Royal Ascot and Wimbledon: Dressing up for Britain’s summer season of sport

0:03James Emmett:Hello and welcome to the Leaders Worth Knowing podcast, the sports industry show from leaders where we talk about what's worth knowing in the business of sport this week. I'm Leaders Editorial Director James Emmett.

0:15David Cushnan:And I'm Content Director David Cushnan. On the show this week, hot takes from James's week in amongst the agencies, celebrities and brands in Cannes. dressing up for sport as Britain's summer season is in full swing. And two weeks in, who is winning the World Cup? This is Leaders Worth Knowing. It is.

0:37James Emmett:It really is, David. David, it looks like you are... Do you know what? Never has the blue dressing of the Leaders Studio looked so appropriate and offset so wonderfully with a sort of peachy nectarine-y salmon pink. number that you're wearing there. But the blue looks good. It looks cold. It looks cool. It looks air conditioned. Unprecedented times here in June in the United Kingdom. David, it's hot.

1:06David Cushnan:It is. This is one of the few bits of London where there is a little bit of air conditioning, actually, in my experience this week. Blimey, it's a hot one. Good luck if you've been experiencing the heat wave in the UK and indeed large parts of continental Europe, which, James, is where you and much of the sports industry has been holed up this week down on the French Riviera.

1:30James Emmett:Yeah, and it's hot down there as well, down in Cannes. We are speaking on Thursday. I spent Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in Cannes. And it's interesting talking about the heat wave here in the UK. Similar temperatures out in Cannes, but it's sort of perhaps more normal for temperatures to be plus 30 degrees Celsius. out there on the French Riviera. But the talk of the town in Cannes, or some of the talk of the town, of course, about the freebies that you get at a big junket, a big boondoggle like this with all sorts of major companies looking to make an impact, looking to give something memorable away.

2:12James Emmett:What's in your bag? Well, I've got a new philosophy personally, which is I am vehemently anti-merch now, anti-freebies. I will not. Is that since you were told to declare it? No, it was, it's basically I now only travel with a backpack. So I don't actually have any room for anything. No, well, in such hot weather, the things that you really need to have, fans, what's useful? What's useful sports industry merch? What's useful industry merch? These things, any kind of fan motorized or, you know, analog. um sun cream um sun cream of course um hats um but also there was this i can't remember the brand but there was some kind of emulsion being pushed around and no one could quite um get their heads around precisely what it was for it wasn't sun cream it wasn't face cream and the rumor doing the rounds so there was something that's um sort of colloquially known as um cream for chub rub days uh which which is a particular type of chafing um that you might get in hot weather um around the legs uh but who knows i don't know where this cream came from so i didn't

3:33David Cushnan:didn't receive any um but yeah yes uh you have returned from can um without any goodies by the sound of it but i'm sure with um you know lots of great memories and uh perhaps a few business cards as well um it really seems more than ever and we have done some podcasts about it um over the last week or so with our friends at fuse that the entire sports industry i would say apart from me decamps to can this week and has done for the last couple of years as sport has become a more formal part of all the festivities at the Festival of Marketing. How was it this year? What was your sort of overall sense of it?

4:21David Cushnan:And to what extent did it really feel like sport is not just there, but there in force and perhaps even the dominant player there now, the dominant sector?

4:34James Emmett:Yeah, well, it's interesting you say that it feels like the whole sports industry has decamped to can i would say that there's something um there there's definitely a marmite element to can um and um you know people love it or hate it um and there are equally as many people who absolutely wouldn't go anywhere near it if you paid them um as are there um formula one we're doing a really interesting activation um with caa which was a real trend actually of can and sports um showing up in Cannes this year, the rights or rights organizations kind of partnering with agency organizations to put on some kind of B2B focal point hospitality type offering.

5:23James Emmett:But Formula One was in town doing this thing, this hospitality kind of thing with CAA. They had various woke up watch parties and sundowners and whatnot there. But I messaged Emily Praiser, the chief commercial officer at Formula One, to see if she was in town she came straight back to me within seconds uh two words god no um and and i thought no that's reasonable um there's definitely something that most most of the conversations i had there with sports folks um who have been to can before there's definitely a sense that you get sucked into it it's like a black hole that inexorably sort of sucks you in most people said they weren't intending on coming this year um but kind of made a last last minute decision to go and you're right the breadth of there is there is much more sport at can this year and it has just continued a trend that we've seen over the last few years so significant differences this year there is an official sports program can line themselves have started an official program.

6:32James Emmett:That is inevitably sort of ramping up marketing and attention for Sports Place at Cannes this year. There is, it's worth saying for anyone who hasn't been to Cannes, it is not just an official program. There are something like 20, 30 other essentially conferences going on at the same time at activation spaces around the town, most of which have sort of four days of programming, you know, people getting up on stage and talking about stuff. And sport has never played a bigger role in the programming and it's never played a bigger role in the participants, both the number of them and the breadth of them.

7:14James Emmett:Yes, agency folks who are sort of advertising, marketing adjacent, who always will have found Cannes to be a kind of happy hunting ground. yes rights holder organizations particularly sponsorship focused folks at sports properties yet definitely come along to a hot spot for kind of brand marketing conversation you are going to get something out of it but increasingly an extra layer of the sports ecosystem could be found there. What I would describe as sort of more like bread and butter sports industry service providers out in force who are attracted to the bigger fish that are there. You know, their audience, their selling audience is, or their buying audience is there.

8:10James Emmett:So yeah, all sorts of folks that you would see at mainstream sports industry conferences. around about the place sort of there often for the first time um and yeah a real range of people real range of kind of yeah um sort of execs talent there's a lot of athletes a lot of influencers a lot of um techie people ad tech folks a lot of major u.s firms lots of u.s money of course and a lot of big hitters there as well. I literally bumped into Shad Khan, the owner of Fulham and Jacksonville Jaguars, just sitting at the back of a talk that was going on at Omnicom on one of the days and had a nice little chat with him.

9:02James Emmett:Very accessible. Yeah, there's a lot of folks there.

9:08David Cushnan:Yeah. I suppose it'd be quite interesting to speak to people in, say, the music industry and, you know, the official part of Cannes, the Cannes Lions Awards. They have a music category. You know, is the music industry, you know, noticing really that sport has sort of dialed up its presence at this thing? Or indeed, is the music industry seeing itself as dialing up its own presence at Cannes? I think there's, as somebody who's not there, I've never been to Cannes, I suppose my sceptical side would suggest, well, would wonder whether this is simply a week for sport to sort of slap itself on the back.

10:02David Cushnan:you know give itself a big pat on the back at the very shiny elite celebrity end of the industry in front of the big brands and sort of somewhere near you know Spotify's beach etc

10:19James Emmett:um well remind me to come back to the music thing um but is this a place where sport just goes and slaps itself on the back I don't think so I think in general that's the vibe of Cannes It's lots of marketing type people going to slap themselves on the back. But maybe that's just what you get with anything that has an awards program at its heart. But the sports thing, I'm not sure it's necessarily so self-congratulatory. Sports has become a real focal point and an easy hook for more complicated hats to be hung on. And what I mean by that is if you want to talk about programmatic advertising or an AI program that's going to sift through millions and millions of thumbnail adverts to deliver sort of A-B testing for a particular market, that is going to be interesting to a very narrow market.

11:27James Emmett:market but if you manage to get yourself up onto stage with um to talk about that but with Draymond Green who's a you know an NBA player um who's come to talk about his involvement in Cannes as well and you know it just it puts bums on seats yeah and much more obvious storytelling opportunities

11:49David Cushnan:with sport and actually the athlete point is interesting because of course it's useful for the event to have a load of athletes turn up. It's obviously helpful and the brands and agencies in particular can help facilitate that. I suppose the rights holders as well, but actually maybe part of this growth in focus for sport at Cannes is actually jumping on this trend that we're seeing for athletes, seeing themselves as more than athletes and as media entities, as entrepreneurs, as investors and they, I assume at some level for some of them, the most forward thinking, they're coming to this and using it, yes, as a networking, you know, they're using it in the way you might use a B2B event, which is a networking exercise and a learning exercise.

12:37James Emmett:Yes, definitely. And I've not, obviously we are fortunate enough to go to lots of different sporting events and perhaps less fortunate to have to go to lots of sports industry events. But I don't think I've ever been in an environment where there are plenty of celebrities, I suppose. There are plenty of well-known athletes and well-known artists from other fields who are so open to engage with whoever. um they certainly the people that are there are not just there for a payday although clearly a lot of them are getting a big payday and it's funny how the money sort of changes hands and can um you know it's one agency paying another agency for an appearance from some talent and then sort of being paid back as that person then goes and yeah there's all that sort of thing um but yeah the athletes are really happy to engage and they are not just shiny diversions i would say um that are being sort of shown off or you know used as fodder to invite people to a kind of round table where you can sell your services um they the ones in my experience anyway tend to show up and know that they have to engage to get something out of it out of it i would point to a few examples just the people that I came across this week um who were great um Daniel Sturridge former footballer turned pundit uh had a really nice chat with him uh very interesting very smart guy Adam Ola-Lukman uh likewise current Atletico Madrid player um very sensitive and open-minded, softly spoken guy.

14:31James Emmett:And Adam Ola himself was there with Clutch Sports Group. And I had a chat with Farah Leff, who's the chief operating officer at Clutch. And they were saying that it's so pivotal for them, Can, in their year and in their ambition to go global and go into different aspects of the sports industry. Clutch is a relatively new sports agency founded in 2012, I think, by a little group of NBA players, including LeBron James and his business partner, Rich Paul. It's grown out of the seeds of that as a different style of representation agency. Now it's doing much more traditional sports agency things. It's doing brand consulting, sponsorship, property sales.

15:20James Emmett:It's currently selling Aston Villa's front of shirt space, for example, or attempting to. And Farah was explaining that the investment in Cannes, you know, they take a space. They take one of the beaches, I suppose, and it costs somewhere between three and four million dollars for the week just for that space. And then bringing all your people along, bringing talent along, you're probably, you know, another three million dollars probably. That is a huge investment over the course of the week. But she says it's so useful for them as they expand and make an impact in wider media and marketing industries.

16:01James Emmett:They are, as they see it, showing up with sport and demonstrating that sport can operate in a different way than it has in the past. This sort of athletes as X, Y, and Z conversation, which is one that we've been talking about for a little bit in the sports industry, but it's not one that necessarily your average sort of marketing leader is going to necessarily be au fait with. The idea that this athlete is very useful and versatile and much more open to working in a multimodal kind of media landscape than simply pushing the, you know, being a mouthpiece for a brand.

16:49David Cushnan:You mentioned to remind you about music and the point I was getting to was I would be intrigued to understand how the music industry, how industries other than sport see can and whether they feel like their own industry is dialing up, dialing down its presence and actually what they think about sports creep into can, if you like. And I guess a lot of what you said just there probably holds for artists as well.

17:19James Emmett:Yeah, definitely. And I reckon there's probably more music artists in Cannes than there are sports athletes, simply because it's quite a good payday for music in Cannes. Most of these beach activations have gigs, sort of concerts attached to them. most nights of the week spotify is there and has had a large presence there for many years and they go really big and they have massive name artists come along every day uh to perform but you also see artists show up and perform in all sorts of different spaces across the week self-esteem was there for example this year prof green is always there um will i am shows up absolutely everywhere um yeah he does yeah there's also there's all sorts of and obviously all of their representation people will be there with them as well um i i don't know about the wider music industry i wouldn't know to bump into them and they're on the on the closet so i wouldn't know uh if there are you know if it's teaming with uh label executives or or you know the wider ecosystem but I assume so.

18:30David Cushnan:Yes, yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to all the lukewarm takes about Cam on LinkedIn and elsewhere over the next few days as people summarize their trip and tell us all exactly

18:45James Emmett:what they learned. Did you see? So the perennial kind of stars of Cam, the big marketing thought leaders um who always do a bit of everything they're very busy during can your galloways your ritsons your galloways your ritsons your sutherlands um even your evan shapiro's right there are plenty of folks who like do the rounds ritson uh was everywhere and he did a he did i think on the monday he did a talk in the palais on the official program um with another bloke in marketing and they basically it was set up as a debate um and they ran through a lot of different disciplines in marketing and gave their view on them um but that's this great it's so just generate that sort of stuff just generates so much extra content there's a guy there's a marketing professor somewhere who wrote his lukewarm take on linkedin about that thing saying that he was quite underwhelmed overall because x y and z but he'd stated earlier on that he didn't get to see this talk but he's seen plenty of summaries already on linkedin and he has to say he's underwhelmed and just oh no he's summarizing the summaries yes and he's underwhelmed yeah so i mean ritson's not shy of going in on people like that um and so he has did linkedin do linkedin do a big activation yeah they do yeah do they yeah yeah yeah i've got some questions for linkedin but you know

20:17David Cushnan:So maybe we'll get them on one day. Well done, James. You survived another can. Give us some color on your travel flights. All okay? All fine, man. Yeah.

20:30James Emmett:Don't worry about it. Travel's boring. All right. I did see that Danny Rogers, who is the, I think he's the editor-in-chief of PR Week. Yes. He did the, you know, the whole moaning about travel. from the position of immense relative privilege. Yes. Sort of been done to death on various social platforms. But Danny Rogers did one, a rare example of the complete opposite, where he posted something about how great it was to see the pilot come out of the cockpit, grab a microphone and explain to the plane, looking them in the eye, that they would be delayed because of various weather situations. Great example of PR, and he just wanted to shine a light on it.

21:16David Cushnan:Yeah, well, why not? Actually, genuine question. Everybody flies into Nice. Does Nice Airport get dressed for Cannes?

21:23James Emmett:No. Not everyone flies into Nice. Most people fly into Nice. But there are plenty of people who go into Marseille also. Got it.

21:33David Cushnan:But the airport is not taking advantage of that influx.

21:40James Emmett:Yeah, there's some, well, there's advertising. um you know i noticed a big tiktok a very funny tiktok ad dev um at nice airport which said something like uh if we can do out of home you can do tiktok um you know and we were all chuckling

22:00David Cushnan:at that yes no no well it could be in line for an award next year um james shall we move on from can and yes can i fill you in actually on a couple of other bits that have been happening in the industry as you've been, you know, treading the boards or whatever it is people don't. Well, do you know what?

22:16James Emmett:It's been happening once I've been there. We're going to talk about it. But Osama Al-Khassab from Wimbledon was there yesterday and I was able to talk to him about what we're about to say, David.

22:29David Cushnan:Which is that Wimbledon, which begins on Monday, has renewed its UK media rights deal with the BBC until 2033. The BBC has promised a a refreshed approach to coverage and next year will mark 100 years since the BBC first broadcast Wimbledon. So a significant moment. MSP Sports Capital has acquired a majority stake in the Blackfoils New Zealand Sale GP team, valuing it at a reported$60 million. That's the final Sale GP team to move into private hands in the end of a long process. And Kilmer Sports Ventures and Illich companies have joined the Professional Women's Hockey League as strategic partners.

23:12David Cushnan:They are the first outside investors since the league launched in 2023.

23:17James Emmett:The UK Professional Golfers Association has hired Nick Oakley as its new CEO. Another Nick, Nick Coward, has been named chair of the National League, the body that runs English non-league football. And former Leicester City CEO Susan Whelan has a new role as chair of Prime Arena Holdings, the company behind a new indoor arena being developed in Dublin.

23:44David Cushnan:Back to the conversation in just a moment, but first some exciting news about Leaders Week London. The first batch of speakers are confirmed and this October you'll be hearing from a formidable line-up of leaders across the sports and entertainment industries, including Brandon Riege, the VP of Non-Fiction Series and Sports at Netflix, the CEO of the International Cricket Council, Sanjog Gupta and NWSL's Commissioner Jessica Berman alongside many many more. To find out more about who else is speaking, the key themes due to be covered, why it all matters to you, head to leadersinsport.com forward slash leadersweek.

24:23David Cushnan:That's leadersinsport.com forward slash leaders week.