Hello there 👋
My tweenage sons’ media diets used to look like something out of a childhood developmental brochure.
They started, literally, chewing on books; Julia Donaldson then a bit of Harry Potter. Then along came Disney movies and Disney+ in lockdown. Moana & Star Wars. So good. Then, along came Fortnite & Roblox to fill in the gaps. Not so good.
Subsequently, via visits to their friends houses, YouTube came along and everything got upended.
What used to be reasonably predictable in terms of what they’d choose to watch or play when they had screen-time now jumps in all sorts of directions. They now spend as much time watching gamers gaming, as they do gaming themselves.
They also go down their own rabbit holes that have been formed searching, clicking, watching and scrolling around the bits of YouTube we allow them into.
William, my youngest, courtesy of Nick DiGiovani (29.4M Subscribers on YouTube, 8M on TikTok) can now cook an amazing steak, well seasoned, medium-rare at 10 years old.
Can’t really complain at that.
Here’s a classic of Nick’s genre designed to draw people in and keep their attention long enough to load-up those sweet, sweet ad-slots that will make him even more visible the next time someone loads-up YouTube.
Jack, my eldest, is into football creators and channels.
With his current flavour-du-jour being a five-a-side team in North London called 5ive-Guys, who from what I can tell simply play, film then edit their Power League matches before uploading them to YouTube. In doing this with a combination of ‘FIFA’ style graphic cards and a heavy dollop of charisma have built a platform of 500K subscribers, over 75 million views and half-a-dozen brand deals across their sprawling merch line.
Now, I’m not sure which channel was the chicken or the egg, but Jack’s other go-to when it’s on TV is Baller League; basically 5ive Guys on Steroids, which has got me spending time getting familiar with their format and the mechanics of it.
But what is Baller League? What’s interesting about it? ⚽
The cynic in me, catching it out of the corner of my eye, thought: “It’s just a bunch of ex-pros and failed pros dicking around a six-a-side pitch?”
And yes, at face value, there’s plenty of that. My only previous frame of reference for YouTubers playing football has been their slightly painful takeover of Soccer Aid.
But this is different. The dicking around, rather than in a traditional stadium, playing out a conventional match where it’s jarring, happens inside a pimped-up six-a-side cage converted from The Box That Rocks in East London; featuring a mix of academy graduates who didn’t quite make it, managed by ex-pros like John Terry, current players like Chloe Kelly, celebs like Maya Jama and creators like Angry Ginge.
All of it held together by KSI, YouTuber-in-chief on co-commentary.
If I had to sum it up: it’s where the charisma of the cage...
…Meets the Creator Economy.
Take a look at the promo film to see the tone and some of the talent involved.
What is it challenging? What is it championing?
At a moment in time where the beautiful game has become cripplingly expensive, heavily sanitised and geo-politically charged (and somewhat dull for neutrals watching advanced positional play trying to break-down deep-blocks every week); Baller League with its rule twists and surprise cameos is trying to inject some drama, jeopardy, and a bit of fun back into the beautiful game.
For instance a manager can pull a joker out of their pack, like a Premier League footballer in-disguise to take a free-kick, causing people to query and question who they are and how good they are relative to the rest of the pack.
The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice who shared this clip.
An interesting side-bar to how the league is building its distribution from what appears to be a hedge by SkySports who’ve become the broadcast partner of this nascent league.
As an impartial observer, Sky get to attract and engage younger fans who they can up-sell and cross-sell into other sports, whilst Baller League benefits from broadening both their reach and their bench of talent to draw from, be it to manage teams but probably manage a chunk of the production too.
Resulting in some entertaining promos like this one where Ex-Pro and SkySports Pundit Micah Richards unwittingly announced that fellow Ex-Pro turned pundit Daniel Sturridge would be joining him as co-manager of League side Deportrio.
It’s a little bit different to their patter on Super-Sunday.
Underpinning it all. De-Centralised Distribution 📱
What makes Baller League interesting to anyone in our world of media, advertising, content and communications isn’t the football itself, it’s the distribution model.
Unlike the Premier League which hoards its content, packages it up, and sells it to the highest bidder in each market (whilst aggressively shutting down clips spreading across social media); Baller League has been built with de-centralised distribution as its operating principle from Day 1.
Every camera, every edit, every moment, every move is designed to be clipped-up, re-mixed and re-circulated by fans who effectively become the league’s media network.
It’s not a rights model built on scarcity like EPL/UEFA/FIFA, it’s a reach model.
Not broadcast per-se, but broadly cast across creators, the cast, fans and followers as just like with Nick DiGiovani, with every thumb that’s stopped and every sweet, sweet ad that loads, the algorithms adjust to make the league a little more visible week by week.
Which, if you’re in the business of attention like many of us are, should make you sit up and take notice because it signals what the future of owned, earned and with it paid media starts to look like when decentralised content platforms grow faster than the broadcast-industrial complex.
Bridging the Broadcast Era & the Creator Era 🤳
Thinking out loud an interesting contrast is emerging.
In a world that’s likely to be less centralised, with fewer packages of time that can be bundled up and sold via a single-point of entry to the highest bidders; the ability for brands to “build” reach and resonance, rather than predictably buy it or borrow it, becomes a source of competitive advantage.
Requiring new types of muscles to be built for brand-builders seeking to deliver disproportionate attention, associations, actions and transactions at scale.
In a nutshell. ‘Totemic’ & ‘Systemic’ Muscles are Required 💪
Big brands still heavily rely on totems; single, highly produced expressions of brand meaning, made highly visible in scaled ad-formats. Be it a 60-second film. A global sponsorship. A Superbowl moment for instance.
But in an increasingly decentralised world, those totems will work harder when they feed a system of creators and communities with clips and collateral that can carry the message and the meaning it’s trying to convey further, faster and with more energy.
A great example of this interplay, in-play, is Uber’s work around their sponsorship of the NFL in the States.
Meaning the modern media planner will have to be equally comfortable helping create totems that shape what the brand stands for at scale, with systems that shape how it moves across modern, de-centralised media systems.
Until next time,
Matt & Tom
Excellent and fascinating issue, thanks for this.