Faris Yakob knows nothing about sport. That's why we got him on the podcast

Faris Yakob is an award winning strategist, creative director, writer and public speaker. I first heard of him when he was chief innovation officer at Naked Communications in the noughties and his book Paid Attention is a really interesting primer on the way media and marketing are evolving.

He’s also very good on Twitter (@faris).

By his own admission, Faris Yakob knows nothing about sport. His wife and business partner Rosie dropped me a note beforehand saying that the closest Faris had come to sport in the last year was when they went to the Super Bowl and he spent most of the game talking about set up time of the half time show.

But this is precisely why I wanted him to come on the podcast. Because his point of view doesn’t come from inside the bubble of the sports marketing business and so he is free to challenge some of the received wisdoms that grow up in a silo like sport, where its in nearly everyone’s interest not to look too deeply below the bonnet and ask whether sponsorship for example, really does everything it’s proponents say it does.

The conversation spans 45 minutes and ranges from the brand funnel ('a fiction'), personalisation ('Do we want it? No. Are we going to get more of it? Yes) through to the rise of brand patronage, using sponsorship to send big power signals and the degradation of the value exchange between sports fans and the media.

It's good. But I'm biased.

Unofficial Partner is owned and run by Richard Gillis and Sean Singleton.

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