Geoff ReissSVP and General ManagerESPN Consumer Products How'd You Do That?American Magazine Conference 2005October 18, 2005Fajardo, Puerto Rico
Few things are as risky, alluring, seductive and essential as growth – especially in
ever-changing marketplaces. Growth is universally appealing; we all want it but sometimes get tripped up in its pursuit. Positioning your brand for growth starts with thinking about who you are and what your overall mission is.
Growth has also been at the core of ESPN’s success and I think that there are some things that we’ve done that can applied elsewhere. For ESPN, growth starts with really understanding our overall mission. In some ways, ESPN’s mission statement is more remarkable for the words that don’t appear on the screen than the ones that are there.
How can a company with 6 domestic television networks, a web site that attracted over 17 million unique visitors last month, a growing radio network and an over-achieving bi-weekly magazine not include any of those mediums in its mission statement?
Remaining platform agnostic is key to understanding ESPN’s basic growth philosophy; long ago the company decided to serve fans first and foremost and got incredibly comfortable with managing a stable of overlapping – and at times mildly competitive products. This way of thinking comes into play in both big strategic decisions about where to take the business next as well as more routine calls like how to break news. ETM has a terrific group of enterprise reporters who have been at the forefront of some the sportsworld’s biggest stories the past couple of years.
We don’t however try to keep big stories bottled up to coincide with the vague publishing schedule of a bi-weekly magazine. When we hit on a big story we break the story on Sportscenter and lay it out in greater depth in the magazine. By refusing to solely define ourselves by a specific platform ESPN allowed the role it played in its fans’ lives to evolve with the way technology, tastes and media mixes change. The thinking that began over ten years ago with leaps in the nascent world of the Internet continues today as we prepare for the ambitious launch of Mobile ESPN, a proprietary cell phone coming to market early next year.
One of the biggest challenges facing the magazine world today is breaking out of the mind-set that has it defining its brand largely by its current and core medium. The more narrowly you associate brand and platform together the more you limit growth opportunities, and in some cases your long-term survival.
ESPN’s publishing group faced exactly this situation two years ago.
Since its launch in 1998 the magazine had enjoyed tremendous growth with circulation growing from 350K at launch to 1.85 million copies, ad revenue growth that out-paced the industry’s and a national magazine award for general excellence to show for itself. We also knew that we were within a few years of ETM’s reaching maturity. As we started to think about what to do next we tried to draw up some criteria to guide our decisions.
We realized that we have brand considerations to make on both a macro and micro level. By that I mean that new initiatives have to make sense to the ESPN brand on a corporate level as well as making sense vis a vis our existing magazine.
New projects also have to make sense to our fans. Our fans are wonderfully permissive about our taking ESPN new places, but even their indulgence has limits. We have to believe there is both a consumer and ad market for new initiatives. We’d like them to head in a direction that makes sense for our company in a strategic sense, have the ability to grow into being decent sized businesses and, yes, we’d like to both make money and manage our exposure along the way.
We’re also careful about cannibalizing our existing businesses and believe it or not we think about just how much appetite the market has for ESPN products at any given time.
One of the other things that you’ll notice as I walk through the initiatives we chose is that none of them are intended to work as standalone efforts. They all tie into other things happening in our company in multiple ways.
We started with a fantasy football newsstand special for a bunch of reasons. When we launched ESPN.com a little over 10 years ago we made fantasy sports one of our real pillars though at the time being a fantasy devotee was dangerously close to being perceived as the sports world’s version of a Star Trek convention attendees. Today, over 10 million people play fantasy football... capturing fans’ passion for fantasy is important to all of our businesses – it drives ratings for our studio and game telecasts, as well as driving usage of dot com.
This year also marked the first time that ESPN.com made fantasy football available for free and we offered a fantasy football preview show hosted by Chris Berman and the rest of our NFL countdown crew on television. While researching the idea we also discovered that as much as readers value ETM, they don’t consider it a leading source for fantasy information.
Every time we talk to readers I’m deeply impressed by their grasp of how our different products fit together and of the products strengths and weaknesses. The good news was that while they didn’t think ETM was a fantasy leader they certainly thought ESPN and fantasy are a great match.Rather than risk confusing readers, we branded the special differently than the regular magazine, stepped away from our signature 10 x 12 trim size and ended up outselling all of our 20+ competitors.
ESPN China
We also launched our first licensed international edition last year, starting in China with what now seems like our monthly Yao cover story. We started in China because of a combination of market potential, the strength of our local partner, and a desire to have this title hitting its stride in time for the 2008 olympics.
ESPN international has established itself in varying degrees on every continent, allowing for subsequent international editions to be launched in the near future.
ESPN Deportes
We also sought to complement our domestic Spanish language television, web, and radio efforts with ESPN Deportes, a new monthly magazine designed to serve Spanish speaking fans in the United States and Latin America developed with our partners at Editorial Televisa.
ESPN Books
This fall ESPN books hit the market in full stride, featuring three big releases, Bill Simmons, who writes a column for both ESPN.com and ETM has assembled his story of his life-long love affair with the Red Sox, in ...Now I Can Die in Peace. Bill’s book sits in the high-teens on the NYT bestseller list and has been the best selling sports book on Amazon since two weeks prior it its release.
We’ve also published the most comprehensive college football encyclopedia ever attempted. Forests live in fear of our going beyond our current 2nd printing because the book weighs in at about 7 pounds.
We’ve also published an impossible to categorize personal memoir by a guy named Kevin Carroll that I expect you’ll be hearing a lot about soon.
ESPN Insider
We also connected ETM to the premium content section of ESPN.com in a unique way allowing subscribers to access a complete version of the magazine online in advance of getting their copy in the mail.
We have other titles in development and are also weighing some acquisitions. We think we will succeed because just as our parent company was able to envision its business going beyond television we believe ESPN’s publishing business needs to go well beyond our anchor property for us to keep apace with our company’s overall growth.
We are also successful because of the way we are organized on a corporate level – taking an even greater leap towards realizing a truly integrated content environment with a major reorganization that was announced a couple of weeks ago.
In our new organization, our President George Bodenheimer has put long-time magazine sympathizer John Skipper in charge of all of ESPN’s content groups. In his new role, John is responsible for everything from SportsCenter’s content and set design to the acquisition of our major rights deals and the content of properties like ETM and ESPN.com.What that means in addition to really long days for John is that we’ve just begun to realize how to move ideas and stories across platforms and that we have layed the ground work for greater success in the future.
So for ESPN, you’ve seen three key ingredients for our growth; we’ve shaped our organization to get meaningful integration of all of our platforms; we are willing to rally around platforms outside our core business;and when we launch new initiatives we always think in terms of not just how they can leverage our existing businesses, but how those efforts can resonate back across the company.
Thanks for your time!
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