Why Charlie XCX's Brat Summer is the perfect sports marketing template

34:57And even in mainstream media, I think when I was reading about them in a Daily Mail article, I was like, oh, wow, you know, this is this is cutting through. And they not just the players and the influence of players that they brought in this summer, but actually on Friday night, they delivered an incredible experience on Friday night for a lot of new fans coming into the sport alongside some of the old fans. And I think what they will deliver will will be really interesting and interesting to see how other clubs respond to that. We've seen Manchester City women launch a new brand over the summer as well.

35:32And what's the impact that's going to be? Continued influx of international stars coming in. We are the world's leading league for the talent that we have and the most amount of players that play in World Cups, etc., in our market. So actually, there's going to be some really interesting player stories, different narratives. I think it's going to be hotly contested at top and bottom of the table. Other new thing for this season is we had the playoff last season to expand to 14 teams. So we had a playoff between the bottom WSL and the third place Barclays WSL 2 team. This season, slight shift because we're not expanding.

36:15So we will have the bottom team in Barclays WSL will get automatically relegated. the 13th place will then play a playoff against the team that's won the play-in okay this is new all right so the uh first placed uh barcluse wsl2 team will get promoted okay and then the second and third will play each other to see who plays that 13th position uh wsl team yeah so that's new for the season keep things interesting keeping it interesting and keeping trying new things yeah um you talked about getting bums on seats plateauing audiences last year i assume that you're aiming for further growth this year where's the where do you think about um what that challenge is in terms of the marketing funnel that's that's I guess that's a bit further down the funnel right that's that's conversion at some point and where is the specific opportunity you think to drive at that I think there's a couple of things I think from a league perspective I think it's um one is how are we making sure that the increased digital engagement that we have how we converting that into great data and quality leads that we can then pass to clubs so i think that's one part the second part is how we helping our clubs to understand this is a new fan a different fan and get them to theme of this conference know their fan yeah their fan best and mark it in the right way i felt what was really interesting in the opening keynote that was talked about was uh the irrationality i'll say that word of fan marketing and how you know focusing on emotion focusing on identity um uh all those things which inherently as a brand marketeer you know when you've been doing it for years you kind of know but it's like how are we helping um a club and i'll be honest with you one of the big four clubs has said to me last season ruth we have a season ticket wait list of over 20 years for the men's team we've never had to sell a ticket how do we do it you know so we I know it sounds mad these are some of the biggest brands on the planet but they've never had to do it before so how do we work with them to kind of follow those principles and the irrationality of fan marketing to build like those audiences for them like that emotional habit that weekly connection you know like how are we doing that for them and finally keeping with that kind of theme of education educating your stakeholders how do you like to educate yourself you're here um at this event there's all sorts of different rights holders around from around the world where do you look to for specific direct inspiration that will help you do what you do um I I come to a number of events a year I don't go to them all I go to certain events where I think I'm going to be challenged or think I'm going to learn something new.

39:07I look outside of my sector, mostly. I look a lot at entertainment brands, what entertainment brands are doing, and get my learning from that. And then I think at an event like this today, obviously it's kind of a reunion. I've been in the sports marketing industry for over 20 years. There's a lot of people that I know. And quite often it's in that casual conversation of having coffee. I say, what challenge are you facing right now? And you have those conversations. And you realise that actually people are facing similar challenges and maybe somebody's gone through that before. And there's a lot you can learn from that.

39:37I'm just like the more informality of it. Yeah. Yeah. Ruth Hooper, thank you very much indeed. Thank you. OK, Alex Willis, Chief Digital Officer of the FA. Hello. How are you? Hello. Very good. Thank you. Good. Alex, I think you're coming up to six months in the new role. How's it been? it's been a whirlwind obviously with the men's world cup over the summer and it's been an amazing opportunity actually just to get to know the organization at one of its most sort of significant moments at the same time it's obviously been summer holidays and so people you know have families and and everyone's taking the time to go and take a break so it feels like now is you know like for most of us, proper back to school, back to work, getting used to the proper rhythm of what everyone is up to across the FA's very broad expanse of responsibilities.

40:37Indeed. Well, tell us a little bit about the role, what your responsibilities are, what your remit is, and maybe how that differs from a similar-ish job that you were doing at the Premier League before you joined the FA? So I think something that all sports rights holders are thinking about is that we have these audiences out there in the world across various different properties and platforms. And we're incredibly privileged to be able to create and capture that attention and engagement from audiences. Many parts of the world would love to have what sport has, but we need to do something with it and we need to generate impact from having those audiences, particularly commercially.

41:23Every organisation needs to have a strong commercial backbone to invest in the things that it needs to, but also as a national governing body to create positive impact on the sport. So whether that's playing football or helping find new coaches or so on and so forth. So it's not that the FA hasn't been doing any of these things. It's more that we want to put a much more deliberate and considered focus on them and take the benefits that technology provides, both in terms of creating more direct to consumer facing products, but also becoming more effective, more efficient in the way that we do things.

42:02and creating a much stronger commercial connection between fandom and commercial impact through our relationships with brands, with media partners, direct revenue streams, etc. So that's the gist of the job. And it is similar to the opportunity at the Premier League, which the Premier League is obviously still pursuing. great to see all the new innovations out there this season in terms of trying to attract and engage audiences and deliver benefit in the Premier League's case to clubs and to partners we at the FA have got the opportunity to go deeper because we have direct revenue lines but also go broader because we have not only the England national teams we've got Wembley Stadium there are the FA Cup competitions there are other competitions there's other league football and there's the grassroots game so it's a broader canvas using a similar mix of tools and it's obviously within the same big sport football yeah appreciate it's a very broad question and you've touched on it a little bit in terms of outlining what the role is but how do you think about fandom in this particular job so I for me I think fandom is a a personal connection with something and um I'm you know a big sort of proponent of the fact that fandoms are much more complicated and much more of a mixed situation than maybe they used to be and that's an incredible thing especially when you think about something like the FA where we've got various different routes to reach people but the temptation is to put people in buckets and say today you're playing football today you're watching football today you're buying a ticket to go to Wembley whereas actually you are one individual and we need to find a way to reach you as that individual based on the things that matter the most to you and the reasons why you're interested in in the first place and I think particularly what the adjacencies are so how does that correspond with your daily life your music habits your food habits all of those things certainly you know when I was at Wimbledon we had so much opportunity to do this because of the nature of Wimbledon as a social event and social occasion as much as sporting products and I think you know various different parts of the sports ecosystem can lean into this more readily but yeah at its core it's about personal connection and human emotion yeah You mentioned the World Cup, you joined the FA in April, you didn't have long to get your feet under the table before you were being whisked off to America, to North America, to experience the World Cup.

45:02I wonder, were you on duty or were you sort of on a watching brief when you were over there? It was a bit of both. We had launched a new product for England fans, the official England app. Not something that the FA had done before. And at the heart of that is what actually should the product be for? Is it a new service? Is it a behind-the-scenes content library? Is it something that you can use as a travelling fan to find out where to go? And is it a vehicle to buy tickets? It could be all and any of these things. And so it was trying to learn through the World Cup period what that product really should be.

45:42And we had some great success with things like a squad selected game and the squad was announced exclusively on the app. And, you know, that drove some really good engagement. There's around half a million people using the app. But equally, there are other things. It's a very competitive market during a World Cup. But one of the things that I just really fascinated me, though, and it was the great privilege to go for a brief period of time, was we talk about, you know, football going into other countries and celebrating the stars and the teams and the players and teams and all that sort of stuff.

46:25we maybe don't talk enough about the fans and those scenes of the Scottish fans taking over Boston or certainly you know when England drew with Ghana the reaction of the Ghanaians sort of in the stadiums and the traditions and the rituals of the traveling fans yeah I think had a huge impact actually on people's appreciation of the tournament and the sport and I think that's something for us to think about. Yeah, it's interesting and it comes up in every tournament, doesn't it? Possibly because there is a search for stories within media entities and there is something different going on, but you're right.

47:07And when we think about fandom, so many traveling football fans identify not just as a fan of that country or that team, but as a traveling fan of that team it's like a club within a club uh and you're right probably plenty of opportunity or at least some food for thought there um alex what's keeping you up at night what are you worried about right now um what am i worried about i i think all of these things that are both sort of threats and opportunities but sort of thorny to work out um how we adopt ai how all of us adopt ai is definitely one of those amazing opportunity to do more localize more create more be more personalized but at the same time we can't lose what makes sports so special which is that it's human and you can't predict the outcome and it is very unique and personal to every individual so that's that's certainly one of them um and i think something you know i care about a lot hopefully always have done is is people working together and and not feeling like we're all in an arms race and um that everything is a competition so actually i think when people work together there's amazing outcomes yeah um and finally Who or where or what do you find yourself most drawn to when you're looking to learn to help you do what you do?

48:43Where do you get inspiration from? Well, there are some very good podcasts out there in the industry with very good guests that I enjoy listening to. um i um i should try to look at various industry specific um journals and themes so lots and lots of different things on ai of course and technology um i think what's happening in the media industry and in terms of consolidation and acquisitions and all that stuff is absolutely fascinating and and actually just having coffees with people um and going and talking to them and saying do we have a similar challenge here and what can we do about it? Yeah.

49:25Okay. Alex Willis, I'm going to let you go now. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Tom Lister, CMO United Rugby Championship. Thank you for being with us, Tom. Hello. Thank you. Hello. Thanks for having me. Tom, what does the CMO of the URC do? Well, it's an increasingly broad role. I came on board seven years ago when we were the Pro 14. and less than a year later we became part of the CBC family and since then we've developed and changed a lot. So over that time we've rebranded to be United Rugby Championship, we've expanded into South Africa and we've got generally more sophisticated and focused on really good marketing and general improvement of all our different stakeholders across our ecosystem.

50:18So my role remains in that context. We are about promoting the league and helping our clubs grow their own fan bases so that we can ultimately leverage that for our broadcast rights and subscription rights, sponsorship rights, I should say. That's how we make money and we distribute that money back to our shareholders in that way. So I've got a marketing team that is set up across the marketing funnel to increase earned media exposure, tell our own story internally and ultimately own the direct relationship with the fan and understand the fan better. So my CMO hat sits across that kind of spectrum.

51:06And then there's, because we are in quite a sort of complicated and evolving space, there's always big strategic projects happening as well. So I'm involved in that. I'm pleased you described it as a complicated and evolving space. It seems to me that rugby is stuck in this permanent kind of no man's land of potential enormous disruption. that we never quite get there we're in just sort of soft change for now uh it's complicated and evolving with that being the case um sum up where urc is in the rugby ecosystem yeah i think firstly i might challenge that a little bit um i think rugby has a habit of telling the world that it's complicated and telling the world that it's not as good as it could be.

51:58It has a lot of features and characteristics that sports would, other sports would be really envious of. It has an enormous interested consumer base and I use the word consumer carefully there because there's rugby tournaments that are part of the wider cultural conversation like the Six Nations. we have a smaller fan base and and the fans are disparate and fragmented across many different nations and different entities from national teams to professional clubs like the ones that play in URC to their local rugby club as well so I think rugby has a lot of things to be optimistic about but yes it is um it it's challenges to make sure it's all those different operators in the ecosystem are pushing in the same direction where does your c sit in that landscape i like to think it sits um pretty close to the forefront of some of the the big moments of change that we've seen over the last few years i mentioned up front cbc's investment um we are now part of the wider global sports group platform which includes prem rugby and six nations so we've had that injection of private equity capital that's come with an investment in premiumizing the the tournaments and its constituent parts of the tournaments and we've seen the results of that you know last year was our record year in terms of revenue it was up 15 percent last year our audience numbers continue to grow we've outperformed some of our competitors without wanting to blow smoke up my own bum here we've outperformed some of our competitors in the social and content space as well so we have the benefit of being slightly new urc is only in its about to start its sixth year we changed a lot over our 25 year life from being celtic league to what we are now and that's kind of given us a remit to test and trial new things and so where does URC fit I think we are always trying to move forwards we're not an organization that likes to sit on our hands and accept the status quo so hopefully and I think we're beginning to see some of that ethos spread in rugby you know we share an office with Prem Rugby and Six Nations and I'm very complimentary about the work that my colleagues in those organizations do I think there's some really really good stuff happening and the challenge for me is the CMA is to make sure that we continue to be at the forefront of that I've always wondered this situation where there is shared office space as you say Six Nations you guys at the URC Prem Rugby um are the lions sometimes the lions have space there as well they don't they don't right but we we know the lions people we work closely with them is there a sense that it's all one organization like how do you physically you know stay apart from each other or is the intention that you're you know you're you're competing i think we were chatting before this interview started about the benefits of days like this and it's it's about getting like-minded people together that can share experiences um the ups and downs so you know having um peers that you can test new ideas with and have mini therapy sessions when things aren't going your way is really important that's it we get a lot of benefit from that by sharing the office so we we've we um we talk about what's working from a marketing point of view we've borrowed programs and initiatives from prem rugby that have had results there.

55:51I think they would admit they've done the same the other way. We share supplier knowledge. And so, yes, we do compete in certain spaces, probably the sponsorship market we would compete. And to a lesser extent in the broadcast market, we might do too. But they're such big topics that it's quite rare actually that we find ourselves butting heads so that the benefit of collaboration one of the messages from this morning's session was less competition more collaboration that's a line I'm stealing and taking I mean it's in our ethos at the moment but that as a descriptor line is very powerful and how do you think about fandom yeah it's a it's sort of an academic question in a way isn't it I think fandom for me is about forging something that sits in the identity of the person.

56:48So I'm going to take myself out of the CMO role and put myself in my own personal role as a fan. I'm a Norwich City fan. I'm a big Norwich City fan. I grew up in that city. And those guys that pull on the yellow and green shirt week on week represent me. And my proudest parenting achievement is that I've managed to convert my 10-year-old son, who lives in Surrey into being a Norwich City fan and that that is now becoming part of his identity do we have all the bells and whistles fancy fan engagement techniques that that Norwich provide do we engage in those that Norwich provides no not really our our fandom is is through uh wanting to be part of a bigger community that represents me and so that's how that's how I see it and and that's how we um i suppose how i take that through into my professional life is that we are trying to create experiences and touch points that mean that the person the ultimately our end customer and consumer wants to come back to us and feels proud of it and feels like they want more of that it feels like they relate to other people that are also engaging with it and that is you know that is not an easy thing to do because as we again as we learned today it takes there's a limited amount of fandoms that people will have and there's a limited amount of brain space that people have to um to commit to these emotional attachments but it's yeah they said 10 didn't they 10 you can have 10 avid fandoms and 50 memories 50 memories yeah 50 core memories but I would suggest 50 memories probably in general yeah I think every time I get a new memory it pushes one out yeah exactly once you've got 50 I think 10 avid fandoms is a lot it is a lot isn't it that surprised me I think the definition of fandom can be stretched as well because Marmite or Vegemite yeah well exactly I'm a big fan of Peep Show sure but it's not that's not necessarily part of my identity No, exactly.

58:55It relates to my sense of humour, I suppose. There's the academic question around fandom. When does a like or a preference become a fandom? Like there is a difference there. I think that's the essence of sports marketing, isn't it? Because this year the conversation has moved from winning the attention battle to winning the affection battle. And that's part of the same journey, but totally different. Yeah. And I think there's been some really interesting chat here around knowing your fans and the organizations that know their fans best will win which i agree with but i also think the organizations that know what to do with that knowledge of fans and apply it creatively and authentically they're the real winners yeah um what's the best fan initiative you've ever been a part of and what made it yeah i think the best the best thing is something that we're doing at the moment and because we are a league we're essentially an aggregation of 16 16 clubs and we're spread out over five different nations so really our our role and the way we are solving fandom is by helping each and every one of our clubs to grow their own fan base and we talked loosely about there aren't fans of the league you'd say they're fans of the individual I think the fandom in certainly in our space is primarily consumed through the lens of the club then through lens of the player I like Jack Crowley so I'll follow Munster on that basis and then more broadly the league I think there are leagues that do have fans NFL have fans NBA, Premier League have fans I'm not sure we're there yet so the best fan initiative that we have is something called Fan Labs which is our collaboration programme with clubs which is a set of consultancy services, tools, technology licenses that helps our clubs do exactly what we talked about.

1:00:58It helps them deliver better fan experiences and helps them grow that emotional connection with fans. So it's not something that we're running directly to the end consumer. The most powerful thing that we're doing at the moment is helping our clubs raise the bar because selfishly a strong league needs strong clubs and vice versa. Strong clubs need a strong league. So collaboration is absolutely the essence of our fan strategy at the moment. And finally, Tom, what is going to get you a pay rise this year? So we measure all sorts of different KPIs, but we would really like to see a marked increase in attendance and optically bums on seats.

1:01:46So I think it will, I'm not in it for the money, you know, but if I was, I'd like to see the clubs that we're working with consistently and helping and that are most engaged in our collaboration programme, seeing marked tangible uplifts in the things that really matter in sport, which is live event attendance, live event experience, improved ticketing yield, and then some of the drivers behind that like database growth and content engagement. If we can hit our markers on our club strength, I think I'll be doing high fives around the boardroom table. Good luck. Tom Lester, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

1:02:33Harry Hawkins, Managing Director EMEA here at Two Circles. Thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you for having me. I think more appropriately. Harry, set the scene for us. What is this? It's the Two Circles annual client summit here in the UK for the Europe region. What's the point of today? We think the industry needs a forum. We think the industry appreciates forums to come together and talk about the topics that define what we do day in day out and um you know we hope that represents an opportunity for people to connect and catch up and do lots of informal stuff but i guess the formal red thread running through the whole day is is fans yes and it's fandom and it's uh this emergent currency kind of well understood currency that that runs through sports and entertainment and we love creating spaces where people can connect and talk and dissect and analyze and understand and take action in their own fandom?

1:03:28So as an observer, you know, a long standing industry observer, I would suggest that Two Circles has moved from a very strong outward marketing position of the data led sports marketing agency to one of, it's the fan focused agency for everything. You know, your one stop shop for everything fan. Yeah. how do you think about fandom in two circles yeah that's a fascinating question we um you're right historically our positioning externally was was centered on data and centered on sport probably to a greater extent than it is now everybody does data now yeah i think i think when the company was set up and in our early years data was a real differentiator and the founders of the company Gareth and his colleagues I think had the insight that to center data in our sort of company rhetoric and in our company it was in our company logo for the longest period of time right would really set us apart and in a nutshell tell the world what we were all about it always been about bringing evidence and empiricism to sports and the sort of industry that exists around attention and commercializing attention yeah I think you're right.

1:04:47I think what we've seen over the last few years is our position, not dilute, but I think we've been conscious about talking about our company in a different way. And really, I view that as just making more explicit something that was true all along. We've always been a fan-centric business. Data just happens to be, in our view, the best currency through which you can understand fandom. Now that the market's broadly caught up on the data-driven thing, we've made a decision to be more explicit than we ever were before, perhaps about fans and knowing fans best and that's therefore become um the center of gravity i think of the company rhetoric um how do i think about fandom i i'm i use this line quite a lot i think um professionals in our industry should think about fandom the same way victorians thought about railways i think i think that's the that's the scale and that's the yeah that's the tonality with which we should talk about fandom i think we're living in a relatively unique period of history of perhaps a few decades where this incredible trend architecture industry is emerging that is both incredibly valuable in its own right but also having this amazing economic externality effect across frankly every sector of global commerce and so we're here today sort of sharing that good news if you like we're sharing data and perspectives and case studies from clients and things that basically bring that trend to life and give people perhaps a bit of breathing room to reflect on how how exciting that is and how cool that is because not every industry is going through a a similar or symmetrical trend i don't think you've got hundreds of clients here in the room from across the spectrum of the sports um and entertainment industries um everybody here uh today to think about fandom to think about their own approach to fandom um how are they building and growing and moving fans down the traditional marketing funnels, I suppose.

1:06:44You delivered, and very well, might I add, the opening keynote today. Could you summarise, I mean, I've got a few notes here of things that I enjoyed, but could you summarise the key messages that you wanted to land in that? Of course. so the session was titled fandom is our higher choice which was a soundbite we landed on you know way back when we think it encapsulates a lot of the important content of the session fandom in sports and entertainment we think has become a more compelling proposition than many of the other cultural and media propositions that people are faced with because it it delivers things that the other media products don't both for the individual and for businesses it has a sort of emotional ROI profile that seems to outperform the rest of the market.

1:07:34And then it has a more literal ROI profile for the world's investors, brands, media, etc. And we think the concept of higher choice is just a neat way to articulate that. So I was there sharing some of our perspective and the data that sort of led us to that conclusion. I hope the keynote did a reasonable job of illuminating what that means in practical terms. that you know we try to describe the size of the market and the shape of the market and the structure of the market that is emerging around fandom um all of which are amazing you know good news stories which i'm happy to get into if if you'd like me to and then um most importantly and you know the thing that gets us most excited about sessions like today is giving people action inspiring people to go and do things differently and think about their own businesses um in perhaps different ways or with you know subtle changes in emphasis because of what the data is telling us Yeah.

1:08:24Big number. Arguably the biggest number I've ever seen in real life. We love big numbers. Sort of the centerpiece of your session. $1.94 trillion. Yeah. That is what you believe the fan economy, sports and entertainment fan economy, is worth today. For context, that's 1.7 times bigger than the global automotive industry. Manufacturing, yeah. Manufacturing.

1:08:54Where do you get that number from? And what does it mean? What does it mean that sports fandom is worth 1.94 trillion? Yes, we put a lot of work into this data. You're right, it's an enormous number. It's one of the largest numbers we've ever practically used, I think, in a constructive way. I couldn't write that down, like in terms of writing out the number of digits. Sure, sure. It's a million million, isn't it? We think it's really important that any industry, and in particular the industry that we exist to support, understands how big it is and what its relationship is with the wider world so we put a lot of work into um into validating if nothing else how big that marketplace is um so we've set upon ourselves to to quantify the total economic footprint of fandom if you like um there are pockets of this industry that are already relatively well quantified we know for example um how much revenue sports ip captures and collects as a subset of that market that that number is 1.7 sorry 174 billion I should say and growing every year what we tried to do through the through the process of quantifying the fan economy is to just contextualize that number and wrap around all the all the other types of economic architecture that participate in fandom in some way what's always been really clear to me and a little bit unsatisfying about the 174 billion number is it doesn't capture the end value of the people that have invested in sports rights that the reason that a buyer would invest in sponsorship or media or betting or whatever is to then perform a, if you like, a kind of arbitrage to recoup their cost and hopefully make more money.

1:10:21That number's really interesting to us. That kind of tells a more holistic story about the end value, if you like, of fandom across both sports and entertainment. And what you mean by that is, for example, you might read, so Liverpool have just, just literally the last few days done a sponsorship deal. It's supposed to be worth 60 million pounds a year, but that is the fee that they're receiving from Turkish Airlines. no one then does the work to spit out the number at the other end at Turkish Airlines. What if anything is the incrementality of people buying more flights or engaging with different touch points around the Turkish Airlines business?

1:10:54Exactly that. We've tried to quantify that and that phenomenon across all the spaces in which fandom manifests as behaviour. So whether that's media consumption, whether that's gaming, whether that's betting, is it sports tourism, is it advertising adjacent to fandom? because again, you have to remember that YouTube and Google, the world's biggest advertisers, make an awful lot of money out of fandom, very often without investing in rights. So we've tried for the first time, I think, to quantify the whole ecosystem that is in some way attributable to fandom behaviors. Yeah. OK. Now, something else that was pivotal, I think, in your session was this line that there just isn't enough time left anymore.

1:11:31Right. Our cups runneth over. and there is there is no longer spare attention uh for brands for entertainment for anything to be fighting for um and that that there's a consequence to that right there's a consequence to how um brands sports rights holders sports any any kind of entity in sport needs to be thinking about how they market how they show up what is that that shift so i think um the the line we used in the session and i think it represents this shift really well is that um the the industry's maybe had its labels wrong i think for the last 10 years there's been a lot of editorialization of this concept of the attention economy i won't explain it because it's been done to death that exists as a concept and i don't think we're we're claiming that that's wrong or invalid or anything like that but what strikes us i think is a lot more significant and a lot more pertinent to the challenges that our clients face every day is there's an affection economy as well.

1:12:34And that shift from attention to affection, I think, is quite instructive because what we're really fighting for, the ultimate battleground that most of our clients in sports and entertainment are really engaging in is to make people care. It's not just to get people noticed. It's not just to get a transient impression as someone scrolls through TikTok or to get, you know, two seconds of view time while they're changing channel or whatever. It's to get them to buy in and become a fan. We're quite choice about our definition of fandom, which is sustained positive attachment because it's that it's that sustained feeling that actually creates long-term value and so we're we're encouraging our clients to um engage and be more thoughtful perhaps than they've ever been before about showing up in the affection economy yeah perhaps more so than the attention economy um i know i don't know where you got this from but i liked it um i don't know whether it's spur of the moment or whether it's something that's in your sort of traditional arsenal of language but uh you came up with what you termed as a few gangster questions Yeah, that was the story at the moment, but I stand by it.

1:13:29And these were sort of nuanced ways of thinking about optimising activity in this kind of fan marketing space. That's it. And where a rights holder, where the traditional bog standard question might be, how can I get more fans? Or even should I try to get more fans? Can I get more fans? How should I get more fans? Where should I go to get more fans? there are actually a deeper set of much more useful questions that a rights holder in sports and entertainment should be asking themselves. I wonder whether you can, you know, lay down some of your gangster stuff right now. Could you drop a beat? We're not doing that.

1:14:10Sorry. No, I believe this so wholeheartedly. The leading players in our industry have made a connection that wasn't possible for a lot of the last two decades, which is audience and revenue is causally and directly connected in ways that I think the industry is perhaps underappreciated. So historically, the questions that the industry would ask, which I think are increasingly bad questions, are, as you say, things like, can we grow our audience? Is there room to grow our audience? What if we tried really hard to grow our audience? What might happen then? And that gets you some of the ways some of the time.

1:14:44It sets you on an intention. Yes, indeed. But I think as technology gets better and as our understanding of these environments gets better, and as I say, things like the causal relationship between media consumption outcomes and rights values gets richer, we're getting much better at answering these good questions. Gangster questions was what I joked about in the session, which are essentially, they're centered on the same subject matter, but they have a different mental framing. What's the most valuable type of fan growth for my business to pursue? Did you see how there's a subtly different emphasis, but it places the center of the question much more in the bullseye of the dartboard for how you're performing as a business.

1:15:23And that unlocks a whole new world of constructive dialogue with finance teams and budgeting decisions and connecting audience and revenue in that way. Yeah, as I said in the session, it's given rise to this higher class of question and by extension, better work streams, better activity, more exciting projects with our clients, all that kind of stuff. With that question in particular, is that leading from your perspective? And by that I mean, are you leading people down the route to kind of one or two answers that are useful and fruitful? Again, a lot of people, the first thing you think of when faced with this sort of scenario of what should you do to grow, should I grow fandom, is to think about the people who are not currently fans of yours and where you might find them and how you might turn them into fans of yours.

1:16:10but you're ignoring the fact that there is a very valuable set of people already there in your midst yeah yeah i think that that um that lies at the heart of a lot of what we're describing here today and i mean you're speaking to mel today one of the one of the really strong through lines of mel's sessions is that the industry has historically just structurally undervalued existing customers or existing fans maybe maybe to use the more relevant language um fan businesses grow through loyalty more than through increased penetration. It's just a fact. 80 % of consumer revenues in this fan economy typically come from existing customers, whether that's ticket sales, subscribers, whether it's renewing members, all these kinds of things.

1:16:53Passion industries tend to just centre more closely around existing fans. Now, that's not to say penetration of new customers is impossible or that you should never find your fans. Clearly, you should. But what I think we've tried to do today in a few of the sessions is just shift the emphasis towards a mindset that connects fan growth to commercial and strategic value in a more explicit way. So yeah, you're absolutely right. There's this category level opportunity that exists for fandoms of all shapes and sizes to grow. What we're really encouraging people to think about is, are you getting the right type on the right channel?

1:17:30It might be that you've got loads of the right customers already, but they're just not consuming at the right touch point. Remember that you don't have quite the right profile of fan it might be that you've got fans in the wrong markets it might be that you've got fans who are exhibiting less valuable behaviors or they're you know they're um they're consuming in ways that has a lot of value leakage that's the really fertile space for for rich conversations much more so than than you know the the older questions of can i can i just have more fans please can i can i do a bigger media campaign yeah um final question harry um most people come to this event and events like this um because they're keen to learn they're keen to share challenges understand how different folks are tackling similar challenges that they have.

1:18:12It's a learning environment. And I wonder, given how Two Circles is set up and run by Gareth Bolch, who has a tremendous personal energy and seems to also transmit that into how he runs a business. He told me the other day that he likes to move offices every two years at a minimum. He's an intense guy, isn't he? in order to keep the dynamic and the energy high. I've never heard of him say that, but I'm not surprised. So that people do not just sit in the same seat and think the same thoughts. Yeah. And I think that's an extraordinary literal way of keeping things fresh. But I wonder, for you personally, and for Two Circles in general, how do you guys learn?

1:18:57Where and how do you keep open-minded and keep growing? It's one of the things, one of the great, without being too sort of on message, It's one of the great joys of working at Two Circles is quite literally a lot of the subject matter of the work we do doesn't have textbooks written about it. The industry is not old enough. The wisdom is not embedded enough yet. It's actually quite rare that there is a piece of established, you know, academic or sort of industry literature to refer back to. So a lot of it we're learning and developing in real time as we, you know, go on journeys with clients, etc.

1:19:29I suppose a more prosaic answer is we love training each other. We love talking. We love forums like this. We love learning from clients and colleagues and suppliers. We have, I think, quite a vibrant culture internally at two circles of forums and sort of training sessions. We get external speakers in quite regularly for more narrow areas of subject matter. We have now a fantastic academy, which is oriented more towards our more junior members of staff onboarding, a bit like a grad scheme type environment. But yeah, like I suppose the slightly more zoomed out hand wavy answer is we're creating a new type of industry wisdom as we go and we're doing it together.

1:20:11And it's one of the most energising, rewarding things about being on this journey, much more so I think the move in office. Well, watch our office move coming your way soon. Yeah, we told you more than he's told me. Harry Hawkins, thank you very much. Thank you very much for your time.