Whit Harwood

advisory @unitedtalent Baseball addict ⚾ Old Bay evangelist 🦀 Alum: Peacock, NBC News, FOX Sports, ESPN

[Whit Harwood @WhitIsHere]

@austin_rief @patrick_oshag Hidden gem and elite

[Whit Harwood @WhitIsHere]

@loudmouthjulia Between this and the early wake up thing, I feel like you’ve drifted to “spiritually Tribeca” in the last week

[Rameez @rameeztase]

The year started off with Disney playing all angles of the sports streaming game in a confusing way... and just a week in, we're already seeing a much more cohesive & focused strategy that still positions them for the same big win.

At the end of the day, it was always too much surface area to have 3 competing sports brands:

1) Launch ESPN flagship SVOD

2) Compete in the vMVPD space with Hulu + Live TV

3) Launch a third brand in Venu Sports

However, the deal with Fubo TV may allow Disney to have their cake and eat it too. They will be able to play all angles *and* at the same time reduce brand confusion and double down on their existing winning brands, ESPN and Hulu. How?

First, Disney can launch ESPN, and do backroom deals with Fox and WBD to include their sports offerings within the ESPN SVOD brand, to achieve the end goals of having an ESPN offering that includes sports programming beyond what Disney already owns.

Second, they can now combine Fubo + Hulu + Live TV into a single Hulu vMVPD brand that can finally stop the bleeding vs. YouTube TV with a combo of tech (Fubo) and media (Disney) DNA.

It's been a whirlwhind of news around this subject — but things are starting to come into focus.

vMVPD Sign-ups per @AntennaData

[Whit Harwood @WhitIsHere]

@austin_rief @jacksettleman Not sure I feel great about the potential FG unit here if it comes to it…

[Whit Harwood @WhitIsHere]

@loudmouthjulia 🏋️‍♂️🏋️‍♂️🏋️‍♂️🏋️‍♂️

[Whit Harwood @WhitIsHere]

@austin_rief Steals a lot of time from googling nowadays too…

[Rameez @rameeztase]

@adexchanger's @JamesHercher wrote a prescient article last week: Walled Garden Platforms Are Drowning Marketers In Self-Attributed Sales. In it, he describes the problem of over-attribution: ad platforms claiming credit for driving a sale that they didn’t actually cause.

Here's how the story goes...

– Most large ad platforms these days are Walled Gardens: they sell the ad, show the ad, and report on ROAS. That's OK when most of a brand's advertising goes through a single channel.

– As more & more large, Walled Gardens emerge — Facebook, Google, Amazon, TikTok, Snap, Walmart, every other emerging Retail Media Network — this is a *huge* problem for brands. Why? Because you now have dozens of brands all claiming credit for a sale.

– Since the user-level data sits behind each walled garden, there's no easy way to figure out which ads a given user was exposed to — and, therefore, no easy way to figure out which ad actually drove the sale.

– As a result, the CMO is faced with a handful of checks to pay without knowing which one is the real one.

This is nothing short of a crisis for consumer brand marketers. Marketers need to figure out how to get three pieces of data to figure out which half of their advertising works — and they need to figure it out quickly.

1) Ad spend data per channel

2) Sales data (as a result of that ad spend) per channel

3) The impact of that ad spend on specific audience segments across every platform << this is the tough one

The good news: there are a few options marketers have to obtain this data. And some methods of attribution they can use once they have it. @WhitIsHere and I dive into the topic of over-attribution in our post below...

[Whit Harwood @WhitIsHere]

@loudmouthjulia Not remotely historical but have a farm to glass cocktail at Little Red Door. It will not disappoint!

[Whit Harwood @WhitIsHere]

@kendallbaker @Orioles @Angels Send Pickles content pls

[Rameez @rameeztase]

nice lil’ @AntennaData shout out on @theallinpod — hey @chamath next time call out the source!!!

[Antenna @AntennaData]

In light of today's Netflix + #WWE news, we took a look at some historical data to provide some additional context around the deal. A quick lil' data 🧵... 1/3

[Whit Harwood @WhitIsHere]

@austin_rief @RampCapitalLLC Tailgate is going to put Bills mafia to shame…

Too soon?

[Antenna @AntennaData]

Another Friday data🧵for you! Last Summer, the @NFL pulled its mobile-only offering out of a distro partnership w/Verizon &amp; brought it in-house. As of the end of Sept'23 , Antenna estimates NFL+ has just over 2M subs, up from a high last season of 1.7M.

[Harrison Remler @HarryRemler]

cpg friends. working on something really special in media space at intersection of music, sports, fashion. DM me if you want to chat 👀

[Whit Harwood @WhitIsHere]

@rameeztase Projecting streaming at the same cost &amp; pricing basis moving forward is the equivalent of saying in 2013 the MVPD floor was 95m homes.

The better question to ask is how long before Netflix pricing crosses the low end of the current bundle (~$50)?

5 years? 7 years? Fewer?

[Rameez @rameeztase]

While today’s big 4 sports may seem like they’ve been dominant forever, we often forget the story of american boxing, which was once much more popular than football, basketball and hockey

What happened to boxing — and how does it help predict the future of today’s major sports?

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

Many founders who raised large amounts of money ($10m+) in 2020-21 but subsequently realized they don’t have PMF, are going through an excruciating psychological journey right now.

On one hand, they feel beholden to employees and investors to keep building, pivoting, doing anything to live up to their perceived commitment to their stakeholders to build an enduring company.

On the other hand, they have a sinking feeling that they are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Their heart just is not in it. There is a deep-felt malaise.

The more money a founder has raised, the deeper this predicament.

I just had the first such founder return a good chunk of invested capital back to investors, because they couldn’t take the pressure any longer. The relief they felt when they realized investors and employees were on board and 100% supportive of their decision, was palpable. (All employees received solid severance before the company shut down).

Founders - ultimately it’s your call, but know that there is a graceful way out. Chasing endless pivots trying to find PMF is a bridge to nowhere.

Investors - let’s have the grace and courage to tell founders this option is available to them. The founder told me that the reason they ultimately decided to return the money stemmed from a convo with me several weeks ago, when they told me about their latest pivot, and I told them I’m supportive “as long as their heart is truly in it”. That phrase stuck with them, they introspected and ultimately realized their heart was not in it.

[Rameez @rameeztase]

1/
A decade ago, we woke up with an incredible insight that fueled a wave of investment in digital media companies

“wow, a lot of advertising is going to move to the internet, media companies benefit from all of that revenue in the analog world, so why not in the digital one?”

[Rameez @rameeztase]

if you're an employee at a startup worth $1B who joined in the past 2 years, there is a very, very high chance that your equity is worth $0.00... unless you're planning to stick around for the 5-7+ years it's going to take to recover a 90% dip in market value.

[Rameez @rameeztase]

There's a truism in startups that's experiencing a renaissance given the markets:

More people ≠ success. Your team size is not an indicator of how well things are going.

But what's *really* behind that? Let's unpack. 🧵