Unofficial Partner Podcast

This the first of a series of podcasts interviewing senior decision makers on the brand side of the sponsorship market across different business categories. Today’s guest is Ben Carter from the food delivery company Just Eat. Ben’s current role is Global Director of Restaurants and Strategic Partnerships, which sees him charged with commercial growth and partnership strategy to support the busines...

This week we’re talking digital marketing with the founders of Fifty Three Six, Tom Fox and Marcus McDonnell. Often the digital conversation is about strategy and can be a bit abstract. This one isn’t like that. It’s an urgent conversation about how sports properties can use their digital assets to make money as we approach the race to the end of the year. Across the sports landscape, teams, leagu...

Kim Skildum Reid founded Power Sponsorship in 1994 to provide advice to major corporate sponsors in the Asia-Pacific region for clients that include Target Stores, Unilever, Qantas, Dubai Government, SABMiller, ANZ Bank, QBE, Virgin Group, Singapore Government, Mazda, Estee Lauder, and many more. So the topic of the conversation is obviously the sponsorship market, what’s the difference between go...

Today’s guest is Claire Enders, who has been the UK’s pre-eminent media and technology analyst, strategist and forecaster for over thirty years. After working across cable, satellite, and commercial Public Sector Broadcasting she set up Enders Analysis in 1997, to build comprehensive models for all parts of the UK media, telecoms and technology sectors and provides its research and expertise to ov...

This is episode 6 of The Bundle, the fortnightly sports media conversation with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke. This week’s topics are the Premier League’s China problem and we ask whether it has implications for other rights holders selling in to that country. Then it’s Barney Francis’ views on the OTT streaming market, DAZN’s potential IPO or SPAC, and finally, we peer below Nielsen’s announceme...

This week we talk to Simon Hughes, the former professional cricketer, journalist, author and award winning broadcaster, which began as The Analyst on Channel 4’s ground breaking coverage of test cricket in the early noughties. Since then, Simon has been a regular presence on television and across social media, and has just co-written a book called A New Innings on the business of the IPL with Mano...

This is the third in our Tomorrowland series about the sports tech and innovation, and we’re delighted to welcome two guests from two major sports governing bodies: Helen Rowbotham from British Rowing and Chris Pollard of the LTA. Helen moved to rowing in 2016 from CSM, where she was director of consulting. She has nearly 20 years experience in the sports and events industry, delivering projects b...

This week’s guest is Jeremy Dale, one of the original co-founders of the OTRO the football media platform, who has had a marketing career working for some of the world’s most famous companies. He was former VP of Worldwide retail for Microsoft, won a BAFTA for the launch of Pokemon and led Motorola’s Product (RED) Campaign in collaboration with Oprah and Bono, the latter of whom he claims gave him...

This is episode 5 of The Bundle, our fortnightly show that goes deep in to the murky world of sports media, with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke. This week we unpick DAZN’s negotiations in Japan to move their long term J-League rights deal in to a profit share agreement and wonder if this is how things are going to be in the post Covid era. Like DAZN, Amazon is never far from The Bundle conversatio...

Greg Dyke’s hugely successful career is defined by leading some of the UK’s biggest and most influential organisations, from the BBC, ITV, London Weekend Television, The FA and Brentford, the west London club he’s supported since childhood. Sport has been a theme throughout his professional and personal life. When he was managing director of LWT in the early 1990s, Dyke arranged to meet representa...

It goes without saying that we wanted to find a guest with a big enough reputation in the industry to withstand the enormous pressure of celebrating our 100th show. So, it’s a great pleasure to say hello to Donald Dell, one of the real legends of sports marketing folklore. He was the agent who signed the two most valuable and enduring shoe deals in sports history, Stan Smith and Adidas and Michael...

Today’s conversation takes us inside Snapchat as we talk about the platform’s relationship with sport, head of partnerships Anmol Malhotra. Snapchat burst on to the scene in 2011 as the anti facebook, a photo and messaging app aimed directly at a much younger target audience and with an entirely new visual grammar. It now claims to reach 90% of 13-24 year olds in America. This stat has led many te...

This is the second in our Tomorrowland series on sports technology and innovation. Our guest is Jean Baptiste Alliot who’s in charge of UEFA’s Innovation Hub, which is described as ‘a vehicle for future proofing UEFA and ensuring UEFA stays one step ahead of the latest trends to shape the game’. So, what does that mean, how does one of sport’s biggest and most commercially successful right owners...

This is episode 4 of The Bundle, our fortnightly series that goes deep in to the world of sports media with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke. Today’s we’re looking in detail at the value of tv rights beyond the domestic market, and ask what drives fan interest and therefore the price of international sports rights, is it the big clubs or the competitiveness of the league or tournament, and we look a...

David Wheldon began his career as an ad exec at Saatchi and Saatchi in 1983 and retired as CMO of Royal Bank of Scotland earlier this year. In between these dates, Wheldon established himself as one of the most influential marketers of his generation, a career in which sport and sponsorship played a big role. His name is associated with several of the biggest spending sports sponsors of the last t...

There were already plenty of people worried about what was going to happen to their jobs and their careers in the sports business, as new technology and the data era made them question the relevance of their skills in today’s talent marketplace. Covid has amplified that fear at every level, from college leavers aspiring to break in to the industry, through first and second jobbers right up to the...

Mundial started life in 2014 as the football hipster's magazine of choice, and built a publishing brand around the culture and obsessions of fans, from retro boots and exotic European kits to cheap continental travel and South American derbies. James Brown, the former loaded editor and previous guest of Unofficial Partner, described Mundial’s appeal as ‘the draw of the unfamiliar and the thri...

This is episode 3 of The Bundle, our regular look at what’s happening in the market for sports media rights with co-host Yannick Ramcke. If you enjoy our podcasts, you might like to follow Yannick on Twitter and read his blog posts that go deeper in the topics we cover on the pod. And if newsletters are your thing, subscribe to the unoffiicial partner weekly briefing, via unoffiicalpartner.com Uno...

This is a podcast about sports tech and innovation with our guest Angela Ruggiero. Angela is a four-time US Olympian and Gold Medalist in Ice Hockey and has been an IOC Executive Board Member for over a decade and served as the Chief Strategy Officer for the successful Los Angeles 2028 Olympic bid. This is mentioned here because we barely reference it in the podcast, because this is a conversation...

In previous episodes of our digital series, All Models Are Wrong we’ve talked to people from across the industry about how digital transformation is impacting the sports business. Today we continue that conversation with Elliot Richardson, co-founder and chairman of Dugout, the football digital platform part owned by the biggest clubs in the world, including Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, Chelsea, Man...

Simon Oliveira is founder and Managing Director of KIN Partners, a sport and entertainment agency specialising in talent management & creative IP. Simon is well known as being a long time business adviser and ally of David Beckham so we talk about what he’s learnt from the experience about fame and celebrity and it’s relationship with the media and marketing world. KIN also has represented Owe...

This is number three in Money Talks, our series on sport and finance. The two previous guests were Jason Traub of 23Capital and George Pyne founder of Bruin Sports Capital. Today’s guest is Kyle Charters who leads Inner Circle Sports tech division. Inner Circle is a New York based boutique investment bank focused on the global sports business, which has been involved in multiple high profile merge...

This is the second episode of our series on the sports media market with regular co-host Yannick Ramcke. Every couple of weeks we choose three stories from around the world and pick them apart to see if there’s anything we can learn that’s part of a broader trend in relation to sport tv, streaming or OTT market. This week we talk about beIN Sport’s stand against piracy in Serie A and what the impl...

Sally Hancock and Sally Horrox created the Y-Sport consultancy to offer clients commercial, media and sports expertise and have built a reputation for helping rights holders and brands to use sport to drive social change and to promote the commercial opportunities in professional women’s sport.  We talk about the diversity question, Black Lives Matters and the impact of COVID19 on women’s sport. U...

Today we talk to George Pyne, the former Nascar and IMG CEO, who founded Bruin Sports Capital in 2015, which has emerged as one of the most interesting companies operating in the sports business today with nearly a billion dollars invested across the sector. Bruin was created with $250 million from Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP; Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Nassef Sawiris, exec...