Channel 4 cricket and the open sore of 2005; Rugby's imminent mistake; Mark Cuban's guide to recognising crypto value when you see it; Trouble is coming to SPAC-land; NBA Topshots vs Kings of Leon
The newsletter of the podcast
Tl;dr
The story of Channel 4 cricket and why it remains relevant 15 years later
Nice Threads: Facebook data, Clubhouse and building an audience
Personal Best: Emily Mills, Arsenal FC
There are no bad ideas in sports PR
Sentenced: What Wall St really thinks of SPAC mania
Sportsbiz Objects No.10: When You See Yourself by Kings of Leon
UP Coming: Ken Goldin on the future of sporting memory
Mark Cuban knows about blockchain and you should listen to what he has to say about stores of value
A six step guide to irrelevance
Money v exposure is the classic sports leadership dilemma.
Every rights owner is seeking to balance the need for short term revenue with the importance of remaining relevant to as broad an audience as possible.
This winter, Channel 4 has been broadcasting live test cricket in the UK for the first time since the 2005 Ashes, one of the most celebrated moments in the game’s recent history.
It also marked the end of the channel’s award winning cricket coverage, as the ECB, England cricket’s governing body controversially sold all rights to Sky Sports, which meant test cricket disappeared from free to air television for a generation.
This decision remains an open sore and is used to frame the debate about sport’s relationship with pay television, and the critical balance between generating money at the expense of exposure and audience reach.
To tell the story of Channel 4 cricket we recruited two people who played central roles in the drama.
David Brook was head of strategy for Channel 4, the man who made the argument for cricket and led the pitch to acquire the rights from the ECB.
And Terry Blake, who was marketing and commercial director of the ECB, who helped shape the decision to take cricket to Channel 4 and away from the BBC, the game’s traditional home.
Hear the podcast here - UP Pod #145
‘We always kill what we love’
David Brook: “In C4’s presentation to the ECB, the England player Dean Headley said, we always kill what we love, and that’s what the BBC was doing to cricket, it was suffocating it by thinking things have to remain the same.”
The bitter irony of de-listed events
Sky Sports swoop on the 1995 Ryder Cup led to a reappraisal of listed events legislation and an opportunity to offer test cricket to the free market, aka Sky Sports. There were unintended consequences however. Ten years later, this move led to test cricket disappearing from free to air completely.
Timing (of highlights) is everything
A major part of C4’s pitch was to move the daily highlights show from the graveyard of late night BBC2 to 7pm.
Terry Blake: They (the BBC) put on a decent pitch, I suppose, with Perfect Day playing in the background and David Gower being very David Gower-ish, but there was no mention of highlights. And at the end I said, good pitch lads, but what time would you have the highlights on? And they said, we haven’t thought about that yet.
It was at that moment that I thought that Channel 4 had thought through a better way of updating the coverage and providing a narrative.
Data driven myth making
The 2005 Ashes on Channel 4 reached a peak audience of 8million viewers. This number is the stick that’s been used to beat the ECB over the subsequent 15 years, after they sold the entire International and county inventory - tests, ODIs and subsequently T20 - to Sky Sports.
This is the point in the story at which cricket ‘went dark’, and used as a simple storytelling device to explain the subsequent decline in grassroots participation.
Like all good stories, some of it is even true.
Blake: “They actually only got £55 million a year. So for £10 million a year more - which no doubt helped Giles Clarke secure his chairmanship from the counties - they moved it off free to air television altogether.
Imagine the audiences that would have grown and the interest we would have had at the grassroots and club cricket and school cricket had we stayed on free to wear…imagine how big the audience would have become and how much more we could have done with the sport by 2011, 2012, when we got to number one in the world.
Brook: The myth that’s been perpetuated in the press has been that moving cricket off free to air and onto pay has been in some way, the salvation of cricket’s finances, but actually it was 10 million pounds a year. That’s not what people think. People imagine it was untold riches.
In 2005, every kid on every street corner wanted to be Freddie Flintoff. He was the biggest thing that year and cricket had almost regained its position as Britain’s summer sport.
Remember the open top bus. I remember the cricketers thinking, is anyone going to turn out and look at the way London turned out for that? Because it was on every TV.
‘Sky didn’t steal test cricket, the ECB gave it away’
Brook: It’s no disrespect to Sky Sports. I think Sky’s coverage is excellent. And I should say Sky were fantastic partners for English cricket, not least for putting their hands up for overseas tours, which the BBC never, ever covered live.
Trevor East came out with that famous line at the time, in response to accusations that Sky had stolen cricket from the public said, “Well, we didn’t steal cricket. The ECB gave it away”. And that was true.
Rugby is about to make the same mistake
All the necessary ingredients are in place for rugby’s leaders to follow the route taken by the ECB in 2005: Private equity’s short term agenda, a chaotic calendar, players feeling undervalued and overworked, Unions under pressure from members who face a Covid inspired cash crisis.
Answer: Put rugby’s entire broadcast inventory on pay TV, take the money and worry about the grassroots later, when it’s on someone else’s watch. PR the participation numbers with one-eyed research, talk up using the TV money to restore old clubhouses. And try not to notice when your kids can’t name the England team.
Here’s a snippet from the ECB’s presentation to the DCMS in 1998, with a diagram which could just as easily be written today.
Hear the whole conversation here.
Nice Threads
Eric Seufert tries to understand Facebook.
Audience building advice. Bilal Zaidi says each platform needs it’s own approach
Personal Best
Sportsbiz people list their favourite things
This week: Emily Mills from Arsenal (#sadface). Click the image for more PBs.
There are no bad ideas in sports PR
Rooney, Zlatan flog Man Utd’s Tag Heuer partnership. With cheese. To this day, nobody knows why.
Sentenced
William Cohan on the growing nervousness about SPAC-mania.
Perhaps more important, the sirens are ringing among Wall Street practitioners too. One senior banker tells me that SPAC bankers have become infected with Masters of the Universe Syndrome—think junk bonds in 1987, the dot-com bubble in 2000, or mortgage-backed securities in 2008—and he worries the market will crash and burn in similarly spectacular fashion. “Trouble is coming,” he says.
This is a good bit too.
My billionaire friend points out that SPACs can operate like “venture capital in the public markets,” which on the surface may appeal to retail investors searching for their inner Elon Musk. But it rarely works out well for the retail crowd, even those on a mission like the YOLO bros on Reddit that bid up the price of GameStop.
Sportsbiz Objects
No.10 When You See Yourself by Kings of Leon
#Crypto #Blockchain #NBAMoments
Tomorrow, Kings of Leon release their new album, titled When You See Yourself, in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT) — becoming the first band to ever do so.
The band is actually dropping three types of tokens as part of a series called “NFT Yourself,” people involved in the project tells Rolling Stone. One type is a special album package, while a second type offers live show perks like front-row seats for life, and a third type is just for exclusive audiovisual art. All three types of tokens offer art designed by the band’s longtime creative partner Night After Night; the smart contracts and intelligence within the tokens were developed by YellowHeart, a company that wants to use blockchain technology to bring value back to music and better direct-to-fan relationships.
NBA TopShot is currently sport’s highest profile iteration of a blockchain offering.
Ken Goldin: Every sports team and rights holder will have its own version of NBA Moments ‘Within sixty days’
In the next UP podcast, Ken Goldin says that every major sports governing body and team will have an NFT offering ‘within sixty days’. It’s how they’ll do licensing and merchandise, with tickets following shortly re the Kings of Leon example above.
I mention Goldin because he plays a central role in this story. Goldin Auctions just got a $40million investment from the Chernin Group and a cabale of sport and money celebrities. The interest in the sports collectable marketplace has been super charged by the rise of digital memorabilia as an asset class.
The Chernin Group along with Mark Cuban, sports greats Kevin Durant, Dwyane Wade, and Deshaun Watson, Bill Simmons and others have invested about $40 million of growth financing in Goldin Auctions, a leading marketplace for collectibles and trading cards. Chernin’s investment arm TCG led the round.
‘It’s all narrative’. Understanding the store of value
Blockchain is a headfuck. It requires a psychological leap to understand what Mark Cuban calls ‘the store of value’ in crypto assets, whether those assets are in the form of Kings of Leon albums, NBA Moments, Bitcoin or GameStop stock.
This next bit is taken from Mark Cuban’s fantastic blog post, The Store of Value Generation is Kicking Your Ass and You Don’t Even Know It.
There are inefficiencies and traditions in every marketplace that have become so engrained by the power players that they literally think they are “rules” that most, if not all participants will follow.
Until they don’t.
It often starts on a small scale, a kid finding discarded items, cleaning them up and selling them on ebay, turning this into a business. Or getting trading cards from somewhere, looking up the value online and selling them for more, turning this into a business. You love to see it.
The path of finding inefficiencies has followed an interesting path from purely analog when I was a kid, you had to have something, go somewhere and sell face to face or by mail, or use an intermediary like a broker, to using the internet and sites like ebay or other marketplaces to sell their physical goods.
Now we are seeing the next step in that evolution. What happens when everything is digital ? What happens when literally anything digital can be a store of value ? Including a share of stock ?
What is a store of value ? Its something that some number of people assign value to and are willing to pay for and then hold on to, hoping that circumstances increase the value of that item. One of the most historic and visible stores of value is Gold. Gold bugs would tell you that Gold is a store of value because of its history as the foundation for currency, or actual use as currency. That its a hedge against inflation. That it has intrinsic value because its used for manufacturing and jewelry. It’s all narrative. There are plenty of other “precious metals” that meet the same criteria. But Gold has more buyers. When the number of buyers increase, the price goes up, and vice versa. There is nothing unique or special about gold other than enough people believe the story to buy gold.
This next paragraph is worth cutting out and sticking on the whiteboard.
Old Schoolers say that you need to have something “tangible” in order for there to be value and we will deal with fraud after the fact. If we can touch it, see it or hear it, it is real and can have value. They begrudgingly realized there was value in digital music over CDs. The New Generation that has grown up in a digital world has known their entire lives that what has been of greatest value to them has been digital .
This generation knows that a smart contract and the digital good it reflects or a CryptoAsset are a better investment than old school see, touch or feel uses (STFU) 🙂
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