Summary

• Why Most Marketers Feel Like They’re Failing: Phill Agnew built the UK’s number one marketing podcast because he felt like a failed marketer himself. The irony? That instinct to question everything is exactly what behavioural science is built on. Are most marketers solving the wrong problem from the start?
• The Death of the Scroll: Most brands approach live commerce by interrupting audiences who aren’t ready to buy. The Impulse Lab found that live shopping works because it creates a fundamentally different buying environment. But are brands still building for traditional e-commerce when the rules have completely changed?
• Why Countdown Timers Are Killing Your Conversions: Urgency and scarcity are the go-to tools for live shopping. But the Impulse Lab found countdown timers ranked dead last as a purchase trigger, while confidence and engagement ranked first. Are brands pressuring audiences out of buying?
• The Mere Exposure Effect: The more people see your brand, the more they like it. Phill explains why the brands winning right now aren’t converting on first contact, they’re showing up consistently until the moment a buyer is ready. So why are so many brands still optimising for immediate conversion?
• Why Story-First Buyers Feel Better 48 Hours Later: 74% of people who bought based on a compelling story still felt positive two days later, compared to 55% of discount hunters. Phill and Ed break down why price-led strategies are a race to the bottom and what brands should be doing instead.
• The Behaviour Shift Nobody Is Talking About: Live shopping is growing, but Western audiences still don’t think of it as normal. Phill explains why the biggest opportunity isn’t convincing people to buy your product, it’s convincing them that buying this way is what everyone is doing. Is that the real challenge brands need to solve first?

Show Notes

• YouTube launches Gemini AI creator brand partnerships
• Tubi and Apple bring free F1 alt-casts to every US device
• Savannah Bananas make creator distribution an official rights tier
• KSI streams Dagenham live to 17 million subscribers
• Indiana Pacers launch Fieldhouse Media Network

Transcription

Ed (00:01)
Hello and welcome to the attention shift. In the week, the Savannah bananas gave creator distributed its own line in the right stack right alongside the likes of ESPN and the CW. Apple decided the best way to grow F1’s new US audience was to lend it for free to platform fronted by creators. YouTube killed its agency middleman tool, replaced it with Gemini AI and handed brands a natural language search across 3 million creators. KSI, get my words out.

KSI streamed a 16 national league game to his 17 million YouTube subscribers for free and suddenly Dagenham had a global audience. And the Indiana Pacers looked at Amazon’s retail media empire, looked at their own fan database and decided there wasn’t much difference. Without further delay, Joe, are you ready? Five stories, five minutes each. Ready to go?

Jo (00:46)
I am, let’s go.

Ed (00:47)
Cool, right, so I’ll kick off then, because you are the resident expert on the first story of the day. So Savannah Bananas and Creator Distribution. So they have done a deal with Creator Sports Network, Barrick Prince, who we both know well and will be seeing in a couple of weeks, to broadcast four of the live banana ball games across YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, X, and Facebook through their Creator Network. ⁓ This is not about highlights, obviously. This is about, and it’s not about clips, this is about live games, a form we allocated to… ⁓

Jo (00:51)
You

Ed (01:16)
creator led distribution. So they’re sitting them all alongside their linear and their streaming deals that they’ve already got. So effectively they are giving creator distribution parity in effect with their other distribution partners. So look, the bananas I got, I’m going to set this up and then you can just fly with it. 35 million social followers, I think, if I’m correct on that. Billing video views. There we go. Three and a half million people on a ticket waiting list. God.

Jo (01:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

More than any other major league baseball team, more than the league itself, yes.

Ed (01:45)
Are you on that list? How far up or down are you? you close?

Jo (01:45)
Wait.

⁓

God, I don’t know. keep, well, I did actually once try and message Jesse Cole lobbying for a match in the UK.

Ed (01:57)
So what’s clear here is that this is a sports property that’s put created distribution on the same line as linear and streaming. So there’s real parity there. And I think that’s new from what we’ve seen so far.

Jo (02:10)
Yeah, but I mean, it was going to happen. And it’s absolutely no surprise that it’s Savannah Bananas that have pioneered it because they very much think of themselves as an entertainment IP that just happens to play a sport. And that’s the distinction. ⁓ Jesse Cole already on record as very much borrowing from the Disney ⁓ flywheel and that Disney playbook. That’s same as my old world of entertainment and kids media.

That is how you build successful IP. You think in terms of that franchise distribution strategy, that ecosystem strategy, and whether you’re telling a story about a sponge that lives in Bikini Bottom or you’re telling stories about banana ball players, it is the same principle. And it’s something that I’ve advocated for in my time in sport. this, yeah, this is speaking my language.

What I really like about this, I mean, they’ve always streamed on YouTube. That’s been their USP. ⁓ It didn’t stop them picking up distribution with ESPN. ESPN then increased the number of games that they took for broadcast, but always, it’s been very clear by Savannah Bananas that they were always gonna keep their content on YouTube. That’s where they grew their audience. They are not gonna then cut off that audience on YouTube. They absolutely know which side their bread is buttered. ⁓

ESPN okay with that and the CW and ⁓ other kind of smaller partners Therefore it is a natural extension that rather than just stream on their own YouTube channel they’re gonna syndicate it out all almost to ⁓ a network of creators because You need tonnage on YouTube. There’s so much content on YouTube Discoverability even for someone of Savannah bananas following is still quite hard

when you’ve got 110 million YouTube channels and all of that content being uploaded more than you could ever consume, then you need, yeah, you need tonnage on YouTube as well. So this is a way for them to explode their presence on YouTube. And also when you think about it, I was having this discussion with someone yesterday. You know, we’ve spoke about before how my 16 year old used to turn off the commentary of football on TV and have Colbridge on, because

Ed (04:13)
How’d you find it?

Jo (04:36)
commentators on TV don’t sound like him. They don’t speak his language and he wants to find someone who does. Working with a bunch of creators gives you that optionality. You can find creators who appeal to a certain sector of your audience. They commentate their opinions, the way that they speak, their vernacular, their terminology will appeal to a certain group of people. Then you multiply that and you can hit a much broader range of people.

with a way that presents your game in a way that feels kind of authentic and genuine to them. So it makes complete sense to me that they would then go this one step further with their YouTube strategy.

Ed (05:15)
I think the reality is like anyone looking at this in terms of how and look at they are in a they’re in a very unique position now because the scale they’ve got but they weren’t always in that position but they’ve built up this scale now and and and any anybody running a business like that which is what it is you’re mapping out your audience and going where is my audience where the different age groups where the different demographics and you’re going well ESPN reaches that and the CW reaches that and and you go okay and actually if I go work with Korea to do this distribution it does that gap so you’re just trying to plug the gaps where you’re not reaching

Jo (05:23)
No, exactly.

Of course it is. It is not cannibalistic, it’s additive.

Ed (05:44)
the people you normally rate.

Yeah, so the question here

is, obviously we talk, in the industry we work in and the people that we talk to, obviously it becomes a hot topic, creator led distribution, but do you think to audiences and viewers, they look at, they’re thinking in their minds, this is creator led distribution, or this is just like, can we just watch the game there? Does it even matter to them? It’s just ultimate, they’re just thinking, ⁓ it’s just being brought to where I am so I can just watch it easily.

Jo (06:08)
Well, no.

Yes,

if you’re a 19 year old and YouTube is your first port of call for everything, it’s your media infrastructure layer, it’s not just where you get your sports and your entertainment, it’s everything, it’s your search engine, then, and also increasingly if you’re watching it on the big screen, I know there’s differences of opinion as to how much is actually being viewed on the big screen, but we know that YouTube is-

Ed (06:36)
Well, YouTube

tell us always 50%, but I think that’s massively skewed by US compared to the rest of the world because of YouTube TV in the US, but still.

Jo (06:41)
Exactly, yeah. Yeah.

But whether you’re consuming it on the TV or you’re consuming it through your phone, YouTube is TV to a whole generation of people. So if they’re watching Savannah Bananas because they just happen to have stumbled upon them and they really like them and it’s via a creator’s channel and they happen to like that creator and that creator speaks to them and calls the game in a way that feels familiar, absolutely, that’s no different. No different to them as far as I’m concerned. No different to it being broadcast on

TNT with a commentator that’s in a studio, no different.

Ed (07:17)
I agree. And I think we’re starting to, with things like this, and like I said, we’ll see Barrick in a couple of weeks in Lisbon, right, for the Stream TV conference we’re going to, and I’m sure we will talk at length with him around this, and some of the other things that they’ve been doing recently as well. I think more and more of these things are starting to normalise that it’s just another distribution mode, ultimately.

Jo (07:19)
then.

Mm-hmm.

course it is, but what it does show is that unless you have started now thinking about what your creator distribution strategy is, you’re behind already. So crack on. ⁓ Exactly, okay. So we talked about Tubi last week and there’s another announcement about Tubi who are on a bit of a clip actually. So they’d done the partnership with TikTok that came up last week.

Ed (07:50)
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Which brings on to the next story, which I’ll let you pick up on. Great segue.

Jo (08:09)
talking about giving creators full TV shows on their platform. They’ve got a bit bigger this week. They’ve announced a deal with Apple. This partnership with Apple, which I think is really smart. I mean, we’ve been talking for a while about the benefit of F1 going to Apple and was it gonna scop a things Apple, given that most of us…

Ed (08:29)
They’ve dropped a

few things recently and they’re playing around with them. They’re doing things that no one saw coming, I think.

Jo (08:35)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah. mean, really, they partnered with Apple, okay, not a huge streamer, but a massive technology distribution outlet. And people were still a little bit scratching their heads, you know, what are they gonna do? Well, so they’ve partnered with Apple TV to do alt-casts again, coming up to alt-casts of live F1 races across the whole season, available on every device in the US at no cost.

That’s massive, like massive. So this is really interesting because now we’re not thinking about streamers, we’re not thinking about broadcast, we’re thinking about direct access to your device. Remember you too did it once, preloaded that song onto Apple device. mean, this is similar but done right. I think it’s genius.

Ed (09:24)
Killed the careers.

Yeah, I think they’ve learned the lesson from that. I think what’s clear and anyone who goes on socials or digital video channels on an F1 race weekend knows there’s a multitude of people who are doing some kind of F1 alt cast that are not necessarily in cahoots with the rights holder, the broadcasters who are all giving their opinions on it. So clearly in the US, they’ve all…

Jo (09:54)
Yeah. ⁓

Ed (10:00)
cumulative lent into the gun. This is an opportunity here for us to do something different. And the way that tube has been working, even of late, right, that again, similarly, they’re trying to do something different, which I think for ultimately Fox home them, right, for an organisation like Fox, you wouldn’t necessarily look at them as innovators, I would say. And I think what tube is allowing them to do, just, you know, are the in a lot of ways of Fox using tube as well as a bit of an incubator for the wider business in terms of things that they could be doing to reach audiences.

Jo (10:18)
Mm-hmm.

Ed (10:27)
You’d imagine that the general sort of Fox audience is probably ageing and tubies around and allowing them to reach that younger audience and try out these things that they wouldn’t do under a Fox brand.

Jo (10:34)
to fall.

For sure, and they can’t because their audience is very broadcast first. It’s quite old and quite conservative. Tubi, yeah, is the part of their business where they’re making these kind of innovative decisions. But I think the partnership with Apple for me is the really interesting one because it gives Tubi direct access to the device in your hand. that’s pretty cool.

Ed (11:01)
Well, the worry

was with Apple as well that they were going to be this massive gatekeeper. And if you look at what happened with MLS to start with, where obviously they closed that gate in a sense. And obviously then they went down the road they went with MLS where they then opened it up and actually that you can see easily now. They’ve also learned the lesson. You know, what you’ve got to give Apple credit for there is just like they learn the lessons quick on these kinds of things and they read the room and they see what they need to do. But I don’t think anyone expected them to go this far forward with.

Jo (11:15)
Mm.

Ed (11:28)
tube and do this kind of stuff. Look, the reality is they’re not necessarily giving away any rights here, right? Because it’s an alt cast, it’s not necessarily the thing itself. But what they’re saying is, is no, we embrace this because we understand that this is signposting and potentially driving towards the rights that we do have. And we have to find some way of doing this. And ultimately, if we don’t do something like this, how do we get to these people? And they’ve identified that as the problem, similar to what we’ve just talked about there with the Savannah bananas as well, and a multitude of other people that we talk about.

Jo (11:35)
Mm-hmm.

Ed (11:57)
And just to be clear to everyone here, not like these, like, you know, going like, creators, creators, creators, that’s the only thing you do. It’s part of the marketing mix.

Jo (12:04)
Yeah, yeah, it is. mean, this, like we just said, if you haven’t got a creator strategy, perhaps time to start thinking about one because you need one. And it’s not a zero-sum game. think that’s accepted wisdom now. But yeah, it won’t be the last time we’re talking about creator alt-casts, I’m sure.

Ed (12:19)
Yeah. So, no, there’s gonna be more of this kind of, there’s gonna be more.

I’m guessing that again, we’re like, at Stream TV in Lisbon, this is gonna be one of the biggest things that probably gets talked about while we’re there as well. And the same way it has been at South by Southwest this year, you went to MIP as well, right? And it was all about like, it’s…

Jo (12:39)
I mean, you’ve

got Sidemen Entertainment there, yep.

Ed (12:41)
Yeah,

the whole media marketing ad distribution, everyone has now realised that this is not a fad and it’s not going anywhere, which brings me nicely on to the next story. ⁓ So YouTube have now launched Gemini AI creator partnerships, which they did a YouTube upfront event the other day actually. ⁓ they’ve replaced, they had this older creator brand matchmaking tool with something that’s a bit more powerful obviously, because now they’re using Gemini to sort of help match.

ads with creators essentially, it’s kind of like how can we drive more ad money out of these creator experiences that more and more people are doing. So it allows you to effectively go into ⁓ their platform and basically find me a sports creator who feels authentic, talks about football culture and has an engaged under 25 audience. And ultimately all the data points are in there, right? So with AI, it shouldn’t be that hard to find it. The question is then he’s like, are you matching the right brands with the right creators?

Jo (13:35)
Yeah.

Ed (13:43)
all the things that people are doing are this, they’re still going to be credible, right? And it can’t just be a badging exercise.

Jo (13:49)
It creates a slapping. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, think it’s pretty, it’s pretty seismic this, although it’s not unusual that a big tech platform will decide that it needs to disintermediate ⁓ a lot of the infrastructure that has built that. course it is. mean, yeah. So it’s cutting out the middleman, which is ⁓ what.

Ed (13:51)
your favorite phrase.

Well, it’s taking agencies. Yeah, it’s basically saying you can just go direct, you don’t need to use agencies to do this work for you.

Jo (14:17)
what’s happened a lot with Amazon, with retailers and Uber. So we know that this tends to happen. Eventually they will own the whole stack. A couple of things that really interested me, and this is relating to AI rather than what actually Google’s doing in this intermediating, connecting brands with creators, is this natural language search.

which we spoke about a couple of weeks ago in relation to a sports platform where you can actually search but use natural language. So I want a creator that does this, does that, the other, rather than going in and having to be quite structured in your query, you can go in and just ask Gemini, I need to find a female creator that talks about beauty, she’s 25 and her audience is mainly North America. Boom, there you go. That actually takes a lot of the legwork out of finding the right creator partner.

So this is something that I think AI is really going to make easier. That in itself is a form of disintermediation, but then what they’re also doing here is obviously they’re taking a lot of the value out of the agency business because they’re making what agencies do just a feature of their platform.

tends to ruin your business if your business then just becomes a feature of someone else’s tech platform.

Ed (15:45)
Some would argue that it’s probably long overdue and actually has there been a lot of value in that anyway? And look, I think it has been like even in the last six to 12 months, know, the AI has helped to accelerate these things that people have started to understand. Interesting part I saw with this as well is that what YouTube has said is creators, you’re more likely to be partnered with the right brands if you give us more data.

Jo (15:49)
Hmm?

course. ⁓ Yes, which they will find in some point at the future another way to monetize that and screw creators for that as well. You’ll probably have to pay as a creator then to be surfaced above others with all of that data that you’ve kindly given them. Anyway, that’s just the skeptic in me talking. ⁓

Ed (16:08)
So that’s a day to land grab as well, right?

It was going to be easy

and I think this comes back to that point of, mean, I said, look, anything that allows these creators to start accessing the ad value that they deserve, where they often don’t get the same kind of money that TV advertising gets or other forms of advertising, I think is a good thing. But what I would also say as well is like still like Sidemen Plus and others who’ve done it as well, always be minded about like, reach is rented.

Relationships are on you need to work out how you own the relationship with the audience because you don’t own any of this relationship

Jo (17:01)
Back to ecosystem management. If your whole business, and if you’re a creator, you’re a business, if your whole business is based on YouTube, which is algorithmically curated, which now is saying it wants even more of your data, with the dangling the carrot of accessing better brand deals, but ultimately, they will find a way to extract from that relationship too, because, hello, big tech is gonna big tech.

Ed (17:24)
where the audience is anonymized too, yeah? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Jo (17:27)
then

that’s, I mean, you can see it. It’s not as if we haven’t seen this happening before. I go back to what I said before. This is, it’s about extraction and ultimately that’s what happens. That said, in the short term, yes, better brand deals for creators, that’s a big incentive, but you’re right. And particularly if you’re thinking about a sports media organization or you’re an IP owner, you have to think about that ecosystem strategy. You cannot be solely dependent on this kind of top of funnel, rented.

Ed (17:37)
Absolutely.

Jo (17:56)
algorithmically curated again, because one tweak of the algorithm and your business is screwed overnight, you need to figure out what your ecosystem strategy is.

Ed (18:01)
Yeah.

Well, happened a

lot. That’s a lot happened to a lot of digital publishers with publishers with what Google did around search. Like lots of digital publishers have had to effectively like maybe done this across the businesses because suddenly the ad value they were getting or the traffic they were getting suddenly became a fraction of the traffic they were getting. So their ad value went down because they weren’t reaching the audiences because they were so reliant on that search traffic.

Jo (18:10)
Mmm.

Yeah.

So before we move on to the next story, one final thing to say about this Google deal is I think it, because they’re so keen on getting TV ad money and currently they’re struggling to, I mean, there is a lot of money going to YouTube, let’s not pretend that’s not happening. But again, when we’re talking about TV ad spend, it’s very different to what tends to be spent on YouTube.

Ed (18:46)
Hmm.

Jo (18:55)
I think this puts a lot of pressure on them. If they’re gonna disintermediate a lot of those agencies, they need to show material value and it’s not just through the quality of creators. So I do think it means that they’re gonna put a bid in for an NFL package of rights later this year because they’re gonna want to sell that premium inventory against something as big as the NFL. 100%, 100%. Okay, story four already, we’re cracking on.

Ed (19:14)
and then append everything else to it ultimately, because they’ll have that as the lead. Yeah. Cool.

Jo (19:24)
Dagenham and Redbridge, KSI, big story in the last few weeks. ⁓ They’re March 28th, so a couple of days ago, March 28th fixture against Hampton and Richmond, streamed ⁓ live on YouTube’s, ⁓ on KSI’s official YouTube channel. It was a bit of a mouthful. ⁓ Dozone were quite happy with that. They’ve got the rights to the National League, to that tier. This is obviously KSI we know is invested in Dagenham and Redbridge.

Now he’s doing this. How regularly he’ll do this, I don’t know. Is this more stunts for KSI? Is he farming content for his channel? Is this really gonna help Dagenham and Redbridge? What do you reckon?

Ed (20:07)
Um, so I watched some of the stream, um, at the weekend as well. And ultimately the game was streamed in case I was in the sort of the bottom corner. But what he was doing throughout the game as well is everyone he was writing in the live comments, he was conversing with people. Um, he was insured. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was driving community. The numbers weren’t huge. I mean, last time I looked, they were sort of three, 400,000 people had watched it. So not, not massive. And actually when you compared it against some of his other, uh, content, probably not as well performed as other content because this is

Jo (20:21)
Which is what you need to do, right?

Were

they concurrence?

Ed (20:40)
I couldn’t tell you, to be honest. But this is alien to the kind of stuff he normally does to his audience, right? And I can’t imagine this is going to be a concern to things. I can’t imagine that De Zon are going to allow him to stream all Dagenham’s games all season long and forever. But I also understand why they’ve done it, right? Because ultimately it’s a signpost to the fact that lots of people wouldn’t know that De Zon have the National League rights and that there is other football outside of the top four tiers. And obviously…

Jo (20:47)
Mm-hmm.

Not all of them. Yeah, that was what I was thinking.

and

Ed (21:09)
Dagenham are in the sixth tier as well. I think it’s opening up again to an international audience that might not know of their existence. We don’t know off the back of that people have then gone and sought out more information about them and bought merchandise, decided they to get to a game on the off chance they might meet KSI. There’s all sorts of rumours going around as well that when he originally announced that he’d bought into Dagenham that they’d sold millions of pounds worth of shirts within days, like…

Jo (21:27)
You

Ed (21:37)
Who knows, right? We can’t necessarily verify that. I’ve not seen, I’ve just been searching around. I’ve not seen anything anywhere that confirms or denies that. But the reality is, they will have seen an uplift, but this is going to have to be a concerted effort over a period of time. He’s going to have to be creative, which he’s got, look, he’s no shortage of creativity, right? Be interested if he’s going to bring some of his pals in on this as well. But you look at what Wrexham have done. There’s been some real deep storytelling around what Wrexham.

Jo (21:46)
Mm.

Ed (22:04)
and the surrounding areas and the people mean as much as it’s about Ryan and Rob. It hasn’t just been about Ryan and Rob, it’s about everything about what Wrexham is, which is allowed, for me is allowed to give real depth to the Wrexham story. KSI will have his own way of doing it and he comes across very genuine, genuine how he’s doing it. But yeah, I guess it’s an experiment that they did. ⁓ I imagine that everyone will say they were very, very happy with it and hard to know how.

Jo (22:13)
Mm.

Ed (22:32)
I’m excited to see where he goes from here. Like, you’ve done this now, like, what’s the next thing? What’s the next thing? What’s the next thing?

Jo (22:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, it can’t be short term, it? This is, because ultimately that, I mean, it fades very quickly from the memory. And as you said, Wrexham took two years to really start kind of cutting through with that whole story, even with two Hollywood stars backing it. Now, with the best will in the world, KSI is not a Hollywood star. It’s got a huge following, but.

It came up when we were talking about Baller League, you you can’t speed run fandom. It’s one of the things that you can’t speed run. It’s something that builds over time, affinity growing into passion. You can’t speed run it. So this is something that I feel like perhaps needs to, you know, be sustained. It needs to have some kind of strategy behind it. It’s not just KSI dipping in and out as, you know, he sees fit.

Ed (23:26)
Yeah, I was gonna say, what?

Yes.

Jo (23:34)
He’s a busy guy, he’s got other things he’s doing. So what’s the long-term strategy for this and where does Dazone fit into it as well?

Ed (23:36)
Yeah.

So, because I mean, again, you compare it back to Wrexham, because I actually did an interview with Inside a Sport where I talked about this quite a bit. And when you look at Wrexham, right, look, yeah, Robin Ryan is this Hollywood stardust that you sprinkle over it and ultimately the glue that brings it together. But I know from watching the, you know, the show and real stuff that, you know, I know the story around the pub and how the mining disaster nearby really, really informs the history of the club and how, you know, the stories of, of, of

Jo (24:03)
Mm.

Ed (24:11)
can’t remember the girl’s name, the girl’s name was father passed away, who was a massive fan too. And then the women’s team that they’ve managed to layer into it as well and actually given Welsh women’s football a lift where, know, if you like, like everything that’s going on in the, the, English Premier League for women, Wales has not got that. Like, so what they managed to do and lift that up as well. So there’s, lots of strands that you pull from that. That’s like you say it’s taken like got even three or four years to get to that point.

Jo (24:40)
Mm-hmm,

yeah.

Ed (24:42)
He won’t be worried about this, right? Because he knows how to story tell and he knows how to create stunts. Again, it’s just interesting to see, almost like streaming the game. I’m excited about it because it’s kind like, yeah, that’s interesting. And everyone benefits from that. The league does it all. Daggerham himself. But almost like, in this ilk, it’s almost the easiest thing to do. It’s the most obvious.

Jo (24:46)
Mm.

Mm. Yeah.

Yeah, it just comes down to who’s the story? Is it KSI or is it Dagenham and Redbridge? Because what you’ve just said is I know Rob and Ryan have been a big part of the story, but increasingly it’s been about Wrexham. And that’s the key ⁓ differentiator for me. Who’s the story? What’s the story? If the story is KSI and not Dagenham and Redbridge, I’m not sure it’s going to work long-term.

Ed (25:12)
Yeah.

Absolutely. like, I really want to try and find time to go to a Wrexham game. I’ve not managed it yet. Dagenham, I’ve not been convinced yet. Because what is the story? What is the, what is the, what is the, USP? What is the value extra? Why do I want to go there? What, what is, what are you, what am I going to be involved in?

Jo (25:38)
Mm. Yeah.

Yeah, what’s the substance? Yeah, exactly. What’s the substance?

And the truth is as well, before we move on to our last story, the Wrexham thing, you can only do that once. The mould is broken, yep, once someone does it once. So, yep, another angle.

Ed (25:57)
Yes. It’s got to be another angle. It’s got to be another angle now. Cool.

Last story. So the Indiana Pacers, so Pacers Sports and Entertainment, they’ve decided to go down the path now of turning their fan base into effectively a media distribution network. And we’ve heard lots of talk around some of the biggest sports organizations doing this. They reckon they’ve got 250 million sports fans worldwide. They’ve partnered with Deloitte.

and Yieldmo, who are an ad network to build Fieldhouse Media Network, where in effect they’re going to try and act like the Amazon, the Ticketmasters, they’re gonna give access to their fandom in return for ad money and work to create unique ⁓ branded executions that can be trafficked and tracked like if you’re going to buy into any other media network as well.

Discuss.

Jo (26:59)
More extraction, more extraction from the fan. ⁓

Ed (27:01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think

there’s always been a challenge, right, in sports, let’s call it sponsorships, this, you know, this is, again, badging, so it’s not a career badging, but it is badging, like, you stick your logo on, and usually it was decision from someone higher up, and this still happens now, I’m gonna do it because I’ve got an affinity, I’m gonna do it because it sounds good, or I get to mix with whoever, and the answer, is different, it’s kind of like, like, we’re gonna do this because you’re telling me that my money will deliver better than somewhere else.

Jo (27:32)
Mm.

Ed (27:32)
They’re

gambling on fact that fandom will cut through when you do it in a pure ad distribution way more than if I was going to go and put it on TV or on YouTube or somewhere else that matter.

Jo (27:44)
I would, okay, I get the principles and the theory behind it. You have a network of fans and they’re claiming that they’ve got 250 million fans. Are they verified? Are they active? They’re not lapsed? These 250 million that, exactly, that they claim that they’ve got authenticated, I don’t know about that. But when you’re offering those fans up,

Ed (28:02)
Yeah, where are they? What’s the distribution? How much do know about them? Yeah.

Jo (28:15)
as potential, you know, to brands, to advertisers, how far have they thought about what value it delivers the fan versus the value it delivers the advertiser? And this is where I start getting a little bit antsy because again, it is extraction. And then that leads to the en-shitification of the experience for the fan. It does, let’s face it, you know, en-shitification, is,

Ed (28:29)
Yeah

Shitification. Love that.

Jo (28:45)
It’s been a word for a while and it popped up again this week and I decided that I love it. Have you not heard of the shitification of the internet? Okay, well, you need to look it up. But this is just another part of the shitification of the internet for, but in this case for sport fans in the sense that, just offering your fans and their media experience relating to your club up as advertising inventory doesn’t.

Ed (28:49)
I’ve never heard that. No. No, it’s a new one on that.

Jo (29:13)
make it work, doesn’t make it right, it can bite you on the bum pretty quickly. If again, it’s just about monetizing eyeballs. ⁓ okay, so I’ve just opened up my phone and I wanted to know what the score was and I’ve got a barrage of ads. We all know how annoying that has been over the last 10 years of the internet. So we’re just saying now that we’re gonna, know, as sports ⁓ media networks, as you’ve rightly pointed out, sports clubs and their fan base being considered media networks.

Is it just another way of extracting value from any attention that they give to the club and to the team? Yes. Does that help the fan? No.

Ed (29:51)
⁓

But on the flip side of it is, what we talked about earlier, that they need to try and own that relationship with their fan base when it comes to advertising. So you would hope that there are rules and regs and controls over what they are willing to do and what they are not willing to do. And that the fans are totally clear in terms of what they’re going to get presented to them.

Jo (30:15)
Don’t be dafted.

Ed (30:21)
I’m living in a utopian mindset. Sorry. I’m hoping, I’m hoping.

Jo (30:21)
Not a chance. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the way it works for me is if, you know, we’re talking the Pacers, we’re talking their network of fans, if it is genuinely pitched as, right, if you want to access this fan base through our media network, I’m doing the air quotes, through our media network, which is essentially our fans and their attention, it has to be additive. There has to be some reward for them.

It’s not just sticking a load of pre-roll ads every time you open up your phone and you’re looking for the latest paces score or the highlights, you’re subject to a barrage of multiple ads. It’s really gonna turn sour pretty quickly. So how do they turn it into something that is additive or that is rewarding for the fans? That’s what I didn’t really get from this story.

Ed (31:11)
Yeah, I think look press releases always do what they do right. You always get the sort of the top line thing and you know, and similarly when I looked at the tubey one, it had said that it was going to be interactive experience for the fans. And then when I looked at it, most interactions were around how you manage ads, which is not really an interactive experience for fans. So I think press release versus the reality of what gets delivered, it’ll be an interesting one to keep an eye on, I guess. Right.

Jo (31:23)
and

Yeah,

and interesting the contrast with the Savannah bananas right back at the top of the top of the podcast Savannah bananas only take sponsorships from I think less than five brands. It’s still kept very, very clean. Interesting. Yeah. Yep. Alrighty. Look at that on the nose.

Ed (31:45)
Right. So it’s really premium as well. Cool. I think we’re done. Yeah. So thank you

for joining us, Joe, myself, this week on the Attention Shift. Don’t forget, like, subscribe. If you want to feature as a guest, and we’ve actually had a few people who’ve really written to us, guests that we need to talk to you about and see ultimately when we can fit them in. We’ve done a number of interviews as well that are gonna get released over the coming weeks and months.

But if you’d like to feature as a guest or if you’ve got any questions, can email us at helloattentionshift.media. I’ve been Ed Abyss.

Jo (32:18)
I’m Jo Redfern, have a great week.

Ed (32:20)
Goodbye.

Dan Nagar (32:25)
Awesome, awesome, Should we go through a couple of shorts? Right, yeah, we pulled it back on time. Amazing. We’ve got 32 minutes, could do bit further than that. Perfect. We were a little bit short last week, weren’t we? Yeah, we were a couple of minutes short. Couple of minutes. Yeah, it’s not a big deal. Yeah, we might have our… You know what? Sorry, we’ll just…

Ed (32:28)
32 minutes, beautiful.

Jo (32:34)
Yeah, what were we at then? I didn’t have my clock open. Okay.

Ed (32:37)
32 minutes, Joe, we finished on perfect that. Perfect. We were a little bit short last week, weren’t we? I mean like a couple of minutes.

Jo (32:43)
Yeah, sometimes… Yeah, I don’t think that matters.

Ed (32:47)
Yeah, we’ve had a… You all right? Sorry, Will’s just leaving.

Yeah, we’ve had two different people who’ve been in touch who want to be guests on it. So we’re going back with a bit more information. ⁓ One’s an ARVR person. Don, this would be echoey if you could just…

Dan Nagar (32:52)
two different people have been in touch you want to be guests on it so we’re going back with a bit more information one’s an ARVR VR person sorry Dan this is bit echo if you could just

Jo (32:58)
Okay.

Ed (33:08)
Yeah, one’s an AR, VR person called Dodds that I need to do a more digging on that someone’s… Someone on behalf of Dodds. So if you think Dodds is worth doing… I don’t think he was actually. Was it Rachel on behalf of Dodds? I’ll try to think where that was. I can’t remember. There’s one I got on email. There’s one that someone DM’d me.

Jo (33:12)
I know him really well.

Jack, it was Jack, his manager probably. know. All right, okay.

Do

you know what? reached out to me a couple of weeks ago and I disappeared down my messages inbox on LinkedIn.

Ed (33:38)
No, no, no, no, that’s something I’ll go. So these dots.

Jo (33:41)
Yeah, so

Dodds is an artist, he’s really nice. He’s done some stuff around, I think he did, he’s done some stuff for UEFA. He does these interactive installations. He’s done John Legend.

Ed (33:52)
I

knew you knew it.

Jo (33:55)
⁓ I’ve not got it with me. He’s down there. did a Jude Bellingham VR poster. You scan it and you get Jude Bellingham watching as a kid in his bedroom watching Jude Bellingham on the screen. I’ll send it you.

Ed (34:02)
So was in…

Right, okay, this sounds interesting then.

All right, so was

someone called Steph Mollenew. She’s the head of studio at Dime and Dodds Studios. She reached out to me on LinkedIn. Wasn’t that a couple of, like literally five days ago, four days ago? And I went back to going, could you send me some more information? She hasn’t replied yet, but obviously, because I didn’t really know who it was, but you do. And then there’s another one that we got that I sent to Will, which is someone who does stuff in sort of the golfing sector who I hadn’t heard of, but Will’s actually followed up with me and said,

Jo (34:19)
Okay.

Yeah.

I saw that, yeah.

Ed (34:42)
Yeah, yeah, that came through on the, yeah, so there’s that one as well. And then, yeah, but we’re getting some interesting ones coming in now, because I like them when they’re a bit different.

Jo (34:45)
Mm.

Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah, no, Dodds is really cool as well. He’s a really cool young man.

Ed (34:57)
Right then, these shorts.

Jo (34:59)
Okay,

so we’re doing the short script, yeah?

Dan Nagar (35:02)
Yeah, so I’m putting them in the chat. We’ll do three individual and then two, like what we did last week, two conversational. I’m just putting the other conversational ones in.

Ed (35:15)
Okay, yeah.

Jo (35:24)
this new recording track created.

Sorry, I just got a message.

Dan Nagar (35:29)
Yeah,

yeah, I hear some other sound.

started a new recording track. Did you change your device?

Jo (35:40)
No? I just got a notification.

Dan Nagar (35:42)
It says,

it sounds like your mic has disconnected.

Ed (36:00)
We’ve just got to record the shorts.

Jo (36:05)
my mic has disconnected.

You hear me?

Ed (36:10)
Yeah, I hear you.

Dan Nagar (36:13)
You can hear. ⁓

Is that a USB?

should just unplug and plug back in and should pick up again.

Jo (36:46)
It’s saying that I can’t switch mics while recording but it just switched me mics anyway. ⁓ Right I’ll just have to do it through my laptop. Let me reinstall it.

Dan Nagar (36:53)
good.

Ed (36:54)
You might have to disconnect to reconnect.

but we’ll outload what you’ve done if you do that.

Jo (37:05)
I don’t know what’s the audio like if I record it like this.

Dan Nagar (37:11)
It’s not as good as it was before ⁓

Ed (37:14)
It’s hard to tell though, Dan, because obviously, because you’re on as well, he still feels echoey to me as

Jo (37:14)
Okay.

Ed (37:17)
well, all of it.

Jo (37:19)
Unless we start a new recording.

Ed (37:22)
That doesn’t sound too bad to me though. I think it’s just, I think it’s the background noise of Dan, So when we switch down off, it’s fine. Okay. Yep. Right, we’re doing it now, Will.

Dan Nagar (37:22)
That sounds okay actually.

Jo (37:27)
Okay, well I can record it like this then. I’ll just speak louder.

Dan Nagar (37:44)
Okay, I’ve put the list in the chat.

Jo (37:47)
Okay, so I’m doing Spana Bananas.

Ed (37:49)
Yes you are.

Jo (37:51)
⁓ Can I just edit it a little bit?

Dan Nagar (37:58)
Yeah. Can you tilt your camera back up as well? feel like it got nudged down.

Yeah, perfect, perfect, yes.

Jo (38:09)
Ready?

Right, do we want to say a Harlem Globetrotters style? Isn’t that a bit retro?

Ed (38:24)
only put that in because it used to work there. It still exists.

Dan Nagar (38:24)
They still exist. ⁓

Jo (38:28)
I know, I spoke to them. They wanted to do a Roblox game and an animated series and then they weren’t willing to invest any money in it. So I was like, The average age of the person that goes to watch Harlem Globetrotters now is so old.

Dan Nagar (38:37)
Sounds about right.

No. No. It’s kids. It’s it’s is this really. You might be right.

Jo (38:49)
Yeah it is that.

Okay, are we? Okay, still good. Okay.

Dan Nagar (39:00)
Cool, whenever you’re in.

Jo (39:06)
The distribution is now an official line in your sports rights deal. The Savannah bananas, a Harlem Globetrotter stout, I can’t say that, it’s too much of a mouth.

Ed (39:17)
I know, it’s hard, isn’t it?

Jo (39:19)
Hello.

Ed (39:27)
Could you say the Harlem Globe Trotters of Baseball?

Jo (39:32)
Oh yeah, yeah, that’s a good idea. I mean, I think they’re more like WWE than Harlem Globetrotters, but, you

Ed (39:32)
Would that help you?

Yeah, but I guess the way that they, yeah, see what you mean. But Harlem Globetrotters were doing this stuff before WWE were even a thing, weren’t they? I mean, they’ve been around since what, the 50s, dad?

Dan Nagar (39:51)
the Harlem Globetrotters have been around since 1926. There we go. So they were the first, they’re the OG.

Ed (39:54)
There we go. So they were the foo- They’re the OG!

Jo (40:01)
Okay.

created distribution has just become an official line in your sports rights deal. The Savannah Bananas, who are the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball, or we should say banana ball actually, with 35 million social followers and three and a half million people on a ticket waitlist, including yours truly, they’ve packaged four live games across YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram with their own rights tier. They’re not highlights or clips, it’s another layer in their live game distribution. ⁓

Once a deal like this exists, this becomes a template. So if you’re a rights holder and you don’t have a creator distribution strategy, it’s time to start.

I couldn’t read that bit in red then, it was making my eyes go red.

Dan Nagar (40:48)
That’s all right. Cool. Should we go to 2B?

Ed (41:00)
Apple are letting Tubi broadcast F1 for free. Let me take you through it. So they are running creator led altcasts every live F1 race in 2026 alongside the main Apple TV broadcast. Apple, as you know, holds the US rights and using Tubi as a fan acquisition funnel. Bring audiences in for free and then convert them to Apple TV. Two weeks in a row, Tubi has been the story in our podcast. Last week, short form creators getting TV shows. This week, creators getting live sports.

Dan Nagar (41:30)
Cool. And then one more from Ed, the Indiana Pacers, and then we’ll go into the doubles.

Ed (41:42)
The Pacers have just done something with fan data that changes what a sports organisation can be. They’ve launched a field-housed media network, authenticated first-party data from 250 million sports fans, letting brands reach those fans year-round across 500 publishers, connected TV, email and digital, not just on game night. So Amazon sells access to its shoppers, the Pacers are now selling access to their fans. The game is just the acquisition channel. The word that matters is authenticated, not reach, not impressions.

fans who identified themselves, that’s difficult to buy. You have to build it.

Dan Nagar (42:20)
Awesome. All right, we’ll do the two conversationals and so it’s

Ed (42:25)
session.

Jo (42:27)
Story 3 is not free for YouTube,

it? It’s just YouTube and creator partnership.

Ed (42:33)
Yeah, we’re just doing YouTube and KSI, aren’t we, on the shorts? Is that right? On the conversations?

Dan Nagar (42:34)
Yeah, we’ll just do a YouTube KSI on that in short. Yes, those two.

Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah, that’s the one, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We’ll go with, we’ll do YouTube Gemini first and then KSI. Okay.

Jo (42:39)
Oh, is this conversation short scripts I’m looking at or the short scripts? All right, sorry. I was looking at short

Ed (42:41)
Yeah, that’s the one, yeah.

Dan Nagar (42:52)
Yeah, whenever you’re ready.

Jo (42:57)
So, YouTube has just completely changed the rules for the way brands find creators. Agencies, I should be worried.

Ed (43:06)
Yeah, they’ve launched creator partnerships built on Gemini AI, so AI is doing all the heavy lifting here. Brand tax what they’re looking for. YouTube’s found the creator access across three million channels. No agency, no briefing.

Jo (43:18)
All you’ve got to do is type a sentence into YouTube apparently for the type of creator that you’re looking for. So rather than call their agency, an advertiser just has to type a few lines to find their creator.

Ed (43:30)
And apparently, creators who share their data, so they’ve to share more data, get surfaced 60 % more in brand searches. More visibility in exchange for handing YouTube more of your audience intelligence.

Jo (43:41)
Big tech’s gonna big tech, isn’t it? YouTube aren’t just hosting the creator economy now, it’s becoming the operating system for it. Well, who could have seen that coming?

Dan Nagar (43:55)
All right, cool. KSI and Dagenham.

Ed (44:02)
So Joe, non-league football is being streamed on YouTube and it could change how lower league sport is distributed forever.

Jo (44:09)
Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, we KSI took a stake in Dagenham and Redbridge last month, and he streamed their match live on his YouTube channel, which is the first time a National League game’s ever been broadcast this way, so that’s pretty cool.

Ed (44:21)
Absolutely. But the challenge for KSI will be that his audience doesn’t know Dagenham yet. There’s no emotional intelligence that anyone’s invested yet in Dagenham and Redbridge. But KSI knows that.

Jo (44:31)
I’m sure they’ve sold a few more shirts though since that announcement. But Dazon, they’ve got the National League rights and rather than block this, they’ve chose to embrace it. And it’s good, that’s pretty open-minded of Dazon, I thought.

Ed (44:45)
Absolutely. But the Rexham model took two years to build a global audience. In I can’t do that on one stream, there’s going to have to be some real work put into this.

Jo (44:53)
I

Dan Nagar (44:57)
Excellent cool. That’s good. I’m going to stop. Can stop the record and let it upload now.

Ed (44:59)
some serious ad lib in there.

Yeah, it makes it easier.

Jo (45:10)
Sorry, I’m.