Agility Matters in TV and Football

 The agility of high-level American football players has always amazed me. 300-pound men change direction instantaneously as they pursue their missions of either protecting or demolishing a ballcarrier.

We saw a lot of agility among the guys in pads as we produced a television program about the College Gridiron Showcase this year. The event, in fact, revolves around former college football players trying to show pro scouts how nimble, strong, ferocious, and/or intelligent they are. They’re high-level performers – young men who excelled as amateurs hoping to show they’re truly elite. So our crew got to see some good football.

We also discovered we needed to be agile ourselves, and not just because videographer Suzanne Wilemon isn’t afraid to push the limits of how close one should get to a pileup involving guys up to a foot-and-a-half taller than her.

We first had to find a way to get the show shot. We didn’t have the financing or distribution in place by the time the event rolled around, and at the time we believed the football calendar to be an immovable object. The CGS had to happen in January in Fort Worth and we had to shoot it. So we called in some favors and pulled a few double shifts. We emerged with a lot of interviews, football footage, and a whole lot of great narratives involving young people trying to realize their dreams.

Our goal had been to create a series in which we would take deep dives into players’ stories using CGS as a common core element. We would conduct additional interviews, go to their hometowns, and generally let the audience engage with their whole life situations.

Then we had to pivot. As we worked on financing and distribution, the production world abruptly came to halt. NFL and CFL calendars normally propelled by pro days and live drafts came to an unprecedented halt.

The pandemic meant we wouldn’t be doing any more interviews or shoots.

So we took a look at what we had. And it turns out we had a lot. One thing we always liked about CGS from a production standpoint was that we could shoot efficiently, with a lot of players in one place. And we had some great stories we could still tell, including:

·     A one-time top recruit confronting the off-field issues that caused him to enroll at four colleges and put his pro football dreams in serious jeopardy.

·     A record-setting running back from a small school, homeless as a kid, who hopes to realize a lifelong dream on the NFL’s big stage.

·     An offensive lineman whose mental health issues forced him to leave the Big Ten school he loved and finish college at a lower-level school in Texas.

·     An offensive lineman who grew up in poverty and became one of the few players to announce he was gay while still competing.

·     A small-school running back who persevered through two torn ACLs.

So we decided to make a show from it. It wouldn’t be a series, but instead a one-hour capsule summary that revolved around the CGS chapter in these player’s lives. Mixed in with the football angles, we worked in how they prepared for life off the field. That part included powerful testimony from rape survivor and activist Brenda Tracy that made these 20-somethings really consider matters of character.

By the end, we thought we had something people would want to watch. Executives at a couple of networks agreed with us, but those deals fell apart when others in the organization didn’t share their vision. That led us to choose to distribute the show via broadcast syndication.

The broadcast syndication process involves placing a program individually on local stations throughout the country who agree to carry it. There are a number of groups who own many such stations and a couple of those, Nexstar and Scripps, agreed to offer it to their local decision-makers.

I was on a Zoom call with one of my business partners in late July and I checked my email when I got done. I’m not sure I had ever before received an email from Grand Junction, Colorado, but the one I read that day was from that city’s CBS affiliate. KREX wanted the show. We had our first broadcast outlet. No matter how many emails I get in the future from Grand Junction, that will always be the best one.

A number of other stations followed and we have gradually built up our coverage to a significant portion of the country. I think one of the things our team is most excited about is that the road wasn’t smooth, but we eventually found our way to where we wanted to be. One has to be agile.

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We also try to provide a package to our partner stations to allow them to be agile. We supply promotional spots of multiple lengths (you don’t know useful that is until you’ve found yourself hunched over a computer terminal trying to fill in the holes on the log of a typical broadcast day), social media content (including versions without voiceover so they can let their own sportscasters voice them for added localization), and materials to facilitate earned media. We want to give them the tools to drive viewers to their stations.

Thanks a bunch to our sponsors – we could not have pulled this off without them:

·     44 Management

·     KT Tape

·     One on One Kicking

·     Reveal Suits

·     Service King Collision

·     Space Center Houston

·     Visit Fort Worth

Ensuring Hockey Is For Everyone

This post originally appeared in the Blotch section of the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To consume it there: https://www.fwweekly.com/2020/02/21/sports-rush-making-hockey-a-sport-for-everyone/

In 1993, the Dallas Stars brought their sport to a whole new group of people when they moved to Texas from Minnesota. Much of the native population had little affinity for the game when the club arrived. Early marketing efforts emphasized similarities to American football.

The Stars gradually expanded their reach. They became the first Sun Belt team to win a Stanley Cup. Their initiatives to establish youth hockey programs have resulted in thousands of children playing the sport and even delivered locally-trained players to the National Hockey League. Sports fans previously unfamiliar with ice hockey developed affinity for the likes of Mike Modano, Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin, and Marty Turco. The Stars gave North Texans a comfort level with their game.

Before, during, and after Wednesday night’s game against another southern team, the Arizona Coyotes, the franchise looked toward making even more people comfortable in the sport. They held a Hockey is For Everyone night at their game against the St. Louis Blues in partnership with the You Can Play organization. You Can Play aims to, as they phrase it, “develop locker room cultures that replace ‘casual homophobia’ – the unintentional use of anti-gay slurs – with acceptance and respect for an athlete’s contribution to the team.” The organization works with a number of sports, but has roots in ice hockey thanks to former NHL GM Brian Burke and his son, current NHL Senior Director of Player Safety Patrick Burke. Their son/brother Brendan came out in an ESPN interview and advocated for a more inclusive hockey culture. After Brendan’s 2010 death, You Can Play was created to continue his legacy and move the issue forward.

The league has embraced the cause and almost all of its teams have participated in some form as well. The Stars held a pregame happy hour at Dibs on Victor. Their foundation’s staff, including Turco, the Dallas Stars Foundation’s president, attended and they also set up a silent auction. The video interviews in this post were conducted there and they offer some real insight into what the issue is all about. 

And there does seem to be plenty of misunderstanding of this initiative. Check out the comments on the Stars’ Instagram post about selling pride-taped sticks as a fundraiser. Many commenters take a strongly supportive tone. Others condemn the post.

Some objections consisted of juvenile jokes. Others were Biblically-based. Several called it out as a political play and wanted the team to stick to hockey. My conversations from Wednesday’s event lead me to think these hostile commentators miss the point. This whole thing IS about “sticking to hockey.”

You Can Play doesn’t have a PAC. They aren’t trying to get laws passed giving LGBTQ hockey players special privileges or restricting straight people’s freedom of speech. Their function is one of education. They want to help straight teammates and fans understand that certain jokes and terms can be detrimental to a teammate’s psyche. A stray comment can create a hostile atmosphere without the speaker even realizing it.
That’s especially true for young players. Coming out is hard enough without having to wonder if doing so will put you at odds with your teammates. Billy Scullion, one of this post’s interview subjects, spent years overcoming the repercussions of the challenges he experienced hiding his sexual orientation amidst what the perceived as hostile junior hockey dressing rooms. Scullion appeared with defenseman John Klingberg in a video that Stars created that discusses the initiative, and a number of other NHL players have expressed support for the principles behind Hockey Is For Everyone. You Can Play wants athletes to view teammates and opponents strictly on the basis of their performance. Their mantra is “if you can play, you can play,” meaning that if players have the requisite skill to compete on a team, they should be able to do so regardless of factors like race, creed, or sexual orientation. 

Scullion and You Can Play co-founder Brian Kitts explained how an environment where all players are comfortable helps them perform better and leads to a greater chance of realizing the shared goal of all teammates, gay or straight: to win the game. As I discussed with Fort Worth dentist Bill Ralstin in his interview, that can apply to business, too. An inclusive environment also improves employee productivity.
Any Stars fan or player wants the team to win. If an inclusive environment leads to a better quality of play, that seems like a good enough reason to get on board with it, even if one can’t summon up empathy for the particular people involved. What we’ve seen in the past, however, with issues of, for instance, race in sport, is that excellence in competition leads to greater overall acceptance eventually. The late Fort Worth baseball icon Bobby Bragan often talked of his objection to Jackie Robinson’s presence when the African American trailblazer first joined Bragan’s Brooklyn Dodger team. But soon enough, the Alabama-reared Bragan came to realize Robinson’s worth as a player and a person and it changed his whole outlook. You Can Play hopes to see that scenario duplicated, but without the initial hostility.

Hockey’s an uncomfortable sport. Bodychecks ram you into the boards from every angle as you glide along on tiny metal edges. You try to use a stick to convince a little blob of rubber to do what you want it to. And have you ever smelled a hockey dressing room? But the Stars and the NHL want to ensure discomfort in their sport remains confined to icing sore muscles or regretting you didn’t get a better shot on net in the second period, and not whether one can be oneself in front of one’s teammates.


Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

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Content Creators And AEs Running The Same Playbook

The Early Days of Football And Ad Sales

For the first four decades or so of American football, play selection had its limits. The introduction of the flying wedge in 1892, wherein a ballcarrier ran behind a massed wall of blockers, was the height of innovation. Then, in 1906, John Heisman finally convinced Walter Camp they needed to add the forward pass to the rules and everything changed.

Television ad sales and TV show production have behaved much the same way. For about the first four decades of the technology, the brute force proposition of four networks selling the only available video inventory dominated the game. Then, in the 1990s, the rapid growth of cable penetration and online options introduced the video equivalents of multiple sets, spread offenses, and jet sweeps. 

National TV reps used to come to work with a (relatively) simple job to do. They’d look at the last Nielsen book (or maybe a three-book average if they had an especially demanding buyer) and service a group of existing agency customers who wanted to match up their clients’ :30 second spots with the (relatively) simple demographic numbers in those perfect-bound manuals. Sometimes you’d add in a sales promotion or some opening and closing brought-to-you-bys. They competed in a (not relatively) small universe of networks, and while they did have to counter threats from outdoor, print, and radio advertising, TV had the hammer. They had the richest content (pictures PLUS sound!) and nobody could deliver audience numbers like they could.  

Content creators also had a (relatively)straightforward mandate. They needed to deliver 22-or 44-minute shows that could make the numbers Nielsen recorded large ones. Barring the occasional product placement or an actor on stage at the upfronts, that’s mostly how those who produced programming serviced sales reps.

Digital Spread Offenses 

Today, digital has gone all run-and-shoot on traditional ad models. Audience segmentation has become more fragmented, though that has also come with new, more targeted measurement tools. There are more networks, and they’re delivered on multiple devices. Advertisers even have their own channels, thanks to social media and websites. 

In addition, the consumer’s buyer journey has changed. A :30-second spot that used to drive people to a store where a clerk would complete (or foul up) the sale now pushes people to visit a website and/or a search engine to contemplate (and potentially execute) a purchase decision. 

So ad salespeople now face a world where their :30-second spots on linear television still have some value, but media buyers want to see more. They want more ways to speak to consumers than just one-off ads attached to content. Content creators have to help AEs deliver.

We still need to create compelling 22-minute shows, 2-hour films, or six-episode miniseries, because that’s still sellable. But we need to also think, “What else can we supply to help the network rep when she’s in that meeting with her client?” 

Content Creators As Team Players

Can we create some supplemental digital content to enable a deeper dive for the viewer and an opportunity for the advertiser to retarget the digital consumer that tuned in for the full piece? Can we make content available for an advertiser to use on their own channels? Can we offer directors and principals to participate in B-To-B functions? And what can we do to make sure viewers don’t want to skip what content we’re using to help the advertiser engage prospects? 

Producers can get sophisticated about truly helping network sales departments service their clients. How do clients’ prospects progress down a sales funnel? Much is made in the sales enablement world about having content to target (and retarget) consumers as they make their ways through their buyer journeys. If a network could supply buzz-worthy content (and video related to a network show should be a lot cooler than your standard testimonial vid or infographic), could such innovation cement a larger share of a media buy for your network partner? If so, then it might be worth some thought in planning a production. 

Football Analogies At Work

An advantage of having viewers who’ve signed up for, say, an SVOD account with you is that you’ll know more about them than the Mad Men boys knew about their mass-appeal audiences. And online services have the ability to serve content based on identifiable patterns - if they’ve got the right content to serve. It’s not too different from a middle linebacker who’s studied his opponent’s offensive tendencies out of certain formations and quickly processes that data to put himself in the right place to stuff the ballcarrier.

This can be fun for content creators. We got into this line of work because we love to tell stories, and here’s an opportunity to make even more of it, in innovative and efficient ways. The rise of subscription services who don’t show ads has helped drive cord-cutting. But ad-supported content isn’t going anywhere, because sellers of goods and services still have to communicate about what they do. Networks, including streaming ones like Tubi, Quibi, and Peacock, want to continue to be the ones to help them do it.

Ad-supported networks have to compete for eyeballs with ad-free services like Netflix. They also have to contend with Amazon Prime and Walmart’s Vudu, who have the ability to facilitate direct sales through their e-commerce platforms. Certainly content creators can make content for Amazon and Walmart, and they should be thinking about how to best drive sales there, too. But when we’re working for networks, we need to use every tool we can to help our partners succeed. That means getting in lockstep with the needs of their sales departments, kind of like quarterbacks do with receivers . . . or safeties do with cornerbacks . . . or holders do with kickers . . . or whatever football analogy works for you. 

Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

MintFarmFilms.com

https://www.linkedin.com/company/mintfarmfilms/

RushOlson.com

Football Takes More Courage Than You Realize

This post originally appeared in the Blotch section of the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To consume it there: https://www.fwweekly.com/2020/01/14/sports-rush-a-courageous-tackle/

It takes a certain degree of courage to play the sport of American football. On every play, you know an opponent will likely attempt to ram into you traveling at a high rate of speed. If you’re a receiver going over the middle, or a quarterback looking downfield, or a linebacker unaware of a pulling guard, you might never see it coming. But since the 19th century, enough men have braved the violence that football has become this country’s most popular sport. The game has a rich history, full of dramatic hail marys and clutch third-down tackles.

For Brenda Tracy, it takes courage just to think about football.

Tracy came to Fort Worth last week to speak to a group of football players at the College Gridiron Showcase. Her audience consisted of some 200 former college standouts looking to impress NFL and CFL scouts with their physical and mental skills. In addition to providing on-field opportunities, CGS tries to address off-the-field situations the prospective pros may face. The attendees receive instruction in financial planning, the draft process, and, from Tracy, lessons about a side of their sport’s history they need to know about. A vile, putrid, unacceptable side.

In the late 1990s, a group of men that included major college football players gang-raped Brenda Tracy. She tried to address the horror through legal channels, but the authorities, both at the local district attorney’s office and the large state school whose players perpetrated the crime, prioritized the football team’s success over proper legal processes and the young woman’s unimaginable suffering. She remained anonymous and dealt with the psychological ramifications for her and her two sons as best she could over the ensuing decade and a half.

in 2014, however, she went public with her story, and decided to try to change the landscape for other women who might find themselves in situations similar to the one she had experienced. Her activism helped alter the legal environment regarding such cases. And meanwhile, she also turned her attention to football.

A sport played mostly by men that necessarily glories strength and toughness has historically generated more than its share of cases where its participants carried the “strongest men take what they want” mentality outside the stadium. From the recent Baylor scandal to the multiple NFL controversies, the game has basically been a #MeToo franchisee. Tracy’s nonprofit, Set The Expectation, aims to change the sport’s mentality, and, indeed, use it as a vehicle for a broader update of attitudes men have toward women.

She speaks to football teams (and athletes from other sports) about her experience. She invariably cries when she describes her rape. It’s still hard for her to talk about it. But she fights through it because she knows the platform football possesses, and if she can get more of its participants to embrace a mindset that respects women, it would go a long way to influencing the substantial portion of the public who devote their Saturdays and Sundays to the game.

One of the players with whom I chatted at the CGS talked about needing to “flip the switch,” referring to leaving football’s violence on the field and not bringing it into his off-the-field conduct. Another player (a big-time NFL prospect) talked about using his platform to influence others, and not just publicly. He also referenced being the guy who, when he sees a developing situation at a party, steps up to say something, because, as an influential football player, “you have enough power to stop it.” If Brenda Tracy can get more players and coaches to buy in like they did, she’ll make progress toward reversing the sport’s sorry history of objectifying women.

Another player and I talked about some of the aspects of football that could make it part of the solution. The game does reward good decision-making, concern for teammates, and, yes, courage. It takes courage for a player to step in when a buddy might be about to do something improper. Brenda Tracy puts aside her own fears every day to try to empower them to do so and write a new chapter in the game’s history.

Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

RushOlson.com

MintFarmFilms.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports