How the San Francisco 49ers Create Content That Keeps Fans Coming Back w/ Danny Farris

0:00I think a lot of the growth that can come is from positioning ourselves as a media brand, stepping outside of just sports and just football and more into culture and more into media and more into things that fans consume on a daily basis.

0:21Hey Danny, welcome to the show. How are you? Doing well. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to chat with you. Absolutely. A couple of years ago, we did an episode also about NFL that was a bit more like, you know, as a core, right? More than going into teams. So I want to see what changed in the past two years. Quite excited also because we talked about athletes in the past and how athletes and teams are getting much more in social media, the behind the scene and all of that, right? So quite exciting episode, I'd say, to go over. But before we get started, I always ask this thing to our guests.

0:54Basically, I want to learn a bit more about you and use this thing called the map that is basically dividing three different sections, right? The first one is the M, the mission. So what do you aim to achieve with your work? The second is A, achievements. Anything that you are really proud of can be in your life, can be on business or both of them. And the last one is the purpose. So why you do what you do. Yeah, absolutely. My mission, geez, my mission is to build great teams and allow them to do great work. That's, you know, I think everything that you do starts with the people around you, whether that be in personal or professional.

1:31And building great teams is really what my ultimate goal is. Allow them to create great work, trust them to do what they do. I'm certainly not in the weeds creating videos or creating social content or doing all this stuff. So really trusting them and giving them the opportunity and the platform to create great work is kind of what my mission is and what I hope to achieve. Achievements. Achievements is a tough one for me. I don't like talking about myself ever. My default thing to say is that when I was two years old, three years old, and four years old, I won a chubby cheeks contest at a local county fair, back-to-back-to-back winner, never been done.

2:07I think I've shed the cheeks, or at least most of them. But yeah, I've been lucky enough to do a lot of cool things throughout my career, and sports has kind of taken me along some crazy journeys and crazy paths. I was with the Houston Astros in the 2017 World Series. So got to attend a bunch of World Series games in 2019 as well, was part of the parade, got to go to Cooperstown and to do all these things. And now I work for the NFL and for the 49ers. So a lot of achievements, big and small, but couldn't have started without the back-to-back-to-back wins of the Chubby Cheeks award winners. And then purpose and what I do.

2:43My purpose is, I think the coolest thing about working in sports is the fan connection that you have. That emotional investment that people have in sports is pretty unique and pretty extraordinary. I think the best example I can give you is you walk into a stadium on game day, you have 70 ,000 fans there, and they're all super passionate. You can feel it in the building, and you walk along the field pregame, and you see a bunch of kids and their families, and we have special programs here with Make-A-Wish and our 49ers Wish through our foundation, And to see players come over and make time for these kids and the reaction that you see that the kids have, it is so powerful.

3:27And it is so just like you saw somebody make somebody else's day or week or month or, you know, year. And that is kind of the purpose that I bring or that I try to like relate to the team of like, hey, we really make an impact here, whether that be through content or through the team. and just driving home that fan connection and that passion that people have drives me in terms of my purpose. Love to hear that. Let's continue on that, right? On how these days, right, you can have even more opportunities for the meet and greet situations and also how you're able to broadcast something like that to others on social media.

4:09And social media has been working a lot for a lot of different sports, right? But NFL teams have been finding a lot of luck with that, right? A lot of different, again, you know, type of videos and formats behind the scene, you know, meets with fans and so on. Can you tell me what are some of the like key marketing moments for your team that led to, again, either something that, as you said, right, make you very happy and proud of what you're building and also maybe something that are more on the marketing side in terms of like, you know, metrics and numbers. Like what is bringing the most results these days?

4:37Yeah, in terms of like moments that we look at that are that are going to make that connection, there are several throughout the year, but just top of mind super recently was during the month of April, 4-9 day. So April 9th, 4-9, 49ers, very like marketing fun play. But last year, we kind of just soft launched it. We kind of put it out there of like, hey, this is 4-9 day. Let's celebrate it, celebrate our history. This year, we kind of went a little bit further with it. And next year, we're hoping to do a little bit more. But this year, we kicked off our 80th season or 80th anniversary season.

5:11So The 49ers have been here in San Francisco and here in the Bay Area on our 80th season here, our 80th anniversary. So we launched our campaign to celebrate our history, to celebrate the incredible past champions, the alumni that we have, the impact that we've had on the community. We launched that on 49 Day as well as our brand new app that we built in with PWC. So we just launched a brand new app that hopefully does all those things, right? connect with fans better, provide better access to content, you know, make fans connect with each other. We have a bunch of events that we put on throughout the year.

5:46It's all housed there in the app. So it's really the epicenter of what we're trying to do in terms of content, in terms of fan engagement. And that all launched on 4.9. In terms of things that we do to bring fans in a little bit more, it's through storytelling. So any kind of behind the scenes content, any kind of access we can give the fans we look to do just today or this week towards the end of May here. We have players back in the building for OTAs and this is when players come in and they are you know working out with each other again. This is like kind of the time that they're practicing but also getting to know each other.

6:22We just had the draft last month in April and our rookie minicamp happened then as well so it was really our first moment to introduce fans to these players and introduce players to the fans. So we did a bunch of content around them, you know, sitting down, giving us your background, you know, what got you into the sport, what makes you unique and how do you, you know, how are you going to represent the 49ers on the field of play? So it's really, really goes back to storytelling for us in terms of connecting with fans. And we try to do that through like helmet off content is what we call it. I think football is a little bit unique in the sports world in that you don't see the players' faces on the field.

7:01so you may not know what they look like you don't have that like connection with them or fans don't have that connection with them that they're doing baseball or soccer or basketball or anything else nhl still has those those those helmets as well but we have the face mask with the helmets it's you know we're all padded up so the helmet off content is really how we try to break down that barrier between the players and the fans and just try to get to know each other a little bit more do you think you know exactly on these on the helmet for off right top of content do you think that social media made like a huge difference in terms of that?

7:32Like, do you think that, you know, before social media was even almost impossible to show that behind the scene? And again, the face of the player, right? And the human behind that. Like, I'm trying to understand how, you know, not only now social media is helping, right, to bring again the content out, right? But as you said, who is the person behind? So I'm curious to see if that even before like social media was something even possible or if social media actually opened up a new opportunity. Oh, yeah, big time. I think that it just it provided so much more access to players. I think if you think back, like through the history of media consumption, right, like you may have gotten a feature story on a player in the newspaper or through a news outlet or through ESPN, you know, through the years.

8:14But now it just makes it much more accessible. Our social team does a great job of heading down to the field that they're right now and getting players walking out to the field, engaging with the camera. And, you know, it can be as in-depth as like a sit-down interview, or it could be as quick and dirty, as I like to call it, as, hey, give us your winner for the FIFA World Cup. And then you get a little bit of information about the player. The next question is something else to get a little bit more about the player. So as social media has evolved and as social media has become, you know, the monster it is today, the more accessible things are, the more insatiable fans are for this type of content.

8:57And it just provides so many different avenues to just to get to know players and get to know them as people instead of just athletes and, you know, their stat line. What type of content is driving the most either, you know, eyeballs or engagement these days? Is it the interview that you said or it is the quick right and wrong type of, you know, vertical short form videos? Yeah, we actually did a pretty deep dive just over the past couple of weeks. Our social team went back through the numbers and, you know, looked at YouTube, looked at the site, looked at our social numbers to determine what is performing best.

9:31And by far, the highest performing content was personality driven helmet off content. So whether that be, we call them whiteboard questions, where we literally write a question on the whiteboard. Players come through. They may have something funny to say or they may jab at another player. Or something like, we just had the draft. This is top of mind. But players and a quick selfie video of just like, hey, Niners fans, super excited to be playing in the Bay Area. You know, you're going to get a lot of intensity out of me. I'm going to bring this and that to the table. So the personality driven helmets off content is by far our highest performing.

10:09And that's not unique to the 49ers. I think that's pretty consistent across all sports. Of course, we're going to have football highlights and we're going to have all that stuff when games come up and fans are going to consume that, you know, at a super high clip as well. But it's the fun, social, you know, very personality driven content that's going to kind of break out of our like football bubble and reach a broader audience and hopefully convert like casual fans into actual 49ers fans. So that's by far our most performing stuff and stuff that we lean on quite a bit. Hi, ready to elevate your brand?

10:42At the Influencer Marketing Factor, we've got you covered. We manage influencer campaigns from start to finish. So creator sourcing, strategy, legal, shipping, logistics, all of it. We work with Fortune 500 brands and DTC companies worldwide, and our campaigns are backed by real ROI analysis. Check us out at theinfluencermarketingfactory.com. And what about trends? You know, you usually ask this question when it comes to different type of brands out there, right? There are legacy brands, there are newer brands, right? There are different categories and industries. and each one is different when it comes to online trends, right?

11:20There are some companies that jump on all of them. There are others that stay away from all of them. Others that say, based on our DNA, based on our customer base, based on this and that, we are all going to be very selective. When it comes to like online trends, how do you approach that? It's again, let's try everything out to get to most people possible or do you like still be, you know, like paying attention to what really matters to the people that actually are your fans? Yeah, I think it's a super interesting thing to chat through. And it's something that we think about almost on a day-to-day basis.

11:52The 49ers are such a legacy brand, right? Like we've been, kind of like I said, we're approaching our 80th anniversary here. We've been in the Bay Area for that amount of time. Historical, you know, championship type of brand. But we also sit in the most innovative city or area in the country. We sit in Silicon Valley, which is very innovative, very pressing, you know, proactive. And I think that we try to balance that as much as we can. There's also the aspect of social audiences also expect that out of brands and teams nowadays are the trends or different engaging pieces of content that traditionally, you know, maybe 10 years ago, the 49ers wouldn't kind of touch because of that legacy of the brand.

12:38And I think as we continue to evolve in the social space and as we continue to look at trends, I would say that this is like a terrible answer, but we kind of sit right there in the middle. We're not going to be the ones that are going to be jumping on every single trend or not going to be the ones that are going to have a super social, you know, Wendy's or, you know, that kind of voice. But we're also not going to be, you know, just posting football highlights and, you know, just posting, you know, stuff about our history. We really want to thread that needle between very innovative and very legacy type of brand.

13:10So a good in between, right? So to having, as you said, right, the type of legacy content more sport related and then something that also can maybe present. I think that these days, we were saying that also like other episodes, how because of social media, sports is also getting in front of people that are not necessarily sports fanatics, right? or they care, but not that much, but they still care now because of these different angles, right? On, you know, as you said, like maybe the behind the scenes. I think it's also sometimes it's also interesting because you can actually attract new audiences, right?

13:45Because of that. They might not be your number one fan, right? But they are the one that they might not go necessarily, you know, during a live game, but they might look at reaction videos, right? Of the best actions, right? And so on. So I think it's also interesting, right? How new audiences are building up but thanks to this type of content that might be, you know, if it is all about the sport itself, right, might be a bit maybe not that interesting for some type of audiences. So I think it's quite interesting to see that. And, you know, also one of the most recent, right, the social campaigns also was the skeletal release, right?

14:17That is like a big important moment. Can you tell me maybe more like about this year? What was the strategy behind, you know, and also the aspect of all the creative behind and why it's always important as a moment and how did it change again before social media was this impactful compared to now? Yeah, it's crazy how much schedule release has exploded in the past five years, six years. And schedule release is like just become a massive campaign in and of itself. This year in particular, we really wanted to, in the theme of the 80th and our branding for this year, we really wanted to tell the story about being a fan in the Bay Area for the past 80 years.

14:59So our schedule release video, we hired a 3D artist to build essentially the painted ladies. For those of you that aren't familiar, it's like the full house, houses, the Victorian, different color pastel houses here in the Bay Area or here in San Francisco. And he 3D modeled that street and the house. And we kind of flew through the house and each room represented a different decade. So what did it look like to be a fan in the 1940s of the 49ers? So we had different artifacts come in. We had different scans from our museum and did a ton of homework on the back end of some historical pieces that would fit into that era in the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, so on and so forth.

15:46So we really wanted to celebrate the history as well as really make it rooted in realism in terms of like these are actual assets that we had. Schedule release is also interesting because it's the biggest day for ticket sales. It's when single game tickets go on sale for the NFL. So while the schedule release itself, the video and the creative and the storytelling behind it may not drive a ton of ticket sales, like just on a one-to-one basis. I talk about the example internally, like if we just posted a graphic and a ticket link. We would sell as many tickets as we would as if we put a million dollars into a video.

16:23However, I think it's a brand play, especially the schedule release videos. Some teams go all out and they do incredible work. Just scrolling on social media during a schedule release day is like Christmas day for creators like myself, for content folks like myself. It's super interesting to see the different angles that teams present. But for us, it was really a brand play and celebrating the 80th and our fans here in the Bay Area. So it is a bear. It's a beast. A lot of eyeballs on it. And you know that there's a lot of pressure behind that, both internally and externally, but super proud of the work that we did and with the work that the 3D artist, his name is Dom.

17:03But it's a very, very fun activation and it hits everybody, right? Like we not only did the content with the video, but we also built out this microsite on our website and would encourage people to check it out. That dives into each room a little bit more, showcases some of those Easter eggs. And our team did just such an incredible job of storytelling, just that extra layer deeper in celebration of our 80th anniversary. And I don't know if you have this data, but I would be curious to know, since each room is a different era, it's a decade there. There is always tried on the internet with different generations.

17:38My generation was the best, the 80s was the best, the 90s. Did you get that also at the sentiment of different generation coming in and kind of this nostalgia and sharing also not just the sports moments but also the life moment or is something that didn't happen this time it's something that didn't really happen this time and you know what's funny is that we were kind of expecting that like the 80s were kind of the golden years for the for the 49ers right like that's when we wanted three super bowls four super bowls you know and so on and so forth so i can tell you that personally my favorite room was the 2000s room he really modeled it after like a teenager in the 2000s.

18:15And that's kind of exactly what I was, a teenager in the 2000s. So it looked a lot like one of my rooms with the fat heads on the walls and the video games and the old computer in there. So that was certainly my favorite. But no, I didn't see a lot of like fan sentiment around like, oh, I love the 60s room or the 70s room who spoke to me. It is funny though, a little anecdote is that after it had been posted and fans were having their initial reactions to it, George Kittle, tight end for our team, very massive name, very massive player for us, reached out to the 3D artist directly on Instagram, he DM'd him and said, dude, I love the 70s room.

18:52I love the Grateful Dead poster. Like, this is my kind of vibe. So it's funny to see that. I had the reaction and George Kittle had the reaction. I just didn't see a ton of comments from the fans themselves. But super cool activation and just a ton of work that went into it. Nice. You know, again, I was curious because all the time on the internet, these things about generations and it's always very funny to read. And so, you know, we covered the right IRL activations, meet and greets. We talked about, you know, the strategy behind these and the melt-off and everything. I've got a last question for you, Dani, today.

19:24And it's, you know, what is the future, right, for sport marketing? And what are the big, either one big opportunity that you see that people are not really, you know, jumping on? or maybe if there is smaller opportunities altogether that maybe combined, you know, in a more holistic view would really bring a sports marketing to the next level. Yeah, for sure. And like I said, sitting here in the Bay Area at the epicenter of Silicon Valley, I feel like I would be reprimanded for not just at least mentioning AI. Like I have to at least mention that. Of course, yes. In terms of like building strategies and content and, you know, different fan personalization and all that stuff.

20:03So I have to mention that just like as a San Francisco guy. But really, I think the next generation of growth in how I'm looking at it is treating the brand as, and I don't want fans to take this out of context. There's going to be the football side that's focusing on the football team and winning and the product on the field. I'm focused more on the business side and the side of the business. but really looking at the 49ers as a entertainment brand that just happens to have a football team. So and really like making that as the overarching kind of mission or the overarching goal and then having things sprout off of that.

20:43I've been kicking around an idea internally and hopefully we start activating on this kind of stuff. But making us like kind of a media hub or media company and having a bunch of different content based off of that. A lot of our content now is based off the football team and our fans and the organization itself. But I think I think a lot of the growth that can come is from positioning ourselves as a media brand, stepping outside of just sports and just football and more into culture and more into media and more into things that fans consume on a daily basis that doesn't have to do with football.

21:22So I think that's going to be a massive growth opportunity for us. And then just the last thing here on this was the NIL in college athletics has really changed the equation, I think, in terms of players coming into a team. So at the college level, they're building up their own brands, right? They're getting their own deals. They're very, very media savvy compared to five, six, seven years ago. So when they said into the NFL, they kind of already get their kind of already understand the deal. They know what their personal brand is worth. They know what it means. And they know how to kind of work the media.

21:59They're much more media savvy and more media trained. So athlete IP, I think, is going to be a big thing moving forward and really leveraging their brands to reach new audiences as the football team brand and as the 49er brand. I think it's going to be super interesting to see develop over the next few years. I agree with you. You know, like both athletes and on our side when you work with content creators, right? we are seeing an evolution of going from only their job, right? That is, of course, very important, but in terms of also like IP, right? The revenue streams, how can you multiply yourself in a way, right?

22:30When you are not on the field or for content creators, we're not in front of a camera. So I agree with that. And also on your first point, someone was saying already a few years ago, in the next 10 years, every company is going to be an entertainment slash media company. And we have been seeing that, you know, entrepreneurs have to become and are becoming content creators, right? And athletes are much more than athletes. And so, yeah, I do see your points. I think that a lot of companies are going in that direction because it is what customers want. And also, it's a way to continue to evolve your brand without being stuck necessarily back in the day.

23:07Or again, even if you're a legacy brand, you have to understand what is next. If not, you're going to be a dinosaur. And you can have, of course, you're super fans. But unfortunately, it doesn't work at that anymore in 2026. And I'm pretty sure for next years to come. Yep. Fans just expect more. And it's our job to kind of step up and meet their expectations. Absolutely. Well, Lenny, thank you so much for joining me today, for sharing all their knowledge with us. I know that it's like a pretty packed period for you. So I wanted to thank you again for staying with us today. Yeah. No, thank you a ton.

23:42Love chatting with you. And it was a pleasure to be on. Amazing. This was the Influence Factor by the Influencer Marketing Factory. And I'll see you in the next episode.