said Gies, who had connected with both Gasparro and Widdoes from their time at the Sixers. “And then, you know, you get somebody like Kawhi and PG and you’re title contenders and everything was very calculated.

“That was probably one of the biggest I learned of many things from working with those guys. But that’s something that I always go back to, just there’s always a why behind what it is that we’re posting and what it is that we’re creating, and making sure that it’s achieving what that narrative is.”

Gies went on to describe what, exactly, that narrative was the Clippers sought to build. The ‘why’ to which every piece of content and post should connect.

“For the Clippers, it was, ‘Hey, we’re a blue-collar team. We’re a gritty team. We’re not this superstar team,’” he said. “So we want to show that we’re always putting in work. We want to show that we’re not afraid to roll up our sleeves and here are the specific players that we want to highlight and the keywords — so just really calculated and determined what it was that we were highlighting in the content that we were creating.

“We weren’t just creating things to create them. We were creating things and crafting copy — there are so many things that go into it. But we were doing all of this with meaning behind it.”

 Thoughtfully crafting a brand doesn’t always equal virality. Sure, it’s great for every post to hit big numbers and social media teams will always try to convey the desired meaning or value in the best way possible. But when it comes to activating different aspects of the brand, it may mean not every post will ‘blow up’ on social. If every post were to go viral, it’s probably a sign that the narrative is not well-rounded, the full brand picture is not being presented. Gies talked about the importance of balancing trying to win the internet with content that connects back to organizational goals, and did so more eloquently than this author ever could.

“Focusing on engagement, that doesn’t necessarily mean that can’t hit both [goals],” he explained. “Saying something that’s like, ‘Hey, this is a meme, but that still ladders back to a goal,’ which could be engaging in internet culture because that’s going to help hit fans that aren’t fans of the Clippers; or the complete opposite of that of like, ‘Hey, community is really important and showing what we’re doing in the community is really important for our narrative,’ but that stuff might not necessarily perform that well. There are ways to make it more creative, but that’s still really important to our narrative. 

“So understanding that sometimes things that you’re doing might not necessarily be for the engagement or for the impressions but are still really important in telling that story.”

Our reputations and personalities are the sum of every micro-interaction and impression we have with others. A perception is neither formed nor changed with a single engagement, let alone a single social media post. Over time, everything adds up and it’s integral that every word, each creative piece, and every post has purpose and precision. Brands aren’t built in a day, but they can last a lifetime.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH KURT GIES