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Overthinking the sports business, for money
NEW THING!
The Unofficial Partner Convergence Brainstorm
What will the future media rights package look like?
What role will gambling brands play?
We’ve heard the hype around the convergence of sports media and betting.
So we’re going to put some difficult questions to a group of smart people and see what happens.
Where’s the money going to come from?
That’s the question facing every C Suite sports executive working today.
If Gen Z ain’t buying the traditional sports subscription bundle, the numbers don’t add up.
One answer puts betting far more central to the business plan of sport.
The Unofficial Partner Sports Media Convergence Brainstorm will put that theory to the test.
In collaboration with LiveScore Group.
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We’ve got 100 places, so I wouldn’t hang about.
The UP Newsletter is sponsored by our friends at the Institute of Sports Humanities and Loughborough University London.
ISH and Loughborough University recently launched the new Leadership in Sport Master’s course, running from Autumn 2023.
Students on the MA Leadership in Sport programme will join an amazing ecosystem of sports experts – Loughborough University has been ranked the #1 university for sports-related subjects for the past 7 years. So the world’s top sports university is working in tandem with a unique sports network at ISH.
The new intake starts in October 2023 and applications are currently open.
Find out more at www.sportshumanities.org ISH and Loughborough University recently launched the new Leadership in Sport Master’s course, running from Autumn 2023.
What Cannes Wants
This week’s episode of The Big Idea goes deep in to the Cannes Lions for Sport winners.
The conversation was actually about the limitations of using Cannes as a lens in to creativity in sport.
We did this because:
The awarded work is what the jury deems to be the best creative work of the year in a sporting context.
At a time when awards have gone out of fashion with the cool crowd, Cannes remains important to sports marketing and creative agencies, and their clients.
They still crave that recognition.
So the work in the shortlist will be copied.
Some takeaways:
The big winner is a boring rip off of an older, better ad.
Michelob Ultra won the Grand Prix for this:
Fourteen years ago, Coke’s Blind Fan ad was part of the then revolutionary idea of making fans the focus of football creative, in part an anti-Pepsi Galacticos play.
This ad from the 'Eat Sleep Drink' campaign was created by Jon Matthews at Wieden & Kennedy in Amsterdam.
Michelob has managed to take the same idea and make it less emotionally charged. I think it’s because they’ve made it about tech rather than people.
Michelob Ultra is having a moment, despite it’s advertising not because of it
This is a ‘Cannes as irrelevant agency wankfest’ point.
Bud Light, the market leader in Michelob Ultra’s piss weak American lager category, has spent much of the year in a confected trans culture war.
This excellent piece brings the required nuance.
I’m guessing the people who hated on Bud’s trans episode - let’s call them stupid rednecks and the cynical Ben Shapiro-type culture warriors who make political and financial capital from their ignorance - won’t love Michelob’s wokey blind man award winner either.
So we’re in a weird place.
Michelob’s creative team won the Cannes Grand Prix.
And the rest of the company is hoping their customers never see the ad.
Thank you Unilever v Thank you Mom
Still on the theme of creative ideas.
P&G’s Thank You, Mom is often quoted as one of the great major event campaigns of the last decade or more (it began at Vancouver 2010 Winter Games).
My estimation of Thank You, Mom went up this week when I saw the launch ad of Unilever’s FIFA Women’s World Cup creative.
It’s the sort of corporate film that gets shown at middle management away days, between croissants and fuck-me-I-just-dropped-the-CEO trust-building exercises.
A load of FIFA archive run through with product shots.
In short, it’s a couple of drafts short of a big idea.
But I agree with Sean Jefferson’s reading, via WhatsUP: it’s just good that they turned up:
The squeezed middle just got another squeeze
Viaplay was the future once.
In July 2022, the company announced its acquisition of Premier Sports, an Ireland-based pay-TV channel which has been broadcasting since 2009. Through this acquisition, Viaplay will gain access to a portfolio of tier two rights including LaLiga, the Scottish Cup soccer tournament and the United Rugby Championship (URC), as well as the Nascar stock car racing series.
The Scandi streamer’s rights buying activity excited those seeking to build competitive tension in the market for middle and even top tier sport in the UK.
See this piece from last year for a flavour.
But if Viaplay’s content spend in the UK does stack up, one thing is for sure – it will shake up the status quo and truly test Sky and BT/Discovery’s resolve in their sport investments.
But today, the new CEO pulled the rug on that one, leaving several UK rights holders more worried than they were yesterday.
From the Hollywood Reporter: the company reported “higher quarter-over-quarter losses for the international operations due to the content investments that we have made, the consolidation of the U.K. operation and the launches in North America.”
For more on the plight of the squeezed middle, listen to our podcast of that name, made in collaboration with PTI Digital.
The GOAT of Story Archetypes
Theory suggests there are seven basic plots.
To this we can an eighth.
Needs a bit of work tbh.
Anyway, here’s a quote from Arron Shepherd, founder of Goat Agency, newly of WPP:
“We’re basically the only option right now. We’re the biggest influencer agency by a long way. And we’re the only one that sits within a global holding group. When it comes time to choose a centralization partner, we’ve put ourselves in a unique position. Those contracts will be hundreds of millions of dollars each.”
What’s the point of the Commonwealth Games?
A question that’s getting an airing this week.
Last year I asked it to Kate Sadleir, Commonwealth Games Federation CEO, just after the Birmingham event.
The answer hasn’t aged well.