Leaders special issue; UP Billion Dollar Brainstorm pt3; Twitchileaks; Streaming’s millionaires; Amorality is a useful pose; Sportsbiz bingo; Harpo Marx

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Oct 07, 2021

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Unofficial Partner Billion Dollar Brainstorm™️ Pt3

You know that feeling. It’s Monday morning, you’ve had a coffee and James Emmett is on the phone asking for a plan for that Leaders session you’d agreed to a few weeks before but hadn’t really thought about in any great detail, and you say something that shows promise but is a bit unformed and then a few weeks later you walk in to Leaders to see that Emmett has taken the top line idea and made it in to a proper thing, and what’s more put it up in actual lights.

The full live session is available as a podcast tomorrow.

In the meantime, here was the pre-event email I sent to the 12 WhatsUP members who were good enough to take part.

Starts:

Gillis intro 2mins: The aim is to make a billion quid from creating a new sports property.

A note on amorality: Let’s bypass whether we should and go straight to whether we could.

Quickfire Q to audience:

What are the best new sports event properties to emerge over recent years?

(If you had a million quid to invest, where would you put it? Etc)

Sean makes a list, we decide what bits to steal and a sports entertainment Frankenstein’s Monster takes shape.

The Hundred. The Super League pt2. FA Womens Super League. The Fortnite World Cup. DOTA2 The International. Pro Triathlete Org. XFL. Premier Golf League. Pro Lacrosse League. Rugby 12s. Extreme E. Sail GP. E1 Powerboats. Blah blah blah etc etc.

Brainstorm 1

The set up: Rogan, Broughton, Ayers 10mins

What do investors want to hear? Can we get rich without actually delivering on the promise? Do we get to just keep VC cash? ‘What’s our roadmap to success?’. My worry is that p/e won’t let me and Sean get rich before they do. What’s the best business model to grow quickly: NFL, F1, UFC, Fortnite World Cup, Premier League, IPL, any others?

2. Marketing: Rogan, Morgan, Linke 10 mins

What’s the best audience to go after? What are the fastest growing sponsor categories? What are crypto sponsors buying? Trust? Awareness? ‘A goldmine of first party data’ (See Sean’s Harpo Marx horn below). Where will the betting money go when they can’t sponsor football? Is a brand purpose worth £££?

3. Media: Barnett, Hind, Inglot 10 mins

What’s our media plan? Traditional bundle v OTT/D2C v clever clever alternative 'platform economics' models? Why is Murray Barnett so in to Buzzer? What is Buzzer? Can we stay in business long enough to make a billion from micropayments? Isn’t it easier to just nab one last big dumb TV dinosaur to cough for a huge rights fee? How do we escape the death spiral that is the middle of the media rights market? Is audio the Cinderella rights category that links betting, retail, Fanatics merch and ticket sales via Alexa?

4. Sense check: Purdon, Coward, Massey 10mins

I want this group to tear the idea apart. What are the big alarm bells?

I’ll frame this bit in an absurdly extreme way: Is integrity expensive? How can we Uber the shit out of this thing? How can we best exploit athletes to reduce costs while maintaining the pretence of a ‘best v best’ quality product? Do we give a cut of the ownership to the athletes, as per Michael Moritz and the Pro Triathlete Org, or should we frame them as gig workers and treat them like horses? What if we take the Women’s Super League and put betting at the centre of the business model, like they’re doing in the US gambling gold rush? What would happen? Would we make money faster? Or ruin it?

Sean summarises the “findings” and heads off to make an NFT of the whiteboard.

4 things I remember thinking at the time

There was quite a bit of love for The Hundred. (Hear this week’s podcast with Beth Barrett Wild and Rob Calder from the ECB)
If you squint a bit, the ECB is a bit like a games publisher. Of all the major sports bodies, it’s the one that owns the entire vertical, from grassroots to pro league, national teams and cup tournament brands.
Amorality is a useful pose. It loosens the conversation and topics that are otherwise seen as off the agenda can be looked at rationally. It doesn’t mean I agree or am cheerleading for something. It just makes it easier to ask better questions.
If the job is to make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible, you get in to the head of the investor community. That’s how they think. Emotion is viewed as weakness. Negative fan sentiment is assumed to be a comms issue - The Super League snafu undermined this thought, but it remains central to the group think.
File under boring but important: Inflation
It's coming. And a generation of sports investors and senior rights holder execs are about to be asked questions some of them have never faced. Cheap money has defined the last decade and a bit since the financial crisis. There are people running sports organisations, SPACs, VCs and boutique sports private equity firms whose tenure in the hot seat have never known interest rates at more than a percentage or two. For example, Gianni Infantino’s tenure as FIFA President has taken place entirely within the cheap money framework. Just saying.

Added value newsletter subscriber content

Hearing Sean honk his Harpo Marx horn is never not funny.

Having bought it on UP expenses, he was determined to put it to work signalling sportsbiz bullshit. It kept him occupied at least.

The digital marketing question: Yeah, but how do we make money?

Building on that, there are some other subplots, such as are all eyeballs equal, or put another way does context matter, as in does where you see an advert alter its impact?

Dan Kirschner is good on this topic. Hear him on the podcast (UP #75) and then read Greenfly’s new thought leadership thing: Uncover Hidden Riches in Non-Live Digital Media: A Gold Mine for Sports Leagues & Teams