Unofficial Partner Podcast

This is episode 12 of The Bundle, our regular deep dive in to the media rights market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke and our guest is Murray Barnett, ex ESPN, World Rugby, F1 and current founder of D2C Sport.If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Here’s ten things we talked about:Amazon is beginning to look like just another sports broadcaster. There’s fun to be had over-interpreting the basket case that is the French sports rights market. Amazon price structure for Ligue 1 suggests the end of cross-subsidization, which could be good news for rights owners; increases potential for future rights acquisitions. The Bundle price inflation: ESPN just announced their second rise in 2021. Does ESPN have an international vision, or it just an American thing? I live in the UK and never think of subscribing and I wonder if that’s significant. Does corporate memory shape strategy? ESPN got burnt from their experience with Premier League a decade or more ago, picking up scraps from Setanta and then losing them to BT Sport four years later. Does that experience still shape the company’s strategy, even though the people at the top are different?The reason Big Tech and football don’t fit seems too obvious: Football is a market by market thing whereas tech platforms are about breaking down that structure, like music, films and shopping. Note, Netflix is going after gaming not sport.Amazon’s NFL deal is an enormously expensive anomaly. DAZN x YouTube x Women’s Football: Globalization driving increased sponsorship opportunity; Limited downside, unlimited upside; UEFA’s recent deal for the Women’s Champions League could be the most significant of the year.When does a rights holder become a betting company? DraftKings new MLB deal includes live games alongside odds. The US discovers betting (streaming) rights, already a constant (and significaUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

What would you do if you had a blank sheet of paper and wanted to create a new type of sports rights holder. That’s the question posed in this conversation with Sam Renouf, Chief Executive of the Professional Triathlete Organisation, a body part owned by the best athletes in the world and backed by Sir Michael Moritz, one of the most successful tech investors of the last twenty years, via his company Sequoia Capital. What is the opportunity for the PTO to build a media and commercial programme around a new event schedule starting with The Collins Cup, a Ryder Cup-type international team format that pits the best in the world together on 28th  August. This is a way in to questions facing every sports rights holder as they seek to navigate a global marketplace of fans with fast changing expectations of how they want to consume elite sport. If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

This is a podcast about cookies, the tiny strands of data that follow us around the internet, allowing advertisers and websites to remember us, the pages we visit, our passwords and the contents of our shopping carts. So, we ask what they are, who’s using them, why Google and Apple are trying to remove them and what the specific implications of this will be for sports marketing, from the perspective of sponsor brands and for rights holders seeking to commercialise their teams, tournaments and other inventory via digital channels. To help us understand what a post-cookie internet might look like, we asked two experts in digital marketing to join us. Dr Augustine Fou is a world renowned leader in the topic of digital marketing and ad fraud who has held Group Chief Digital Officer roles for major advertising networks and is a former McKinsey consultant. https://www.linkedin.com/in/augustinefou/Joining Augustine is Phil Stephan, director at the sports data consultancy, Two Circles who has just published a white paper looking at this subject. https://twocircles.com/gb-en/articles/sport-third-party-cookie-crumbles/If you’re a sports data nerd, hold the purse strings of a brand marketing budget or just someone who wants to know more about how digital marketing really works, I promise this is a conversation you’ll want to hear.  If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

Re:Thinking Sport - The Players and P/EThis is the fourth episode in our series ReThinking Sport, organised in collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultant dedicated to sport and physical activity.Today’s topic looks at the role of private equity in football through the lens of the players. This alters the perspective on the conversation and I think, like me, you’ll find it opens up some very interesting routes in to what is one of the biggest questions in professional sport: Is private equity a good fit for sport?Our guests are Jonas Baer Hoffman, general secretary of FIFPro, the global representative of professional footballers which acts to support players interests across 64 national member associations. Joining Jonas is Peter Hawkings, part of the Portas leadership team with a focus on investment, who has served and advised CEOs of some of the largest federations in England and globally. If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

Steve Nuttall is one of the true pioneers of sport media and technology, working within some of the biggest companies in the world including notably, leading YouTube’s sport and UK business and managing the Google owned business’s relationships with major rights holders such as the IOC, FIFA and UEFA. Nuttall has also held leadership positions within Sky Sports, Telepiu (now Sky Italia), and Sportal, the early darlings of the first tech boom. Before that he was commercial director of ENIC under Daniel Levy. He’s a board member of Ofcom and managing director of the America’s Cup sailing race. For everyone interested in sport’s value as a media product, this was a great opportunity to have a conversation about how we got here, and what that tells us about where we’re going. If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

The Cannes Lions awards are synonymous with excellence in marketing creativity and in 2019 they launched a sports specific category. Because of Covid, the entries for 2020 and 2021 have been combined and a short list of the best creative work in sports marketing was produced. The head of the judging panel for the awards was Ben Hartmann, chief client officer for Octagon, and he’s our guest today.We talk about the criteria the panel of ten judges used to judge the work and we choose our favourites from the short list. It’s a conversation about creativity in a sports marketing context, and much more besides, from the role of agencies, whether sponsorship helps or hinders creativity and we look at the threads that are common to the very best work. If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

Today is day two of the Wimbledon championships, a fortnight of tennis, polite queues and Pimms. And as of this year, Sipsmith gin following the brands five-year deal with the All England Club, the rights owner of the grand slam tournament. So we talked to Alex Willis, Head of Communications, Content and Digital, at the All England Club and Shelley MacIntyre, who's Senior Global Marketing Director of gin brands for beam Suntory, the corporate owner of Sipsmith. If you like the podcast, you're really like the Unofficial Partner newsletter that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business. Every Thursday to join them sign up by Unofficial Partner dot comUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

Today’s podcast is the first of a series in which we look at sports market through the lens of one of the biggest media and marketing networks in the world, Omnicom. This allows us to get beyond the bubble of the sport sponsorship industry and look at sport through a wider lens and allows us to ask some broader questions as to the value of sport to brand clients. So this is a conversation about what CMOs want from their marketing spend, and whether sport is equipped to deliver on those demands, we note the gap between the level of digital inventory on offer within sponsor term sheets, compared to the demand for digital advertising generally, which leads to the question, is sport selling what brands want to buy?Our guests are three business leaders from across the Omnicom media network. Louise Johnson is CEO of Fuse, Omnicom’s sport and entertainment agency, with clients including PepsiCo, Barclays, FedEx, Nissan, Vodafone, Royal London, EasyJet and Klarna. Louise is joined by Dan Clay, CEO of Omnicom Media Group and Bhavin Balvantrai, Chief Market Analyst, OMG Group UK.If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

Today’s guest is Roger Mitchell, who you may know from another sports business podcast, Are You Not Entertained, where he uses his background in sport, finance and the music industry to great effect in questioning what’s happening in sport. Roger is great to talk to on a range of subjects, so that’s what we do, from podcasts and private equity to Spurs, Celtic, The Verve, machine learning and Tiger Woods. It’s a broad church and a good laugh.  If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.

This is another in our series where Richard and co-host Laura Weston look at the sports business through the lens of women from within and outside the industry. Our guest today is Jennifer McClearen, author of a fascinating new book, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFCThe book raises issues about the role of women in sports marketing, the difference between their visibility and the value they receive in return, we talk about some of the popular tropes of women’s sport and at the reality of life within the UFC’s business model. If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.