Welcome to Tomorrowland
What version of the future do you carry around in your head? Are you following the crowd and will the crowd turn out to be right?
First question, WTF’s Tomorrowland?
The short answer is: a podcast about sport, technology and innovation.
Why have we launched it?
Because all the pieces matter.
We’re not far off our 100th podcast and the conversations are bumping in to each other in interesting ways. The guests have come from different parts of the jungle - marketing, media, private equity, rights holders, agencies, journalists, tech vendors, teams, leagues, star athletes. And each guest has a version of the future in their head that reflects their professional experience, area of expertise and personal circumstance, incentives and ambitions: The VCs want to know where to place their bets, rights holders are wrestling with what they need to buy to answer the digital question and many of us want to know what our job will look like in three years time.
The map is not the territory
Sometimes these personal maps of the future are a considered and clearly articulated philosophy - as founder of Sports Innovation Lab, Angela Ruggiero for example, thinks deeply about sport’s relationship with technology, which is why I wanted her on as our first Tomorrowland guest. By creating a sports specific tech research group, Angela has created a pinch point between sports rights holders and tech vendors, giving her a front row seat in to the pain sports owners are feeling and the solutions the market is providing. This graphic was from their very good Next Generation Sponsorship report of a couple of years ago. I like it because it gives enough of a snapshot of the competitive heat being generated around sports tech and data.
But the vendors are not the interesting bit
The tech vendors are a necessary part of the conversation. Some will win big, others will fade from view or be overtaken by new tech; but we didn’t launch Tomorrowland as a PR stop-off for them.
The problem is that if I’m selling a solution, I’m almost by definition closing down conversation, which is a real bummer when you run a podcast. This is the problem with much of what passes for corporate comms: it gives away the punchline because it implies that the product or service they’re flogging is THE ANSWER. There’s a complete absence of genuine curiosity, a necessary pre-requisite of conversation.
Instead, I’d like Tomorrowland to be somewhere we can all question some of the received wisdoms that have grown up around sports relationship with innovation and technology. This is more difficult and more interesting territory than ‘is VR the next big thing?’.
(See 13 mistakes you make when exploring the future)
In considering a future time, you have to reckon with a whole thing: a complete culture, marketplace, society, community, industry, and all the things that shape them. Too often we don’t, we take up one change that we think is powerful and important, and leave most everything else like it is.
Analogy isn’t strategy
This week FCBarcelona launched an OTT service. The release is packed full of the received wisdoms of Tomorrowland: Sport as entertainment, Netflix and Fortnite as competition for sports teams and leagues, Gen Y attention spans, B2B to D2C, direct relationship with fans, walled gardens etc.
“Our business model evolved from a sports club to an entertainment company,” Didac Lee, a board member responsible for the club’s digital presence…“We are not competing only against other sports teams,” Lee said. “We are competing for the attention quota of our audience. And our competitors are Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, Fortnite. That’s why, when we realized that the young generation might not spend 90 minutes in front of a TV that sometimes can be boring because nothing happens, we knew that we need to push the boundaries of our core business from sport to entertainment. That’s our focus nowadays.”
A few years ago, it was Adidas' global creative director, Paul Gaudio using the same analogy:
Anybody that competes for the attention of a young person [is an Adidas rival]. Netflix, Instagram: They're all out there competing for share of wallet. A kid only has so much money to spend.
I get it, nobody wants to be Blockbuster, renting DVDs while the streamers render you redundant. But the Netflix analogy feels reductive. What if the D2C strategy is wrong, or at least, wrong for more sports rights holders than its’ right for. And if they are the big and powerful adversary, why choose to play Netflix and Fortnite at their game, the one they’ve built billion dollar empires around? ‘Sport’ isn’t going to win that one, or at least most sport isn’t. What works for the NBA might not work for those further down the food chain.
Already we’re seeing movements back toward old school distribution pinch points in digital, that mirror the traditional broadcast market rather than the digital OTT utopia of one-to-one fan relationships. There’s a real fear that many - most? - rights holders will get stuck in the middle in the great digital migration.
The Netflix analogy is a story. And like all the best stories, it can suggest a direction of travel that comes to feel inevitable. The story gets repeated in thought leadership columns, conference keynotes and zoom calls, giving everyone a simple route forward, backed up by upmarket hearsay.
It also might be wrong. Analogy isn’t strategy.
When Tomorrowland meets The Office
Given the choice, most sports leaders would like to be known as thrillingly disruptive thinkers. But that’s different from saying that meaningful change happens within their organisations. PwC’s last sport survey suggests that ideas get stuck in limbo between everyday busyness and the ‘can someone work the printer’ drudgery of corporate life.
But maybe we should dial down the expectations a bit, and get some clarity on what can be realistically achieved within the constraints of most sports rights holders.
Clay Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma has shaped how tech and finance people talk about the future, which in turn has framed the sports business conversation. Disruption was never meant for everyone. From HBR:
Disruptive innovation. When HBS professor Clayton Christensen introduced the concept of disruptive innovation in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, it was a revelation. In his study of why good firms fail, he found that what is normally considered best practice — listening to customers, investing in continuous improvement, and focusing on the bottom line — can be lethal in some situations.
In a nutshell, what he discovered is that when the basis of competition changes, because of technological shifts or other changes in the marketplace, companies can find themselves getting better and better at things people want less and less. When that happens, innovating your products won’t help — you have to innovate your business model.
So, disruption only applies to certain companies in certain industries at a particular moment in time. Nice graph:
Do you need a Chief Innovation Officer?
There’s something appealing about personalising the innovation challenge, by giving someone a job with the word in the header. That way a rights holder can look future-proofed and the CEO has someone to blame when things don’t pan out as planned - see the PwC graphic above.
On the podcast, Angela Ruggiero is pro the CIO, but with caveats. They need budget and real organisational power. And that’s harder to create than a job title (a good piece here where she talks more about this question).
Outside in
Another question that we’ll come back to in future pods. Real innovation rarely comes from inside the organisation and rights holders are no different in this respect to Kodak or Blockbuster. (Hear Dave Bedford on why UK Athletics could never have created Parkrun and Nathan Homer on why the European Tour’s player membership structure makes it particularly vulnerable to new formats like the Premier Golf League.
The conversation continues.
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