Charlie Megan

Founder Scoreboard Media.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

@petergyang No claude at all? Was claude ever part of your stack?

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

@jackaiwison @petergyang No claude? Was claude ever part of the stack?

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

There's an emotional connection to a high school game you can't buy anywhere else in media. The environment is charged. We put our brands right in front of that train.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

We go a mile deep at the high school level. Big-time media used to stop at the college line, and everything below it was banners and booster forms. We're bringing the real thing to the gym and the stadium.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

Fans at our games take pictures of the board and post them. Nobody has ever photographed a wall banner. When the board is the centerpiece of the night, your brand is in the picture.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

On raw impression math we compete with anything in media. But that's not what a sponsor is really buying. They're buying the lift that comes when a community sees a brand show up for its kids, week after week.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

Banners on the outfield wall and tape on the gym wall, we've done away with all that. We go in with large-format LED and make a high school game night a primetime experience, befitting of big brands.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

Booster clubs are America's greatest sales force. They are the community. We always want to work in partnership with the booster clubs for our schools to help produce maximum revenue. They should be better off, equipment and funding, for having us there. And sponsors win because they get way more value than ever before.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

My whole pitch to a new AD is four sentences:

You never have to be in the ad sales business. We do the heavy lifting. Point us in the right direction and let us mention your name. Your school shares in the revenue without spending a dime.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

Everything on our boards is family appropriate. We never make that mistake. No alcohol, no vaping, no gambling, nothing near politics or religion. A school lends us its trust when it puts our board in its gym or stadium. Keeping that trust is the whole business.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

Old gym banners got read once and never again. A bright LED board has the whole gym's attention at every whistle, every buzzer, bucket and timeout. The ads run all game at the right moments and never feel like ads. Native to the game.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

We ran the math on our gym scoreboard ads: $1.43 CPM.

Billboards are the cheapest major ad channel in America and this undercuts them. TV, radio, and social are several times higher.

High school gyms and stadiums might be the most undervalued ad inventory in the country.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

One of our first markets was a Kansas town of 4,000 people. It's still one of our best. The whole town turns out for the high school, and the advertisers there know exactly what that's worth. You should not underestimate the value of the connection between a tight-knit community and its high school.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

Athletic directors tell me the same thing everywhere: the same ten local donors get hit up for everything.

So we don't call donors, we call advertisers looking for ROI: hospitals, banks, car dealers, HVAC companies. Businesses that want to reach household decision makers.

Because that's who fills our gyms.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

Everything the pros run on their jumbotrons works in a high school gym or stadium. Dance cam, trivia, starting lineups, sponsor spots, halftime features. The production translates. The difference is the crowd: these fans know every kid on the floor or field.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

We do a lot of work with banks and credit unions. The fit is easy to see. The parents in the stands are the household decision makers, and the kids on the court and in the student section are opening their first checking accounts, which they'll keep open for their entire lives. It's an opportunity to acquire that customer for life.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

@clairevo @bot I’ve tried @bot and I don’t get it. It was easy to setup no question, night and day from ClawdBot and even Hermes, but what can you do with it that you can’t do with Claude and codex, which run on much stronger models?

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

@K1ngArtes @ethanCaballero Couldn’t agree more. I thought they were saying mannered prose was replacing metaphors. Then it’s not and it’s bad. The whole thing was an example of complicated writing to flex the writers iq, which I thought they were saying fable 5.1 doesn’t do. Maybe the wrote it with Opus.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

We thought we were in the scoreboard business. Then schools started calling that didn't want boards at all. They wanted us to run their advertising programs.

The revenue engine turned out to matter more than the hardware it runs on.

[Charlie Megan @charliemegan]

Nearly 10,000 people packed Buell Stadium on Friday night to watch two heavyweights duke it out. They weren't disappointed. The No. 1 team in the state came from behind to win it by a point.

Our sponsors were in front of every one of those fans all night. Where else do you reach a crowd that big, that loud, and that invested?

[Sports Plus Nebraska @SportsPlusNeb]

An overflow crowd of 10,000 football fans packed Buell Stadium to witness an instant classic last night when No. 1-ranked Millard South came from behind to beat No. 3-ranked Millard North 35-34 on Friday night.
Visit https://t.co/EFCcdx7PYw to see our game photos.