That's what the money's for; PR's top table ambition; Sent by Coventry; Bang average; Netflixification redefined; Chasing Indian eyeballs
Overthinking the sports business, for money
1. Sent by Coventry
The sports PR industry’s fury at Kirsty Coventry is, ultimately, a fury at being seen. It wants the status without the exposure. The influence without the accountability.
The IOC president has inadvertently pulled the curtain back on a function that has spent two decades insisting it deserves a place at the top table while simultaneously insisting it should never be publicly blamed when things go wrong at the top table.
The IOC's communications chief, Mark Adams, is reportedly paid £420,000 a year. He's been at the IOC since 2009, before which he ran media for the World Economic Forum at Davos, and before that worked at the BBC, ITN and EuroNews. He is not an intern. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the best-resourced and most experienced communications professionals in world sport.
His job, in its most elemental form, is to ensure that the president of the International Olympic Committee does not walk into a press conference and get blindsided by entirely predictable questions.
To borrow from Don Draper, that’s what the money’s for.
2. The tyranny of targets
There’s a good book out on how we’ve allowed quantifiable metrics to seep in to every aspect of our life, and the consequences of that. It’s called The Score by C Thi Nguyen. It builds on Charles Goodhart of ‘Goodhart’s rule’ fame, that suggests metrics become corrupted when ‘pressed in to service’ as targets.
I thought about it in relation to prediction markets.
‘Not Holy Grail truth’. A comms playbook is emerging. Specifically, the prediction market c-suite talk a lot about truth. Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour told the FT his North Star was ‘making the world a little bit smarter about the future’, not ‘Holy Grail truth, but better than the alternatives’. This explains the above Substack deal, and others with news outlets, which place odds in to news stories. See previous note re Truth as Commodity. Mansour’s co-founder Luana Lopes Lara said ‘Kalshi is trying to be a newspaper in a world of op-eds’. (Think in Bets is another good book btw).
Don’t look here, look over there. The news strategy is a way of saying Kalshi and Polymarket are not (just) sports betting, despite a lot - most - of the money coming from football bets. The FT says 90% of all fees Kalshi has ever collected have been sports related. You wouldn’t know that if you just listened to the noise around prediction markets in news, elections and entertainment. It’s about competitive positioning, but also gives legal wriggle room against US legislators seeking to clamp down on online sports betting.
‘Financialise everything’. This clip shows Mansour saying “The long-term vision is to financialise everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion”. He told the FT: ‘Some of it could the future of, like, climate change and the future of our politics, and others can be, like, sports because a lot of people care about that’. The word Kalshi is derived from Arabic, meaning ‘everything’. Mansour grew up in Lebanon. The push back is that few things in life have a yes/no answer, so it’s hard to work out when something should be paid out.
Reductive by design. Simplicity changes how we judge what matters and what can be cast aside. The outcome is that nuance and subtlety and personal values are abandoned in favour of what can be conveniently measured. This has consequences, from how we judge schools, partners and our health. Sport has ingested the mantra whole. The obvious point to make is that the appeal of sport, or a large part of it, is about the mess that sits beyond the financial models.
‘This is a bad idea. It is a very, very, very bad idea’.
Substack just did a deal with Polymarket.
This by Brian Moritz on that link:
Imagine for a second that instead of Polymarket, this was FanDuel announcing an exclusive partnership with Substack. Or Draft Kings. What would your reaction be? What would everyone’s reaction be?
3. Netflix-ification moves everything to the centre
An alternative definition of Netflixification is emerging.
An ongoing example is the impact of Netflix on Korean cinema.
There’s an argument being made that the incentive to please the global entertainment market’s gatekeeper has made Korean culture less interesting.
The edges get smoothed. What worked before is tried again. The thing becomes a parody of itself. A caricature of Korean film is an average of what Netflix’s algorithm deems ‘a good show’. Supported by seemingly inarguable data.
See previous: What if Jake Paul is the top of the market?
4. For a so-called conservative sport, cricket asks the best questions
Stuff arising from this week’s Inside Edge podcast:
Is the audience following or leading? Something I’ve been trying to articulate but not quite getting to the nub. I’ve had a few conversations recently about the assumption of the sports marketing industry that the product leads the audience: as in, you get your sports property on telly or YouTube or wherever, and the audience grows from there. Cricket and golf make me think something less obvious, or less linear, is happening. Golf is said to be booming at grass roots level despite the shit show at the tour level, where the snafu between LIV and the PGA Tour has bored golfers, and presumably TV viewers, rigid. Golf as TV product is a sideshow. Likewise, the story of this T20 Cricket World Cup is that of fervent fandoms outside the traditional heartlands. What has driven the audience for the game in Nepal, US, Netherlands etc? It probably isn’t bilateral test cricket on television, which still pays for the $600million annual ICC revenue pool.
What if, we’re just chasing Indian eyeballs? The ICC’s map of the world shows hotspots in unexpected places, telling a story of the global fan dispersed from Japan to New York?. But who are these people, the ones behind the digital impressions at this T20 World Cup? Many of them are the Indian diaspora. So what? Does that help or hinder the argument that cricket’s product market fit is misaligned? Do they need high quality local product, if they are IPL and Shubman Gil fans?
Is the public-private frame useful? If there is a huge untapped market, who will create the product to service it? Often this is seen as governing bodies as public sector, and the franchises as private money. The players shift between the two depending on who’s paying the most, either in money or status. From there you go where you want to go depending on your personal bias. The free market lobby will say that the associates have benefited from franchise leagues, and that the game is thriving despite not because of the cricket boards of the big test playing nations. The ICC, ECB, BCCI et al will counter that they built the infrastructure and are the bulwark against the risks of bad actors creating short term fixes. Is the IPL public or private? What about The Hundred?
Wait, are we arguing for a busier calendar now? A point made by Mike Jakeman, Inside Edge co-host. The improved quality of the smaller cricketing nations at the World Cup rubs against the usual story of ‘too much cricket confusing the audience’. This is a line you tend to get from established governing bodies who want to sell their own thing at the expense of someone’s else’s thing.