A business-minded look at digital and social media in sports
Listen to episode 282 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Rob Perez, aka World Wide Wob, NBA creator/community leader, Twitter Personality, SiriusXM + Sorare NBA host.
98 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Check out my LinkedIn articles
A common storyline around the Taylor Swift effect on the NFL was how the pop star’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce brought in a deluge of new, especially female fans. Many brands even capitalized on the idea, showing fathers and daughters bonding while watching an NFL game together.
Football bringing families together. While the Swift effect is a recent phenomenon, sports have been strengthening bonds between families and friends for generations. But for Gen Z, and certainly for Gen Alpha, developing a fandom of America’s favorite pastimes is not a given. Not with a plethora of other screens, apps, and feeds competing for their attention. Parents can plop their youngsters next to them while they watch the big game, but good luck getting them to understand what 3rd and 8 after an offsides call means. Let alone getting them to care to find out.
Look around the sports industry and there’s plenty of angst about missing out on a generation of sports fans. Teams, leagues, and partners spend millions on clinics, camps, and other initiatives in hopes of driving participation and, ultimately, consumption.
But are they missing the forest for the trees? Most of the tens of millions of avid NFL fans have never played the sport. However, they will debate a 4th down decision or an iffy DPI call for days. This is the trail the folks at Future Fans are blazing. It’s great to have endless YouTube videos and games to teach their kids letters, numbers, and virtuous lessons. But, seriously, who’s teaching them why the Tush Push gaining half a yard on 4th and short is a play worth celebrating?
“Our core hypothesis is [that] the primary ingredient to create long-term fandom, not just wearing the gear, not just paying attention to the mascot — all those things are fine — but real long-term fandom, requires understanding whatever is going on on the field or on the court or on the TV,” said Michael Gold, Co-Founder of Future Fans, whose product teaches sports like football and soccer through a combination of a storybook and interactive play.
I spoke with Gold recently about the problem that Future Fans is looking to solve — teaching little kids the basic rules of the game so they can cheer and chat with mom and dad. He’s seen the alternative pathways major pro sports teams and leagues and media have taken to reach kids. And while it’s cool to see the slime cannons after a touchdown and Big City Greens characters tearing up the ice, Gold and Future Fans take a different route going direct-to-kid in a way that’ll help create more moments between mom and dad and kid as they cheer on their favorite players and teams. “It’s all about connection, it’s all about creating memories together,” he said.
Gold explained the Future Fans perspective alongside the existing efforts from leagues and media rights holders.
“There are teams and leagues out there and all of them are looking to engage fans in any number of ways. Be it at the league level, like novel presentations of the game, [such as] the NFL Toy Story simulcast or their partnership with Nickelodeon and SpongeBob Squarepants and the NHL has a version, MLB has a version. So that’s one path that the leagues are taking.
“Then participation is another primary path. When you talk to league and team executives, the first place that people go to is, well, if they play street hockey or if they play NFL flag, then these kids have a much higher likelihood of becoming fans and getting the whole family engaged. And there is absolutely truth to that. We just think that there is another complementary path to what leagues and teams are doing, and that’s where we focused our time.”
For Gold and Future Fans it’s not an either/or equation. All of the efforts together present the highest likelihood of turning ‘little kids into big fans’ (as the Future Fans slogan says). It’s just that amidst all the kids’ brand activations, family-friendly ticket pricing and broadcasts, and drives for participation in the flag version — they can’t forget to learn how the beloved game works on the field.
“They’re all pushing participation, and you see that in a variety of ways,” said Gold, whose background was in health care and startups before founding Future Fans. “Then from there you’ve got teams that invest in different things. Some are oriented around the experience on game day and providing family ticket packages. You’ve got the kids clubs and you’ve got those types of activities. You’ve got kids-oriented activities at kids-specific tailgates within the stadium, so you’ve got activities for kids to do. That would be kind of a second bucket.
“Then a third bucket is around community programming, where teams are going into schools either with something from NFL Play 60 or their own programs. Where we fit in with teams today is when they take their own programs into communities, specifically around schools. What we did is we took our football activity box and we shrunk it down to the highlights such that it can be done as a 30-minute activation with a player in a first or second-grade classroom.”
It’s not at all mutually exclusive, either, as Gold noted. Learning the rules drives more interest in participation — and vice-versa. The goal is not necessarily to create more football players — remember, the majority of fans screaming at their TVs on any given Sunday have likely never played a snap of 11-on-11 — but participation is a nice ‘side effect’ of the Future Fans solution and another element fomenting fandom.
But at the end of the day, for Gold and so many of the Future Fans customers, the vision of success doesn’t focus on lining up on the gridiron in Pop Warner or Peewee, it’s seeing parents connecting with their kids. Sharing a mutual enjoyment of something that can last a lifetime. (I can attest, having texted with my parents more than once in the past few days, even, about our teams). That social, communal, and familial glue has always been the most powerful part of sports.
“It’s about having something to connect with,” he said Gold, who discussed connecting with his daughter around football. “Sometimes that means watching it together, sometimes it means watching highlights together, and sometimes it just means talking about it, and she’s conversant enough in what’s going on that we can have that connection and whatever else is going on in her world, we can always go back to that.
“That is priceless and I cannot emphasize that enough.”
On episode 281 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Michael Gold, Co-Founder of Future Fans.
What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast via Apple or listen on Spotify or YouTube.
Listen to episode 281 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Michael Gold, Co-Founder of Future Fans.
69 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Check out my LinkedIn articles
Which sport’s fans are the most avid?
Not which has the most fans, but the major sport whose average fan is highest on the avidity scale?
It’s an interesting thought experiment because while everybody knows the NFL Rules the roost in the US, do they have the highest concentration of fervent fans? To have a high density of diehards is not necessarily desirable. Businesses, brands, creators — they all love their biggest, most passionate fans, but the common trend is to chase the casuals.
Sean McIndoe has a lot of avid fans. The longtime hockey writer who’s also known as Down Goes Brown learned early on in his career that it was better to be the best in a niche than to try and compete for the generic masses. McIndoe took a new take to hockey content, infusing comedy and (eventually) esoteric minutiae and wit that a subset of fans fell in love with. He’s been number one at what he does ever since.
“If there was a strategy that I mapped out I think at some point I kind of realized — and maybe this would be the advice to people starting out — is first of all, early on when there’s nobody reading you, try a whole bunch of stuff,” said McIndoe, who was working a full-time 9-to-5 when he started blogging about hockey on the side. “Go nuts. Because if it stinks who cares? Five people are going to see it. You’ll know kind of what works for you and what doesn’t or at least you’ll form an idea, and then from there find that niche, find that voice. Try to be number one at something.”
He continued: “It’s better to be number one at something very small than to be number 100 in the ‘I’m (national hockey writer) Greg Wyshynksi’s 100th backup; like if a hundred things happened to all the people ahead of me I’m the new Wysh’ — and you know Greg’s a friend of mine — he’s awesome, but he’s awesome because he can do everything and he can do it fantastic and he’s built this decades-long career doing it.
“There’s no market out there for the 100th-best Wysh, but there might be a market out there for the first or second or third best in some sort of niche.”
McIndoe’s work appeared in several major publications and he spent time at Grantland (RIP) before making his way to The Athletic, where he works today. He recognizes the advantageous equation at play for him at The Athletic. While wholly ad-supported sites are beholden to driving site traffic to every last fan, a subscription site like The Athletic thrives on fans who love journalism and/or individual writers so much that they’ll pay for the right to read.
DGB (an abbreviation for Down Goes Brown) wants his work to be enjoyable for everybody who ends up on his stories, but he also recognizes there’s something special about including some more obscure stuff within his stories, with a wink and a nod that only the geekiest and most ardent will understand.
“As a subscription-based business, [The Athletic] is not just about page views. Every time we write something someone doesn’t like [readers] come in like ‘Oh, it’s clickbait.’. It’s like ‘Dude, we’re a subscription model. What — do you think it helps me to get 100,000 people to click on something that they hate. Like walk me through how you think that benefits me or the site,” said McIndoe. “So it’s been nice to do that in a way that you that I’m not constantly churning out [content], I’m not sitting there going I gotta do ten posts a day and I gotta rank first in Google and I gotta jam keywords into the headline and all of that stuff…
“You’re right, you can’t go completely niche all the time,” McIndoe continued while noting he tries to keep a balance. “If it’s too niche, at some point, there just isn’t enough even if that’s not what you’re being directly measured by. But at the same time that niche audience are going to be the ones who love you the best…”
McIndoe’s niche audience loves him. (I read and listen to just about everything DGB produces) His fans likely have a high average avidity rate. The same could be said about fans of the National Hockey League. You won’t find too many fly-by NHL fans. It’s perhaps a blessing and a curse. The ceiling when it comes to ratings and self-identifying fans for the NHL will never have as many fans as the NFL, that’s a given.
As McIndoe sees it, in some ways the league leans into that too much, focusing on growing revenue per capita instead of seeking more capitas (fans).
I think the NHL — I’ve been banging this drum for a long time — they haven’t done enough to grow the audience they haven’t done enough to make the product appeal to as many people as they can.
“I think what [NHL Commissioner] Gary Bettman has done well is he is figuring out how to squeeze more and more money out of the audience they do have, and to maximize how much they can get from that,” he said. “That can be a business model. A lot of sports or entertainment places out there are realizing that Hey, I can’t grow the audience but what I can do is figure out who my real core audience is and then just grabbing by the ankles and hold them upside down and shake them, and that’s sort of what the Bettman model has been.”
The NHL revenues, like every major pro sports league, continue to go increase — those avid fans are paying off. But the ceiling for the NHL is lower without the finding avenues to bring in new or casual fans. A lot of emerging sports are also on a constant quest for new and casual fans to notice them and sample their product with an open mind, in hopes they’ll seek to learn and follow more (For example, sports like lacrosse, cricket, rugby, and volleyball, among many others).
The optimal set of conditions is existing fans welcoming newbies with open arms, serving as their sherpa and helping them learn the ropes. As McIndoe has seen all too often in his career, however, hockey fans are quick to call out novices and, well, shunning or shaming them. Is the ‘I liked this band when they were playing small clubs’ audience alienating new fans?
“The gatekeepers can go get bent,” said an exasperated McIndoe. “I hate that stuff. I hate that stuff where it’s ‘Can you name five players?’ Shut up, man. Hockey fans are ridiculous for that because the two things the hockey fans love doing most are complaining that there aren’t enough hockey fans. ‘How come everybody doesn’t see this sport the way I do?’ And then the second anybody new shows up just absolutely kicking them in the ass and turning them around and sending them home because they don’t know or how dare you ask a question. How dare you get a player’s name wrong?”
McIndoe recounted a time when his former boss at Grantland Bill Simmons, a powerhouse in the sports industry for years and still today, wrote about hockey but messed up a player’s name. The fans were relentless, possibly chilling Simmons from delving more into NHL content.
McIndoe did note that such overly protective ownership is not necessarily just a hockey thing; social media and the internet foments such tribalism.
“That’s not a hockey fan thing or even a sports fan thing, that’s an internet thing,” he said. “I know there are other industries that have much bigger problems with the gatekeeping stuff, but my message to hockey fans is Man, pick a lane. If you want hockey to be a little niche small thing that only you’re cool enough to know about, okay. You want to be the cool indie band, that’s fine.
“But then don’t complain and at the same time you’re going to complain not enough people are hockey fans like we are. We’re all like ‘We’ve got the cool indie band; we’re like Hey, this isn’t this the biggest band in the world and then they put out an album that goes to number one and we go ‘Oh, man, they’ve changed.’ No, they haven’t it’s exactly the same.”
The NHL may be the answer to which league’s fans have the highest avidity rate. That concentrated cohort has helped McIndoe and others like him succeed, he concedes, but it’s all those diehard fans that may be stopping the NHL from moving more mainstream.
We want to move fans up the passion spectrum; more superfans of your team, league, or sport is a great outcome. But there’s a balance (just like with McIndoe in his articles) — serve the superfans, for sure, but also develop the easy avenues and entrypoints for fly-by and casual fans. You want a big cohort of diehards who consume every nook and cranny of the sport, but you also want a sizable segment that knows next to nothing.
This was such a good interview with Sean McIndoe and I wanted to also include his insightful take on the increased presence of tribalism among media outlets. Such polarizing cliquishness is obvious in the world of politics, but that same us vs. them mentality is starting to penetrate sports, too, as this statement from McIndoe implies.
“You have this relatively new thing where people used to almost identify themselves by what team they cheered for, that’s as old as sports. But now it’s like a lot of people identify themselves based on what media they consume, which is deeply weird to me. Like I’m a [Spittin’ Chiclets] guy. I’m like Alright. Cool. You know, I get all my stuff from Outkick. Awesome, never talk to me, please, I don’t know, I guess. But you know some of that is the more personal style of writing and certainly podcasts it feels like a much more social thing and you start to identify with people. And it’s all good; like it’s more opportunities…I really mean that when I said Hey, if you like Outkick, please never talk to me. I feel that way. But also I’m not saying shut the site down. I’m not saying you don’t ever get to like the stuff that you like. Go like the stuff that you like, don’t ever talk to me about it because it’s stupid, but go ahead and like your stupid stuff. You’re allowed to. I like some stupid stuff too. Let’s get the audience out there.
“I don’t love the thing where it kind of turns into If you like my site that means you have to hate these guys or if you listen to my podcast we’re enemies with these guys — like, what are we doing? But at the same time some marketing guy would be like, No, That’s how you build loyalty. That’s how you do this and that. I guess that makes sense. It’s not really my angle on things.”
LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH SEAN MCINDOE AKA DOWN GOES BROWN
On episode 280 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Sean McIndoe (aka Down Goes Brown), Sportswriter (NHL/Hockey focus) for The Athletic, author, host of Puck Soup and The Athletic Hockey Show podcasts.
What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast via Apple or listen on Spotify or YouTube.
Listen to episode 280 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Sean McIndoe (aka Down Goes Brown), Sportswriter (NHL/Hockey focus) for The Athletic, author, host of Puck Soup and The Athletic Hockey Show podcasts.
59 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Check out my LinkedIn articles
Athletes have an unfair advantage in the creator economy. It’s always been that way. That’s why the opportunity for athletes to capitalize on their leg up by adopting even the most minimal tactics of full-time creators is so vast. The athletes are starting to understand that advantage, with many surpassing the legacy media outlets and building brands that’ll last (and continue to grow) after their competitive career ends.
Your talent is making you the minimal viable product. Because of your talent, because of the fact that you’re a professional athlete,” veteran sports marketer and The Athlete Brand author Thomas van Schaik told me in a recent interview. “What we see more and more is that athletes are starting to understand how this industry works. Content creation, brand building, and distribution have commoditized. Everybody can do it. And now they’re learning how to actually be better storytellers, how to be better entrepreneurs, how to be better content creators, and they are beating the established media outlets and they are beating the rights holders at this game already in large numbers.”
Thomas van Scahik has spent decades in sports business, from helping to grow challenger sports and athletes at NFL Europe and the Dutch Olympic and Paralympic Committee to working with superstars at adidas — and he’s seen the convergence of athlete social media with the dominance of creator platforms. But it’s not as easy as just flipping on the figurative lights. If that were the case, the viability of athletes’ holistic platforms would be an exact match with their place on the league depth chart. Then explain Pat McAfee. Explain Livvy Dunne. Explain JuJu Smith-Schuster.
As creators proliferate across platforms and monoculture diminishes, the key for athletes is to not try to beat every creator and media outlet or even to beat every athlete creator. That’s not the point. Athletes just have to be the best at being themselves.
“The only thing that’s better than better is different,” said van Schaik, invoking the aphorism put forth by author and speaker Sally Hogshead. “So you need to be distinctive. And once you look at yourself and you say ‘Which elements of me, of my appearance, of the way I play, of how I feel about this game are different from everybody else?’
“Either you are different or you are invisible. Which part of my distinctiveness do I actually enlarge? Which do I intentionally showcase? Which of them do I not want to amplify? But looking at yourself and saying, what is distinctive about me is crucial.”
This intentionality starts by thinking like a brand. There’s a clear distinction between branding and marketing, van Schaik tells me, and that difference is key as athletes build their platforms.
“Branding works only from the inside out,” he said. “Marketing starts with the fan in mind and you adjust the product, you adjust the price, you adjust the design, you adjust the promotion in order to attract the right customer. That’s what marketing does. You change the product to get as many customers as you want. Branding is the other way around. You can’t change who you are on the inside to fit better to the audience that you’re trying to attract.”
Once athletes decide who they are and how they want to portray themselves, the strategic foundation is built. They don’t have to be everything to everybody. Even athletes in niche sports or smaller leagues and programs can achieve the ‘1000 true fans,’ said van Schaik, referencing author and journalist Kevin Kelly’s well-known principle.
“The next question is who would you want your 1000 fans to be?,” van Schaik said. “Who is your ideal fan? Who are you actually creating content for? Where are these people? What is it they love about you? Why are these people your fans? Get to know these people. Because your vibe attracts your tribe. You attract the best and you repel the rest. Once you start creating content, for your most valuable audience, that audience will grow.”
The brand and business picture becomes clearer now. My own eyes light up as van Schaik talks through this logical, easily digestible process of defining a brand, the fans, and then the business. This is the creator business model in action, it’s no different for an athlete. Attract fans intentionally, get to know them, and then figure out how to give something valuable — and monetizable. I’ll let van Schaik take it from here:
“Challenge number one is defining which people am I actually creating content for. The second is actually connecting with them and that’s what digital channels perfectly allow you to do. You can target your ideal customer. You can find them anywhere they are. You can go to the channels where they already are and you can attract them there, making a digital connection with them.
“The third step is once you get to know them and once you’re connected with them, now you can actually ask and interact with them — what would be the products and services that they would love to buy from you? You already have the know, like and trust factor. You know them better than anybody else. They are already digitally connected. The challenge with AI is not product creation. The biggest challenge is distribution. And within this niche authority, this niche fame that you have already built with your community, now you are the authority. You are the authority on yourself, right?
“What is it that these fans would love to buy from you? Is it a T-shirt? Is it a book? Is it a clinic? Is it a stream? Is it an NFT? What is it? Once you get to know your true fans, really, you can offer the value that they are looking for.”
This all makes sense. It’s easy to comprehend and one thing leads to another. But what about the messy middle? Athletes may have a better understanding of who they’re trying to reach and why, what about themselves and their life they want to showcase and why — but a lot of the best-laid strategies can get lost in the tactics. It’s the day-to-day posting that intimidates most athletes. They’re used to having plans laid out for them, how many sets and reps to perform in training, drills dialed down to the minute, and schedules and meal plans just as rigidly set for them.
This is where van Schaik helps break down the intimidating book into approachable chapters and pages. When the big goals are broken down into achievable parts, it feels a heck of a lot more doable.
“I have five building blocks that I recommend every athlete includes”, said van Schaik, citing posts can be broken down into 30% personality, 30% performance 30%, 15% community 15% monetization, and 15%, passion (he elaborates on each of these areas in his book and in our interview). “Of course, all of the percentages are flexible. What I’m advocating is that you actually make a conscious choice about them, that you intentionally decide what your holistic brand profile is actually going to be. And depending on the archetype that you select, those influences might actually change…
“Let’s just say you’re comfortable posting twice a week as an athlete. Now you’re committing to posting twice every week, which means 104 times a year. Now you start applying those percentages to all of your annual posts, and now you’re creating a content plan for 104 posts as opposed to randomly live-casting the fact that you’re eating, you know, a plate of pasta today.
“All of a sudden, you are creating narratives surrounding your passion, surrounding your community, and you know that you’re going to have to post 24 times about your community. All of a sudden, you’re in a different creative challenge.”
The new era of athletes is here. Where they think less about securing the next endorsement deal (those aren’t going anywhere, to be sure — especially because they directly benefit the agents that solicit and manage them), but as the athlete economy becomes bigger than the legacy media platforms that rely on them, empires of all sizes will be built. Every athlete will realize the opportunity they have. This isn’t about Ronaldo and Serena and Messi and the other single-named athletes, but the average pro athlete who can aspire even higher.
This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky dreaming, it’s a real business opportunity that, if it’s thoughtfully planned and executed, will succeed. Athletes just need to formulate that plan and put it into action, van Schaik explained, with fascinating detail.
“The five steps that I recommend every athlete takes is step number one, make a plan. Step number two, optimize your socials, which basically goes back to coming to your plan, establishing a frequency, coming up with a narrative.
Three is build your own digital home base, which is basically a website. You can do there whatever it is that you want, whether that is crowdfunding, whether that is e-commerce, whether that is collecting [user] data — build your digital home base. Number four is predominantly for athletes that enjoy a little bit less visibility of traditional media outlets like a javelin thrower or a gymnast or somebody who’s not [an everyday player] in the NBA, get a newsletter so that out of your followers you can get [them] to subscribers, people that actually follow you.
“The fifth is to think about an annual live in-person or virtual event. Even if you only invite 10 of your hardcore fans or 20 or 25, what is the annual event that you could organize to engage your most passionate audience? Because the idea is that even that event could be a content engine where people actually create content around you or you are capable of creating content. The idea should be that your 1000 true fans should want to be there next year.”
The blueprint for athletes is there. Their stories have already been driving multi-billion dollar businesses and massive attention empires for years. It’s time for them to understand the power they really have. Creators run the media world, athletes can be creators with built-in advantages and the highest ceilings. The athletes have already won, and they’re just getting started.
BONUS INSIGHTS
This interview was so packed with value that I felt compelled to include a couple of other thought-provoking insights from Thomas van Schaik. There’s even more in the full interview!
On how the value of a given athlete is about their ability to attract people and their attention. Competitive greatness is still a key factor, but it’s not the only factor.
van Schaik:
“What we see is that entertainment and sports are more personality-focused rather than performance-focused. That the value lies not in their ability to compete, but in their ability to attract attention…but they’re still being outperformed by individual athletes, and I think that opens up a range of opportunities for people with the willingness and capability to understand and service and facilitate athletes.
“I think not only partners will start doing that, but also the rights holders. Because rights holders without icons will lose the competition for eyeballs. Icons equal eyeballs. The roadmap into fandom for the young sports fans is through the individual athletes, which means that rights holders will have to invest in actually building up these athlete brands because it is the shortest way to attracting a valuable audience”.
A fascinating excerpt discussing ‘multi-player brands’ and ‘open-source branding.’ When your brand is a platform for further activation, development, expression, and community, this is so great.
van Schaik:
“What I will add to this is this idea of multiplayer brands, this open source kind of branding. If we look at Taylor Swift, then the beauty of this is that, you know, an individual can never out-produce in terms of content volume her community, right? That would be impossible for her. Every event that she organizes is a content creation hub. There’s not a person at the Eras Tour that doesn’t make a photograph, that doesn’t make a video, and that doesn’t amplify this event and her brand message to their individual audience. So all of a sudden, everybody in their audience is a creator. And that makes Taylor Swift not only a great content creator, but also a great content director. The environment that she has created enables each of her fans to amplify her message, to amplify her love, to amplify her passion, to amplify her narrative.
The future of brand building is not at your audience, but with your audience. And what we see in sports, but also with athletes, is that they are increasingly looking for opportunities to enable their community to produce this content.
On episode 279 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Thomas van Schaik, Founder of The Athlete Brand, author of The Athlete Brand Book, and sports/athlete marketing and branding expert with 15 years at adidas.
What follows are some snippets from the episode. Click Here to listen to the full episode or check it out and subscribe to the podcast via Apple or listen on Spotify or YouTube.
Listen to episode 279 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Thomas van Schaik, Founder of The Athlete Brand, author of The Athlete Brand Book, and sports/athlete marketing and branding expert with 15 years at adidas.
97 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube
Posted by Neil Horowitz Follow me on Twitter @njh287 Check out my LinkedIn articles