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Being a high -ranking professional athlete means living under constant infection, while the billion industry was built to analyze your every movement. From tabs to talk shows to tweets, sports content is almost impossible to escape.
Do you have a bad game? Some media members lick lips. Playoff Dud? You avoid bar TVs playing ESPN for the weekend. But what happens when you give athletes tools to balance the conditions? What happens when they react?
This is the question that Brandon Harris answered with Playmaker.
Rewriting The Playbook
Founded in 2018, Playmaker has grown to a world-renowned media enterprise, which represented a video podcast-or, as Harris calls them, shows top athletes like Angel Reese and Shaquille O’Neal. Harris founded Playmaker after he grew with his role in sports marketing.
“I was on the purchase side and I have always seen people on the other side to have more fun,” he says. “I was tired of buying people to buy goods. I wanted to build things that fans could enjoy. ”
For Harris, this meant creating distribution channels focused on sports narrative directly from athletes.
As soon as Harris defined his content strategy, his next priority was for a player to be unlike the competition. He did this by emphasizing the video, unlike the main players in the space who focused on the sound.
“It was simple for the playground,” Harris says. “We understand the landscape, we know how social on social, build communities and create an engaging video.”
Harris and his team started a seller who produced dozens- if not hundreds of thousands of “graphic content”, including three to six-minute escape videos. He tried to consume as much feedback as possible, an estimate that he had read millions of comments.
“I said my characteristic barometer of an ordinary man,” Harris says. “I read enough and published enough to think I would mention most of the sports fans.”
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One of the reasons why an athlete could hesitate is the risk of becoming a viral even after a bad game or vision of the main sports outlets, such as “player X recorded more episodes of podcasts this season” while recovering from injuries. Whether it is jealousy, uncertainty or loyalty to a competitive team, some sports fans-dokonci, and traditional media that negatively respond to the shows of hosted athletes, often for reasons that have little to do with the actual content.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” Harris says. “It seems to me like” shut up and dribble “. Play. “
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Turn the clips
In 2024, the original content of Playmaker generated more than $ 25 million of the earned media value of more than 1,000 posts and articles shared publishers. The acquired media, which concerns the advertising of the brand from third parts without paying for it, is considering the Holy Grail in digital marketing.
Harris compares this organic content to the “funnel” that directs viewers of viral clips for the show. It attributes the success of Playmaker in the earned medium to two key factors: its huge social distribution and a dynamic list of talents.
“We have a talent that is authentic and will say that some safer personalities avoid PR,” says Harris, emphasizing characters like Shaq, Angel Reese and Marshawn Lynch. “We have always preferred the talent that is really fun and we will not just regurgit messaging in every episode.”
As a relatively small company, Playmaker has no luxury of unlimited resources. For this reason, Harris is very strange about who he decides to work with.
“There are a lot of talents I really like and I respect that I have to say no,” says Harris. “We do not take projects if we are sure in our ability to devote time, resources and be careful to be successful.”
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Unlike many of their competing resources, Playmaker allows athletes to maintain full control over their assets and IP.
“If you are an athlete, a Playmaker partnership means having a platform for you that you can take with you, monetize now and use to grow your other brands,” Harris says. “So why wouldn’t you do that?”
This becomes particularly repetition with streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon, watching video podcast. While Playmaker is open distribution stores, Harris insists that any partnership must be non -exclusive. This means that it does not exclude, has cooperation with one of the content kings.
“We cooperate with them on the development of something new and non -exclusive,” he says, “but for us has always been a digital and social natives.
Although the Playmaker’s business model is relatively new, Harris admits that they are not the first to make an athlete podcast. Yet, rather than building a company in a sector with decades of proven stories of success, to model plans, Harris began at a time when the athletes podcasts Wree still considered a novelty rather than a norm. Instead of blocking himself, Harris accepted uncertainty and believed he had something with a massive potential.
“As a big sports fan I’m thinking about what I want to see more and what I want to see less,” says Harris. “And I’d rather watch a quality, authentic athlete than anything on TV.”
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