The Will Greenwood rabbit hole; Threaded plagiarism; Luke Littler and the Next Big Thing story archetype; Why brands don't like darts; The coming tsunami of crap; Good people around him etc

Overthinking the sports business, for money

Sport vertical rabbit holes

This week’s Will Greenwood podcast is a pilot for something a bit bigger.

I like the idea of taking the UP model - audio first, followed by live events, newsletters, WhatsApp communities - and going deeper in to particular sports.

Rugby is a first go at this.

Already the feedback on the Greenwood podcast is interesting.

His fame means the audience moves from B2B to B2B2C.

Our working assumption is that the outer ring is likely made up of informed, business-interested rugby fans and/or people who work in and around the rugby pyramid who don’t yet listen to UP.

Some of them might migrate to become part of the core UP audience.

Most won’t.

And that’s ok.

Have a listen to the podcast here.

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Story archetypes - The next big thing

Luke Littler is the new Emma Raducanu, discuss.

For an agency seeking to impress would-be clients, the call from a national newsdesk is irresistible. ‘What’s he worth?’ is a story that takes The Next Big Thing and adds the faux certainty of ‘data’. There are three basic rules to follow when responding to this question: 1.The number must be divisible by 10. As in ‘Luke Littler set to rake in £40million from brand deals’. If your answer is £37.4million, you better have some facts to back it up (See also UP Rule: The number’s always wrong). 2.There is no right or wrong answer. The figure just has to be massive. Newspapers (and the websites that copy them) report business in the same way they report sport: up/down/heroes/villains. Sponsorship rights fees are just a way of keeping score. 3. The number must reflect the direction of travel. Luke is on the up. This sets up The Next Big Thing’s alter ego, which is The Sponsor Exodus, where something bad happens and brands flee the scene. Search Tiger Woods and a fire hydrant for more details.

Good People Around Him

From the same piece:

To add jeopardy to The Next Big Thing, the story must conclude that vast riches will test the moral fibre of both TNBT and the backroom team. The words used to describe the entourage are coded, often on class lines. ‘Agent’ is a shiny suited snake out to exploit TNBT for all he or she’s worth. By comparison, ‘Management team’ suggests the safe hands of the stolid professional classes. If the young star is managed by a family member it opens the door to accusations of naivety, unless they are sharp elbowed parents (middle class).

Second Bounce - Why are brands so scared of darts?

The job of the second bounce story is to take it somewhere non-obvious.

Thought this was a nice angle, from Greg Double of Mischief.

In fact, I liked it so much we’ve got the author on to the podcast tomorrow, along with the bloke who sells Luke The Nuke’s darts. Been quite a week for him.

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Industrialised plagiarism vs Genius steals

Why I fucking hate threads.

The content marketing business model is based on gaming the algorithm to build followers.

Feature articles, news stories, podcast transcripts, wikipedia pages and even whole books are just the source material for threads. AI will accelerate this trend.

This is rife across the sports biz media ecosystem, particularly in the US, where it’s become part of the B2B influencer playbook.

This is done with no or minimal attribution to the source material.

Ironically, it was the Daily Mail who found this out this week.

This sort of naked plagiarism is stealing, pure and simple. The threaders are low end grifters.

But.

Where’s the line?

This newsletter, like the blog that preceded it, often takes other people’s work and lays an opinion over it. I always attribute credit and try to build on the source not just re-present it as my own work.

More broadly, anything creative comes from somewhere.

Wilde’s “talent borrows, genius steals” is sometimes given as an excuse for nicking ideas.

In fact, Wilde probably nicked that idea from this essay by TS Eliot.

     ”Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”

Or, more concisely:

‘We’re a mosaic of everyone we’ve ever loved’. Chuck Palahniuk.

So, we’re all plagiarists.

Then I googled ‘We’re all plagiarists’.

Got this.

And within that piece, found the author had done the same thing, googled the idea.

On it goes, deepening like a coastal shelf (nicked from Larkin obvs).

But as TS Eliot would’ve said, the threaders are still cunts though.

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The Number’s Always Wrong

Oi media agencies, make your mind up ffs

Dentsu: 2024 boosted by Olympics, Euros and US election.

Hopes are high that global advertising revenue will bounce back after a disappointing 2023. Dentsu, a media giant, forecasts an expansion of almost 5% in 2024, to $762.5bn: thank America’s presidential election, the Paris Olympics and football’s Euro 2024 tournament. Digital advertising will make up almost half of this spending. Magnifying this will be retailers’ efforts to sell slots for electronic ads displayed in their stores and on their websites, in the hope of offsetting a slowdown in consumer spending.

WPP/GroupM: 2024 decelerates due to Chinese uncertainty.

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“This is a major appeal of sports, often unstated: Witness something that endures in the public consciousness”

From this piece on memories, cultural relevance and the importance for sports events to seem big.

Please Like My Sport

But you don’t have to claim similar memories to ask the question of whether it’s a big deal if America’s best game becomes more of a niche. Does it mean anything if the NBA becomes something disregarded by most sports fans as peripheral noise in a time of information inundation? Would this matter financially? Economically? Structurally? I’d just argue it just matters if the NBA matters, and those other considerations are downstream of that larger truth.

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"Motorsport teams will do anything but hire actual women"

The rise of the virtual influencer isn’t going as well as hoped.

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Podcasts vs The Coming Tsunami of Crap

From The Rebooting:

I’ve found over the years of podcasting that it creates a human connection that’s rare. Podcasts trend longer at a time when most media is going in the opposite direction. 

That depth of audience engagement doesn’t easily translate to spreadsheets and the scale-focused digital advertising system, but I’d argue it has more enduring value than the fleeting impressions that have propped up much of digital media. 

The coming tsunami of crap from AI will disproportionately affect text-based content. The inevitable humanist reaction to this onslaught of synthetic content should benefit podcasting…

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