NFTs are about us; The football blob; Fear and innovation don't mix; Wu-Tang Clan's role in tech history; Who needs an MBA?; Olympic feds on social; Kim Skildum-Reid's big night out; StepUP to Joymo;
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NFTs are about us
NFTs are the single most emblematic issue in the sports business in 2022.
They are the hottest new revenue stream in town. This week Liverpool released its version. Last week, the Premier League revealed its hand. Next week another club will go public with their own go at it.
When you hear those three letters you’re heart soars or sinks.
You find yourself - probably instinctively - for or against them.
It’s odd when you stop to think about it, how a jpeg can stir the emotions to this degree. People get properly angry.
It can’t be about the thing itself, surely?
Something else is going on here, something closer to home.
Story 1 - NFTs are about innovation.
Plot: This week’s Liverpool release was an example of a club engaging with the near future, a willingness to experiment in public with new ideas to serve their fanbase.
Subtext: I’m in favour because my self image is that of a radical reformer, an activist for change against the bureaucratic groupthink that has stifled my career to date, and stands in the way of me fulfilling my genius and making shedloads of dosh in the process.
Conclusion: It’s about me.
Story 2 - NFTs are about greed.
Plot: Those conniving bastards are trying to squeeze even more money out of the club’s fans.
Subtext: Fucking typical! I always knew you couldn’t trust them. Now they’ve found yet another way of screwing over the little people for money and commoditising the beautiful game. This is not about tech and fan engagement, it’s about the 1%, the bankers and the billionaires, and those smug middle class wankers who gob off on ‘the future’ like they know anything about it.
Conclusion: It’s about me.
Build: Football is a blob
The reception of NFTs in to football has been revealing.
Fear is the predominant emotion displayed by people running clubs and leagues.
As ever, sport is a microcosm.
It’s the same in government.
Kate Bingham is a venture capitalist who chaired the UK government’s Vaccine Taskforce.
Her description of the culture in government rings true:
“I saw an almost obsessive desire among officials to avoid any suggestion of personal error or scope for criticism, and a concern amounting to paranoia about media handling and the possible public reaction. This created groupthink and a massive aversion to risk which, which in turn held back innovation, and the pace of execution.”
It might be that running a big, public facing organisation is close to impossible in the era of social media-driven news cycles.
One thing’s for sure, fear and innovation don’t mix.
Innovation requires creativity, which in turn is a function of trial and error.
The tropes of Silicon Valley are all based on this premise: move fast, break things; failure is feedback; make your mistakes in public.
But these cliches break down as they journey from personal to corporate, from the level of the individual to the level of organisational or societal culture.
Real life tends toward a boring fudge: some NFTs are worthy first stabs at making something good, while others are cynical short term rip-offs.
I’m not qualified to tell the difference, or the proportion of good:bad.
But whatever the next big tech innovation is, football’s NFT battlefield doesn’t bode well for its success.
See also:
“Many governments are stuck. Every individual high-functioning competent person knows they can’t make much difference by being one more face in that crowd.’ Eliezer Yudkowsky, LessWrong.
‘[M]uch of our intellectual elite who think they have “the solutions” have actually cut themselves off from understanding the basis for much of the most important human progress.’ Michael Nielsen.
‘People, ideas, machines — in that order.’ Colonel Boyd.
‘There isn’t one novel thought in all of how Berkshire [Hathaway] is run. It’s all about … exploiting unrecognized simplicities.’ Charlie Munger.
You don’t need an MBA to work in sport
I'll park this for another time, but if the above line of thought is somewhere near true, then what should we be teaching the next generation of people?
Anyone with a kid at university will report back that the news isn’t great.
Boring, 19th century-style lectures delivered by people who’ve never worked in the industry teaching an out of date curriculum that rewards memory over problem solving.
And that’s before we talk about specialist sports business degrees, which are proliferating.
My problem is two fold. I suspect the majority of these degrees don’t work in and of themselves. They don’t teach people the right skills they need to succeed.
Secondly, universities and the education sector more broadly, are very adept at seeking out popular topics and turning them in to academic courses, so raising the barrier to entry - media studies, criminology, sports business - and we turn around and find the industry is full of middle class people whose parents could afford the ticket.
The WhatsUP Group had a fascinating thread on this subject, and we welcome thoughts on how best to approach it via the (obvious) medium of podcasts and/or small room events.
See also: The professionalisation debate. UP224
Build: people slag off YouTube and TikTok creators, but there’s a business in teaching teachers how to use digital platforms to deliver content in an entertaining and informative way.
The first NFT?
Loved this story about the Wu-Tang Clan’s role in innovation.
They spent six years making an album and then released just one copy, in a silver and nickel box.
“When I conceived the single copy concept and brought it to RZA, digitization was asset-stripping the creative industries and society was half asleep at the wheel,” Cilvaringz explained to me in a previous Zogblog installment. “By taking physicality, rarity, and price to such extremes, we were out to cause a ruckus intense enough to trigger a real, visceral debate.”
Get this sentence:
In 2015, pharma villain Martin Shkreli bought the album for $2 million, only to have it seized by the U.S. government when he was tossed in jail over fraud charges. The record languished under DoJ control before yet another (underpriced) sale, even ending up as a key plot point in an episode of Billions along the way.
See also: A good series of podcasts on the debate surrounding the future role of data.
Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, release strategy and the elusive nature of cultural impact
This snippet is from a piece is about the decline of the Oscars TV ratings in the Digital Native newsletter.
The streaming release format (popularized by Netflix) further dilutes cultural impact.
An interesting case study is to compare Netflix’s Stranger Things with HBO’s Game of Thrones. Both shows were massive hits and both were viewed by roughly the same number of households. But Game of Thrones’s cultural impact was orders of magnitude larger. This came down to release strategy. Netflix dropped the entire Stranger Things season the week of the Fourth of July; by mid-July, the cultural conversation had moved on. In contrast, by releasing one episode of Thrones each week, HBO kept its show in the cultural water cooler for three months. Game of Thrones was appointment television: everyone was at the same place, at the same time, week after week. (Side note: probably for this reason, Netflix has decided to split Stranger Things Season 4 into two releases, one in May and the other in July, a strategy it just tried with Ozark.)
Phrases you never hear: Long term social media strategy
Social media is so skewed to the here and now: that meme on that platform.
So it was refreshing to take a longer view in tomorrow’s podcast with Jonny Murch of Red Torch and Stéphane Schwander, the FEI’s head of digital.
Since 2017, Red Torch has tracked the performance of every Olympic federation on social media - Download the #SportOnSocial League Table here.
The conversation asks, what’s the lessons from the last five years in sport’s relationship with the big social media platforms; it charts the rise of video as the dominant format; the implications of Instagram’s rise and the TikTok Question.
But that’s just the surface.
The decisions IFs make on digital are revealing as to the broader organisation, its internal dialogue, self image and the corporate and personal incentives at play.
One example.
The FEI found that 170million people ‘like horses’.
The content follows the insight.
So video of horses as hero. And the numbers are enormous.
This poses a good question: what exactly is an Olympic sports federation in 2022?
An event organiser - with social content that points everything to the next tournament and supplies reams of results.
Or something broader, that appeals to that 170million number, who just like horses and may or may not follow that cute horse video back to the ‘proper sport’.
Pragmatists (cowards) will say ‘both’.
And that’s before we get to the pros and cons of owned and operated v platforms and the age-old question as to how to retain the eyeballs in non-Olympic and Paralympic years.
Get the podcast from tomorrow, usual places. Search ‘Unofficial Partner’ in Apple, Spotify or your favourite app.
Job of the Week: Vice President of Sales, Joymo.tv
The blurb: Joymo.tv is a disruptive streaming company in the sports broadcasting space. We are an award nominated media company, a direct-to-consumer broadcasting solution, and a global sports rights holder originated in Oslo, Norway.
As Vice President of Sales in Joymo you will be a critical contributor to our content acquisition strategies, our future growth and our aspirational (whisper: global) objectives.
The link: Go here, tell them UP sent you.
Personal Best
Sports business people list their favourite things
This week: Kim Skildum-Reid
Sponsorship strategist, Speaker and Author: Power Sponsorship
