What does a Chief Media Officer do all day?

0:03Hello and welcome to Leaders Worth Knowing, the sports business podcast from Leaders. it's a podcast from leaders in sport about leaders in sport one of these days i will get that right and we'll inject a bit of consistency into it my name is james emmett i'm the editorial director here at leaders and i'm flying solo today david kushnan caught up in a tube strike chaos here in london but it's not the end of the world though because it's giving him a lot of time with computer to nail down the final bits and pieces, cross those T's, dot those I's, squiggle those Q's. Anyway, finalize the program for Leaders Week, which is fast approaching.

0:5229th of September, it begins. We are kicking off with our Attention Seekers Workshop on the 29th, moving to a Leaders Club event on the 30th and our awards at the beautiful V &A Museum on the evening of the 30th. And then we've got the summit, the big one at Allianz Stadium, Twickenham on the 1st and 2nd of October. An absolute smorgasbord of sports business greatness on the menu, headlined, of course by roger goodell um the haslam's ted leonsis a whole truckload of brand sponsors this year we've just confirmed the cmo of hugo boss uh as well it's honestly it's going to be huge final places uh available now it's going to be about 2 000 people there 3 000 across the week but do get in touch and get your place once you still can on the show today i've literally just wrapped up a conversation with Brian Herbst, who is the EVP Chief Media and Revenue Officer at NASCAR, the American Stock Racing Championship.

2:06And Brian is something of a lifer at NASCAR, which has developed into, in this new media age of ours, something of a pioneer in its approach to reaching new, younger, sometimes younger audiences on new, interesting platforms. So Brian's responsibility as chief media and revenue officer is principally in generating revenue through media platforms. But he also works closely with Tim Clark and Nick Rend, who work on the marketing and technology side of the business and are responsible for partnerships with the likes of Roblox, Substack, Fortnite, you name it, NASCAR are in it. There's a lot of talk, obviously, in the sports media world about Formula One and what a great job Formula One has done, reaching new fans, internationalising, since Liberty really got into the swing of things with their ownership, the Las Vegas Grand Prix, a focus on the US, drive to survive, obviously.

3:14But Brian, in this conversation, really gently lays down a marker as to who the dominant motorsport series in the US is. Formula One doing very well to be reaching around about 1.2 million viewers now, significantly up since Drive to Survive. 1.2 million for each race week in the US. But NASCAR, particularly for its big races, Daytona 500, for example, is reaching eight or nine million folks. We'll get into the conversation very soon. But the really interesting thing that Brian has just done and is really interesting and articulate on is the media rights landscape. So a couple of years ago, he finalized the latest batch of partners for NASCAR on that front.

4:06He signed five separate deals, five partners,$7.7 billion over seven years, the reported numbers, and it all kicked off this year. So this year NASCAR have Fox and NBC Sports as retained broadcast partners, both of them showing 14 Cup Series races and kind of splitting the calendar beginning and end. And then they've got new partners in for this cycle in TNT, Max, Amazon, a new streaming partner, as well as the CW network who are in for NASCAR's second tier Saturday series, the Xfinity series. Enough waffle. Brian is a very interesting guy and you will be able to hear from him now. here is Brian Herbst.

4:55So joining me now is Brian Herbst, EVP, Chief Media and Revenue Officer at NASCAR. Brian, how are you? Fantastic. Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. Love, love leaders. And really appreciate having the time to talk with me today. Well, good of you to say. And we love NASCAR, it has to be said. It feels like pretty much once a month these days. We are putting something in our weekly newsletter, Brian, just lauding a piece of innovation that NASCAR are putting out. It strikes me that you are sitting in an organisation that is sort of pushing the boundaries of what's possible for a sports organisation at the moment.

5:42So hats off to you and the organisation for trying things. And we'll dig into some of those things as we get on in the conversation. But the first question I want to ask you, Brian, is can you dig into the role a little bit? You've got a few titles in one there. What are your role and responsibilities? What does the day-to-day look like? There's no standard day-to-day for sure. So each day is a little bit different than the one prior or the one to come. My professional portfolio is the media side of the business. So managing our media partnerships, both domestically and our global media strategy, our productions group.

6:22So we have an in-house live event productions group of about a hundred folks or so. So similar to if you're talking about F1 or you're talking about, we're talking about Wimbledon before there's an in-house team that produces a host broadcast feed and then distributes that globally. We handle that for NASCAR races, not just our NASCAR Cup Series on Sunday, but the Xfinity Series on Saturday. And then on Friday, we run our Truck Series. So we have kind of like a motorsports programming block, if you will, from Friday to Sunday with the Cup Series on Sunday being the most high profile event. So the productions group, the sales and revenue teams as well.

7:04So what we've seen is, especially in this very complex environment, the more we can kind of be a one-stop shop for brands and for sponsors where if they're doing an official NASCAR partnership, if they want to do a track entitlement deal and they want to do a media buy, finding a way to package that all into one. That's been a shift in strategy for us over the last year. So the revenue side of the business reports to me as well. And then technology. So anything from making sure that you get your computer on time to making sure that we don't get a cyber attack from a ransomware actor. So like I said, And each day brings a little surprises, but it keeps us on our toes.

7:40Wow. So you're responsible for making sure that your staff have working laptops. Well, yes, not me personally. In fact, my laptop's a little buggy right now. But yes, all those sort of important jobs as well. Well, there's a big old brief you've got there, Brian. And will you humor me just for a little bit? And whenever we ask this question, you know, what does, especially with people who have sort of senior and broad briefs, always they will throw in no one day looks the same. But I just wonder what today actually, just take today. What does it look like for you? What have you got? Obviously, it's early morning for you over in Charlotte.

8:20What's coming up? Describe what the day's got in store for you. Tuesday, it's coffee for sure. Yeah. So Tuesday morning is usually routine. ish from February and until November. And that will get some sort of a TV report, ratings report that comes in from the weekend. So I'll look at that and then there'll be a top line number and then I'll try to figure out why. So for instance, today, whenever that news report lands, it'll be interesting to see how NFL is doing relative to us. And every time the week start to compete with NFL, our ratings will take up a little bit of a hit just because they're such a beast in the States, at least in terms of the attention and timeshare that they draw from the media landscape.

9:05So that'll be a little bit of this morning. There's some personnel things that we'll talk through. I already have a couple requests to figure out if we add new positions or give people a bump. So we'll work through that from a budgeting perspective. it's also 2026 business planning time and so we'll get our first look at 2026 numbers and how those are trending and then we'll go to work to make sure that we we can hit the numbers that we need to hit for for 2026 but that's the the kickoff to that part of the year for us is usually right around now um so that's i guess that's a version of today and then whatever surprises pop up between now and the time i get off this call and forgive me one more question on this sort of theme presumably it's a lot of meetings right there's a lot of talking there's a lot of listening but do as a as a senior exec working in sport are you building in time in your calendar to have just focused time for you to not be disturbed i try to do a better job of doing that so i'll look at the the week coming up and i'll try to block off windows um that i see are already open um sometimes those get gobbled up.

10:11Sometimes those don't. But what I find is that if I don't try to take that time during the day, then I end up doing all of that work at night. And that can be tough over the course of a 12-month season for us. So I do try to block off some free time, for sure. So those media numbers that are going to hit your desk this morning at some stage, you mentioned the NFL obviously starting last weekend. They're obviously going to make a big impact on viewing figures, you'd think. But we are in the first year of a new media cycle for you guys at NASCAR. You, Brian, oversaw the sale of this current cycle of rights last year, confirming a sort of split between four key media partners.

11:01$7.7 billion was the reported total figure across seven years. You can confirm or deny that if you wish. But could you just give me a very quick overview from your perspective on what you considered to be highlights of the package that you were able to put together? I mean, I think the biggest piece that we wanted to try to get right, and I'd say tough to get this perfect, but we were very intentional about finding a way to balance kind of the linear audience and traditional cable audience that had been our home and destination for NASCAR fans and NASCAR programming for the better part of 40 years or so, while also finding a way to have a digital and streaming component into our media rights package to talk to the fans of the future, a younger audience, somebody that may not subscribe to cable television, but we want to make sure that we serve them NASCAR content in some way, shape, or form.

12:01For NASCAR, cable TV and pay TV was A, still the most valuable piece of the media rights puzzle. We, NASCAR, are very important to Fox Sports 1 and USA, and we perform really well on cable TV. But we also saw the number of cable homes in the U.S. drop from about 100 million paid TV subscribers when we signed our last deal in 2013 to about 65 million or so by the time our next rights deal came up in 2023. So we need to find some sort of a balance between traditional linear environment and the digital streaming side. And so we were intentional about adding digital and streaming pieces to the puzzle.

12:44So we knew we had interest from both our of our incumbents, Fox and NBC, to renew their NASCAR rights agreement. We were able to get to a good spot with them from both a value and an inventory perspective. Both partners were able to give up some inventory for us to get a little bit more innovative during this summer series, part of the season for us. And then we ended up working with Amazon in terms of only pure streaming capacity, as well as TNT slash Max. They simulcast Cup Series races in their package as well. And then the last partner is specific to the Xfinity series, that Saturday series that I talked about before.

13:23That's Nexstar is the biggest public station, local station group in the country. They have a free-to-air broadcast network called the CW that was getting active in sports. So we ended up with five meteorites partners. Five. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Okay. So a sort of midway through the first year, a little bit more than midway through the first year, what's your assessment now of how it's going? First of all, reflecting on the deals you're able to put together, do you feel like they were still good deals? If you were doing them right now, would we be in a similar place, worse, better?

14:00And yeah, how do you feel like it's gone so far? The media landscape moves so quickly that I would be surprised if we came up for a rights deal in 2025 that it looks the exact same as it did in 2023. I mean, just the fluidity of this environment, obviously globally, but particularly in the States, there's always some new initiative, right? And so a new initiative might be Paramount is acquired by Skydance, and so they're going to become more acquisitive. Or ESPN is launching an app, and so they're going to be more acquisitive. So do I think it would look exactly the same in 25 as it did in 23?

14:34Probably not, but I don't know what the different iterations of that could be because it's impossible to prove a hypothetical. But what I would say is we're really pleased with the first launch of the first year of these media rights deals. Fox, if I'm just doing our quick report card, Fox came aboard and they had less broadcast windows than they did last year because we had to move inventory to cable. But their average viewership for NASCAR was the exact same in 25 as it was in 24. So it probably performed a little bit better on the viewership side with Fox than we anticipated. Amazon, they did a great job marketing and promoting the sport.

15:13If you were trying to buy paper towels for your family on Sunday afternoons during a NASCAR race, you were going to see a NASCAR race instead of buying paper towels. If you're trying to watch Reacher, the TV show, you're going to see a NASCAR race instead of that. So they put us in places that are unexpected, homepage of amazon.com. And those numbers were better than we anticipated. About 2.2 million viewers for the Amazon portion of the season, which is in line with cable. And then TNT was our third Cup Series partner. We're in the middle of the NBC portion of the season now. But TNT performed well on the viewership side.

15:46And then what was kind of equally cool for us to see is they got really innovative and creative in terms of how they promoted to market the sport. So Bleach Report, House of Highlights, It's all of these like TNT, Warner Brothers Discovery endemic tools that they had. They helped us get younger as well. And then the Xfinity series is actually up 17 % year over year. It was a mostly cable property last year. It's a broadcast product only this year because the single home for the series is on the CW on Saturday afternoons. And those guys have done a great job as well. At a broad brush sort of level, a macro level, what's behind the approach that you took and that we're seeing a lot of big rights holders taking at the moment of spreading content across multiple partners, more partners than previously?

16:39And is the concept of exclusivity in the media world or near exclusivity dead? You know, I don't want to be disingenuous on this. I mean, it starts with the economics and it starts with the financials, frankly. So if the UFC is able to get$1.1 billion from one partner versus two or three, I understand the reason that you go with an exclusive strategy with Paramount and CBS. Yes, I think for other partners and other properties, the financials are so important. They're essentially the lifeblood for certainly our sport, but most sports that you do have to get to a certain financial target. And you feel that when you're in the middle of these negotiations, for sure.

17:21But outside of the financials, for us, it was important to diversify our content distribution mix between cable and digital streaming. I think we've seen the cable environment fall faster than we maybe anticipated five or six years ago. We've seen the digital and streaming time consumption increase faster than we would have expected. And when you have a property like the NFL, for instance, who have more rights to play with on a year-to-year basis, you can kind of see them getting intentional about shifting to the digital and streaming platforms. They're carving out more inventory for Netflix. They're carving out inventory for YouTube.

17:59So they're trying to make sure that there's some sort of relevancy there. with the digital companies where content consumption is shifting to. You've been lauded across the sports business landscape for your work specifically moving NASCAR into the streaming age, your outreach to streaming partners. You talk there about the new deal with Amazon and the sort of high scorecard you'd give the folks at Amazon for the marketing aspect of what they've done so far. I wonder how you would describe the difference that you see now that you are in the swing of things, working with the legacy broadcasters versus working with the new wave kind of streamers like Amazon.

18:44So I think each company is different. The business model for each company is different. And the culture and the organization for each one of these companies is a little bit different. If you think about somebody like a Fox or an NBC who have been in the sports production business for 40, 50 years, they don't need a lot of help from us in terms of what they need to do to produce a NASCAR race. If you think about somebody like a CW and a Nexstar, we produce their races for the Xfinity series. That's because they don't have the live event infrastructure that a Fox or NBC has, at least in this cycle of their build.

19:26So Amazon is unique in that nobody has more data than them. They know exactly who you are and where the customer is. And they were very analytical when it came to our negotiations, for sure, and very precise in terms of what they wanted to buy and how they wanted to buy it and at what price point, frankly. And they're very disciplined in that approach as well. Where they went above and beyond is once we became partners with Amazon, that's when they started to activate different parts of the company. So you think about the prime video marketing side that we've promoted to. You think about the e-commerce side that we have different shopping integration and widgets and engines on Amazon as well.

20:12That's where you have to go most like division by division within Amazon to make sure each is marketing. But there was buying at the highest levels of the company to make sure that NASCAR was taken care of for sure. Where are you at in terms of your international deals at the moment? And how would you describe NASCAR's current international aspirations and approach to the market? We're still very heavily dependent on the U.S. market, both financially and from viewership perspective. I'd say broadly speaking, if you look at a snapshot on a weekend basis, probably 90 % of our viewership is happening in the U.S.

20:48About 5 % is happening in Canada, our second biggest market. And then I would say the long tail's 5 % is the rest of the world. So this was the first year that we ran a NASCAR race internationally since 1958. So it's very difficult logistically for us to take the NASCAR kind of industry and move them from Pocono to Chicago to Michigan and then down to Mexico City. It's a big operation. But we were able to do that successfully. We had a partnership with Televisa on the Frida Air side and then Fox Sports slash Lauman on the pay TV side. It performed well from a viewership perspective. We'll take a year off at least in 2026 when the World Cup comes to Mexico City.

21:39But I think you'll see us get more aggressive in our efforts internationally, at least on the competition side of the business over the next two to three years. So it's easiest for us as a sport to move within the continent. So just because of how many 18 wheelers and moving the TV compound, all the logistics of our operation, we don't have a week off. So that's one thing that is pretty NASCAR specific is we usually run straight through from February until November. So going, I would say, outside of the Americas is going to be a little bit more difficult for us in the short term. And then with respect to media rights, we do all of our media rights partnerships directly with the partners in the Americas.

22:19So U.S., Canada, and then Latin America. And then we rely heavily on IMG slash Endeavor outside of the States. So we don't have boots on the ground in South Africa. We don't have boots on the ground in Australia or the UK. And so Hillary and Andrew and the IMG team do a fantastic job representing our rights with us working on their behalf outside of the States. When you look at, and for better or worse, NASCAR gets compared with other major motorsport entities, obviously Formula One, the main one. When you look at the, I think, tempered success that they are now having in the US and internationally, clearly they have had a boost and a bump, the drive to survive effect.

23:09But it feels like, or at least it felt like, they had absolutely nailed their international strategy for a little bit, at least. Do you find comparisons with F1 helpful, annoying, or useful in any way? And do you think that there is something that you can learn from what they've done recently? For sure. Those guys are very sharp, have invested heavily in the States, but have known those folks for a long time before they started to make inroads in the U.S. with Drive to Survive. So if you take a property that was doing 600 ,000 viewers in the U.S. before Drive to Survive, and now they've essentially doubled that and there are 1.2 million viewers or so in the U.S., all the credit in the world for them making that happen.

23:56That is to achieve that type of bump at that type of scale is really encouraging. And I would say, frankly, as the dominant property in motorsports, the U.S., frankly, has helped shine a spotlight on motorsports or some properties and some brands and platforms that maybe had thought of motorsports as a bit of an afterthought. So I find it, A, helpful that motorsports as a category is growing, whether it's the U.S. or internationally. And then with respect to comparisons, like, frankly, they've helped us get better at times. When you think about the investment they've put into Las Vegas, we're not going to be able to spend that amount of money at any one of our single racetracks.

24:41But does it make it a little bit easier to get sign off on some of the scheduling innovations that we've had? Bringing the first street course race into the streets of Chicago, that's a healthy investment for us. We're running a race in the middle of a naval base next year in San Diego Coronado. It would have been cheaper for us to run another race in Richmond or Darlington. But frankly, having the investment, having the creativity, having the resources to invest in those schedule innovations, having the bar raised for us a little bit has been helpful. And with respect to the audience, there's very little overlap between the NASCAR audience and the F1 audience.

25:20If you look at us running a race on a typical weekend, there's about 6 % of our fans will be watching that F1 race as well. So I'm more concerned about competition from the NFL or college football or the NBA, frankly than i would be um about f1 and us running head to head um but uh to the extent that they can help elevate motorsports along with us and indycar and others i think that's a good thing um sticking with the macro if we if we may macro kind of media trends in sports it seems we've come through different eras of rights buyers at least you know you've got a traditional linear cable then the streamers um and the streamers take all manner of different kind of forms some of them tech giants some of them pure broadcasting businesses but it seems like we may be not too far away of another from another layer and what we're seeing in in lots of different sports at the rise of you know there are lots of different words for it but the alt cast you know like the Manning the Manning cast or influencers streaming watch alongs on YouTube over here in Europe we saw just recently some of the big soccer leagues sell rights to podcast platforms I don't know whether you're on top of this but yeah a couple of different podcast platforms have bought highlight and live rights in Bundesliga and La Liga football.

26:53So we've got a new wave of rights buyers, really interesting in the market. But I wonder whether the landscape includes those sorts of non-traditional folks in NASCAR and what your view generally is of altcasts and other potential rights buyers. Altcasts we love. We had a altcast this year with TNT and TruTV on what we called our in-season challenge. So if you think about the NBA had their in-season tournament that they launched in 2023. TNT was a media rights partner for the NBA at the time. They had some success with that. So we partnered with TNT to do this in-season challenge where it's like a bracket style.

27:34If you're familiar with like March Madness in the States, it's basically like that where our top 32 drivers become 16 and then eight and then four, then there's one winner. So we did an all cast for that And it ended up accounting for about 7 % to 8 % of the viewership of typical race was around that altcast that we did with TNT on their TruTV platform. So we love those to the extent that you're talking to an additive audience or a different audience. With one of your existing… That's right. That's our original. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, correct. So would we, we would certainly, A, not want to do this, but B, we wouldn't be able to do it from a rights perspective, carve out all cast rights to a competing third party.

28:14So like, let's say there's a partner that we not work with. So Netflix, like we wouldn't be able to sell all cast rights to a NASCAR race to Netflix and also have that race on Fox, for instance. There's exclusivity for the media rights partner during the live window there. But to the extent that TNT wants to do something on True TV or Amazon wants to do something on Twitch and they own that platform and they're speaking to maybe a gaming audience if it's on Twitch or speaking to a sports betting audience if it's on True TV, that's a good thing. I always think about, I probably couldn't do this for the Daytona 500 just because the scale of the event is so big, but that race will probably do 8 to 9 million viewers for the 500.

28:54And for a typical NASCAR race, we'll usually do 3 million. That means there's a casual audience of 5 to 6 million people that are probably tuning in to NASCAR, maybe just for that race or maybe just a handful of races. They probably don't need to talk about track bar adjustments or PJ1 or resin going on the track. They may just need to understand what a pit stop is, right? So is there an opportunity to educate a casual fan on your sport? And what about this idea of, you know, podcasters, broadcasters themselves becoming rights buyers? Is that something that you think could be realistic in the future?

29:29I love the idea. I hadn't thought of it. And so I should read Leaders more often, apparently, than I did. I missed that one. Um, the podcast, I would say realm for us is very active. Have we done a great job monetizing it so far? I would say probably not. Um, and a lot of the podcasts that, that we have that are popular in the industry are not tied to the league itself, um, if you will. And so frankly, a lot of the podcasts, uh, speak about decisions that we made that were in their opinion, incorrect. And, you know, they would like to see more out of. But I think there's probably some strategic partnerships that we could have that are more kind of under the radar that allow us to be more thoughtful about providing footage, providing rights, providing data, things like that, that could link us a little bit closer together.

30:16If someone's going to do it in the US, Brian, I imagine it's going to be you guys, because your track record for jumping into new platforms with a sort of pioneering approach to reaching people is impeccable at the moment. I mean, just to list a few recent endeavors, well, maybe not even so recent, Roblox or Roblox and Fortnite you've been into for a little while. Just a couple of weeks ago, you announced a new Substack newsletter, perhaps not quite so glamorous, but certainly a new, you know, you're the first rights holder on Substack. Tell us how do you make the decision to push the button on something new like this?