In 2015, my partners and I founded SportsCastr (rebranded in 2021 as PANDA Interactive). Among the initial investor group were NBA Commissioner Emeritus David Stern, the NFL Players Association and NBA great, TNT commentator Steve Smith. Another partner of ours, Billy Owens, Syracuse basketball legend and 1990 NBA Rookie of the Year, introduced us to a professional basketball league that was entering its inaugural season: The Basketball League. At the time, our secret sauce was a remarkably cool technology that we called "Remote Commentary," which enabled anyone in the world to video-commentate a game being broadcast on our network. The commentator was layered into the broadcast like PIP. This was attractive to TBL because part of our proposal included sourcing commentators who could bring in their own audiences, as well as commentators who could speak other languages. We call it "TBL on SportsCastr."
Among the relationships we successfully cultivated was with the Indiana University Media School. Eight Sports Broadcast majors participated in a for-credit internship that was as good for the goose as it was for the gander. The students got to research and commentate professional basketball games; the league got really good commentary for each of its broadcasts. We also recruited several popular YouTube personalities and well-known former professional basketball players to commentate individual games and conduct player interviews. While the partnership didn't set the world on fire it provided an encouraging entree for the collaboration between us and TBL.
Though the collaboration between us and TBL was solidified, we made the call to abandon the "Remote Commentary" for the following season. In our estimation the juice was not worth the squeeze. Specifically, the amount of time that it took to source, recruit, organize, educate, manage, and promote the individual commentators did not result in what we considered to be a significant-enough uptick in viewership for TBL. (Since this was TBL's inaugural season we had limited evidence with which to build any reasonably YOY model, but one need not be Sherlock Holmes to recognize whether or not the talent we recruited brought their people along or not.) What's more, since the offering was free to the viewer, "Remote Commentary" offered little financial benefit to either us or TBL. We also didn't see any indication that the "Remote Commentary" feature was all that important to viewers, which lead us to conclude that, as is so often the case, what we thought was really cool might have been unimportant, or even irritating, to end-users.
Subsequent seasons would see us rethink the product, ultimately delivering what we called "TBLTV," a live streaming subscription platform where users to pay to unlock viewing access to every teams' games, a single team's games, or a single game. No wheel-reinventing. Nothing discombobulating for TBL fans. And, very critically, money coming in.
In the process of rolling out TBLTV, we had undergone our own transformation, changing the name of our business from SportsCastr to PANDA Interactive, and with it, altering the focus of our company from an open social platform to a SAAS model. Moving from the foreground to the background saw us abandon the "TBL on SportsCastr" monicker and re-direct much of our focus away from marketing the product to ensuring its quality. Working with individual teams, and their broadcasters, became our modus operandi. While we still sought promotional opportunities for TBLTV by, for example, seeking out relationships with publishers by offering them financial incentives for utilizing our Embed feature (a feature that had, and still has, far more depth and flexibility than any similar feature that I've come across, be it from YouTube, Twitch or any other platform), far more hours of each day were spent working with the broadcasters. And since the broadcasters hired by the teams ranged from experienced professionals to first-timers, the time requirements of this operation were substantial.
As I mentioned, among the improvements from "TBL on SportsCastr" to "TBLTV" was a new revenue stream from subscriptions. And with that new revenue stream a new set of requirements to keep customers happy. When the offering was free to the user, a stream could dip out, an error could occur, and an apology to the customers would suffice. But once we began accepting payments of $4.99, $39.99, $99.99, we were obliged to offer real-time, courteous and more-than-satisfactory customer service.
This meant long, often intense, night and weekend working hours for me and our CTO. The work was important and useful towards delivering a product that customers enjoyed, but its time requirements pushed other marketing and advertising possibilities to the fringe. Since customer retention tends to be more critical than customer acquisition - though I cringe to paint with such a broad brush - I would not change our operations if given the chance. We, PANDA, offered an excellent product to the consumer in TBLTV, and we provided world-class, efficient and personal customer service. In congress with TBL teams delivering good broadcasts, and their players delivering exciting basketball, viewer retention YOY was high.
I write these essays for two purposes: the first is to educate myself via confession; and the second is to invite anyone interested enough to read to craft their own learning lessons from my experiences. Regarding the former purpose, marketing and advertising is an emotional endeavor. It can be painful to believe in another person's product, champion that product, work like hell to sell that product and find that either your or your partners' expectations have not been satisfied. The activity of confession that undergirds these essays allows me a sense of a sense of objectivity and distance that being in the weeds in real-time does not. There are also myriad metrics of success. Did we make money? Did we attract new customers? Did we retain existing customers? Did we upsell existing customers? A question that often goes overlooked, though, is What did we learn?
As regards quantitative results we learned - or reinforced what we already knew - that if you are good at something you should never do it for free. A sports league that doesn't charge for access to its content, be it in person or through a camera lens, neither expresses confidence to the public in its product (ie it cheapens the brand) nor does it, quite simply, make as much money as it can. Marketers and advertisers can get cute with their goals and forget that the only objective with any business is to make more money than you spend. While I will not divulge privileged information about TBL's or PANDA's respective P&L statements, I can say with certainty that turning "TBL on SportsCastr" into TBLTV, that is, from a free offering to a premium one, was smart. It made everyone more money.
And as regards qualitative results, I learned that expectations can become emotional, and if those expectations are producing emotions like anger, frustration, guilt and fear, you need to adjust your expectations. Doing so will do for you what these confessions do for me: You'll have the objectivity and distance necessary to make adjustments to your marketing and advertising efforts. In my essay about Sergio Zyman's The End of Advertising As We Know It, I unpack how ego participates in a marketer's process. Zyman is a champion of change. So am I. No one is so smart to develop the perfect campaign in one fell swoop. Marketing, advertising, even production and operations subsist within the complex dynamics of life, and as such, must be willing to adapt and do so boldly. Most ideas stink. Most consumers dislike most products. Most advertising doesn't do shit. And everything takes time. Try. Breathe. Study. And then try something else.
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