From the winter of 2018 through the summer of 2022 I ran point on the partnership between The Basketball League and the live streaming video platform my partners and I founded and operated, PANDA Interactive. Prior to the tip-off of the 2023 TBL season I was appointed the league's Chief Marketing Officer.
It was my conviction, having worked closely with the league for four seasons - the 2020 season had to be cancelled because of the pandemic - that TBL teams would increase game tickets sales and TBLTV subscriptions in 2023 if they were to produce and promote significantly more content that they had in previous season. I worked closely with the league office to create financial incentives for the teams who produced and promoted content that we laid out in a comprehensive document. In brief, if the teams shared videos of their players dunking (in a game, in practice, in their backyard, playground, a fan's driveway, etc.) every Monday; if they shared videos of their players making a three every Tuesday; putting on a dribbling exhibition every Wednesday, and so on, then they would be rewarded with a greater percentage of the profit share produced by TBLTV subscriptions.
To supplement the teams' efforts, I created TBL News, a professional-grade sports journalism website that housed articles written by sports journalism majors who joined the TBL News Internship Program and episodes of "TBL News: The Pod," a video and audio podcast that produced multiple episodes each week. The articles and podcast episodes were then used to make the regular email campaigns relevant and engaging, while also increasing the shear amount of content available to the league, its teams and players to share on social media.
As I write this article I have had several months to review the work - which was intense and constant - that we did throughout the 2023 season. It remains my steadfast conviction that the combination of teams producing and promoting content featuring their talented players doing what they do best, playing basketball at an elite level, and TBL News disseminating that content via a professional-grade vehicle (TBLNews.com really looks like a premium digital sports publication) would attract more fans. Ultimately, the amount of content that would have produced the maximum amount of success, that is, an increase in fans and money spent on the league by those fans, was not delivered with what I would have considered to be the requisite consistency. And therein lies my critical takeaway from the 2023 season.
The way I delivered my expectations of the 49 teams was dictatorial rather than collaborative. I was heavy-handed and presumptuous. Had I developed a content-production program in congress with the 49 teams then perhaps we could have designed a schematic that was both doable and effective, whereas what I'd handed to the teams in the form of directives, incentive-laden though they may have been, did not correspond with what the teams reasonably could achieve given their respective resources (staffing, time, money, etc.).
That is the lesson which applies to my work as Chief Marketing Officer. But there is another lesson, one which applies to the teams and by proxy the league itself. Advertising is simple but not easy: Tell potential customers what you are selling and get them to buy it. For a basketball league it is crucial that customers see the players playing basketball at an elite level. Basketball fans will invest in players and their associated team/league if they are impressed with their abilities. It is therefore important for a basketball team to show as many basketball fans as possible the impressive abilities of its players. In the absence of video content that does just that there is too much competition to expect to attract fans by any other method.
If I were to apply the learning lessons from the 2023 to the 2024 season, I would remove the complexity of tethering content creation to financial incentives. It was poor internal marketing on my part. The complexity diluted the message while the incentives introduced fear. I would also adjust my own expectations. TBL News was built to support the teams' promotional efforts, but in the absence of a lot of video content it wound up being used to try to play catch-up. As such it wound up distracting from other potential promotional opportunities. For example, whereas TBL News, with its staff of 15 and its rigorous content schedule was a 60-to-70-hour-a-week job for me, leaving me little room for any more fruitful promotional exploration, I could have applied many of those hours to collaborating on a regular schedule with those teams who indeed had the resources to create lots of high-quality, engaging basketball content. I could have allocated a greater number of hours interfacing directly with local publishers, radio stations, youth groups, schools, religious organizations, restaurants, barber shops and retailers to maximize individual teams' exposure within their communities.
TBL teams from Newfoundland to San Diego, Tampa Bay to Seattle give their communities professional basketball teams to root for. They give neighborhood kids players to admire, role models to emulate. And a basketball fan is 160% more likely to see an overtime game watching TBL rather than watching an NBA game. It's a helluva league that, with or without my participation, is sure to grow in size, in popularity and in purpose to the towns and cities in which it operates.
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