ESPN Improves Fan Experience and Boosts Tune-In Through Social Media

VideoTranscript

Panel Introductions

Andrew:
Hello. It’s on. So this track is about how, obviously, OTT services, publishers and tech giants are reinventing the ways that sports are consumed largely in response to fans redefining their preferences. For this panel, we’re fortunate to have ESPN that sits at the top or near the top of all three categories, as well as a former Major League Baseball all-star who founded and runs a tech company that works with some of the largest sports leagues and brands in the space. My hope today for this chat is that we’ll talk and discuss how the activation of fans has changed and also examine some of the strategies in how technologies have evolved to meet these challenges.

So to start off, I want to introduce our panelists. We have Kaitee Daley. Kaitee is currently the senior director of social media at ESPN and overseas content creation and distribution strategies across Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. She was instrumental in the formation of ESPN’s social media team, a group that leads the sports media field in total followers, shares and cross-platform views. In the last year, Daley’s team has increased overall social engagement 125%, nabbed an Emmy nomination for SportsCenter on Snapchat, developed several successful IGTV shows, launched fast growing ESPN MMA channels and spearheaded an internal influencer program to work with the company’s forward-facing talent. That’s a lot [laughter]. Daley’s in her 10th year with ESPN and unsurprisingly was named a top woman in sports by Cynopsis. Thank you.

We also have Shawn. Shawn is the co-founder and chairman of Greenfly. Shawn played Major League Baseball for 15 years as an all-star right fielder including with the Blue Jays, Dodgers and Mets. Prior to playing ball, Shawn attended Stanford University. He’s been a lifelong and passionate fan of technology. Shawn developed the Greenfly concept after his playing days from intimately understanding the challenges that faced athletes in the changing content environment and his desire to streamline the complexities of working with media companies and brands to help them create, share and promote videos and photo assets across their channels.

Thank you both for joining us. So Kaitee, if you don’t mind we’ll kick it off with you.

Kaitee:
Sure.

ESPN’s Approach to Social Fan Connections

Andrew:
So I know the relationship between sports organizations and fans has changed as consumption behaviors have. What’s kind of the approach with ESPN for finding new ways to connect with fans across social platforms?

Kaitee:
I think the first thing is that we have to stay nimble. We don’t make the rules of the road when it comes to social platforms, but we need to drive on them and we need to drive value back to fans and, ultimately, back to ESPN. So what I say today may be different two months from now, three months from now. But right now our focus is on platform engagement, specifically meaningful interactions, retweets, shares, time spent viewing. And the reason is that we recognize that those things give us greater algorithmic reach and we’re able to get in front of more eyeballs. And when we’re able to reach more people we’re able to build a deeper fan connection. And that helps us with brand relevance, but that also helps unlock the ability to do other things like refer our social platform audiences to the great things we have going on on our owned and operated platforms.

We don’t want to be the person at the cocktail party who’s just talking about themselves constantly, right? We want to be creating social-optimized, engaged content, but then we want to, occasionally, let you know that there’s a really great game on ESPN’s air. There’s a really great new original E+ show. So yeah, that’s been our focus.

Andrew:
And so, I guess, how’s that changed since you– I mean, 10 years in ESPN, how’s that changed from when you first got there?

Kaitee:
It’s changed a lot, you could probably take this whole panel and just talk about the changes. But for me, one story that comes to mind I was thinking about the other day, back in 2012 I was working NBA Finals Heat/Thunder, and our social approach for the SportsCenter account was I was sitting in a studio with Tim Legler just firing out all texts, tweets of his takes like, “I don’t think this is going back to Oklahoma City.” Things like that. And fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, we had a ton of people on site at the NBA Finals producing everything from a Snapchat show to Instagram stories, Instagram live, Twitter live show, and we had other people back in the office distributing content. So I think what it takes to engage fans today is just it’s a lot more production. We’re asking people to be great writers, videographers, photo editors, and the stakes have been raised for sure.

Changing Athlete-Fan Relationships

Andrew:
Thank you. I guess, Shawn, for you, I mean, from your playing days, how have you seen the relationship between athletes and fans change?

Shawn:
Yes, it’s changed a lot. So I stopped playing in 2007 with the Mets. I don’t know how many Mets’ fans are here – I actually was on the infamous team that blew a seven game lead with 17 to play. That’s how I ended my career. So that was a fun memory, but I apologize for those of you that are Mets fans. But no, it’s changed a lot. I think it’s gotten more intimate. Now players want to let people into their lives. When I was playing before, social media was only– we were three years into Facebook when I retired, and players wanted to have a wall up and not let people in. They wanted to kind of hide. And I think that wall’s slowly gotten– it’s breaking down with each generation of player that has come up because now they’re digital first and they grew up with Snapchat, they grew up with Instagram. So players that have come in over the last 12 years and continue to come in, they want to build their brand. They want to get closer to the fan.

Before, the closest you get to a fan is maybe you throw him a ball, maybe you sign an autograph, and that’s the relationship. Now, it’s a retweet or maybe an interaction on Instagram and Snapchat. Those are the types of ways that players are connecting with fans. And the players enjoy it. They enjoy the positive feedback. Sometimes you’ll see players go after fans with negative– whenever they give them negative feedback after a tough game. But still, the players are completely engaged. And they realize that nowadays if they want to have opportunities off the field as well as kind of build their brand within their sport they have to engage and they have to let people into their personal lives. People want their shows. That kind of started, I guess, maybe 10, 15 years ago. Showing their houses, their cars, different things. That was kind of the start of it and now everyone is doing that on their own now on their social channels.

A Look Across Social Platforms

Andrew:
For Kaitee, with so many fans and so many places and so many platforms at ESPN, how do you strike a balance between how much time and resources you devote to the various platforms you’re on?

Kaitee:
Yeah. It’s tough to find a balance, but I think, for us, we pride ourselves on being social metrics nerds. We like to– we have a weekly meeting where we’ll look back on everything we’ve posted, what over-performed, what under-performed, why, and then we’ll look at the week ahead and how we should be allocating resources, energy, what sort of content plans we should put together. And again, that is going to change. It’s going to change depending on the event. I think it’s going to change depending on what we’re seeing fans lean into and engage with. But one thing we don’t do is we don’t have platform specific teams. So there’s not really a Facebook team and a Twitter team. It’s we want a bunch of different people who can wear a lot of hats and they know when content bubbles up. They can figure out how to optimize that for a lot of different platforms.

Andrew:
Fantastic. So, I guess, kind of keeping on platforms. I know you show love to all the platforms out there, but [laughter]–

Kaitee:
We do. We love them all.

Andrew:
Specifically, when we look at Snapchat, you guys were an initial launch partner on Snapchat, Discover, and I think ESPN has really set the pace for the sports category. Can you talk a little bit about your approach there and what you’ve learned and how that content– your approach there may have led into other platforms or other parts of ESPN?

Kaitee:
Yeah. So our approach started with, we knew it was a younger audience on Snap. And for context, I can share that – for SportsCenter and Snap – 65% of our audience is 24 years and younger. So we do, from a content perspective, have to think about what’s engaging that demo, which is going to differ from what’s engaging someone on a linear TV program. And one of the ways we’ve done that through content is by finding different frames to get into storylines. So, for example, this week we had a Cubs highlight and on some platforms we may have just shown the Cubs highlight. On Snap, it was Stranger Things night at Wrigley, and so the entire Snap segment had demogorgon jokes and we didn’t necessarily tell you Jon Lester’s stat line. But we still gave you the highlight, we still gave you the information, but we did in a way that was fun and engaging.

And then from a technical perspective, we’re making sure that there’s movement on the screen every three seconds. So a zoom cut, a graphic, and we’re just trying to keep those eyeballs engaged. And we’ve been able to do that specifically with, again, with the SportsCenter show. We’re seeing that 60% of our audience is watching three or more times a week. So it’s a really loyal fan base. They’re coming back and engaging. We haven’t directly lifted– we don’t directly lift any sort of segments from Snap in terms of your question about other platforms. But I do think just the notion of operating from a space of creativity and fun and loosening up, I think we have taken that spirit and used it in other spaces and programs.

Andrew:
Fantastic. And, I guess, Shawn, from your perspective, what platforms have you seen players really gravitate towards to kind of connect with fans?

Shawn:
Yeah. For a long time it was primarily just Twitter, right? And I think those who have a lot of funny one-liners and things like that they love Twitter because it’s just this megaphone to get these comments out or to get– to share– retweet. People love retweeting fan comments and things like that because it’s a way to connect with the fans. So that’s always been the one in sports. And Twitter is still super successful and relevant in sports. But I think over the last couple of years everyone knows Instagram’s rise. And I think a lot of players now are embracing Instagram stories and they realize there’s so much engagement on the stories.

So I think that the biggest uptick over the last year has been the stories. But I think the thing about Instagram that’s great is you could fill it with– if you’re an athlete, especially in baseball, you play every day so there’s so much great content that you have, and that’s one of the things that we’re trying to solve with Greenfly. We are solving, is just to be able to give them access to that content because you can– whether you’re sharing stuff that you did, you’re sharing stuff with your teammate, maybe there’s a player on another team that did something that is funny or whatever. It’s a place where you don’t have to be necessarily as creative I think as Twitter to have a successful account. You could rely on the photographers or highlight clips or whatever it is to build a brand and be very successful. And I think a lot of players gravitate towards that because it’s a little less pressure on the personality side.

The Importance of Speed and Relevance

Andrew:
Yeah. And so, I guess, the words speed and relevance when it comes to social content are probably somewhat overused, but again, they’re very important. When you think about speed and relevance in terms of the jobs that both of you do, what does that really mean to you and is it that important at all in how you’re going to deliver content to sports fans?

Kaitee:
Yeah. The first thing I think of when I hear speed as it relates to news specifically is rather be right than first. So we definitely pride ourselves on working really closely with our news desk and our reporters and making sure that what we put out there can be a bit of a fact check for sports fans. But then as it relates to other types of content, I think my answer is going to vary based on platform. So on YouTube you can generate views with a longer tail. You could put something up 30 minutes, an hour after it happens and still be seeing views months later. Whereas I think about NBA Twitter, and when a moment happens you need to be there, right? You need to be a part of that conversation. And then relevance is really dependent on the platform and the audience. I think what’s relevant to a 13-year-old is very different from what’s relevant to a 35-year-old, and we think about that in how we program platforms and also the brands that we use.

Shawn:
Yeah. And I think from the player’s perspective, speed and relevance are crucial. I think speed is players want to have access to content as soon as they get off the field or off the court. They want to be able to share it immediately. And that’s something that we solve. But it’s crucial because they realize that an hour or two hours later the moments pass in a lot of ways because other people are posting things. So that’s crucial. And the relevance, I saw WSC present earlier, they do some great work. But one thing that they said that they do is really interesting. If, let’s say, you’re following– I can’t remember the game they used as an example. It’s a few years ago, but there was a European player that had five blocks in the same game that Steph Curry had 50 points or whatever. And in that player’s hometown, that player did– that content did way better on those channels.

And that’s where the relevance comes in is to be able to hit the right people at the right time in the right places. And that’s what’s so great about social is you can micro target. And you’ve got players in baseball at one point we had I think six different languages on the same team. We had Korean, Japanese, French, [inaudible]. I mean, it was crazy with those players to be able to access their audiences, and MLB loves that. The teams love that because they want to spread their brand all over these other countries. And when we had Hideo Nomo on our team, this is pre-social, but there were 25 Japanese photographers and media people following him around everywhere, and that’s just the way it is. You have players from different places. It builds that sport and that team in those areas. And to be able to then double down and have those players push content out to those same people is super powerful.

Challenges in Driving Social Fan Engagement

Andrew:
So Kaitee, as you talked about kind of the differences in how you specifically design strategies for each platform it seems like a lot of work and a very big challenge. What have been some of the difficulties that you’ve faced in trying to drive that deeper engagement and have the strategy that is not only broad but deep as well?

Kaitee:
Yeah. I think the big challenge for any sort of legacy media company right now is that screens are democratized and young people are predominantly spending more and more time on mobile. So for us, we have amazing content across a number of different platforms and we have a lot of content creators who traditionally specialize in linear TV. And so what our team has to figure out, and I think we’ve met the challenge, is when to run a completely different playbook and when to collaborate with our partners in different areas of the company on taking content and optimizing it for social platforms.

Andrew:
I guess, Shawn, for you, what challenges have you seen across organizations in kind of sharing content or deepening that engagement with fans?

Shawn:
Yeah. I mean, those are the challenges that we set out to solve. But it’s I think being able– you have all this content. If you’re an organization you have all these photos, you have all these videos coming in from all these different sources. You have relationships with different distribution partners. All these things and to be able to have a workflow solution to get everything into the hands for the last mile, right? Because nowadays, I think the biggest challenge from when I was playing is very simple. You have your areas where you’re marketing or areas where you’re distributing your content. And now, instead of having a handful, you have every single player in your team, super fans, celebrities, all these– everyone now becomes your distribution channels. So to be able to mobilize all these people around your content and make sure they all have access to the content that’s perfect for them at the right time, that’s the biggest challenge.

And to be able to do that at scale and you might– as an organization you might work with 20 or 30 people that are relevant and you might work with thousands, and to be able to say, “Okay. We could scale it.” That I think has been a huge challenge because social as valuable as it is I think if you’re a brand or if you’re a sports property or whatever like ESPN it’s scary because ESPN was always very TV first. Now it’s a content company, right? And where the eyeballs are coming from, you have to find those eyeballs and do it in a streamlined way. And I think that’s always been the challenge over the last– every year it gets– becomes more important but over the last 10 years or so.

Kaitee:
And just to play off of it, everyone has a production kit in their pocket now essentially, right? If you have a smartphone and you’re on site you can capture a pretty compelling content. So I think it’s a good problem to have that there’s this content tonnage, but you have to figure out how to prioritize it and how to optimize it for this space.

Shawn:
Yeah. If I was playing today, I don’t know if I could handle it because everyone has a camera now. So I gave you, take picture, take picture. Yeah. You see players now and they’re just– it used to be like we sign the ball or whatever, and now it’s like you sign a ball, take a picture. So it’s like everything takes–

Kaitee:
You would be in so many selfies.

Shawn:
–three times as long. Yeah. Exactly.

Talent and Athletes as Social Media Influencers

Andrew:
So to switch gears slightly, and let’s just talk about talent. Kaitee, I know you’ve led the efforts at ESPN in creating an internal influencer program. Can you give us an idea about the scope of that and what the goals were when you started that program and how’s it going?

Kaitee:
Yeah. So, I mean, if you’ve worked in this industry you’ve heard the buzzword influencer, and we felt like we had influencers that already worked for us in talent. We noticed that the broader consumer trend was a little bit more trust of an individual over brands and that that was playing out in social algorithms as well, and that made sense to us. If I was following someone who’s a huge movie buff and they were talking about this great new movie that I should go see, I’m a little bit more likely to hear that message than the production company who produced the movie giving me that same message, right? So we thought about that a lot, and it was important for us going into this to just build trust and bring value to our internal influencers first and foremost. So work with them on getting their accounts to be social optimized, and that could be everything from a full-on suite of templates with their headshots and with text on video to just telling them, “Hey, make your copy a little bit shorter here. Make it a little longer there.”

So once we can deliver value to them, when something like OBJ to the Browns breaks, it’s a little bit easier to pick up the phone and say, “Hey, do you want to do an Instagram live with us, Q&A, answer fan questions about this trade?” Because you’ve built that foundation of trust. And then the last thing is that it does help us solve a little bit of a problem we had had around voice. Meaning if you’ve worked in social you’ve heard like your account should have– every account should have a voice. And the ESPN account was tricky because it could be so many different voices depending on the time of day, the sport, the program. So if we lean into our talent voices, the halo effect there is if Rachel Nichols has a great IGTV post sharing her opinion, that brings greater awareness of how great Rachel Nichols is on the jump or her being at the NBA Finals and doing courtside interviews. So we really felt like there’s an opportunity to help a talent and then also have the halo effect of helping the larger brands.

Andrew:
Fantastic. And, I guess– well, exactly. I mean, our– when you work, we know that almost every influencer has a social person. Are you working through representatives for the talent? Are you working directly with talent? And how’s it been?

Kaitee:
So mostly we’re actually working just directly with talent. We have meetings with them. We’ll show them metrics reports. Of course, we onboard them to Greenfly, show them the magic of that and that’s just been really helpful for us. When we occasionally have had to work with representatives it’s easy because we’re speaking the same language as them. But I think that face time and those one-on-ones with talent is really important.

Andrew:
I guess, Shawn, using the word talent to describe athletes, have you seen the advantages of athletes or talent getting content as well?

Shawn:
Yeah. I think for the athletes to get content is funny because I’m removed from the game, I still do– I’m still involved with the Dodgers and do things. And so I’m around players and get feedback from them and I get my agent will forward someone over that says, “All right. How do I get my content?” And I said– I just tell them just download the app and register.  And then they text me back like, “Thank you. This app is so dope. I appreciate it.” Other guys are like, “This is sick. I walked off the field I have all my photos and highlights from the game.”

Andrew:
This is your words or theirs?

Shawn:
This is their words [laughter]. Yeah, I know this is definitely their words. But yeah, those are direct quotes from the these guys. Joc Pederson and Tommy Pham are two of the guys that come to mind. But Tommy Pham should be an all-star I think. He’s having a good year. But yeah, anyway. So yeah. I think for them it’s a win. So I know a lot of the organizations or the sports properties that we work with and teams and leagues, they feel like they’re building a better relationship with the players. Players want this stuff. And 10 years ago, the players didn’t really care as much. I mean, I will say when I was playing I would’ve loved to have the solution that we have where you have a gallery with all your photos and then you can add– anyone can be on that gallery. You could have your mom. You could have– my mom has already bugged me for stuff, right? And if you have your agents or whoever is handling your stuff, some players have tons of people involved.

So I think that’s a solution that I would’ve loved. So there’s that side of the coin. And just for players to be able to distribute it and know that the teams, and the leagues, and whoever they’re working with, their agents, they’re trying to help them build their brand. And I think it creates a better relationship between leagues and players and teams and players because it’s a win for everybody, right? The league obviously wants to get– and the teams want to get the content out through their best distribution channels. All the algorithms are favoring the players much more than the leagues and teams and the players want to build their brands. So everyone is winning in it and it just makes sense that there’s a system in place to benefit both sides.

Greenfly Streamlines and Scales Social Media Reach

Andrew:
I guess, Kaitee, as you’ve talked about kind of having the talent take that content, where does Greenfly fit in there and how do you–?

Kaitee:
Yeah. It’s been huge for us. If you’ve ever had to email someone a Dropbox link to a video and then send them the instructions, download it, upload it to a social platform, use this copy, the word that comes to mind with our work with Greenfly is just it’s all streamlined for us. So we have over 70 ESPN talent have shared content from Greenfly. And we have a leaner team that’s working on this initiative, so it really helps us to be able to scale. With something like Zion’s emotional post draft moment that happened recently that was on our air, we were able to give our talent network pretty quick access to that video. And we sent them the ESPN posted video so that, I think a couple of years ago, if they wanted to react to that on social they probably would have just reacted with whatever popped up on their timeline first regardless of brand. But in this case they were able to lend their voice and opinion to that moment, but tap into it through the ESPN video. So it streamlines for us and it’s really helped us build, Shawn’s point, build a relationship with our talent in a way that we hadn’t been able to previously.

Shawn:
Yeah. So the other thing I think is important that for us talking to players and coming at it from the angle that I come at it is it’s important to not only be able to give them content, but to be able to get content from them as well. And that’s one thing that is crucial because a lot of players maybe don’t want to say anything, and a lot of players do. And we all have something happen or someone breaks a record and be able to get content from those players in a streamlined way that is just as important. And in some ways that content is even more valuable because it’s original content and it kills it on social whether it’s the players or whether it’s someone, an announcer, or something at ESPN. That type of content is really, really valuable and that’s why building a platform we felt like it needs to be the full circle and not just a one -way street.

High-Performing Content

Andrew:
And, I guess, looking at value and thinking about engagement being as important. Are there any examples that you have of content that really kind of crushed it that you might not have been able to do before?

Kaitee:
Yeah. Well, I think to that point, before the draft lottery this year, we had said to a number of our talent, “We’d love for your– this is a– it’s a big draft lottery. We’re going to find out where Zion is going. We’d love for your reaction to be authentic. We’d love for you to film that and send it back to us through Greenfly.” And Stephen A. Smith, who’s a Knicks fan, when that drama unfolded, I’m sure many of you saw the tweet. What was surprising about it– so we generally will try to take the raw content, optimize it a little bit, and then send it back to talent to share. In this case, it looked as though he had filmed this in a cave [laughter]. It was like a very, very–

Shawn
That’s impressive. Yeah.

Kaitee:
–dark, grainy video. And what’s interesting is that we tell the talent a lot like, “Don’t be too precious about how perfect the content you’re capturing is. It doesn’t need to be pristine, studio setting. Have it be authentic and raw and that’s going to connect better with your fan base.” But I think we were surprised that that ended up being the most retweeted tweet on Twitter on draft night was Stephen A’s crazy reaction, it was all kind of set up through the talent influencer lens.

Shawn:
Yeah, I know. That’s cool. We’ve had tons of videos from athletes, super high profile, whether LeBron’s on a private plane talking or they’re on a team flight and they just won a game. And one of them was I think a hockey team and they had– it must have been in Toronto and the Blue Jays were in the playoffs and they’re wearing their Blue Jays– I mean, you get this– you see these cool things. And when you watch the videos it’s much more interesting to see what’s going on in the background, to see who’s walking on the plane, oh, it looks like there’s players and their wives and they’re– it’s interesting because you feel like you get that extra peek in there.

An (Authentic) Look Ahead

Andrew:
All right. And so last question because I’m not going to keep everybody from lunch. It’s a bad idea. So when you think about your approach to fans and content and tech, what do you think that looks like three years from now?

Kaitee:
You want me to go first? I think something that Bob Iger had once said is, “The riskiest thing we can do is maintain the status quo.” So I think we’re going to be continuing to think about ways we can leverage social to bring value back to the fans and back to ESPN. One of the things I don’t– it feels like people aren’t talking about enough is the rise of 5G and what that’s going to mean for content producers, particularly if you’ve ever tried to produce something from onsite at a stadium, just having that technological advancement I think will make a difference in how we’re thinking about live streaming content like an IG Live before a game, something like that.

Shawn:
Yeah. You kind of mumbled on that. What was the question again [laughter]?

Andrew:
How will content tech change in the next three years?

Shawn:
Oh, how will content change?

Shawn:
Okay. That’s why I let her because she’s like looking at me and wanting me to start.

Kaitee:
I was like, “I don’t know.” I’m done.

Shawn:
I didn’t understand [crosstalk]. I just think it’s going to– it’s just getting better. I think that the content from– I keep coming at it from the player’s perspective. But as younger kids, everyone is getting so good at creating content. And we’ve had different influential people for different brands, and then stuff with like drones filming them doing yoga and– people are just getting so good at it that kind of the prosumer type– before, I’d say, yeah, we needed a– send a camera crew and have a photoshoot. Now, people are just great at it. And I think that and I know you love GIFs and–

Andrew:
Love them.

Shawn:
He loves GIFs. Yeah. But all that stuff is–

Kaitee:
I do, too.

Shawn
People are getting better at creating quality content that is more personalized and it has enough of roughness to feel authentic. But yeah. I mean, I look at my two teenage daughters and they’re so good at this stuff, and I just think it’s– we see it time and time and time again where some of the stodgier companies that just started using us they’ll try to do something produced and they’ll do something with us and the raw stuff kills it every time, and it’s just going to keep getting more and more so.

Kaitee:
We’re going to see drone yoga–

Shawn:
Drone yoga.

Kaitee:
–instead of goat yoga? Yoga.

Shawn:
That’s right. That’s right.

Kaitee:
It’s the new–

Shawn:
We’re–

Kaitee:
–the new way [laughter].

Shawn:
That’s right.

Andrew:
All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us and thanks for staying.

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