Unofficial Partner Podcast

Today is day two of the Wimbledon championships, a fortnight of tennis, polite queues and Pimms. And as of this year, Sipsmith gin following the brands five-year deal with the All England Club, the rights owner of the grand slam tournament. So we talked to Alex Willis, Head of Communications, Content and Digital, at the All England Club and Shelley MacIntyre, who's Senior Global Marketing Director of gin brands for beam Suntory, the corporate owner of Sipsmith. If you like the podcast, you're really like the Unofficial Partner newsletter that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business. Every Thursday to join them sign up by Unofficial Partner dot comUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Today’s podcast is the first of a series in which we look at sports market through the lens of one of the biggest media and marketing networks in the world, Omnicom. This allows us to get beyond the bubble of the sport sponsorship industry and look at sport through a wider lens and allows us to ask some broader questions as to the value of sport to brand clients. So this is a conversation about what CMOs want from their marketing spend, and whether sport is equipped to deliver on those demands, we note the gap between the level of digital inventory on offer within sponsor term sheets, compared to the demand for digital advertising generally, which leads to the question, is sport selling what brands want to buy?Our guests are three business leaders from across the Omnicom media network. Louise Johnson is CEO of Fuse, Omnicom’s sport and entertainment agency, with clients including PepsiCo, Barclays, FedEx, Nissan, Vodafone, Royal London, EasyJet and Klarna. Louise is joined by Dan Clay, CEO of Omnicom Media Group and Bhavin Balvantrai, Chief Market Analyst, OMG Group UK.If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Today’s guest is Roger Mitchell, who you may know from another sports business podcast, Are You Not Entertained, where he uses his background in sport, finance and the music industry to great effect in questioning what’s happening in sport. Roger is great to talk to on a range of subjects, so that’s what we do, from podcasts and private equity to Spurs, Celtic, The Verve, machine learning and Tiger Woods. It’s a broad church and a good laugh.  If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

This is another in our series where Richard and co-host Laura Weston look at the sports business through the lens of women from within and outside the industry. Our guest today is Jennifer McClearen, author of a fascinating new book, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFCThe book raises issues about the role of women in sports marketing, the difference between their visibility and the value they receive in return, we talk about some of the popular tropes of women’s sport and at the reality of life within the UFC’s business model. If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Charlie Sale is a legend of sports journalism, often credited with creating the sports news genre, most famously as the feared and fearless writer of the daily Sports Agenda column in the Daily Mail and before that in the Express. Charlie was one of our early guests on the podcast, following his premature retirement due to ill health in 2018, so it’s great to have him back on to talk about his new book, which in true Charlie Sale style, is already ruffling feathers in the corridors of sport. It’s called The Covers Are Off: Civil War at Lord’s and is about the two decades old dispute over the future development of the Home of Cricket, between the MCC and Charles Rifkind, the property developer who acquired the rights to develop the defunct railway tunnels that lie beneath the ground’s Nursery End. It’s about cricket, and sports business, but also about class, politics and the often painful balance between preserving the traditions of the past in a fast changing modern world. If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

This is the third in our series looking at the formative years of the sports business with industry legend Patrick Nally. The first two episodes are on Fifa and the Olympics respectively, and in this episode we branch out in to athletics, starting in the late 1970s and early 80s, a period of called the golden era of track and field but which saw as much competition behind the scenes as on the track, as the athletes demanded an end to shamateurism, there were plans for a breakaway professional circuit, the inaugural London Marathon and the launch of the first ever World Athletics Championship in 1983. The deals that were done still resonate today, and help explain why professional athletics looks and behaves as it does. It’s a story of brown envelopes, car park bust ups, Bernie Ecclestone, Seb Coe, Horst Dassler and a whole new cast of characters.If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Our guest is Matt Locke, whose previous Unofficial Partner appearance remains one of our most popular ever episodes. Matt is the co-founder of Storythings, a consultancy specialising in the understanding of audiences and the entertainment formats that attract them across a variety of spheres from entertainment to cause marketing and the public sector. Clients include the BBC, PBS and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Before founding Storythings in 2011 Matt worked for over a decade in senior digital roles at Channel 4 and the BBC, including as Head of Innovation at BBC and Head of Multiplatform at Channel 4. He also started the Public Media Stack project, and is writing a book about the history of attention metrics, part of which is the focus of today’s conversation. Matt thinks we need a different way of thinking about personal data, starting with the metaphors we use to describe it. As ever with Matt, that’s just a way in to a rabbit hole of a conversation that questions much of how we think about fans, digital platforms and the purpose of a football club.If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

This is episode 11 of The Bundle, our series on the media and streaming rights market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke. Topics include the AT&T decision to merge WarnerMedia and Discovery, the state of the international football rights market, the Premier League renewals and we hear the buzz around Buzzer, the new short form mobile streamer which has just done a deal with the NBA. If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

Today we’re talking to Tim Hollingsworth OBE the Sport England chief executive and former chief executive of the British Paralympic Association (BPA). Tim leads Sport England’s mission to get us all moving, by investing government money in sport and physical activity. This gives him a perspective in to some really important questions, such as what’s the role of government in sport, what does it want sport to do, does the system of national governing bodies work as well as it should, are they able to respond to a fast changing culture in which it’s easier to order a pizza than book a tennis court. I ask him what Park Run has taught Sport England, whether Olympic gold medals are worth the cost and what the success of the Paralympic sport says about us as a country. To find out more about Sport England’s work, I’d point you to their recently published 10-year strategy document called Uniting the Movement, which we reference during out conversation. If you like the podcasts you’ll love the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes direct to the inbox of thousands of senior executives across the global sports business every Thursday. To join them, sign up via unofficialpartner.com Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.

This is episode 3 of our regular collaboration with Portas, the global strategy consultancy dedicated to sport and physical activity. This week’s topic is media strategy with special guests Glen Killane, Executive Director of Eurovision Sport, Andrew Ryan, Managing Director of FIBA Media and Wissam Khalaf, Partner at Portas.The media rights market is central to the sports economy, but we often talk about it in narrow price terms, focusing on how much money has been extracted by the major rights holders and ignoring the nuance and complexity in each particular marketplace.So in this episode we look at the regional variations in strategic approach to sports media, and ask dissect the role of OTT streaming and the impact of the Olympic Channel on the sports rights market.To go further in to the topics discussed you should subscribe to the Unofficial Partner newsletter, that goes directly to the inbox of thousands of senior sports professionals every Thursday. Sign up via unofficial partner.comUnofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.