Who will win the race to Sportsbiz GPT; LXXII Golf; Let them eat cake; Money v History; Make my logo bigger; The open web is over
Overthinking the sports business, for money
Chat_UP Live: If AI is a race, who’s going to win?
Someone is going to make a billion by creating SportsbizGPT.
I can say with quite a high level of confidence that it won’t be me.
Some are claiming they’ve already done it. Whereas others have just added the letters AI to their old thing and are hoping nobody asks too many questions.
Beyond the noise, I want to spend an evening pursuing the answer to a question: What’s the difference between the sports organisations who will prosper from AI and those that will be punished by it?
For one night only: a live AI experiment
What SportsbizGPT is, or could be, is one of the threads of Chat_UP Live on Wednesday 19th November at FUSE.
Working with our clever friends at Twenty First Group, we’re going to attempt something very ambitious, live on stage.
A cast of experts has been assembled from across sport, marketing and tech. The audience are wearing some seriously impressive badges.
One way or another, it won’t be just yet another AI conference panel.
The real meaning of LXXII Golf
From WhatsUP:
Scott O’Neill’s explanation of the switch is a cute reverse ferret, containing words and phrases such as ‘innovate’ and ‘eye toward progress’ while reverting to a product format first popularised by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in 1892.
“The most successful leagues around the world – IPL, EPL [English Premier League], NBA, MLB, NFL – continue to innovate and evolve their product,” said Scott O’Neil, LIV’s chief executive. “And as an emerging league, we are no different. LIV Golf will always have an eye towards progress that acts in the best interest of LIV Golf and in the best interest of the sport.”
Why is it 72 holes anyway? To counter variance, or put another way, it’s the most effective way to find the best golfer of any given week.
Golf tournaments are 72 holes because that seemed to be the right length to properly determine the skill of the players competing in the event the magnitude of an important championship. Over a short duration, golf is a sport with a lot of variance and a variety of things beyond the players’ control, including wind, other weather and course conditions. Having a tournament spread out over a long time period and with more rounds allows better players to rise to the top.
Of course, LIV’s switch is not about that. It’s about the tedious minutiae of OGWR ranking points and major event access for the LIV players, who after four years of basking in the role of radical disruptors, want to have their enormous cake (the money they took to break away) and to eat it (play in the career-defining major championships).
They want money AND history.
History - the badge, the records, the slams - is a key feature of the incumbent’s moat.
Not just in golf but across every sport. I’m just off a call with Phil Weston of TGI Sport, who is Harry Brook’s manager, the superstar England batsman. What’s a cricket career now, in the T20 franchise age? Turns out the red ball game remains central to the cricketer personal brand (we’ll release the podcast in the week of the first Ashes test in Perth).
This is why LIV is the most important case study in the sports business today.
It’s about change and resistance to change.
Most of the air time is spent on the first bit, the thrill of the new.
But LIV shows just how hard it is to challenge the primacy of a major sports rights holder.
And what happens when the thrill of the revolution subsides and the upstarts are left with the same problems they were created to solve (there’s a Reform party analogy to be made here btw, but we’ll leave that for another time).
See previous:
Ripples
Won’t anyone think of Performance 54, the agency recently rebranded 54 which is now presumably 72.
See also, will The Hundred still be The Hundred if and when it switches back to twenty overs? The Hundred And Twenty has a ring to it.
Make my logo bigger
Variety reports on the growing pressure to get brands in to the live feed.
The Bundle’s Murray Barnett added context:
The new marketing inventory iterates with every passing rights cycle, as the client demands more for less.
This is the plumbing that lies below the top line conversation about sports rights fees. How does the broadcaster make back the outlay if viewers are skipping the ad breaks?
Whether this is a new story or a non-story rests on whether you think the publisher side has the strength of will to defend the integrity of their own product.
The same story appears in a different guise, this time on cringeworthy product placement in Netflix’s hot rabbi romcom, Nobody Wants This
If you venture deeper into the weeds you find the same story again, this time about the challenge of surfacing brands in AI model responses.
Each of these three stories are about the deep fear in the marketing industry that their route to the consumer is blocked.
This concern is not shared by TV viewers and/or sports fans who are hating on the over-commercialisation of their chosen thing.
But, who pays for the content if the ads don’t work?
The answer is one that nobody on the publisher side, which includes sports rights holders, particularly wants to hear: Control costs. Stop overpaying for talent. Grow a pair.
Welcome to our new podcast listeners
Now be a good sort and press the like button below.
