The Expanding Pathways to Sports Fandom and What it Means for Personalized Experiences

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 306 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil
chatted with Brian Hough, Founder and CEO of PressBox
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the
full interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast
platforms and at www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

Brian’s Career Path
“I've had a weird career. I sold cars for a really long time. I spent, like, ten years in
sales before I got into tech. People would describe me as smart, but not necessarily
motivated. I think now I'd probably get diagnosed with ADHD or something. So I
went to a technical high school, I went to college, it took me longer than normal to
graduate. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I'd go [to school] for like a
quarter and then I'd sell a bunch of used cars so I could pay my tuition, as I kept
doing that. I graduated from Ohio State. I had no idea what to do with my life, so I
took the LSAT and I went to law school literally for like two weeks after I graduated
from Ohio State. I just moved to Akron and went to law school, and I absolutely
hated it. I think in my head I was like, look, this could be like Law & Order. It's
going to be so exciting and whatever. And like, no, it's just like relearning the same
thing. I became a very good writer, but beyond that, it didn't really help me.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So I found myself coding, and I was like, you know, I really just need to get
back to the tech side of things. I went to a technical high school, I taught
myself how to code despite not having a technical degree, and I was like, you
know what, I'm going to take the shot. So I moved to Seattle and my first job,
weirdly, in sports, was working for a radio station. So I was working for
Starbucks, just like trying to find a job, I was doing a World of Warcraft
podcast. We're getting deep here, Neil, and I got discovered by CBS Radio, and
they offered me a job, but it wasn't full time. And I was like, well, I can kind of
code, and they're like, Cool, we need somebody to help on the marketing site,
and one of their radio stations was a sports site. That's kind of how my weird
career in sports started was working for CBS Radio in Seattle that I learned,
weirdly, today, is the exact same radio station that fired Jimmy Kimmel back
in, like the 1980s for refusing to do a bit. I literally just learned that today.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Fast forward, I'm not going to go through every month of this. So I spent a lot of
time in tech, and moved down to San Francisco. My first real startup was a
company called Piqora. Piqora was one of the first visual social media analytics
companies. So we were originally called Pinfluencer, so you can imagine we
started on Pinterest. And what we did is we crawled the internet for brands
looking for usage of their content across the internet. So if you were The Gap and
you had a t-shirt, we would go and find where people were posting you on
Pinterest or Tumblr or Instagram and give you analytics on that content. And I
got the opportunity to work with some of the most incredible people. The guy
who wrote the search algorithm we were using, I can say all this stuff now
because it's been decades, but the search algorithm to scrape Pinterest, we got in
trouble multiple times because we were scraping Pinterest faster than they were
understanding what was going on. They had no API at the time, but it taught us a
lot about a couple of things.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“One, understanding large amounts of stuff, especially visually, that
are happening on the internet. And two, how to deal with the
peculiarities of scraping, which is obviously like a hot topic here in AI
today, how AI models learn and garner that knowledge and who owns
rights and that type of thing. We had to deal with all those same
things. We had all our same headbutts with the social platforms and
things of that nature. So, did that for quite a while. That company
ended up getting acquired, and I ended up at Bleacher Report, we're
getting to the relevant part of the story.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Myself and my co-founder, Torey, we were at Bleacher Report for a combined 12
years, and our roles at B/R were running the engineering side of what was called
the programming tools. What the programming tools did at BR, if you're not
familiar with media publishing, is everything that runs the newsroom, basically.
So the understanding of what's going on, the aggregation of content about what's
going on in the labeling of that content and then distribution of content to users.
So if you're an OG B/R [user] and you used the TeamStream app, this is what was
powering that. So our tools were used for things like finding all those tweets from
the NBA and putting them in the feed. So if you're a LeBron fan, we got you. Or if
you're down for League Fits, like powering the league fits social accounts, there's
always things going in there. And this is around the era of House of Highlights
getting big and getting bought by Bleacher Report. This is when TNT got the
rights to the NBA, so we got all this awesome access to highlights. It was a pretty
awesome time.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So I did that for quite a while. I learned a lot about personalization,
we'll get to why it didn't work super well at the time, probably, later. I
did a detour in healthcare. I spent ten years as a CTO in health tech.
I've done everything from work on a toothbrush that maps your
mouth and underwrites your insurance, to helping with women's
reproductive health and customizable skincare. None of those things I
thought I'd ever have on my resume when I took that radio job. So I
did that for a decade. Then when I got out of health tech, we originally
set out to build a consumer app.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We were all kind of at this point in our careers. You can see the gray
in my beard, midlife crisis time, and we were trying to decide, what
are we going to do? We loved our time at B/R. B/R set out to have this
mission of personalization that sports still has not even gotten close to
deliver on, which is like, regardless of who you're a fan of, your
version of being a fan of sports, we will be your sports app. So if you
want to consume nothing but video about sneakers, we’ll be your app.
If you want to do hardcore fantasy and betting, we’ll be your app. And
we never could quite get there. It took so much human intervention. I
don't know if this is news to you, but media companies don't make a
lot of money. So it was challenging.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We had 70 million users at the time, and you can imagine what it
takes to try to personalize content for 70 million users at any level, let
alone at the 1 to 1 level. And so it just kind of fell over. And it's not to
say that Bleacher Report is not awesome. It's great, but it never really
got to that vision. It was still covering, you know, the big five, six,
seven leagues. If you love somebody in La Liga or you were into
curling or you're into motorsports, there was nothing for you in the
Bleacher Report app. So we started out with that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“It's not a good time to build a consumer app, not a good time to build something
that looks like a sports media company, anything of that nature, but then we got
super lucky and we got connected with an old friend of ours, a guy named Robert,
who is the CTO at the World Surf League, and saw an opportunity for us to take
the tools that we built to run our own media company and actually make media
better for both leagues, teams and the media companies that inspired the
direction that we were going. And as you and I were talking about at the top of
the call, it's taken me a while to refine how to describe what we do. It does take a
lot of like, industry knowledge of how media works, but it's been pretty awesome
to go from our first conversation where I probably could have gotten one
sentence out of my mouth about the direction we were going to where we are
today, where at least we've got these use cases, we're seeing how excited our
customers are. We get that weird product market fit feeling maybe coming
towards our direction, but it's been a pretty awesome journey.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

On defining what personalization means
“So personalization has been stuck in what you described for a very long time. What
was novel for Bleacher Report is now in every sports app that you download from the
App Store, big or small, right? Tell them the teams you like, tell them the athletes you
like, get a customized feed of some sort of that content. But personalization goes far
further than that. Like if I, for example, have 20 minutes to figure out what the heck's
going on in sports that day, I might prefer just an audio update of the news that's
happened as I'm driving to work. Or maybe I consume all my sports in a newsletter, so
I want everything to come in that way. Sometimes I think of this experience and it feels
very like Minority Report, but like personalization should get to the point in which I
can just have an app or subscribe to it, what I would like to see, like show me all the
three pointers from the games this week, or show me just the highlights from these
three teams and be able to get that when I want it. And that's the level that we are
shooting for.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“If you want to know every little mention that has ever been made about a
news story on 50 different podcasts, we want to find that for you. If you
want to get everything in a five minute newsletter, great. If you care a ton
about fantasy and want a super detailed fantasy report before and after
every game so that you can prepare — those are the type of personalization
experiences that are possible today. There's a lot we can talk about all the
obstacles that keep us from getting here from an industry's perspective, but
that is the personalization that is possible and nowhere near what is
happening. In the places where you do see it happening, tickets, merch,
places like that, you see the value that it can bring, but there's so much more
dynamic stuff that we can do on the content side with stats and highlights
and gambling. There's so many different aspects of how people enjoy sports,
and right now everything's just kind of one size fits all.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“There's always going to be some of those [fan-provided] signals. You
have to take people at face value. We have spent the last decade in this
algorithmic trap that is like part of the reason why we're having this
conversation, right? Following sports requires you to be very online
and very all over the place and subject to the algorithms. Is it a legit
story? Is it a rumor? Oh, that was reported five days ago. Oh, that got
taken down because of rights violations, etc., etc. and so we do have to
have some — we do not want to take complete control away from the
user.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“You never want to be in a situation where you feel like, I just don't
know what it’s going to give me. Like we all try to trick the algorithms
into resetting for us that type of thing. So it's a combo of those signals.
There's going to be things you tell us both implicit and explicit, right?
You tell us that you like the Baltimore Ravens, then you will get
Baltimore Ravens news. But then also like, Oh man, you interact with
a lot of video content or you've connected your Reddit account, you
probably would like to know what's going on on Reddit in the sport.
Those are the type of signals that we can also take in.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Yes, there's some behavioral things, but we always want to be careful
about overlearning from those things. We've all done the watch one
video on YouTube and now our feed is nothing but that. So when
we're working with our partners, because obviously we have some
control over this, but when we're working with media companies,
leagues, etc., they have editorial control over the type of things that
they are doing. We often talk to them about these use cases and what
are good signals versus signals that are probably not going to get you
anywhere, and how you can create an experience that learns, but also
has some outs so they can discover new things, right?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Like just finding out that someone only cares about music does not
mean that the newsletter every week should have nothing but music
in it, right? So how do we help them do that random sampling and
find ways like, Oh, it actually turns out this person does like that
content without completely destroying the fan experience. So it's a
little bit of a balance that we find. But to answer your original
question, it really is so far behind beyond those explicit signals, but
we have some responsibility here about what we do with those
implicit signals.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“It's like I need a pair of sunglasses, and literally all I get on
Instagram now is with sunglasses. And I bought those sunglasses like
two months ago. It's just the life that we lead on social right now. But
when it comes to sports, it's also that the ultimate goal, whether it is a
media company but in particular with leagues and teams, is to move
fans down the funnel, right? So you want to meet them where they
are, which is why personalization has become so big, because right
now content gets written for the hardcore fan, right? You watch the
game, I give you the recap, you're into fantasy, I give you the recap.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So this part of our personalization efforts is to get to these types of
content that can get to those more casual fans, but you still want to
convert them, move them down the funnel, get them more excited
about the sport. So you have to sprinkle some personalization in with
some of that; like, Hey, let's see if they will watch a game now or if
they're not a highlights watcher, let's see what it means to recommend
them highlights. So there's a lot of art behind it, and not just science
because it's a lot of how you approach the personalization as the end
customer, not just in like the tech behind it that powers it.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

About what PressBox produces, its outputs and services
“The easiest way to put us is that we help build automated media companies,
meaning that we help media companies, whether that media company be an
actual publisher a la like an ESPN Bleacher Report style or a team, a league,
etc., and it does everything from understanding what is going on in that
vertical; so in the case of sports, we've built all these agents. Those agents
have a deep, nuanced understanding of sports. We are sitting on top of tons
of information from news articles, podcasts and media coverage. We follow
social conversations with athletes and coaches and teams. We're on Reddit
following that conversation. And what it does is it builds this corpus of data
that powers our agents’ ability to create very detailed, personalized sports
content for fans. So that can run a pretty wide gamut.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We are in some cases, because the way we handle personalization is
through tagging. OG B/R people will know what I'm talking about
because you literally pick your tags in the app when you're picking
what you're doing. But we will go through in a much more detailed
way and understand what a piece of content, whether we're creating
that content, we're ingesting it from someone else in that organization
that's done it, or we're pulling in third party coverage, we are labeling
it semantically about everything that's going on in that. So it's about
these athletes, it's about this news item, it happened at this event.
And that knowledge base then allows the league to turn all of that
stuff happening around their sport into the super detailed content.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So if you think today, when I write one of those event recaps, I'm just
writing it for who I think the most important people are. If it's F1, I'm a
huge F1 fan, I'll use a lot of F1 examples, you're just going to get like,
Here's what Max did, maybe here's what Lewis did, here's the winners,
that type of thing. But what if I could write the intro to the recap, but
then a tool could power part of that article page that is specific to what
we know about that fan. So if they have a fantasy team, there's a graphic
inserted with how their fantasy drivers did. We, in some cases through
data partnerships, have access to live results and things that are
happening, so now that live graphic is following your drivers that are on
your team, not just the people we choose to pick, because the majority
of fans like this person; those are the types of experience we're enabling.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“From everything from article and content hubs to full blown
newsletters, we do audio output and partnership with Eleven Labs, we
also power stuff on the broadcast side of the equation. So things like
the same tools that we use to highly research a piece of content is also
good for broadcast, because they're trying to understand what's going
on in the event. What are all the past head-to-head matchups that
have happened? What is what's going on at this venue that is historic?
What are the milestones statistically, that all the athletes may or may
not meet during this event?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So it starts to become this powerful experience where, imagine getting a
newsletter and you're a fan of Luka and you get in that newsletter, ‘Hey,
did you know Luka is like two threes away from setting this [record]? You
should buy a ticket and show up to the game.’ Like, it's starting to give that
real contextual reason to show up. Not just like, Hey, I swapped your name
out at the top and I know you like jerseys, so here you go. Like, those are
the levels of experience we're trying to enable, but the output is pretty
wildly different. Sometimes we're integrating via APIs, sometimes we are
fully generating that output for our customers. We are definitely more of an
enterprise-style integration product than we are a SaaS product. We don't
have people like putting in a credit card and setting things up. We're often
deeply integrating with our partners, their data, that type of thing.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

On understanding when personalization is successful
“Ultimately, the name of the game is engagement, but you have to have a
flexible definition of what engagement means. I think this is something that
Bleacher Report figured out very early on that ESPN didn’t. And what I
mean by that is Bleacher Report set out to build an app, they did not set out
to build a way to access their website to read the news. And why that
differentiation matters is, like, I always point to silly things that B/R did
before that others take as commonplace: spoiler mode, for example, and the
ability to hide spoilers. The fact that we were one of the first partners with
Apple to do rich push notifications, meaning we stopped caring whether you
even made it into the app, you got everything in the push notification.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“If I said those words to 95% of the people in media right now, they
like, What the hell? But we were taking an approach to tech in the way
that a tech company would. It's like, Hey, we're going to give it away
for free. We're going to trust that we're making a good product and
that will bring you back. So if you're coming back for trivia, if you're
coming back for scores, if you're coming back for highlights, if you
just want to read a bunch of tweets, whether we wrote them or not, we
weren't precious about that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“This was at a time when the industry was very precious about
journalism in sports. Everything was handwritten. No offense, I love
The Athletic, butThe Athletic is coming around like, We're gonna
make journalism so great, and there's tons of room for that in sports.
But the personal, that only goes so far. How many long form sports
articles do you read a day? But how many highlights do you consume
on the toilet? Like the answer is hundreds over the course of a month,
right? So we started to figure out that, like, We just want you to spend
time in-app regardless of what you were doing with that time, we
wanted to be valuable to you as a sports fan, and the leagues. And the
companies that figure that out will get much further than the ones
that think it's purely a content game.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Just writing an article is one thing. Having this living experience — a great
example is F1 and multiviewer? F1 gives away these APIs that let people
build these tools that let you watch all from every single car on the track.
They don't care if you ever turn on the actual broadcast. You just want to
follow Carlos Sainz around on the track, you do that. And that became an
official F1 TV product. But like, is that potentially taking sponsorship
dollars away. If you think about it Neil, like the exposure and the lack of
eyeballs that are no longer on all the cars and just on one car, like all those
things are impactful, but they did it for the fan experience because they
watched fans doing that anyway, and they realize that you're going to stay
more stuck if you just care about Lewis and can watch just Lewis than if we
force you to watch the entire thing. So that was like a very early thing we
learned at B/R.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Like, when we first started doing things like integrating with WSC
[Sports], the ability to do cool things, just putting together highlight
montages. So if you love Steph, we could just be like, hey, here's
Steph's highlights from the game. We started learning that may be the
only way people care about the Warriors game and otherwise may not
watch the Warriors game and the leagues that are okay with that
versus the leagues that fight that trend are where you start to see that
line between the successful and the not successful.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“This is where you get a lot of the leagues that let things happen on
social media tend to thrive than the ones who clamp down on
highlights and fair use and things of that nature. It's the same lessons
that we learned at B/R. The tighter ESPN got, the more that they were
like, Hey, we're going to give you a teaser in the push notification,
make you read the article. The more people that came to B/R, and I'd
love to tell you, like this is no offense to anybody at B/R, because a lot
of this was built long before I got there, but like B/R didn't get there
because we were this amazing growth team, right? We were not
growth-hacking our way to those numbers, it was just natural. We
were a little bit of a cultural moment.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We were a little bit of like the right thing at the right time, and it just
worked out really well for us, not because we were great at advertising or
that we were, like, awesome on the App Store. There were a lot of cool
features that didn't make a whole lot of sense for a free product. Like, it
didn't make revenue to do these things, but we learned that you're more
likely to read the content. [That’s] the reason why we featured other
people's content. This is a conversation I have all the time, it's like, Oh,
wait, you want me to feature a competitor, or like a third party medium?
Like they're going to read it anyway, wouldn't you rather they read it
within your ecosystem in the context of everything else you have going
on in your sport versus like, Nope, we're not going to let those companies
aggregate that content and then they're just not going to read it at all.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

On what the end goals and funnels look like for sports content
“So everybody has their fun origin story. My origin story was I went to the Barcelona
GP, and I read this book about the history of Formula 1. But in particular, what struck
me was Liberty Media's takeover of F1 and how they've changed the sport. I don't want
to co-op any of this as my idea, I was just inspired heavily by this, and this is really
what drives PressBox. If you view the sport as a sport, which is what we have for a very
long time, you hold it very preciously and this is my word of the day, apparently, and
you see things like, I mean, we grew up in that generation of like, you're not a real fan
unless you're watching the games live, right? Why are you not sitting on the couch in
your jersey with your bowl of Cheetos, doing your thing? Like, it was America, that's
how we watched, especially the big four. And we were okay if the sport stayed small. I
say we, not just fans, I'm talking about people at the leagues, I'm talking about the
athletes themselves. There was an identity in that, you were not a fan if you were not
watching the game.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Over time, and especially in this age of these upstart leagues, brand
matters more. And when you start viewing the league as a brand, you
start to realize that your job is to help the league meet the fans where
they are and where they're going so that you can both grow and adapt
with the league. If you think about, like you're a fashion brand, what
you're producing today is going to have to change if you want to get
the next kids coming in, and a lot of fashion brands fail at that. So if
you think about how our sports fandom is changing; my wife is a
hardcore F1 fan, loves Oscar Piastri, gets teary eyed when he wrecks
— and that woman did not watch a single F1 race for years, but she's
now a hardcore fan. And you know why?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“And I hate this example because it's the classic one, but Drive to Survive. And
Drive to Survive [does not mean] everybody rush out and make your
documentary, though I love them and I will binge all of them like, but the reality
is it showed that if you meet fans where they are and let them enjoy the aspects of
the sport that matter, they will become fans and they will move their way down
the funnel. And it turns out there's a finite amount of fans that are ever going to
be hardcore sports fans. So do you just want to have 10 million hardcore sports
fans, or are you okay with another 10 million that might have some churn in it,
but they buy some jerseys, they occasionally show up to games, they may not
even know who's starting on the floor, but they think the jersey looks dope or
they love watching the league fits, and that's been a big thing, sneakers and music
and collectibles are so many ways to interact with sports, and we pooh-pooh
these as not real sports fans if they didn't also care about what's going on in the
game.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So it's funny, the highlight-driven league, I view it as a compliment.
Like, to me, I would rather have that than be stuck in something like
soccer that has a really hard time putting out very small, short form
content to pull people into the sport. Like, yeah, it sucks, and you
lament that they're doing a lot more of it than you wanted them to on
social versus coming back to your owned and operated, but in the
end, at least you have that, and that is something that can drive
excitement you can capture in a very exciting way what happens in
the course of a basketball game in a very short amount of time versus
like NASCAR or Formula 1, can struggle with that type of stuff.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“You put highlights for Formula 1 on there and you're like, Man, there
wasn't a single overtake. I'm like, I love motorsports, and I'm willing
to admit it is boring for long swaths of time, so I don't necessarily
view that as a negative. I view those other leagues at a disadvantage
because what is their hook if not doing stunts like Drive to Survive
and that type of thing to get those social eyeballs to get somebody
interested. The more exciting the highlight, the more highlights it
produces.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“This is why you see this weird spike of like, influencer athletes that
are maybe not super great at the sport, but one of the most popular
athletes in that sport because they drive eyeballs. And when you talk
to leagues that have those, motorsports has a fair amount of these
influencers that quite frankly, aren't very fast, sorry, all of you, if
you're listening, but have millions and millions and millions of
Instagram followers and, like, maybe I should embrace them, and
leverage their audience. That sounds like, Duh, but like a lot of
leagues you talk to are like, That makes me a little nervous. And it's
not like, they're not great at the competition, but if they're fans,
they're fans, right?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

On constraints that prevent even the most avid fans from consuming
games lives or IRL
“If they work a night job when the games are on, there's a variety of
reasons. They're too young, the kids don't have full control over their
TV habits. There's like a ton of different reasons. I think the industry
is getting there. They're starting to learn that the casual fan is actually
incredibly valuable. And maybe it's actually, and this is like a direct
quote from the book, it might be okay that they never convert. Like,
Formula 1, Liberty Media has come out and said We're fine if not
everybody falls down that funnel, which is the smart thing, right?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Would you rather have a temporary 5 million [fans] or nobody? So I
think that is one of the bigger things that we've learned is that leaning
into those different types of fandom, expanding the definition of
fandom by practice of doing so gives you more opportunity to get
fans. You will convert some of them, but also don't view the top of the
funnel as just this, like unconverted bunch that you're frustrated
about. View them as a good amount of revenue. Probably, yeah, they
may only see one game a year, they may only buy a jersey every
couple of years, but then they also may be, like my wife, two years
later, just decide they find that one athlete they care about because
they've stayed up on social, and now they're a hardcore fan because
they found that person that they could identify with.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We're past the point where things like I'm from the city do enough to
make you a fan of the sport. We're more fans of athletes than teams than
we ever have been as like a human race following sports, and that is
going to continue to be the case. I'm a LeBron James fan. Brian, who's
your favorite NBA team? I don't have one. I just really love LeBron
James. I have since I was a kid, and there's a lot of that going on,
especially when you get into these very individual-driven sports. Like, we
do a lot of stuff in motorsports and aggressive sports and judged sports
and all those are very individual driven, and so they have already learned
they have to rely on that. But you just really need to be out there fishing,
waiting for them to find that thing that pulls them into the sport and
don't have a whole lot of judgment about what it is that pulls them in.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

On learning about the different types of fandom, entry points, and segments
“So one of the ways we got started just because of our background was
content aggregation. And part of the reason why content aggregation was
important to us is one of the patterns we were seeing is the gateways into
the sport used to be one of two things: the sport itself, or the people who
own the broadcast rights to the sport. Those were literally the only ways,
right? Then we got some media companies and that type of thing, but we
didn't have to the degree we have today where it's like, I know people who
only follow Formula 1 through specific influencers, or we talk about the
Bundesliga giving rights to a YouTuber is a great example of how this is
changing. I talk about the connections to the sport, like emotionally.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Let's just also talk about physically, right? Like you're learning about
sports on Dude Perfect, or you're learning about sports because you
follow this one particular influencer. There's this influencer in F1, her
name is Toni Cowan-Brown, and like, I know people for whom that's
the only way they consume F1 content. That's their vibe, they love
how she approaches it. They love the specific niche that she talks
about.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“This is why aggregation was important, like work with these folks. And
I know saying work with influencers is not a new thing. But it's not
about brand content and you telling them to go and develop a specific
thing for you. It's how do I give fans who come into my sport through
these alternative pathways? It's like this weird version of not owned
and operated that isn't like a traditional media company. So if I have a
million people that engage in the sport through this podcast, that's just
some random people on YouTube, how do I make a pathway for those
fans into my owned and operated properties? Is that partnerships? Is
that featuring that content? One of the things that we do is we take this
long form content and we identify pieces of like, say, a YouTube video
in which a particular news topic is being talked about.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So if you know a bunch of people in your audience are following this
particular influencer on YouTube or Instagram, start working with
them, pull in that content. Now it's like, Oh, cool, here's the two
minute and 30-second blurb of what Toni thought of that news, I'm
now more engaged. And there's a lot like, I don't want to gloss over
the rights and the fun of like, are the right people getting paid and
that type of thing, because it is very much a thing that we need to be
figuring out, not just in sports, but generally in media.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“But it goes to show you that there's all of this marketing happening
for free in sports in a way that doesn't happen in any other industry to
the degree that it does in sports, where they’re writing fan blogs left
and right, we're out there creating our own networks to cover sports.
We're doing all these crazy things. They are still in service of your
brand and your sport. How do you leverage that in a way that both is
authentic to those audiences, but pulls them closer to the mothership,
so to speak, of the owned and operated and getting them closer to the
game, that type of thing.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We didn't set out to build a media monitoring solution when we built
the company, but it turns out that's what we needed to do. Exactly
what you described is like, we want to do things like, so when we're
looking at Reddit for conversations, it's not, Hey, so you can go in
there and participate like a Meltwater, like that type of social
listening. What we're saying is, is like, Man, this Reddit thread
around this particular topic is getting tons of engagement, do you
want to highlight this? Do you want to feature this in content in some
way? Is there content we can create for you that rides on this trend?
So you can imagine how when we're doing that, we're crawling.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“What's going on with athletes on Instagram? We're crawling. What
conversations are happening on Bluesky? Like, find all these
opportunities so you can take advantage of that in an authentic way.
It's not about brand tracking. It's not about like, Oh, I want to get in
there and comment so I can have my engagement metrics. It's
knowing that, like, Hey, it turns out when Kai [Cenat] does this that's
really engaging with his audience that also really likes us — what can
we do with that information? Whether it's just aggregate it and do
that, or whether it's like amplify it or build your own content around
those same themes.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“These things can happen on a variety of different levels. To your
point, there's a lot of weird niches in sports. Tons of weird niches, like
a lot of my motorsports fandom is through sim racing, which is
something that like, there's probably 10,000 people on this earth that
bother with the expense and the complication of doing it. But like, I
get content about motorsports delivered to me all the time with a sim
racing angle that keeps me engaged in that sport in a very real way.
And that's a lot of work for me, one of 10,000 people for a league,
right? You're not going to see F1 go out and try to invest a ton in this
type of content.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“But if I can produce that type of content, or be your central hub for that
type of content, then I can get those fans. I think the bigger point is there's
all these niches that all have these various different parts of fandom that
they care about, and the easier you can produce content for those, the more
likely you are to draw them into the other pieces of content. So this is why
you're seeing like, collectibles. Yahoo invested very heavily in collectibles
and collectibles news. Fanatics obviously has their collectibles side of the
business, and we can't ignore Whatnot, just as a company, and that's a great
example of what is a very specific niche. Like there's people who only follow
sports because they have a bunch of NBA Funko pops in a case behind
them, but Yahoo recognizes that. There are people who could be larger
sports fans who are entering the sport because they picked up a pack of
Topps cards at the gas station, and those type of things.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So to me, that's really what it's about. It's not like there are all sorts
of fun niches I learned about every day, but I think it's more about
how do we help you find them and serve those niches and turn those
people into a broader fan over time by giving them authentic content
for where they are currently as a fan, not try to force it down their
throat. Here's a bunch of highlights, and you're like, I just thought the
hat looked cool in pink and you're like, Yeah, cool.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“But then if I know that, how do I start catering to you? If you were
like, Oh, that means this person only bought merch, maybe they care
about cool new merch drops. So what content are we doing about our
merch drops? Like, those type of things. Not just spamming them e-
commerce style, but like is where like LeagueFits and other things
start to come in. And there's a variety of ways that we can, like, give
you content, even if you just engaged with us because you thought the
hat looked cool.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

On the ability to super-serve an exponential number of fan segments
“The answer there is, the sizes up and down are small, like imagine
the number of people collecting La Liga Funko Pops is probably
small, right? But it is that exact point, right? How do we give these
same superpowers that we saw work at the scale of Bleacher Report to
a variety of different organizations that are trying to solve the same
problems, and now in a way that doesn't require the awesome but
very large editorial team that had to sit on the other side of these
tools. Because the curation is not something that should be undersold
here. Like being on top of everything going on in a sport is
challenging at a variety of levels.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

Just imagine even just being a social media manager at an NFL team,
trying to keep track of every player on the roster, the things that are
happening with them that you could be posting about, the rights deals
the team has signed that you should be promoting, like all these
things are happening in all these disparate parts of the system. If we
can get everybody in that same spot where it's like, Oh cool, we have
this thing that is happening, marketing can use this system for the
content they need to make around this cool thing that's happening in
the sport.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Social can do the thing they need to, the broadcast team is tipped off
about it, and everybody's working from that same kind of insight or
thing that has been found interesting, and then they can produce
whatever type of content they need to do out of it, and do that with
one person looking at a dashboard with agents helping them filter
through it, not 45 people mindlessly doomscrolling scrolling
Instagram trying to wait for LeBron to post, which is how we had to
do it a lot of the time at BR, right?”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Imagine being the tech team at like a B/R or ESPN and something
like, you know, LeBron gets traded and no one finds out until Shams
drops the tweet. And then it's like, Oh my God, I wasn't the first
person to see that, now I've lost. It's interesting because news
breaking is something that has changed quite a bit from the old B/R
days. It used to be like exclusives mattered a whole lot. You needed to
be the first person to find that thing. Now it turns out that most
people don't remember who broke the story within minutes of the
thing happening, and it's really just who has the most interesting
take, who finds the right way to get in front of you?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“And while I won't say that speed doesn't still matter, obviously you still
want to be the first place the person hears about it, it is perfectly viable to
run a media company today without having your newsbreaker, because I
think what people care about from a fandom perspective has just changed
quite a bit. It's no longer cool to be the person who broke the story, I want to
hear the 30 minute podcast conversation about why that was a horrible
trade. Like, that's the type of stuff that we desire a bit more than just the
news itself, and that's why it's important for us to be able to stay on top of
all of this. Because even if we're not necessarily there at the moment, it
happens, it gives you all of this corpus of content that you can then
distribute to your fans over time as you're collecting it. So a lot of what
we've built is to help people stay on top of those exact trends so they can do
that.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

On the lessons and insights from PressBox’s work with more
emerging sports and leagues
“We ironically have taken a very similar approach that we've taken
with just the company itself, which is we start small with them
because you're right, I'm not going to come on here and say that we've
got this magic bullet that can take a sport that nobody's talking about
and turn it into this super amazing thing. Like, there has to be things
happening around the sport — and there are, like, these leagues
would not exist if there wasn't enough traction behind them from a
fandom fandom to exist.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“But how do you tap into that? How do you find those fans? How do
you find the things they care about? And we start there. Because, for
example, if you take, and this is not a real example I made up on, but
if you take a sport like curling, for example, that has its moments, like
a couple times a year, the Olympics comes around, everybody gets
really excited. They find out that like, Hey, people just want to know
what's going on in the world of curling in a newsletter, and we'll often
start with that simple of a project where it's like, how do we start
building this functionality into your system?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“And sometimes not even doing the personalization, just helping you
figure out everything that is interesting that is going on in the sport.
So these are the top curling athletes, a couple of them posted some
cool content, like trying to find those opportunities in something
small and then build up the fan base from there. Because you're right,
I imagine there's no curling trading cards, so there's probably not a
big trading card collectibles community there, so you wouldn't spend
time there. But you build up that when you build the personalization
in from the beginning. The magic just happens over time versus
having to do this huge lift and shift.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“It might start with just like personalized merch offers a la something
like a Fanatics does. But then over time as the league, because the
league built it from the beginning, even like a few months in, now
we've got all this data. If you're running a fantasy game, we can start
doing fantasy reporting, we can start pulling stats. And like, yeah,
sometimes it can feel a little silly to be like, this is the biggest thing
you've done since we started the league four games ago, right?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“But like, you have to start somewhere and that helps you build that.
So when you get to season two, now your broadcast team has all these
awesome insights you spent the first year building. You've learned
what does and doesn't work. We're collecting data from how your fans
are interacting with your content. You're collecting data from how
they're reacting to the stories you're telling on the broadcast, that type
of thing, and you build it from the beginning.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We try to start small. We can flex from somebody paying, you know,
five, ten grand for us to ones that are paying seven figure deals, so
that we can say, Hey, we'll just start small so that in three years, when
the sport is blowing up, you already have all this stuff built in when
it's time to turn on personalized newsletters, because now you have
5000 fans and you've got a little bit of CDP data on them, and you've
got a couple of years of highlights and articles that have been written
about them, social content you've produced, that type of thing. We
can start using that. More people are talking about you in the media,
so we have more opportunities to feature you.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“But it is like, I don't want to say it's a magic bullet, but things that
when you build it from scratch, it's a little bit easier than when you're
trying to lift and shift it. A lot of ways, some of the bigger orgs we tend
to work with are right, where they didn't build it from the beginning,
and they're trying to figure out how to get an off-ramp from a ten year
old app that doesn't collect any of this information into something
where they can deliver it. So oftentimes, that set of customers is a
good example to help us sell the smaller customers of like, Hey, it's a
low investment. We're not trying to boil the ocean, but let's build the
infrastructure for you.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So when you're ready, when you want to take that from one
newsletter to 1 to 1 newsletters or newsletter per team or however you
want to do it, we're there to help. Or if you want to produce an audio
update, and now you want to do a personalized audio update for your
fantasy players, that type of thing. Cool, let's do that. It makes it a lot
easier to to sell into. Like, the sales cycle here is brutal. The adoption
cycle is even more brutal. And it helps us just plainly both from ours
and the adoption of our customers, the easier we can come on in, the
earliest we can show value so they don't have to go and sell on some
like 12 month long giant project, we just say, Hey, newsletters are a
sticking point for you.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We can come in turnkey, we'll absorb all your data, you don't need to
do anything, and we will give you personalized newsletters. And then
if you like that, then we'll keep going. Far easier than saying, I need
250 grand, and then you sit through the budget cycle, you sit through
all the approval cycles, and they probably don't have the resources to
accomplish the whole thing anyway. You just show them the value as
more of the system comes into your owrld, and how much more
things they can personalize and how much more content they can
produce as more teams are able to leverage the software.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

On not overdoing personalization to prevent cannibalizing discovery and
monoculture potential
“This goes back to what we were talking about earlier with, you want to
make sure when you're doing personalization that you give people a way to
discover new things that might become part of their personalization. And
it's hard because we talked about the implicit and explicit, not to go back
down that rabbit hole, but this is where it comes in. Are they explicitly
telling me they now like this, or are they implicitly telling me I'm
potentially overfitting and causing a situation where it is just purely about
them, we've made an even worse version of the algorithm echo chamber,
it's now your personal algorithmic echo chamber and you can't get out.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Some of this is an implementation thing, like I won't pretend to have
full control over this in every situation. But when we work with our
customers, we often advise like, Look, just for the health of wanting to
convert that fan, like to just be very straightforward from a business
perspective, you don't want to keep them in that specific personalized
niche. If your goal is to grow them out further right, if you want them
to say be more involved on the merch side, buy event tickets, get
involved in fantasy, or just move further, and just like being less
casual and more hardcore about the sport, you're not going to get
there only by serving them Funko Pop videos all day, right? You've got
to figure out how to do that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Then the big news is always a thing that we try to have them do
separate, right? Like there's personalization, when we produce a news
article, for example, we try to always do it in a way that is like some of
this is just the facts of what's happening, and then here's some things
that are very obviously for how you care about it. We don't produce
like 17 page article drivel, SEO-like AI style articles. We're often doing
it where you'll write, Hey, here's my basic recap, and we're turning
that page into more of a dynamic experience of personalization. So it
allows you to both see what everybody else is seeing, but also get a
flavor of it that explains it in a way that makes sense to you, for
example.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We often point to Particle, which is a news app that's gotten really
popular that does AI news aggregation. And I spoke with their CEO
and they have that very similar approach of like, it's like just the facts,
man, right? Like we want to make sure that you're getting the
information you need, and then personalization is a layer on top of
that versus changing what you see, if that makes sense. So we're going
to show you a recap, we still want you to be involved in the sport, we
just make customized aspects of that recap to make it more likely for
you to engage and be interested in that recap of the event than purely
just like removing the recap because we don't think you'd like
watching live games.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We try to leave the editorial decision making as much as we can to
the entities themselves and not us, so that the tech is not making the
decisions. Like I said, I can't control editorial, but what I can do is
guarantee that we're not doing things where it's like, Oh, we're just
not going to tell you about this piece of news because we don't think
you'd like it. It'd be more that we try to tailor it in a way that makes it
easier for you to consume.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“A great example is you can imagine in F1 there's a lot of technical things
that happen. People get disqualified for really complicated ways that are
hard to explain to the average fan. When that news comes across to
somebody we've tagged as a casual fan, it's probably got a sidebar in
there that explains why wearing some stupid piece of wood on the
bottom of the car down a millimetre is like the end of the world, and like
it goes through the history of that and inserts a video explainer that we
found, like that type of thing. Those are the levels of personalization I
think get exciting in sports because it both meets the fan where they are,
but allows them to then participate in the larger conversation versus
shielding them from it, because we think they're going to be intimidated
because they don't understand the game or whatever.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“I always use cricket as an example, because cricket is the game that
everybody thinks is going to blow up, but no one can ever figure out
the rules type thing, right? So if somebody's excited about cricket for
some other random reason, we don't want to hide cricket from them
because we think they'll be intimidated to learn it. You figure out how
to give them that on-ramp into being a more hardcore fan, by
personalizing it with the level of content that you're delivering to
them and the way it's delivered to them, not necessarily the content of
it, if that makes sense.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

On the inherent risks optimizing amidst a sports content ecosystem
colored with unreputable accounts and popular incendiary material
“It's one thing that is nice about sports. I have all the respect in the
world for people building newsroom technology, political news and
things of that nature. My heart goes out to you. Sports is an
interesting space because most of the rights holders, or the people
who want to stay on the right side of the rights holders, generally
speaking, which I think we can classify the media probably as, they'll
say they're journalists, but ESPN needs the NFL to like them, right?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So I think in a world where brand protection is so important, we
actually do a lot more of just trying to make sure that we are not
publishing things that would just be negative to the brand generally,
and that is a slippery slope. I want to be very careful how I word this.
This is not about saying someone's critical about a post. Obviously, if
the NBA, and they don't use our technology, they probably would not
want us to post that on their home page, but that is very different than
artificial censorship, and that is not a role that we try to play
anywhere in this.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Our centralized newsroom says, Here's everything that is going on. The
decision on whether or not to use that — we don't target personalization on
things like, Oh, it turns out if we give them this type of content more, they click
it more. We don't actually do performance in that way, so we are not changing
what shows up in a feed purely based on whether you interact with it more or
not. We use what you interact with more to understand what you care about,
based on that labeling I referenced a long time ago. So if I have, like you, have
interacted with these 35 different articles and the aspects of those articles are
not like, Oh, is this incendiary or is this a hot take? It's usually more things
like, Oh, this article is about technical aerodynamics, or this is about drafting
for your fantasy team, or this is about league fits or things of that nature. So
we tend to more create a mesh of what that person cares about from that
perspective more than we're going out and engagement farming
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We are not an algorithm. There is no algorithm behind how our
content gets selected. It's more about a tagging perspective where
we're like, Hey, this is the type of thing that you've told us very
directly you care about from a semantic level, meaning that it is a
topic of conversation, it is a subject, as in it's an athlete, it's a team,
that type of thing. Or that you prefer to engage with written content
or podcast content or video content. We never want to be in the
business of clickbait farming or things of that nature, and we don't
build our technology to write things in that way. They are more
influenced by editorial decisions than the performance of the
underlying content.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Because it's the problem that we have today. That's why we get what
we get is because it's very heavily leaning into what our fingers
clicking on the button is saying than what our mind is saying. And I
think what we're learning is that those things are not usually the same
thing in a lot of cases. Like, how much stuff do you view on TikTok
just randomly that comes across your brain that you would go actively
out to seek if it didn't show up in your feed? Some of that is because of
the behaviors you're doing. You couldn't tell me what those behaviors
were, right? You just know that I viewed a bunch of things. And
somehow this is what the algorithm thought that I meant.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We're trying to approach it in a different way, albeit a more
simplistic way that just gives you the type of stuff that you care about.
If you want highlights about Steph hitting threes, that's the type of
personalization we want to desire. If people talking crap about players
in a negative way is the only way you engage with the sport, that's not
really the type of personalization we're necessarily aiming to solve for,
and we just get that naturally because that's not the type of brand that
the companies that we're trying to build with want to do.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“You know, a league is not going to go out there and just want that to
be their brand, and we probably wouldn't work with a partner if that
was the angle that they were going [for]. But we do a lot of minor
versions of this, like we're detecting spoilers because we have
customers that want to filter spoilers out for specific types of fans. We
want to be able to properly identify rumors. So we do a lot of outlet
rating to make sure that when we report that a piece of news is
happening, that it's coming from a reputable source.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

"Like, certain people can only be news breakers, other people, no
matter how big of a website you are, we wait until somebody else
reports it before we do it. Like, we're trying to have journalistic
integrity as much as there's journalism happening here in the news
identification. But we're not out there farming clicks. That is not what
the software was built for. It's more to be like, Hey, fans will be more
engaged if you give them this bundle of content in the way that we are
doing it, more so than we're trying to farm it down to, like, you click
this thing a lot, so we're going to do more of that thing.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

On using personalization and content automation to drive business
outcomes
“So that is obviously all part of it. I think to me, I've seen it approached a
few different ways. One is to very much drive direct revenue. When you can
tie content, I gave the example for Luka, if you can drive things happening
in the sport to actions you want fans to take, buy a ticket, buy a piece of
merch, show up to an event, etc. etc., content has a lot of power to play
there that is beyond the marketing type of content that tends to happen.
Just saying most of the time when I tell you to come to a game, it has
nothing to do with what's going on in the game, it's just to tell you that you
should come to the game. Bobblehead night, right? Like, those types of
things.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So I think that is one place where personalization can play in.
Personalization itself, though, has been a larger interest for driving
revenue itself than I was expecting coming into it. We certainly have
ad use cases, branded content, you know, the usual stuff we tend to
see in sports media. But because owned and operated is becoming
more and more important for leagues as their distribution gets more
dispersed; go back to the YouTube comment. What are leagues going
to do when they have 45 different YouTube channels is how people
find the Bundesliga?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“You and I generally describe this as plus subscriptions. So like
[league]+ meaning that I'm getting multi viewer cams like an F1 TV
subscription, and part of that is it's tied to our fantasy game, and that
fantasy game is tied to the personalization you see in the app. So I'm
delivering news stories about the drivers you've told us are important.
I give you betting intelligence. We do a lot of work in betting odds and
daily fantasy, things of that nature.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Personalization is now a paid feature in that world where it's like,
cool, now you're going to give me some edge that I wasn't going to get
if I didn't pay the $9.99. And that's being driven by our agents who
are looking at how the odds are shifting, looking at the content that's
happening. An example we always give is wehn one of our customers
working with our broadcast, they talked about how their athletes’
equipment got broken on the flight into the event, and the only way
anyone knew about it was because that person posted it to Instagram
and it moved all these betting odds. So that's where content and
finding that makes people feel like they have an edge.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So there's a lot of companies, a lot of leagues out there that are
building these styles of subscription products, bringing some more of
their streaming in. You know, there's like, Oh, we'll put a couple races
exclusively in the app has been a thing you've heard NASCAR flirt
with, so that is where they're going. So personalization becomes the
thing they're selling, right? Like, the NBA TV subscriptions, all these
are just the tip of the spear, in my opinion, in which you're just going
to have an NBA subscription one day, and that NBA subscription is
going to include some fun packages and perks and different levels.
Maybe I can go to some events, maybe I'll get these cool app features.
You got companies like Jump that are tying all these different aspects
of the in-event experience together, and it's not hard to picture.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We got these ESPN, NFL getting into bed deals; like the media
around the sport and the personalization that happens around it and
the sport itself are getting very blurry where those lines are. And I
think this is where personalization comes in and becomes a revenue
driver in itself. We will help you enjoy every aspect of being a Lakers
fan in a highly personalized way, from the concessions you buy to the
jersey waiting for you at the end of the game, to the news content that
comes to you as the game's happening, all of those type of things I
think are eventually just going to be blurred together.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

The biggest lesson Brian learned so far from founding a company and
running a startup
“I mean, everyone says it's a roller coaster. Everyone says you can't be
prepared for how big of a roller coaster it is. But if you were to talk to
Brian of March of this year, you would not recognize him. He
probably looked like the world was ending. He was probably going to
have to go back to work. It's so hard. And there's a line between
delusional and believing in the thing that you're doing, and flirting
with that line is probably the hardest thing about being a founder and
starting a company.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“It’s like, am I nuts, or am I just onto the thing these people haven't
figured out yet? Sometimes the answer is you're just nuts, and I've
definitely been wrong quite a few times. But that's probably my
biggest lesson from all of this is, like, you just have to be prepared
that the lows will be really, really low and sometimes you'll be wrong
about whether that's the bottom or there's further to go. But the highs
can also be really, really high. And no matter how much I say this, and
how prepared you think you are, it's still going to feel like a very weird
feeling.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

Brian’s favorite project or product that he got to work on from his
non-sports professional life
“I don't know if this counts as non-sports because sports has been
such a part of my life. Podcasting has always been near and dear to
my heart. I was a podcasting OG, before people even knew what
podcasting was. I've gotten to do some really cool stuff. I got really big
into the World of Warcraft podcasting community, which is how I got
my first job. When I was at Bleacher Report, too, I was basically
hosting with my good buddy Seven, the official ELeague podcast for
Counter-Strike and that type of thing.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“I had those weird two jobs, so that's probably my favorite. It's led to
a lot of opportunities. A good portion of the people at PressBox all
have ties to that weird esports podcast from back in the day. So it's
just one of my favorite stories. It's like, yes, and we also know each
other through esports.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

The most memorable sports event Brian attended during his time at
Ohio State
“This is not going to be what you were asking, but pretty close,
because I have a weird relationship with Ohio State. So my very first
job in college was a valet at the airport, and I got to take [former Ohio
State football head coach] John Cooper to the airport through to the
time which he got fired, and you can imagine what that was like. But
I'll tell you what's weird about being an Ohio State fan is you get to
see both the best and the worst of college football.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So I've seen the Ohio State and Michigan rivalry and everything that
comes with that, including watching grown men scream at small
children wearing the wrong jersey on either side, and that is always
weirdly stuck with me, I don't know why. I don't know what life lesson
I'm going to take from it, but it goes to show you that sports can be
negative. So sometimes, folks, like take a chill pill; that six-year old
just put on the Michigan jersey because his dad likes them, it's okay.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

Tell us a cool success story from a PressBox customer and how it
came together
“Oh man, I wrote about this recently, and I can't say the customer’s
[identity]; I'm sorry I have to dance around this, but we know
broadcast background at all whatsoever. We're all media babies.
We're in the cocoon of of Bleacher Report, you probably can't even
call us journalists of any sort. But I feel like when we got connected
with the broadcast team and we saw how manual broadcast still is,
even at the biggest of leagues, like if you watch the NBA, you'll watch
them shuffle that giant stack of papers out at the end of every quarter
so they can read through and figure out what happened.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“And in our first week, we took something that was taking the broadcast
team at this league 40 hours before every single event to try to recreate all
this research so that the broadcast team would have something to talk about
for the first 30 minutes until everything changed and went to hell. And the
fact that there was still that opportunity, and we were so quickly able to
support the broadcast team and be able to save tons of hours, which
obviously always looks great when you're a software company, but also
change the quality of the narrative that can happen on air; because now,
instead of trying to flip through 45 pages, I've got a dashboard that knows
that that head-to-head matchup just happened in the bracket, and I've got
all the context in front of me. It was pretty awesome to see, and still kind of
crazy for those of us who have not worked at sports broadcasts to know that
that's still a thing that's happening every day.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

The sports fan content consumption medium or packaging that Brian
is highest on right now for the future
“YouTube feels like such a copout here, but like YouTube is just
changing how we're consuming sports media. And I don't just mean
highlights like; [for example], this Kawhi Leonard [controversy] and
how much of that is just played out in YouTube podcasts and various
other things with Pablo Torre has been a fascinating thing that
happened. But, like, we are months probably away from news being
broken by fans. Maybe in small sports, to start, it may already be
happening today.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So YouTube just excites me because it brings me things in formats
that are very flexible. I can choose whether I want it short form or
long form, and it's giving voices to people. I know this is social in
general, but YouTube has just uniquely nailed it in a way that just lets
me casually consume it without doomscrolling, without things being
wildly out of date. Because that's Instagram for all of us, it's just full of
like, crap and things that we're trying to filter through, and it allows
me to have a focus, enough of an experience.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“And I think ignoring that platform and ignoring the various ways you
could deliver video, whether it's everything from faceless, text-based
video to full-blown podcasts, I think people are just sleeping on that,
which seems crazy to think with where YouTube is. But how many
leagues are still just dipping their toe in [with] what they're doing on
YouTube or the influencer sphere and like, embracing them as
journalists and things of that nature is just still very exciting, but still
very nascent.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

What does the near term end game look like for generative AI and software
development? And long-term speculation?
“So the first one is highly dependent on you and your company's opinion of
AI. We are very AI-forward when it comes to engineering at PressBox.
We're all Claude Code users. We’re probably costing them far more money
than we're paying. It sucks right now if you were a junior developer, and
having been someone who came into software development with a non-
traditional background, life is hard for those folks because the things that
made it hard to be a software engineer in the early days, learning language,
figuring out how to do the thing in JavaScript, understand the architecture
things, is not what AI helps with. AI helps the people that know those things
be really fast.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Vibe coding is a bunch of BS. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to swear on
this show, but it is. It is a bunch of BS. But if you know what you're
doing and your company lets you work with these types of tools,
people are faster than they've ever been. The amount of work, and I'm
not saying this as a founder and getting people to give me money,
though you can, it's more of just like I've been fascinated by a bunch
of software engineers that I've spent decades working together with,
how much faster we are, because now we're not having to Google for
15 minutes how to do this thing that doesn't really matter, that I just
need out of the way. AI is amazing at that type of stuff.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“If you think you're gonna vibe code yourself to a full solution that's
going to make you millions and millions of dollars, don't believe the
LinkedIn posts. Those things are very rare and most of those people's
companies are going to fall apart six months from now. There's going
to be a cottage industry in the mid-term of consultancies that come in
and turn your vibe coded BS into real apps. That's my big prediction
for the midterm is if you are a really good software engineer that
weathered this storm, there's a middle ground before things get scary
good in which you're going to be cleaning up a lot of BS from people
who believe the hype that you could just like vibe code it.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Long term, it's so wrapped up in AI; Generally, I am a both a realist
and an optimist in that like, there's a lot of scary stuff going on and
we're going to make a lot of mistakes and do a lot of dumb things with
AI generally as a human race before we figure out the right way of
using it. But I also think that if we can build tools to help humans do
better and higher level versions, and I'm not saying this in the Sam
Altman hand-wavy way you mentioned; like, I don't want your job to
be filtering through Dropbox trying to find crappy clips.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“I want you to feel like an artist trying to find a million different
constructions of those clips to make fans more excited. And that's a
very idealistic view of the world, but we approach our tooling more of
that version. It's not to write articles so you don't have to hire a
writer. It's so that one writer can speak to 80 fans, or 800 fans or
8000 fans with their piece that all have different preferences, and
that's ultimately where we want to take it.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“I mean, someone's going to hear this and leave a nasty comment, and
I'm a tech bro, and that's fine. Like, it's just the world we live in. But
ultimately, I hope that's where we can take it. I say I'm a realist
because I recognize, looking in the world around us, it doesn't feel like
that's where we're taking it, and not everybody is trying to take it that
way. But from my perspective, sports has always been made by people
who work in it and the fans that consume it. And I don't think
robotizing one side of it, whether that's the athletes or the journalists
writing about it, is going to be the solution to making people like
sports more.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

What has Brian learned about motorsports fans, as an F1 fan himself
and having worked with motorsports clients with PressBox?
“MotoGP in some markets is larger than F1 and you would never
know it, so I’m very excited to see what Liberty Media is able to do
with MotoGP, especially when they've got the F1 rub. You got people
like Lewis Hamilton and Max [Verstappen] wanting to get into
MotoGP teams, all those things are awesome.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Motorsports is one of the hardest sports to be a fan of on two levels:
it's incredibly hard to understand, and the participatory element is
punishing to a degree that it almost kills the sport itself. You want to
talk about a sport that is propped up by the advertising model and
sponsorship? Welcome to motorsports, everybody. But what I've
learned is that there are, and maybe this is controversial and probably
not actually accurate, but I would argue that there are more casual
motorsports fans than hardcore motorsports fans and the
motorsports that have figured that out and leaned into it a la F1 are
the ones that are winning. And the ones that are trying to lean into
their old school European legacies, I won't name names, are suffering.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“And that is probably the biggest thing I've learned is that
motorsports fans — one example I'll give, I'll steal this from the
previously mentioned Toni. She often uses the example of Justin
Bieber and Hailey Bieber and [Hailey] she has the lip gloss brand, and
this brand blew up in motorsports with no advertising because a
bunch of female fans that people would probably not qualify as fans
under the traditional definition of the term, have just made it a thing
in motorsports, and that has blown up. I cannot tell you the number
of women I've talked to that became F1 fans for no other reason than
they saw this phone case that the lip gloss goes in the back in some F1
highlights, and that got them curious, and they bought the phone
case, but then they also started watching F1.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“To me motorsports, not to say that it's like the same as every other
sport, but it is a blueprint that you can follow that if you could adopt
that for other fans I think there's other ways to grow by doing those
type of things, and that's been awesome because you would not expect
it from something that has largely been driven by European white
men, with lots and lots of money to race cars in a circle.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

The best meal to get in Washington state (Brian lives in
Bellingham) and where to get it
“Oh, man, this is gonna be so boring. So I live in this little
town called Bellingham. It's near the border somewhere
between Seattle and Vancouver. We have this, like, literal
100-year-old grocery store here. And they have the most
amazing breakfast that you've ever had in your life. It's just
an old school diner breakfast. It's called Nelson's Diner. If
you ever come to Bellingham, you absolutely have to have it.
I'm from the Midwest, so I'm used to the comfort food,
biscuits and gravy, that type of thing. I come out here and
everybody's a vegan, and I found this place and I'm like, yes,
this is for me. So every Saturday before we go on our hike,
my wife and I go and have that and it's amazing. So if you
come to our little town of 50,000 people, go to Nelson's.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

How would Brian describe Bleacher Report's secret sauce that allowed them
to succeed early on and continue over the years?
“The brand. And not the brand in the sense that, like, Oh, the logo is cool
and it's got a vibe. Bleacher Report was the anti-news site at the time when
it was very important to be the anti-news site. We were not the white stuffy
guys on ESPN doing the SportsCenter thing, and not letting you talk about
us on Twitter and that type of thing. That seems quaint and hilarious in
2025, but in the 2000s and 2010s, when Dave Finocchio and those guys
started that company, like it was citizen journalism, it was the anti-
establishment. And they leaned into that. You know, we're doing
partnerships with Kith, we're launching NFTs, we got Shaq playing
shuffleboard in our bar. It just fit the time and the moment.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“We also happened to be at the epicenter of the NBA sports world for many years
because we were in SF and the Warriors were doing great and everything was
happening from there, and it gave us coverage we wouldn't have otherwise been
able to do. I got to meet Shaq in person, just because that was the convenient
place for the NBA to shoot the stuff for the finals with TNT, and, like, that seems
silly. But when we've got that coverage and nobody else does, it puts you on the
map, right? It shows you that it can be different. And this is where you get your
B/R Kicks and you get the LeagueFits and you get House of Highlights, which is
like a separate thing from B/R, but it was also when Omar [Raja] got acquired
and that came into Bleacher Report, it was like another shot in the arm because
we got to kind of have our Instagram moment for Meta. Facebook was declining,
they bought Instagram, turned out that was the right thing at the right time. And
House of Highlights was bigger on social in the NBA than Bleacher Report was.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“So those two things, I think it was just the right time, and not to take
any credit away from the guys, but they had the right attitude and the
right vision for how to deliver that attitude at a time where people
were sick of just the big, old stodgy media companies covering
sports.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“And not too different from what Barstool did. We just took a very different
approach. We were a tech forward product type company, and they were more
of a culture, video, whatever. But the same capturing the wave, just different
sides of that wave. There was this fan that was just like, I'm the guy who goes
to the bar quite literally, and I just love this version of sports, and they tapped
into that culture of it and got big without even really building a traditional
news company. They're getting the same treatment that Bleacher Report is
getting with these big leagues now, without even bothering to write a ton of
long form content or do any of that traditional journalistic stuff. So while a
different approach, it was the same wave that Bleacher Report rode, which is
like, We're sick of ESPN, we're sick of Sports Illustrated. Give us something
that's about the athletes and the people that I'm seeing more and more of on
social, whereas before you didn't see who they were, so you didn't care.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

What did Brian learn about esports fandom from his time hosting an esports
podcast and how would he characterize the state of esports today?
“So the funny thing is, is that podcast had three different names, and that is a
very good way to describe our life and how esports went. So Rally Point was the
Bleacher Report name for the show, because that's what everybody who knew
nothing about esports thought would be a great name for a show. When that
didn't go well, we turned it into Nerf This, which is what happens when you let
the gamers who are hosting the show decide what the name would be. And then
when we got moved and acquired by Turner and started becoming like the official
— so when we first started, we were an editorial podcast and we were covering
sports for Bleacher Report as part of their nascent podcast network. [Adam]
Lefkoe’s show was announced and we were part of that, which was pretty cool.
Lefkoe is an awesome guy and far better at sports than we are.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Then we eventually became, like still editorial, but in support of what was
going on with ELeague. So they're doing Counter-Strike, they're doing
Street Fighter, Overwatch League stuff, things of that nature. And I think
what that demonstrated is everyone saw dollar signs. What you said earlier
is very, very true, which is everyone thought this was going to be the next
league that you could put the money into the ATM machine and poof, that
would become your billion dollar esports. And some people figured it out,
but it's because they went away from esports. I often call out 100 Thieves,
in Cleveland, is a very good esports success story. Because they leaned into
the brand, they understood that winning competitions was not going to be
how esports orgs made money, and they leaned a lot into clothing and
fashion and that type of thing, and they carved a niche out for themselves.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“I think the ones like your Fnatics and some of these other ones that
just thought this was going to be a content creation ATM machine
that would just give them tons and tons of money, and they'd make
millions of dollars from the Overwatch League and NBC would buy
rights. I understand why that sounded exciting. I think it was just a
really long leap from, Let's make fun of the nerds on Twitch to
hundreds of millions dollar broadcast deals. And that's coming from a
nerd on Twitch. Like, I've got video game tattoos all over my body.
But we were never going to make that leap.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Where is it today? We have a lot of Middle Eastern money propping
up esports, and I say that as someone who's not in esports anymore,
and it's better than having nothing. But I think if we fall back into the
same trap to assume that this is now the new norm and this is how
esports is going to survive, we're going to faceplant again. We have to
understand that this is a lifeline that we can now use to turn this into
a sustainable business. Stop thinking everything can be a bloody
esport.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“Not every dumb mobile game, not every version of sim racing, like
there's going to be 4 or 5 games, just like there's only 4 or 5 sports
that can sustain an audience, especially one outside of people who
don't participate in the game. We'll see where it goes. I would not put
money on it. And that's not because I think esports will fail. I think
the people who are supporting esports generally are still making the
same mistakes that they made back when Overwatch League got big.
Remember when MLB BAMTech did an exclusive deal to stream Riot
Esports? And where did that go? Those are the type of things I think
we just got our eyes got a little bit too big and we believed our own BS,
and hopefully we'll not make that same mistake again, even though it
does sometimes feel like we are.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“I'll leave you with this. The one shout out I always give when people
talk about esports, it's the most undersung aspect of esports that is
doing it right, because they're not trying to do esports, and that is the
fighting game community. You walk into Evo in Vegas every single
year, there are tens of thousands of people there. They fill that entire
convention center that they use for UFC fights with esports fans to
watch a bunch of people push buttons.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“And it's the culture. Because it's so tied to various fashion, anime,
rap, like there's so many aspects of the culture of FGC. It reminds me
a lot about the NBA in that there's just so many other reasons people
are fans of Street Fighter. Most of us are really bad at fighting games,
right? But like watching people be good at it, and it's because they
haven't tried to make big tournaments, they haven't tried to franchise
it. They got investment from Sony. They're doing a lot of the right
things, that's the direction to go. But it shows that if you just lean into
what makes esports good, instead of trying to turn it into a business
too soon, you can be successful.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

Brian’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“I have to use this one, even though it's a bit of a copout because he's
an investor, but Andrew Petcash and the Profluence folks. Like, there
are people that are doing it because there's money to be made, and
then there's people who are doing it because they just believe there's a
huge opportunity for more people to get involved in sports and to
turn it into a viable business for all of us. And he's somebody who's
doing that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“The amount of work that man puts into the insights that he surfaces,
and this is someone who's helping him build tools to make this easier;
PressBox is also supporting him in his efforts. But like 99% of what
you see out there is still just his pure hustle. And he's somebody who's
turned it into a real business. We would not have investment without
him. There's multiple other companies who've had that opportunity,
and it's not because he, like, knows all these VCs or has billions of
dollars in his pocket.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

“He's done it through grit and he produces a ton of content. I was
inspired very early on in my career by Gary Vaynerchuk, and he's got
the jab, jab type of thing. And I think he's awesome at that. He doesn't
just come out and tell you why you need to come to his conference,
sell you on his Profluence membership. I've actually never even seen
him talk about the price. He just puts a ton of content out there and
the community growth he's had shows it. So, huge shout out to
Petcash.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

Where to find Brian and PressBox on digital/social
Visit PressBox’s website at https://pressbox.studio/ and follow their
socials @PressBoxHQ
Brian is mostly on LinkedIn at @Brhough
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
Thanks again to Brian for being so generous with his time to share his
knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 306: Brian Hough

The Expanding Pathways to Sports Fandom and What it Means for Personalized Experiences

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The Expanding Pathways to Sports Fandom and What it Means for Personalized Experiences

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