EXCLUSIVE: Why Ex-YouTube Sports exec left for Meta

0:04Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of Streamtime Sports. I'm your host Nick Meacham, CEO at SportsPro. Now this week is the build up to Christmas and this will be coming out just before everyone breaks for a nice few days off between Christmas and the new year. As you might see for those watching at home, there's a slightly new setup for me which I'm hoping will continue to evolve over the new year. but a nice to have a little change up and something different from what I've been dealing with before. And as you might be picking up, I'm fighting off a little bit of a cold here, or as the Swedish like to say, a fersilning, which is almost a cold, but not quite a cold.

0:40So I'm pushing it back for hopefully to be able to enjoy a nice Christmas break. And for this particularly festive edition of the podcast, I'm pretty thrilled to be joined by Rob Pilgrim, who's the Head of Sport for EMEA at Meta. Welcome, Rob. Thanks, Nick. Yeah, great to be here. Now, it's been a fun December for myself. I looked up a report the other day, and there's been 30 minutes of sunlight in Stockholm this year, which is the worst since 1934. So Christmas is nearly here. I'm quite excited about Christmas. Rob, you just started this new role with Meta. Will you get some time to have a little break through those few weeks before kicking off a new year, which you've got ahead of you?

1:23Yeah, for sure. There's a nice moment to take a breather. I've been at Meta now for, this is three months. So really joining since the summer and then looking forward to this as a bit of a break. So yeah, I'll be off for the best part of 10 days, which will be nice. And then kicking off again in the new year, which will be very, very welcome. We've had a really busy Q4, so lots to talk about. Absolutely. Now, for those that are regular listeners to the podcast would have heard your name mentioned a couple of times on the podcast as we've talked about you and what you were doing at YouTube in your previous role.

2:00And that was something like eight and a half years there. I want to touch on that because we've been talking a lot about YouTube of late and then obviously move things into what you're doing at Meta. So let's look back a little bit. What was it like there? I mean, the journey from outside in looked like a pretty crazy one from what YouTube's, not only YouTube is as a business and as a platform, but then it's also its role in sports. What was that like for you? Yeah, it was, it was an unbelievable ride. And I think that's the way I've described it to, to a few people. Um, I was at the broader Google company for 14 years.

2:32And like you say, YouTube for the majority of that. and I reflect that it was it's a time that I'm very very proud of what we were able to build with the industry with the partners and a lot of those conversations started when I joined of partners either not being on the platform and having to to launch them or partners that were suing us because of various issues that they had with YouTube and and by the time I left and this is what you've you've spoken about um a lot I know in your show and at the events is is how it's become a critical part of the sports broadcast ecosystem um and i'm really really proud of that journey i think it's a a company that's done really well to build products that meet the needs of the moment i learned so much about the creator economy and i think youtube really pioneered that the sense of um how you empower the individual to become a broadcaster sounds very normal now we're doing it together on this podcast but was a very very strange thing um beforehand and so i think the normalcy that youtube brought to all of that is is really impressive so now i reflect with nothing but um pride uh humility for the great colleagues that i got to work with the great products i was fortunate to be able to bring to market um and and just a really good story um along the way lately we've seen sports lean into the platform quite heavily obviously you were going along that journey of trying to get sports to understand the opportunity around the platform like youtube and then we see this thing all it's been happening around these creator creator economy the creator led approach around rights which we've been talking about a lot this year as well is this all really a new evolution from what you saw eight plus years ago or is it just kind of now it's being unlocked because this has always kind of been what's been happening let's say behind the scenes at least from sports's lens behind the scenes yeah I think a bit of both I think the very first conversations we had with partners back in 2017 2018 were pointing towards this direction and it was when I first joined that we had the deal with BT Sports to stream the the men's Champions League final on YouTube and at the time that felt very avant-garde and points to something which now is is much more normal you know traditional organizations leaning into social media to stream is not a surprise anymore but but it was then and so in some senses it was a continuation of what we promised at the start and organizations maybe woke up to it a bit um or got comfortable you know woke up is a bit aggressive maybe but got comfortable with the benefits um but in other ways there was evolutions in the product that met the needs of the sports market that um that meant the product did change and did become much more useful you know when i joined youtube there wasn't a tv app and and now we're talking about youtube as a tv dominant platform so there was a sense of the market came towards youtube but also youtube came towards the market and so my gig at youtube much like it is um at meta is not only how do we bring um the best of the platform to the industry but how do we also um advocate for the industry internally and make sure that product teams engineering teams marketing teams whoever they are understand what it takes to build a really good fan experience um and so there's always that two sides to the job and i think we did that uh really well at youtube to develop a product that met the needs of the sports market whether it was around live streaming or channel memberships or prime time channels like things that were made for premium content um were things that we really pushed for for for sports now reflecting back and when i talk to people in the industry particularly those that have worked uh with youtube they they definitely mention you robin as being a key driver to help get them to where they needed to get to it comes up quite a lot so kudos to you and what you've done there i'm curious as to what are some of those i think sometimes it might be misunderstood particularly whether it be from in your new role or even at youtube how complex it is that you kind of, I'm not sure, I don't want to put words in your mouth here, but you have to somewhere between like a politician, maybe a bit of sales in there, someone who's also a product guy, you've got to kind of wear lots of different hats.

6:55Just how difficult was that in those early stages, particularly perhaps before where it's now quite a mature platform to try and bounce between sports properties and and platinum broadcasters back to youtube bouncing two and two and forth i guess to try and find that right equilibrium or balance to make sure everyone can understand the opportunity in front of them yeah it's it is complex um and i think those are very kind words but it was more than than just about me you know there's there's a great team behind all of that at youtube and and many of those that are continuing to lead great things i know you had johnny keogh speak at your event recently and I was fortunate to have some some good leaders that gave me the opportunity to run with stuff in sport but I think it is it is complex and it is a really unique role and I think sometimes when I'm asked about what it is that I did at YouTube or what we'll be doing in Meta it can be hard to concretely explain it because you don't necessarily fit into business development you don't necessarily fit into product development there's kind of aspects of all but I think think people are waking up to understanding that in the in the tech ecosystem that exists um we hired a lot for factors such as navigating through ambiguity was a really big one for cross-functional skills so people that could step into a room with products and speak their language but then equally um step into a room with marketing and understand what it is they needed and so those became things that we really built the team for and and had to be fluent at navigating i think translation became a big part of it so how do we take these products that are being developed and make them work for sport how do you take those to the industry and explain why they're important but equally you talk about the industry we were working and we still do um at this intersect of it might be a small or niche creator all the way up to the likes of a big federation like a fifa and so the conversation pivots every time you have it and so i think flexibility is really really key um amongst all of that um and again just just a sense of being very very attuned to what it is that each team across youtube across google wanted to get from the sports industry so that we could position that with partners um so lots of malleability i think amongst that i imagine um last question before we move on to the meta um new chapter um what was give us can you give us one or multiple major wins and perhaps a challenge or a surprise or a disappointment that maybe you faced while you were there yeah uh so wins i think putting emir sport so all the partners that that came from our region on the map globally for for youtube and for google was not easy and so again explaining the value of global football to the organization and delivering that through things like the um the women's champions league deal we did with the zone in uefa which uh i was particularly proud of us pulling off because we brought women's sport to a whole new audience um the the champions league example for um the men's format with bt sport was again really really powerful and showing how we could work with the broadcast industry.

10:11I think I was always very proud of the democracy we were able to drive as well. So this idea that any creator, small or large, could really grow within YouTube. I mean, people like Robbie from Arsenal Fan TV, having a global platform and then getting a TV deal with Channel 4. Or you may remember we had at one of our events, World Chase Tag. It was this full new sport at the time. Love that sport. That's great. Yeah, that started on YouTube and it ended up on telly. I really love those stories I love the democratizing power of YouTube giving creators a chance to build their own businesses on YouTube that wouldn't have been possible in the past or for fans to be able to watch sports that they may not have been able to do if it was all on pay tv or all on broadcast so I think that was that was really powerful and and yeah we took that really really far i think challenges wise um there were a few i think we realized how hard premium content was to land on the platform so we talked about some of those developments dynamic ad insertion primetime channels but i think they've got a lot more growth to come um but it's really really hard to host premium live sport on a platform especially when you yourself are hosting it and this was the beauty of working with broadcasters was it was much easier to let them run and use YouTube as the platform than us to host, you know, first party, I think was one big learning.

11:34And I think Meta went through and Facebook went through that learning as well. I think the challenge around, um, athletes building a platform where athletes can easily run their own channels was always one we, we found hard at YouTube. YouTube's hard work. Um, you run a YouTube channel, you'll understand it's not easy. And I think for a lot of athletes that doesn't come naturally. So we always had these athletes that were by exception, had production teams behind them or people like ben foster or tom daly who are really passionate about video production but they were the exception so i think that was a big challenge for me to try and navigate um and then i think at a company level and this is where it starts to bleed in some of the appeal of meta is the difference between consumption and connection how do you create content that's being talked about discussed shared um is an experience that's much more natural on the meta suite of apps than it is on YouTube and that was always a desire I think how do you show up at a large cultural moment like a World Cup or Olympics and be the topic of conversation and drive conversation was a little bit harder on a platform that was more lean back and less native for discussion and and so on so there were some of the headwinds we faced but so many wins and so many tailwinds for the business well look I mean congratulations again for what you achieved there um yeah i followed the the journey of not only youtube but indeed what you've achieved uh when you were in in the company and uh i've set up really well to see it grow and take take on new um a new level of importance in the sports industry as we've seen but one of the most interesting things i think in in the wider sports media ecosystem today has been meta's role and place in how it's connecting audiences and that's a that's as good a segue as i can do i'm no chris who's uh should be back on the airwaves uh early in january but uh it it is a natural um a fascinating topic matter in general terms for me because it has so many different parts to the ecosystem that meta operates uh and it's really the connective tissue i think to fans between those live matches and content especially um but we're going to talk a little bit more about obviously your new role there and indeed what some of those platforms are really doing to power sports and sports fandom across the industry so firstly why did you make that shift to meta um you know a few months ago yeah i think um one of them was was simply change is good and i've been at youtube for a while right and so the appeal of doing something new working with new products new new forms of social media beyond video was particularly exciting for me um it's a bigger business you know um uh meta whether you frame it on revenue or audience or the number of apps you get to work with is is just bigger than youtube and so there's more opportunity there for for uh for me to be able to influence so that was uh exciting i think sport uh or i know sport is very much at the core of meta's business at the moment as well so if you look even in the last year you've seen a meta that has pivoted towards having a very um all encompassing deal with the ufc uh we have dana white on the board of the company um and as of the last month when we launched the um oakley meta vanguard product which is the sort of wrap around more sports glasses we've become a sports hardware a sports fashion company um overnight and so it feels a lot more intrinsic to the company mission to get sport right and that made the role personally really really appealing um for me so yeah there's a there's a few factors that went into it but um it was definitely the right time and the right moment and the right business you've been brought in to lead the lead sport across emea what's the mandate you've been given basically to to do to lead is it a similar type of connect that connected tissue between sports and meds and platforms is a specific objectives you're setting out to achieve what just what's what is the mandate you've been given it's similar to what we talked about earlier is so it's difficult to explain but i'll um i'll give it my best shot there's um there's the point of bringing the expertise from the industry to the company especially in emir where we don't um uh we don't have enough of that at the moment of how we succeed in things like global football or formula one which um my team run globally for for meta um there's the partnerships work so you know myself and the team manage the top partners from around the region across all those sectors that we talked about so um broadcasters leagues teams the athletes is such a really really important part of the business here and where a lot of focus is as well um it has that cross-functional aspect so my team are responsible for delivering uh the mission of the products and engineering team so when we develop stuff that we think will work in the sports market our job is to make sure that it it works we give feedback and then we bring it to market and execute um to do the deals with partners to make sure they're bringing the content to those products um across the the different business lines um and i can go into a bit more detail of what that looks like for each business um but also maybe bigger here is the um the serving of marketing functions so our team are the ones that do the um the sponsorship deals so bringing the opportunities to the business of where meta can grow its advocacy with the industry um is something that we execute for the business by knowing who are the partners um who we should be looking at where are the opportunities what are the terms that matter to us so that's a really big part of the role um my team's worked on two big deals this year which have been um firstly having kylian mbappe feature as the um the face really of the oakley launch that we had this year and also the deal that we had for meta ai to sponsor mercedes so we we know we want to do more in the sports space the fans that sports has can help drive advocacy for meta products and so that's a big part of the role um as well and then also i think part of the mandate is is developing the strategy so where should we be taking sports within meta where should we go in the industry and so i've been spending time with the team the last few months figuring out what that three-year plan looks like and that's tricky because meta changes so quickly and this is something i definitely wanted to talk about is is how often we're building new products new experiences and the company almost changes every six months as it's hard to build that strategy and i think sometimes partners can feel on the pointy end of that when there are shifts in what's important um and part of that is the education of um of partners staying with us and staying with the overall mission of um you know driving a connected future for sports fans and not being too worried about the static playbook um of how to achieve it right now but working with us continuously on what are the new products and what are the new opportunities um so quite a broad answer but if i was putting in a nutshell how it's help Meta succeed in the sports industry, help the sports industry succeed with Meta and lead the partnerships and deals that enable that.

18:47Quite a big remit. I'm curious what you found initially in the initial months anyway of sports perception perhaps of Meta. There's lots of different ways you can look at that, obviously because Meta is not Meta the brand and then obviously all the constituting parts underneath that. How have you found those initial conversations with probably no doubt existing contacts you've got across the industry yeah i'll be honest i think the main feedback from partners is they see us as uh indispensable certainly on certain product lines that is really uh critical to their business but sometimes that meta can be inscrutable and so what is it that meta stands for in sport or where is it the direction is going um i think we have a great partnerships team that's been out there doing that and explaining but my job is to help supercharge that and make sure it's really understood for the industry um what it is we're developing why it matters to them how they can bring the best partnerships to life with us and so i think that's been some of the perception i would suggest the last year or two is what does meta stand for in sport what is it these guys are trying to build um and so that that's a healthy challenge for me to address um and it starts with you know our own sports summit which we hosted last week for the industry and it'll continue next year with with with much more of that so So that's, I think, the main perception challenge that I've faced so far.

20:07And I guess flipping that question a little bit, what is it from Meta's perspective, that's perception of sports? And do they have a really solid understanding? Or is there things that you've already had to address early on about trying to bridge that, I guess, that knowledge gap between the sports as an industry, perhaps, versus how Meta operate? I think back to the point about sport being at the core of the company. It's now recognized much more than it was a couple of years ago, I think how important sports can be. If you think about the mission of Meta to connect people as a social company, there's a lot of kinship between Meta and the sports industry.

20:45All of the mission is to bring people together and create really valuable experiences. And so in that sense, the top lines are really, really aligned. I think when you talk about product adoption and getting people around the world to understand the value of the meta apps there's nothing like sport that can do that and bring it to life and we know the reach numbers that sports provides we know the consideration factors that having an athlete um use a new feature on instagram can drive for the rest of the three and a half billion people that use instagram so it's it's often a beacon i think that shows the rest of the world how these products can be used um i think there's obviously some always education we can do internally at matter of how the sports industry functions and how it works and um uh some of the almost the regulations of each of the organizations how they need to work and where rights are accorded you know we work in this industry nick so you and i understand this deeply but that's not the case for people um who have been deep in tech for a long time and haven't worked in the sports industry so back to that translation point a lot of it is that as explaining i think that sports can be tricky to navigate there's almost this stormy sea of hey you know if you want to do something with sport it can be tricky but that we're almost the navigators of the team that can say hey but we can show you the route to get there i think that's really our value in the organization looking back at some let's look at some of the trends that you're following and perhaps seeing since you joined and obviously you presented a number of insights at the metasports summit you hosted as we're recording this was last week.

22:20So talk me through some of those trends, some of those key points that you shared with the audience. I thought the first one looking at that you were able to share that presentation before we did this was an interesting take on that, which I'd love you to set the scene and you're better than that than I am. So I'll hand it over to you. Yeah, I think the goal there was really to show why Meta has become such a big player in the sports industry and so invaluable, like we talked about to organizations where they use us for growing their audience growing their business um showing their creativity those are the three areas we really talked about but um personally just looking at some of the trends and tailwinds that i've seen that i think has led to this um there were three that we talked about in detail so one was the um the idea of the tv um becoming the next generation second screen and i know this is something you've mentioned as well nick or certainly a provocation of of how important is the the mobile versus the tv um so in that sense we've always talked about the mobile as the the second screen so fans are sitting there watching the tv experience of the live game and then you know occasionally they'll be on their phone doing something different i think if we're taking that to its its natural growth where it either is now at a tipping point or where it could come to is that if you actually observe sports fans watching a live game on TV, if you observe fans watching a game even in the stadium, a huge amount of time is now being spent on conversing about that game on the phone.

23:51And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It really amplifies the experience, right? If you're able to take what you're seeing on the TV as a subtext to your conversation with your friends, your family, your colleagues. And so I think it's disingenuous slightly to call the mobile the second screen because it's become the home of the conversation when you're watching um the game itself so we talked about that and i just let's uh stop on that point for for a second i think for those who have heard me recently that point is something that i've i've done it too now two presentations i've done in keynotes i've done i made an explicit point about pointed to the fact is is it really the first screen anymore in fact i do think the mobile is the second screen now look there's always exceptions there's always certain use cases and I think moments are where the tv becomes the first screen in those instances when you know something's coming to a certain point but I think you could really argue that sports can at times on the big screen fall into the background in certain times certain instances but it doesn't mean they're not massively engaged with that sport either at the time or a fan of that sport in general.

25:02It's just the reality of the world we live in. We're always juggling different experiences and very rarely just focused on any one given thing. The only thing that really drives that really well now these days is sports. But it's still going to have to accept. I think once it accepts what you just talked about, then it's going to be able to approach and manage that so much more effectively than try to create some sort of like pushback against the notion of that mobile phones are a barrier or a negative as part of that experience yeah it's not that live sport or sport on tv is dying but it's diffusing right it's becoming an amplified experience across devices and that should be embraced um i think is what you're saying is which i'd agree with yeah and i think that's especially true amongst younger audiences so um we looked at the ofcom data from this year um here in the uk and we see that younger audiences i think it's the 16 to 24 year olds in the uk um 45 of them watch tv weekly so 55 aren't um and we know that's so much higher for older demographics so that's one shift and when these younger demographics are watching tv they're watching 17 minutes a day and i remember a time when that was four hours five hours like much much bigger numbers um even on average so i think it's it's pointing to a new direction where we need to be more sophisticated about how we talk about what premium content is in sport i think it's not as simple as saying there's the live sport which is incredibly incredibly valuable and worth billions and then there's highlights and behind the scenes stuff that we give away i think we're going to see a re-evaluation of what premium is and what it feels like and while valuations at the moment might point to the pyramid looking like that So live sport being where the value is, highlights, maybe a bit of value that you can sell on and behind the scenes you give away.

26:56If you actually observe behavior, it really, really doesn't feel like that. And we talked about a couple of examples from the last couple of weeks of if you take the Liverpool Leeds game, how many people watched it live? How many people watched the highlights? and then how many people were part of the discussion on Mo Salah's interview and Jamie Carragher's reaction and the sort of back and forth after that is where the conversation is is where the culture is and so what is the premium what is the bit that really matters we did the same for Formula One so how many people watched the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix live wasn't particularly a thriller I don't think how many people watched the highlights or was the most important thing that Lando Norris won or again what was being talked about was uh the celebrations of lando norris with his mum with his dad the tears the partying um and so my provocation is around where is the premium in the rights ecosystem now where is the conversation and if you define the culture as what's being talked about um that i would posit we have an over valuation on on live sport at the moment and that the rest of this pyramid can become really really important for younger audiences it's an interesting um theory and i i am fairly supportive of it i think you know the way that you framed it in your presentation was basically it's kind of like live is almost the enabler for the real engagement rather than people seeing the industry seeing that live is classified as engaged and everything else is just noise or just secondary fodder to the live experience and look there is some value this this there is definitely a counter to that it isn't as simple like i think like you said we need to be more sophisticated it's not one or the other right live moments drive greater attention focus of attention driving higher cpms of advertisers for a reason and that's why this sports is getting that support through live more than ever and you've seen that firsthand across in your previous role but i i've been thinking about this for quite a while as someone who is a big fan of a variety of sports that I very rarely watch live sports actually have a challenge where they're not getting enough value out of me being a fan of that sports taking on that traditional model that it that sits across the example I give is my own one is like NFL and fantasy football I've been playing fantasy football for 20 to 5 years or so since like before it was a definitely thing in Australia and the people that are making the most value out of me at the time might have been a yahoo or a sleeper.com which i'm using for the sleeper um the the content experience and then the nfl has to find another way to basically get value out of my engagement through those channels so it's just one of the many examples of all these i think you framed it in your presentation body to simplify it like behind the scenes it's just all the the other stuff going on around the action that is driving really driving the fan engagement not just the live sporting experience so i don't know if you want to add anything further to that But that's kind of how I think it's a huge challenge we've got to face.

29:59The way you put it is exactly the way I see it. It's not either or. And I'm not here to say TV's dying, live sports dying. I'm a huge believer it's still very, very valuable. But I think it's disingenuous to the other formats to say that it's the only place that strives value. And what will be interesting is exactly your point of how, as a rights holder, do I monetize and commercialize all those other parts, which we at Meta are trying to figure out. My insinuation is that the other parts are really what's being played out across the meta suite of apps, knowing that we have tried LiveSport and that it didn't work for a number of reasons.

30:33And so the theory here and my strategy here is own the conversation, don't rent the rights. And that's something we're going to try and build towards and try and build value for partners in all those other formats. I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago around if you were building a new sport now, knowing that the pyramid was live rights at the top, worth billions, locked away, highlights maybe you give away a bit, but you find a way to monetize it, and behind the scenes you fully give away. Would you even flip that pyramid for younger audiences? Would you give away some of the live sport to get them interested?

31:13But if they want to watch it all, well, you should pay for a highlight service that lets you be the catch-up master. And then at the very top, if you want to know more about the athletes, the drivers, the players, the drive-to-survive phenomenon, that's where your subscription lives. It would be very interesting to see if rights holders take that approach. I think Kingsley may have taken a sort of approach within this, but I'm interested to see what comes up for new sports that are being developed over the next few years. Yeah, it's something I've, in one of the presentations I've done recently, I again made the point around that I think any launching competition or new league coming to market should just actively avoid the idea of trying to chase media rights checks and limiting audience and embrace visibility and access across every platform they can and then use that as the the the the tool the source the secret source etc to drive the commercial value the the tricky part of all that is it's still relatively not say unproven but there is few examples that we can point to yet where that has been achieved at the top end at the lower end there's some ones you can start to point to is that are on a journey and that are progressing in the right direction and um but at the top end it's still all built around that media rights check being paid out and some sports is going to have to go through some transition at some stage along the way which uh I'm sure I think you should keep a counter at the office of how many times you get asked to buy media rights in your new role, irrespective of what you're working on.

32:48But yeah, I think it's an interesting evolution that's going to have to happen. And Meta clearly has a lot of different tools in play that lean into into that sort of fandom quite closely. I want to talk about another trend to move on a little bit, which is that you talk about the rise of individual alongside the institution, I think is the way you phrased it. Just talk about, this is obviously linking to athlete economy, the athlete economy or creator economy that you mentioned earlier. Talk about what you're referencing there. The power of the individual is not just a sports phenomenon. So you can take a variety of industries where it's become clear that the individual has grown in prominence, not necessarily beyond the institution, but has grown in prominence, sometimes at an equal footing.

33:35So the example I use is if you take music and you look through the Billboard Top 100 or choose your favorite ranking system. this year was the year that you know for a while we've had a mixture of groups bands and we've had individual solo artists and this year we had the first top 100 where there were no groups no groups zero or solo artists um and so that's music you can take that as as one trend and i think the the stat was eight percent of the top 10 over the last seven years have been groups the rest has all in individuals um so that's one uh that's one aspect or one trend if you take gaming people are watching streamers more than they're playing the games yeah so again another flip if you take news um people are following journalists as much as they're following the publishers and so there's a variety of different industries where we see this happen and i think sports example clearly is the athletes having a bigger voice um a bigger pattern um amongst all of that And that's become really, really powerful on Meta platforms where one and a half million professional athletes have an Instagram account.

34:45And one in three people that come to Instagram, that's three and a half billion monthly active users, are coming to watch athlete content. And so just alone, you can make the assumption that there's a billion monthly active user platform for athletes. and that's obviously something that meta has really leaned into that for me is going to be important part of the strategy is how do we serve that connection directly between athletes and fans as well as the media companies the broadcasters the leagues the teams and now it's not to say that it's going to replace it in any way again much like the the tv and live sport versus mobile behind the scenes debate it's additive is sophisticated and there's no neat answer for organizations but i would say for these organizations and institutions to lean into that trend um hand over the reins a little bit more to creators to athletes um and worry less about winning for example the copyright battle and winning the culture war and the culture war will be won by um embracing these individuals and having them um front of your video front of your communications, giving them access to highlights, for example, so they can distribute to grow your brand as a whole is going to be the big trend, I think.

35:58So you already answered this question a little bit already, but I'm curious though, what does the institution have to do? You've given a sense that you're maybe opening up the rights, but I feel very, if I was in the shoes of clubs and leagues and competitions, I'd be getting quite nervous about the notion that all the people we're trying to serve are now going to be kind of more powerful than us in a way in terms of driving audience and so forth is it simply just are you saying just embrace the fact that this is the case rather than trying to push back it and trying to protect your walled garden instead just completely again it's almost like the whole conversation might be going this way but flip your mindset flip your perception of this and open up the floodgates to your athletes but the I know what they're going to say.

36:47They're going to say, but how are we going to make bang for our buck here if we give all the tools to those athletes who might be moving on and leave us in a year or two? How do you manage that, navigate that if you're a league or a club? I completely understand the challenge and the frustration. It's competitive for eyeballs. It's competitive for revenue. And so it feels, I think, like you're handing a big win to these others at the cost of yourself. And maybe it's the battle between short-term eyeballs and revenue versus long-term growth amongst the audiences you care about. And I think this is one of my bigger challenges working in this space for a long time.

37:27And people have heard me talk about this is how can I help you understand the long-term benefits? How can we measure that? Even though I know some of the advice is going to be tough in the short run. And I think the brands and the organizations that have lent in and understood that are now reaping the rewards of it and slowly seeing the value of it. We talk about a World Cup being streamed by Kazi TV. You know, the fact that you were brave enough to have a creator host your rights would have been unthinkable years ago. But now look at the value that's getting in Brazil. Kazi TV has grown an incremental audience on top of Globo and now is doing that with other properties.

38:06And it's a fantastic story. but it does take time and it may take months it may take years to do so i think embrace it yes but figure out how you can collaborate how how can you also get value from the athlete's own channels and the creator's own channels that drive back to you you know the collaboration doesn't have to be one way it doesn't mean just giving your content to you know this athlete and then post it but also how can you get their channel to launch your new kit how can you get their channel to sell your tickets for the game how can you get their channel to stream your rights and grow your numbers overall how can you do a rev share with these creators or athletes so that you're you're getting your fair share so again it all comes back to sophistication and it it really isn't easy but um the organizations that are brave that are forward thinking um that do some thinking on what this new model could look like will get there and initially it does sound scary but again i come back to that analogy of like are you winning a short-term battle but losing the long-term culture war and uh that's something i would be thinking about very very carefully if i was an organization at the moment and maybe it's also taking parallels from those under other industries what does music do well you know music really welcomes collaboration you know you release a piece of music somebody joins in and and um uh spins it up and edits it and it gets bigger if you're the label how do you put your artist front and center so there's lots that sports can learn from music in in that sense so let's move the conversation on now to platform specific rather than talking meta as a holistic uh brand and uh or company let's go through maybe one by one which which one is basically good for what you've got facebook you've got instagram you've got the hardware side you've got meta ai now whatsapp and threads they all clearly serve and do different things in the day-to-day lives of users um some crossover no doubt just maybe whichever order you'd like to go through let's maybe rattle through as quickly or as long as you want to spend on each one of them on its role and what it does for sports all of the businesses are very interconnected and so you can approach the meta suite of apps as a place where you can achieve lots of different things and you can drive people from one place to another so they're they're siloed in one sense but they're also very very connected and they're all trying to drive the same thing you know social connection um the connection between uh ai and the individual so all of them have similar themes facebook itself is a mature business um but it still has um you know over three billion people coming and using its service every day and i think in some markets we don't feel how powerful it's become because take the uk for example it may feel that instagrams now are much more popular social app amongst certain demographics.

40:55But if you look at the rest of the world, it's still the primary way of accessing the internet in certain markets, in India, in Africa. So there's a great opportunity for sports organizations to grow using Facebook. And so a lot of the conversations we have with sports organizations are about using Facebook to extend audience um it's also great for direct monetization a lot of our story is um is of course not driving towards an immediate short-term check but thinking about the long-term value of growing your audience but facebook does provide that short-term check and it's pretty impressive so this year the team unified the monetization across all the different types of content you can post on facebook including photos etc and then gives you a payout across all of those um and those payouts are becoming really um significant for teams where it makes them not a cost center um not an expense but actually can can make money back so facebook really really offers that there's also a big drive underway to make facebook um cool again and relevant again with younger audiences and i think it's recognized that um it needs to do that and evolve so if you listen some of the product teams here they're thinking about what those features might be leaning into a legacy heritage of being about connecting real people it's still the only social platform where people really use their proper name where you're willing to go meet somebody you've met a marketplace to exchange or go to the house and sell something like there's something really special there about it's very trusted and very human um and so that that relevancy play is something that's going to be ongoing we've seen it from the pivot towards reels on facebook much as we've seen the success of short form video on instagram so um you'll see lots more in that space and so facebook shouldn't be forgotten as kind of the original product it's still very much um at the core and i've certainly learned a lot since coming here about about that one jump in if you want i was just going to say um you know it's been interesting actually since i actually left the uk note and i've been in a couple of countries traveled a bit as well to see how prevalent and how prominent and how important Facebook is in the lives of many people that I've seen in the countries I've been to.

43:06I think it is lost on people. They get a very tunnel vision view of their own life and their own use and therefore expect that the whole world operates like them. And exactly when I was living in Jamaica, pretty much every touch point I had with people was through a meta platform, which kind of was quite a surprise, whether it was the Instagram, WhatsApp or Facebook. There was nothing else. There was no websites. It's the average website I went to was updated at the beginning of COVID. I had, you know, with still the disclaimer at the start of COVID of like, oh, we're closed because of COVID or what have you.

43:39And never been updated since. And that was happening all across the whole ecosystem. So it showed that the Meta ecosystem, because of its, I guess, ease of use for people and perhaps the official nature of how people are able to sign up and so forth, definitely made it a trusted platform, particularly in developing countries and other markets that maybe people discount just because they don't live in them. I think that's completely right. So there's huge value that sports organizations see from that. I mean, if you talk to any sports organization, they're looking to grow international audience and Facebook's a great fit for that.

44:14everyone wants to make some form of direct revenue and it provides that so there's those two and then i think this the story will be around how we grow that younger relevance the latest that i saw was that for five quarters in a row the number of younger people using facebook so i think under 24s has grown um and it's something like 40 million across us and canada but it's a big audience that is i think a bit undervalued um maybe because of the prominence of Instagram and how successful that's been um so that's Facebook Instagram's the obvious next logical place to talk about um the positioning there for the app is very much around the home of creativity um do it anyway is the strapline of the latest campaign that we've done and we've we've worked with some sports partners on on this one as well um and most people are more familiar with this one but it's it's really become going back to my earlier point the pivot of conversational media and the power is the dm so um teenagers in the u.s are sending 30 dms a day with with content in them so it's become a real platform for them where they're having discussion more content now is shared more videos are now shared in the dms in the messages than are shared to stories and more shared to stories than the feed.

45:32And so I think one of the trends that we've picked up on is that media has evolved in the sense of there was a publisher or a TV channel that had a commissioner or an editor that said, you should watch this, this will be good for you. So then the feed experience where the algorithm was king, which is based on what you've already watched, here's what you should watch next. And then I think the third shift that we're going through is then this conversational media shift of through the power of things like the DM on Instagram what is it that your your friends are consuming and watching and they've sent you because they want to spark a discussion and not a lonely isolated view but something you can talk about is I think the next powerful shift and if I think about my own uses that's where a lot of it comes from is the the group chats on Instagram or on WhatsApp which we'll talk about so so for Instagram Graham, it's really all about creativity.

46:24It's a video platform now. It's over half the time is being spent watching videos. So that's obviously the big shift that it's undergone from being a photo sharing app to a video app. It's now launching on TVs, which was the news that we shared yesterday. So people are going to be able to consume Instagram on their TVs with a neat experience, much like YouTube of different user profiles, et cetera, with search functionality. And I think that's going to be really exciting for where Instagram can go next. People were always surprised when I told them that the YouTube app on TV launched in 2018. It's quite recent, really, when you think about how big that's grown.

47:02And so I think looking at that, the Instagram product team have seen an opportunity to have more of a lean back experience on YouTube on the TV for Instagram. Interesting on the IGTV, when I saw the announcement, I felt like it was one of those ones that you kind of think it's fairly inevitable this is happening. it was just a matter of when the question i think most people will come to is obviously instagram is a leading vertical video experience um how does that translate to the a tv experience have you got any idea of how that will play out because you talked about using reels as the the fuel the power uh of content consumption on the platform the big driver the comparison for me is youtube shorts we were always stunned at youtube of how much people are watching shorts on their telly and it was a i don't have the exact numbers but it was a huge driver of that living room growth was people using their remote to flick through um shorts and that again was unthinkable people thought why would you watch that on your tv the kind of vertical format with a background uh but they did and they loved it and maybe maybe the comparison is that what people are doing is watching a reel and sharing it to their friend or even sometimes their partner who might be sat next to them versus having a shared experience of let's watch this together um and it feels strange to us because it's not the world we've grown up in you know grown up in let's watch on the tv together these long two three hour epic movies um but i think for younger people that won't be the case it'll feel very normal to just consume the content where you are so it's it's very much a test you know it's on the amazon fire stick at the moment um and you know plans to roll out further but i think a lot of the feeling instagram is let's see where it goes and let's see what trends we pick up on people using them i think it's one of those things that when i saw i'm like this this will do well my question is will it do well enough for meta because i think for anyone launching a platform with the scalability and the breadth of content that instagram has on um say on file so to speak or access to will that translate to enough value for meta to make it worthwhile and that's why you're testing it i guess uh on fire tv to begin with but it'll be definitely interesting and exciting extension of reach for Instagram.

49:17Now, let's move things on a little bit because I think let's maybe go to WhatsApp next because I think that's probably the most obvious next step. Talk us through how, particularly from the lens of whether it's use, whether it's sports, just what do you see WhatsApp as? I think WhatsApp has huge opportunity. And it's one where you speak to sports fans and you'll probably be the same as me, Nick. You'll have a group chat with people discussing a certain sport or a certain club. And they can be the home of where people are actually consuming sport on the day or during the live game. WhatsApp has 3 billion users worldwide.

49:51So again, huge platform. And the updates tab, which is where you have your channels, where organizations can share content directly, has a billion monthly active users. So that is becoming a really, really big part of the service for sports organizations. They can share content in there and then you can share it with your chat group. and I think philosophically that the importance of the chat group is becoming bigger and bigger most people have them now and use them and I think it's the difference between maybe an isolated viewing experience or an experience that you can have with others and that currency of being able to share it we've talked before about a share in the whatsapp group for your video piece of content is worth a thousand likes and I think that's really powerful like when you take ownership and you tokenize the content and say hey this is a bit of us or this is something that's really really awesome for your friends family whatever it takes on a whole new life and becomes a bit more important than just something you're being served by the algorithm so i think obviously whatsapp doesn't have that many monetization features at the moment partners are using it to drive traffic referral of all the meta apps it's probably the biggest traffic referrer so it sends people on elsewhere so if you want to sell tickets if you want to sell merchandise um it's a great place to be able to do it with whatsapp one of the the challenges that i've understood maybe this is incorrect rob but is the difficulty on the visibility of use on platform for those um publishing on on it uh is there's other than say referral because you can see uh obviously track links going to traditional uh website platforms and the like are there is there able any insight and data you're able to share with let's say a sports property that they can lean into to give them a guide of how well it's performing that maybe perception might be that they can't get access to anything yeah i think there's it's a reason my team exists we can share a little bit more about what we're seeing of how it's trending i think you have to remember that if you take the company view and the uh the philosophy of the product and why it's been so successful whatsapp is all about privacy it's the number one reason that around the world people have chosen to use whatsapp um is because of the fact it's private it's encrypted we don't particularly share much um from it and so there aren't that kind of open analytics of you posted this arsenal kit launch here all of these people have sent it to their groups and talked about it in this way um and it's that balance you know if we did that there'd be the criticism for well actually no it's no longer private and everyone would move to a different app so i think that's the really tough thing for the whatsapp team that is on us to try and navigate and make that case that you know sports organizations need that data um but for now the message would be while there aren't the kind of open source analytics um leagues teams clubs athletes can work with us to try and understand how content's moving um so hopefully that makes sense now let's talk about threads because that's the new new ish kid on the block i suppose you would call it um i saw some interesting numbers in your presentation talk us through what where threads sits in the landscape yeah threads is i think you've got exactly right it's the new platform it's the fastest growing uh platform and it's really punching its weight amongst the other social apps i think people are less familiar with the benefits of threads so we spent a lot of time at our event last week on on that um having said that for a new platform uh it's growing really really quickly in just a few years so uh 400 million monthly active users now on the platform 150 million of those coming daily and as we head towards the world cup we're really trying to build out the football ecosystem on there with with partners to make sure we've got a great level of conversation um differences between x twitter which is the obvious comparison point i think that the product team are trying to build something that's very very conversational it's very very text-based it's not a home for video we don't want it to become another video platform so that's interesting for a lot of people to hear and we want it to be a place of positive conversation which i think is what the world means across a variety of vectors right now and so a lot of what you'll see on there is quite positive debate still spicy still edgy but not toxic um like we know that these forums can slip into if you're not careful and you don't curate it well so um threads is really exciting formula one is the biggest uh ecosystem community that we have on on threads and it's doing really well so i would point sports organizations to go and look at what they're doing well all the teams all the drivers um the federation itself it's got really really nice feeling during a race weekend when you when you open the app um so we're really excited about where where threads can go next um but it's obviously still on a on a growth journey in the f1 example that you just shared how did it get to that place did was it something that meta had to really work with them on to and get all stakeholders and board was it something that just happened organically over time it's a really good point and obviously a lot of this has been before my time and sort of arriving here you just notice how big it is compared to any other sport um but i think there's been a lot of investment in the ecosystem of working with the federations on the benefits and the drivers and getting them um to use it to the extent where drivers have left other platforms and come to threads lando norris being being one um maybe it's slightly easier because the ecosystem's a bit smaller in terms of the number of players you need to make it successful um maybe because it lean's a bit tech heavy and there's an overlap there with with motor racing and and f1 that we've seen before um but yeah there's a few ingredients that are making it well as much as i'd like for our team to take all the credit of working with all the partners to get them on i think there's something that intuitively feels right between between the two but like i say next up football we want to do so much more in that space next year and partners can expect to hear more from us and how we're developing new features for that be it i don't know ip scores um features for conversation in the global football space.

55:35Now, there's a few other sort of, well, you've got feathers to the cap of Meta, whether it be AI, whether it be the wearables and the hardware side. Should we start with the AI? I think that was one of the things listed on your presentation. Yeah, you can't not have a conversation about AI right in this day and age. But Meta's approach to AI is very different to a lot of the other platforms. And so if you look at a Gemini or a ChatGPT, it's about productivity. it's about having a really really smart intern almost that can help you with tasks um and meta don't want to play in that space the meta approach is um all about personal super intelligence what does that mean it's almost like having the best personal secretary you could have so someone that really understands you um your connections your um your favorite teams your club what you've talked about and then being able to serve you onwards and i think that's the meta usp is that it can offer that through the apps that it has.

56:32In terms of how that plays out, there's a couple of places. So there's the Meta AI app, which at the moment is for things like media generation, using templates where you can edit and create content and bring that to Instagram. Then there's the wearables, where it's being deployed as AI as hardware, which we'll talk about in a second. But again, I think partners can expect to hear a lot more from us on AI. And just generally, AI's thought about as a layer on top of all the other products so um how in whatsapp are you able to use it to fuel your conversation and give you the right answers how are you able to better serve ads on instagram or target reels to the right person at the right time so think about it almost as a layer and then it is the ai app and that will become more powerful um and useful over time interesting let's go to the hardware side i'm i did see the new the new sunglasses that you mentioned there's the vanguard you called them i think earlier and uh they are very impressive looking uh looking kit or looking uh fashion uh fashion glasses i have to say talk us through all of that where to begin really i think this is the most exciting i was kind of left it to last but i think there's so much more we could talk about with the sports industry on this i think it's the product that puts us much more squarely in the industry and a lot of the kind of sponsorship deals we want to do around bringing those glasses to market um i think if you look at the trend of technology which which i like to do and we've mentioned it here you can think about technology as always trying to become um more frictionless over time so the analogy is that we used to carry around clocks in our pocket and eventually they moved onto our wrists and so on and so forth and the same is what is being posited with the glasses and computing so rather than having this glass brick that maybe gets in the way or stands between you and what you're trying to watch in the stadium or connect with a friend that you could have a more frictionless way be it a whisper in the ear or having a camera that sees what you see and knows when the right moment to intervene is going to be powerful and that applies for both the Ray-Bans which are much more of a yeah fashion product or a day-to-day for somewhere like Sweden where there's much less light you can have the transition so it's also clear I think that makes it much more useful and then the products that we're developing with Oakley so the Vanguard being the latest release is much more of a sports performance product so the team have dubbed it athletic intelligence which means if you are a weekend warrior or a budding sports enthusiast you can have this personal coach in your ear that links to your Garmin and your Strava and gives you information to make you feel more equipped to tackle whatever you're tackling.

59:19It records really high quality video. It can stand up to conditions, snow, storms, whatever. And so this is like the first iteration of a sports glasses product and you can imagine where it will go next. But we're really, really excited. I'm personally excited about the opportunity for wearables as a kind of AI hardware product. And that feels very, very natural to sport. We'll try and work with the athlete ecosystem to make sure that it's adopted in a really authentic way. So knowing the product came out last month, we're about to see, I think, an explosion of content on things like Instagram with whole new points of view of sport.

1:00:01So you can just imagine, pick your favorite sport, how they might be used to show an angle that's never been shown before. Or even we thought about would you have referees wearing them so they can show you what it's like to be that close to the action. the mind boggles with where it can go but again new product we're about to witness how users are going to use them much as when we launched mobiles it launched whole different things like selfie videos and so on so it'll be interesting to see what content is made with the glasses and then in turn how we can develop that with the sports industry so really excited about the potential for wearables no the vanguards are they bring you back to my childhood a little bit i remember when the m is it the m frame i think they were called the oakley m frames which is the big wrap around sunglasses first came out i remember all the cricketers when i was a kid were wearing them i was like oh they look so awesome and now who would have thought that they are basically this incredible piece of technology now that will i can't see how they're not heavily adopted over time by whether it be like you said sports enthusiasts to professional athletes and training and content creators and you kind of name it it seems like they are built to if you haven't seen them please make sure you go check check them out um they look they just look like a regular pair of sunglasses that someone would wear that i see running past me every day and now they might have meta ai in their ear it's a pretty incredible experience to to see that come come to life um what you said you're looking at to bring that into sport more closely create more education um where is it just to become part of the ecosystem to become adopted by users and consumers on scale.

1:01:39Do you think that it's going to be far away from potentially being linked with a live broadcast? Is that something that is on the cards in the future? Just where do you think some of those applications might go considering I know it's only in these stages? Sure, well, let's take each sector of the sports industry. So for, call it broadcasts and leagues, I think we do want to get to a place where you're able to live stream with them and that could give you a different point of view um it's been called an empathy engine so if you can see from a player's point of view how they play how they train um you have a whole new empathy for what it feels like to be that athlete um in the moment so i think that's that's the obvious place to start is almost a broadcast um version and so at the moment a lot of our conversations are working with organizations to get them the glasses and get them producing content and seeing what works almost an add-on to what they're doing with cameras and phones i think um for the athletes there's everything from training through to a lifestyle play of just showing um you know their point of view or what it's like to um to train and then there's the fan point of view which is um how can you create content of your experience going to the stadium in a way that's much more seamless than having to keep getting your phone out and look distracted versus being able to sit and watch the game and every now and then you know record a piece of content and tokenize that experience for yourself in a way that's really natural so that afterwards you can look back on it and say that was really meaningful and as we add more features you can think about it as how it can enhance the live sports viewing experience so could you have an example where you're in the stadium you're able to look at a player and see their stats on top if you're sat at the wrong end of the stadium to where the action is could you zoom in and have a much better viewing experience so i think the potential there for all of the segments is is is real a lot of our time at the moment is obviously being spent with the first two so the the media companies and and the athletes and coaching them on in the short term how they can just start creating new points of view content the fans are loving so the few athletes we have done stuff with um that you can see um on instagram there's quite a lot around the ashes actually you mentioned cricket but um we have a deal in place with australia cricket they're making fantastic content um and to do abroad who's there from a england point of view covering everything they're making some really nice content with it so i think as people see them and then they want to adopt them themselves and make their own um it could be um the wave of content that we saw when mobile phones first came out i mean these things are already selling at the rate of uh the first generation iphone so there's a comparison there of how how they can potentially grow um but it's it's early days you know these are the first iterations of this and i'm sure there's much more to come a lot of intrigue a lot of excitement but also has been met with some mixed uh reaction by the by consumers because of the the notion of being filmed uh you know say unwillingly or unknowingly has always been a concern how has that been I guess evolved I mean obviously you've only been the company a few months but I imagine like any new tech that the comfort level has improved over time and obviously with the cameras it is typically quite visible uh that you someone has turned their camera you know camera capabilities on but how have you just found have you found it to be an ongoing challenge to I guess get people to embrace it or is it not as big as some problem I think I think it's a challenge across all of the new technologies and i think meta faces this particularly because the experiences and tech it's trying to develop is not necessarily copying what has already been done like the broadcast industry but if you think about the genesis of facebook of instagram of whatsapp most of these were were new technologies that people hadn't thought of it wasn't a case of well tv's digitizing let's make an app that helps that it's let's make something new and when you make something new there are sometimes moments where you get it wrong or consumers don't understand it or bad actors especially can can capitalize on it and use it really quickly before regulations have been put in place so i had a really interesting conversation when i first joined with the integrity team at meta who the team look after a lot of these responsibility issues and they talked about exactly this that when new technology comes out there's a lot of moral panic or a lot of concern of how it will be used and sometimes there's a little bit of a lag between the technology and the rules in place to develop that.

1:06:11So they talked about cars. And when cars came out, there was a shift from kind of horse and cart to cars. There were no rules. People could drive at any age and wherever and under any level of alcohol. And then we introduced rules to make it safe. And I think that's what Meta is trying to be much more careful on with these products now is when we launch them, making sure these things are in place. So the good example with the wearables is, yeah, the light comes on when you're filming. If you try and cover the light with a piece of paper, it won't work. so there's things built in place to make sure that um uh that it's used for the right reasons but i think it's something meta faces a lot more than other companies because it's pushing out new technology it's the tough bit of the gig um but i would say from the inside here that it is taken seriously and much like we were talking about with whatsapp um the feeling is if you don't get the responsibility right if you don't get the privacy aspect right then people will just flock to another platform that does so it's not just doing it because it's the right reason And there's also business reasons to make sure that you get it right in the first place.