Unofficial Partner Podcast

This is another in our series All Models Are Wrong, which goes deep in to the subject of digital strategy in sport. Previous episodes have featured Mark Oliver, Alex Balfour and Daniel Kirschner, each of which is available via unofficialpartner.com or wherever you get your podcasts.This week we talk Aarti Dabas, who has just started a new role as head of media for Formula E having previously been head of media, broadcast and digital for the ICC,cricket’s global governing body.We spoke to Aarti a few weeks ago before she took up her new job and her views don’t represent those of her new or her former employer.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 podcast is a conversation with Ed Smith, the chair of England cricket selectors on the subject of decision making, the first of an occasional series on various aspects of leadership.Ed was a professional cricketer for Kent, Middlesex and England whose career was curtailed by injury at the age of 31 when he started his second career as  an author, journalist and commentator on the iconic Test Match Special before being made England cricket’s chief national cricket selector in 2018.Ed co-founded The Institute of Sports Humanities (ISH) which runs higher education programmes for professionals working in the sports industry. The MA Leadership in Sport is a 12-month non-residential course – designed so that students can stay in their jobs while studying – features evening seminars in London, online and with visits to other partner venues.  You can contact them here.This podcast was recorded on the 8th of May.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.

From sport and music, to films, radio or literature, every part of the culture industry is defined and shaped by the metrics we use to measure the audience for them.But who decides what metrics to use? This is a question posed by today’s guest Matt Locke, the co-founder of Storythings, and someone who I’ve been trying to get on the podcast since we started a year or so ago.Matt is one of the most interesting thinkers on our relationship with media, and he has written a series of essays called How To Measure Ghosts. Before starting Storythings in 2011, Matt worked in Digital Media for over two decades. He was Head of Innovation at BBC New Media from 2001, then moved to Channel 4 where he was Commissioning Editor, Education, and later Head of Multiplatform.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 we ask what’s going to happen next? What should we all look out for as, when or if things return to whatever normal looks like post-covid. To help answer the question, we asked James Toller and Rob Pope of Mallory Group to give us some clues. Rob, James and Ross Collett of Roco Communications have pooled their knowledge working both in Europe, the USA and Asia and have written a white paper under the heading of There's a New Normal Coming for Sports Rights Holders - Are You Ready? which is available free via Mallory Group’s website. So we use this as a starting point for a conversation which is I think relevant to everyone who touches sport, from top to bottom.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 podcast is the first in a series called Money Talks, conversations about sport’s relationship with private equity, venture capital and the financial markets. We’re asking a series of simple questions relating to money: Who needs it, how do they get it, who do they get it from, and what are the implications of that, how does the source of finance change the behaviour of the people in charge of sport at all levels.  Our first guest is Jason Traub, co-founder of 23Capital. 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 podcast is the latest episode of in our series on the past, present and future of digital strategy. You can find the other episodes via our website unoffiicalpartner.com or your preferred podcast app.Everyone’s got the memo on digital transformation, and we’ve heard from strategists about the why it’s such a priority for virtually every business in the sport sector.But we don’t often talk about how it all works in practice. How do you make sense of the what is quite often a chaotic social media environment, where you've got event holders, teams, leagues and players all trying use the same channels to reach an audience and build their brands across social media.So I asked the Unofficial Partner WhatsApp group whose opinion they took seriously in this space, and several of them mentioned Greenfly, which is a Santa Monica based tech company that was co-founded by today’s guest Daniel Kirschner and his cousin Shawn Green, the former LA Dodgers baseball star.We talk about what Greenfly does, and then got in to the broader questions that face everyone when they try to build a coherent story on social media.If you enjoy the Unofficial Partner podcasts, please take the time to rate and subscribe via iTunes as it helps other people find us, and you can sign up to our newsletter, again via the website.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 podcast is a conversation about sports agencies: what they do, how the current shutdown is going to change that and the longer term opportunities and threats they face.CSM’s Jim Glover has been working agency side since he started at IMG’s golf client division in the 1980s before he set up Lighthouse Communications in 1994, for clients including Heineken, GlaxoSmithKline, and Land Rover. That business was sold to Fast Track in December 2005, which in turn was acquired by Chime Communications Plc in 2007. Jim was CEO of CSM Sport & Entertainment for 5 years before taking on the role of Deputy Chairman in 2015, overseeing a range of businesses that comprise CSM, such as Fast Track, Essentially, Iluka, the JMI motorsport business and the design agency Icon.The interview took place two weeks ago.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.

Mark Oliver was the BBC’s first head of strategy before creating Oliver and Ohlbaum Associates, one of the leading sport and entertainment strategy boutiques helping investors, media owners, tech companies, policy makers and sports bodies understand and respond to the emerging digital revolution.Mark has advised on every Premier League rights negotiation since 1995 and the agency’s clients include CVC, Google, Serie A, Formula E, Spotfiy and the BBC among others. Our conversation is framed by two pieces Mark wrote for Sportcal, which I thought best articulated the challenge sport now faces. The first was written in 2018 and describes the first and second wave of disruption hitting the sports sector. The second, written a few weeks ago, looks at how the current covid shutdown will accelerate this process. Here are the links to the Sportcal articles: https://www.sportcal.com/Insight/opinion/118138https://www.sportcal.com/Insight/Opinion/131327 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.

Welcome to All Models Are Wrong, the first in a new occasional series of Unofficial Partner conversations that focus specifically on digital strategy in sport. We first met Alex Balfour when he was chairman of Cricinfo, now part of ESPN in the early days of sports first Dotcom boom. He was one of a small group of people able to articulate the then future of sport’s relationship with technology. It was no surprise then that he landed the key digital role at LOCOG, the organising committee for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Since then his career has included several landmark moments, he is currently CEO of Digital Brand Services and working on a digital strategy for the Commonwealth Games Federation, a Technology and Innovation Strategy for the Supreme Committee organising the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar and advising on digital commercial strategy for CAAELeven, UEFA’s commercial partner for the 2020 European Football Championship (Euro 2020). The day of recording he’d just left his most recent project working with TEAM Marketing, UEFA’s exclusive commercial partner for the UEFA Champions League, Europa and Super Cups. 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 we talk to David Coulthard, MBE the Formula One racing driver turned presenter and commentator, who co-founded the sports production company Whisper Films with BT presenter Jake Humphrey and former BBC producer Sunil Patel.Coulthard drove for Williams, McLaren and Red Bull racing teams during his career, winning 13 Grand Prix in all, finishing second in the 2001 driver’s championship to Michael Schumacher. His got his start in F1 in 1993, when he became a test-driver for the Williams F1 team, where he was promoted to the team after Ayrton Senna’s tragic death during the San Marino Grand Prix, with Coulthard’s first race drive taking place a week later at the Spanish Grand Prix, with Damon Hill as his team-mate.We talk about lockdown life in his home town of Monaco, the Senna documentary, what F1 insiders are talking about when it comes to getting the show back on the road, the W Series the women’s race series which Coulthard co-founded and plenty more besides. He was great company, which I think comes through our conversation.If you enjoy the Unofficial Partner podcasts please take the time to rate and review us on iTunes as it helps us find new listeners and move up the rankings.See you next time for more sports business conversations.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.