Decoding LinksDAO; faux meritocracy and web3 bingo; WhatsUP on Apple Sport; Drive to Survive as strat du jour; Pod awards; Staying in the problem pt2; Octagon's class move
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Beware entitled people selling meritocracy
LinksDAO is a business story with a culture war attached. And it’s fascinating.
The short version: a group of rich men are raising money to buy an American country club.
So far, so 1920s: From Pinehurst to Augusta, that’s pretty much how all the great American clubs were created.
But the method of raising money is very 2022, and is pure Web3 bingo: NFT, DAO, tokenisation, fractional ownership, blockchain.
I’m using LinksDAO as my route in to testing some prior assumptions.
Too many smart people are evangelising web3 to ignore it. So I start from the assumption is that at its core there’s something very interesting and even genuinely disruptive.
I may never know how the blockchain works, and that’s probably ok. As previously mentioned - Trying to understand NFTs while drunk - I’ve come to an accommodation on this problem. I have a superficial knowledge of how traditional finance works too, and many areas of the law are purposely opaque. So I need to find experts I trust.
This is a straight opportunity cost issue: I can either invest time, energy and money in researching the new, new thing (see also coding). Or I can wait till someone makes it easy for me, and I’ll pay for that service.
Getting to that core probably means putting up with the bullshit merchants: the infantile layer of monkey jpegs and crypto-as-fan-engagement grifters.
My worry is that there’s a chasm between the idea and the reality; the sales story and the product.
This might just be that we’re very early and the potential upsides of decentralisation have run too far ahead of the technical realities below the bonnet - the web3 as 5G analogy.
Or, it might be that the web3 evangelists are just plain wrong on the tech, ie this is a bubble not the future. This piece is a great way in to that discussion by Signal founder Matthew Rosenfeld, aka Moxie Marlinspike:
Web3 is morphing into a monster that looks, talks and acts like Web2, but with the shiny addition of the blockchain. “Eventually, all the Web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card,” he writes. That sounds like a way worse version of Etsy!
Armed with these technical questions we should now look carefully at the language used by the evangelists.
My every instinct warns that we should beware deeply entitled people selling meritocracy.
And there are certainly elements of LinksDAO’s output that lines up with what Evgeny Morozov calls ‘neoliberals donning leftish clothes’.
He’s right. The language of web3 gives the impression that the blockchain is the engine of a new democratic utopia, just fronted by some of the richest people on earth. (When Mark Cuban hails the ‘progressivism’ of web3…)
Point this story toward sport and you get a perfect storm, where frustration with the 20th century rights holder model collides with Silicon Valley celebrity culture selling brand purpose. And who wouldn’t want to be in the room when they try to DAO the Olympics?
Then you lay in culture war. LinksDAO takes this meritocratic utopia and points it toward one of the most status-based institutions in America.
Mike Dudas to CNBC: "We can more widely democratize the country club membership experience,"
Dudas knows full well that the American country club is more than just where people play golf.
Since Walter Hagen played Bobby Jones, every generation has been defined by their relationship to the country club.
They’re either inside or outside.
From The Captain Myth: Jack Nicklaus was the ‘country club brat’ whose wealthy father paid for the best golfing tuition available whereas Palmer, like Hagen before him, was from the caddying classes, the son of a blue collar golf pro and head groundsman at the Latrobe Country Club, only allowed on the course when the members had gone home.
Arnie always recognised the debt he and his fellow pros owed to Hagen, who effectively created the idea of the tour professional.
A year before Hagen died of throat cancer in 1969, a dinner was held in his honour. Palmer, at that point still the biggest name in the sport, flew himself through some awful weather to Traverse City, Michigan to make the toast. “If it were not for you, Walter, this dinner would be downstairs in the pro shop and not in the ballroom,” said Palmer, raising a glass to the guest of honour, who by then had been rendered silent following the removal of his larynx.
Today’s Gatsbys live in Silicon Valley and define themselves as piratical outsiders, fighting the old money certainties of class, privilege and social status.
If I’m honest, I quite like the cause, but I’m not sure I trust the people leading me in to battle.
Drive to Survive, the strategy du jour
Talking of golf in the 21st century…
Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Bryson DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods have chosen not to appear in the PGA Tour’s new Netflix doc.
As former F1 commercial head Murray Barnett pointed out via WhatsUP, it’s worth noting that Ferrari and Mercedes opted out of Drive to Survive series one, and their sponsors pressured them to sign up when it was deemed a hit with the yoof.
The golf doc can can be seen in a piece with the Tour’s PIP metric, that seeks to reward players for their social media presence based on five criteria: Google searches, Meltwater Mentions (global media exposure), MPV Index, which is a measure of social media reach, Nielsen score (network broadcast exposure) and Q-Score (familiarity and mass appeal).
The winner was announced this week: 51 year old documentary absentee Mickelson.
I’m with Daniel Ayers.
Geography v Demography
The Tour’s decision to copy F1’s approach is both obvious and interesting. Drive to Survive is the media strategy du jour and I’ve come to think there’s a strong fashion element to sports marketing decision making - I’ll have what they’ve got etc.
Doesn’t mean it’s wrong but there’s a question.
The usual comms story around Drive to Survive has been that it’s connected with younger audiences, which is good for sponsors, both central and team.
But I’ve yet to see evidence that it’s moved the dial on the geographic spread, in particular in the US (probably because Netflix are the only ones with the data).
When I last saw a Nielsen report in to F1, the standout data was the breakdown of the global TV audience: around 70% of the audience came from four countries - UK, Italy, Germany and Brazil. There’s some fluctuation in these numbers as avidity is often a factor of driver nationality, but the main absentee is America.
As Murray points out, the numbers per race in the US have doubled to about 1.4m viewers. A big percentage impact but hardly transformational in terms of the total number, although it might impact on a new US TV deal.
My assumption is that the PGA Tour has the opposite problem. Their audience is US centric and needs Netflix to internationalise them, in addition to attracting younger fans, as per usual.
But Netflix remains a very US centric platform.
See subscribers (in millions) by territory, Sept 2021, via Statista:
WhatsUP on those Apple sports rights rumours
Apple may or may not be about to buy MLB rights.
So I asked the best think tank in sport a question:
Apple Sport, WTF?
Q2. Given the zillions Apple has in cash, why not, as SBJ’s John Ourand has suggested, just buy ESPN?
That’s that sorted.
Staying in the problem, pt2
Sanjay Bhandari’s phrase came to mind when watching new Yorkshire assistant coach Ryan Sidebottom in conversation on Sky Sports.
Bhandari is chair of Kick It Out, and was in conversation about racism at Yorkshire, with John Amaechi (UP212)
Sanjay Bhandari: Whenever you get an issue like this, the temptation is to jump into the solution. And that's because we're so uncomfortable with the conversation, and race is the most taboo subject, right? Of all the isms, people would much rather be called a misogynist or they'd much rather be called homophobic than be called a racist.
It has the strongest stigma attached to that word. And so what that means is people feel uncomfortable. And so they've jumped very, very quickly to the solution.
Sidebottom’s talked of trying to ‘forget’ what had happened at the club and move on, and was coached out of that position by Sky’s interviewer. It might’ve just been clumsiness, but…
Good thread on the topic here.
Nice move Octagon
More of this please, sports agencies, click the image to go to the story.
See also, congratulations to Amanda Fone and everyone at F1 Recruitment for being awarded B Corp status. Here’s a piece outlining the process.
Awards, what are they good for?
Good luck to those who entered Nick Keller’s new Sport Podcast Awards (Who knew there were 24 categories of sport podcast btw?).
There are some great pods on the sports business shortlist, run by people we greatly admire and respect.
We didn’t join in because:
We couldn’t be arsed.
I can’t really write this and then go and do the social media dance necessary to ask people to vote for us.
See 1, above.