Unofficial Partner Podcast

A third of all Alexa requests are about sport. But who’s answering them? Today’s podcast is about audio strategy for sports rights holders, we’re going to ask what does that mean, why has it become a thing and what are the creative and commercial opportunities and challenges that exist today and how those are quickly evolving, powered by advances in streaming technology and the move towards voice...

If your job is to measure the impact of sponsorship, you owe a debt of gratitude to Lesa Ukman. She did the hard miles, doing more than anyone to pioneer and champion the role of sponsorship as a marketing form. So we get in to it all: the problem of trying to measure brand purpose, the rise of blackwashing, to add to sports washing, gaywashing and greenwashing; the ‘horrible’ experience of workin...

The Bundle is our new series of deep dives in to the sports media market where we’ll keep a watchful eye on the latest stories covering broadcast and digital platforms, this could be everything from changing fan habits, upcoming rights tenders, the D2C streaming trend and the decisions taken by the biggest broadcast and technology companies in the world. My copilot on this journey is Yannick Ramck...

We're talking to Jane Purdon CEO of Women in Football, the organisation that champions and supports women working across the professional game. Jane is a lawyer who has a track record at the highest level of football and sport, most recently as Head of Governance and Leadership at UK Sport and previously as Director of Governance with the Premier League and Club Secretary with Sunderland. Thi...

In today’s podcast, we’re going to review the last seven days in the American sports business market and we’re doing that in the company of Corey Leff, who is the man behind the John Wall St newsletter. We talk about Harris Blitzer's regional network ambitions, Endeavour IMG and the agency market, Nike’s approach to the Liverpool shirt and the legacy of the Chevy, Man Utd deal to name just a...

This is another in our series All Models Are Wrong, which goes deep in to the subject of digital strategy in sport. Previous episodes have featured Mark Oliver, Alex Balfour and Daniel Kirschner, each of which is available via unofficialpartner.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This week we talk Aarti Dabas, who has just started a new role as head of media for Formula E having previously been...

Today’s podcast is a conversation with Ed Smith, the chair of England cricket selectors on the subject of decision making, the first of an occasional series on various aspects of leadership. Ed was a professional cricketer for Kent, Middlesex and England whose career was curtailed by injury at the age of 31 when he started his second career as  an author, journalist and commentator on the iconic T...

From sport and music, to films, radio or literature, every part of the culture industry is defined and shaped by the metrics we use to measure the audience for them. But who decides what metrics to use? This is a question posed by today’s guest Matt Locke, the co-founder of Storythings, and someone who I’ve been trying to get on the podcast since we started a year or so ago. Matt is one of the mos...

Today we ask what’s going to happen next? What should we all look out for as, when or if things return to whatever normal looks like post-covid. To help answer the question, we asked James Toller and Rob Pope of Mallory Group to give us some clues. Rob, James and Ross Collett of Roco Communications have pooled their knowledge working both in Europe, the USA and Asia and have written a white paper...

Today’s podcast is the first in a series called Money Talks, conversations about sport’s relationship with private equity, venture capital and the financial markets. We’re asking a series of simple questions relating to money: Who needs it, how do they get it, who do they get it from, and what are the implications of that, how does the source of finance change the behaviour of the people in charge...

Today’s podcast is the latest episode of in our series on the past, present and future of digital strategy. You can find the other episodes via our website unoffiicalpartner.com or your preferred podcast app. Everyone’s got the memo on digital transformation, and we’ve heard from strategists about the why it’s such a priority for virtually every business in the sport sector. But we don’t often tal...

Today’s podcast is a conversation about sports agencies: what they do, how the current shutdown is going to change that and the longer term opportunities and threats they face. CSM’s Jim Glover has been working agency side since he started at IMG’s golf client division in the 1980s before he set up Lighthouse Communications in 1994, for clients including Heineken, GlaxoSmithKline, and Land Rover....

Mark Oliver was the BBC’s first head of strategy before creating Oliver and Ohlbaum Associates, one of the leading sport and entertainment strategy boutiques helping investors, media owners, tech companies, policy makers and sports bodies understand and respond to the emerging digital revolution. Mark has advised on every Premier League rights negotiation since 1995 and the agency’s clients includ...

Welcome to All Models Are Wrong, the first in a new occasional series of Unofficial Partner conversations that focus specifically on digital strategy in sport. We first met Alex Balfour when he was chairman of Cricinfo, now part of ESPN in the early days of sports first Dotcom boom. He was one of a small group of people able to articulate the then future of sport’s relationship with technology. It...

Today we talk to David Coulthard, MBE the Formula One racing driver turned presenter and commentator, who co-founded the sports production company Whisper Films with BT presenter Jake Humphrey and former BBC producer Sunil Patel. Coulthard drove for Williams, McLaren and Red Bull racing teams during his career, winning 13 Grand Prix in all, finishing second in the 2001 driver’s championship to Mic...

Today’s guest is Angus Buchanan, the managing director and co-founder of The Sports Consultancy, one of the leading independent consultancies in the sport and entertainment sector, and occupy a space between rights holders and host cities, a relationship that is under great strain as covid-19 shutdown tears up the sporting calendar. What happens next is the theme of this conversation and Angus is...

In today’s podcast we wanted to talk about something happy, something fundamentally good.  And this week has seen the sports business at its very best.  Brilliant people using sport to raise enormous amounts of money for good causes. So first up I spoke to Nick Rusling, founder and CEO of Human Race, and one of the creators of the 2.6 Challenge , which was initiated by the mass participation indus...

Today’s guest is Michelle Carney, CEO of Special Olympics GB, a non-profit organisation and the largest provider of year-round sports coaching and competition for children and adults with intellectual disabilities. The organisation has more than 120 all ability, inclusive sports clubs covering 28 sports, providing approximately 27,000 regular hour-long sporting sessions per year.  This is delivere...

We talk to Chubby Chandler and Nathan Homer about the big business questions facing the professional golf tours in Europe and America. It’s a conversation that needs a bit of context, for listeners who haven’t been following what’s been happening in the golf business over the last month or so. First, there’s the obvious theme of how the four major championships and the two big professional tours i...

I first met Chris Hirst when he became Global chief executive at Havas Creative Network, which meant he was my boss while I worked at Cake the havas sport and entertainment agency in the network’s kings cross village in London. He was previously CEO at Grey London and is routinely ranked one of the industry's most influential people, and in 2018 he published a book called No Bullshit Leadersh...

Thierry Borra spent 25 years working in sport for The Coca Cola Company, and for a large period of that time was responsible for the relationship with the Olympic Games. So what does the postponement of Tokyo 2021 mean for Coke, the IOC’s longest serving partner? How does the Olympics fit in to Coke’s marketing strategy and how do they know whether it works or not? This was an opportunity to go re...

Today’s podcast is one of a regular series of deep dives in to the commercial landscape in a particular sport. Each sport faces challenges that are common to all, but also there are specific differences that make them unique, this might be the commercial structure, the ownership, the political balance between club and country for example, or the role of private equity, which is certainly a feature...

Martin Offiah MBE is a rare thing, a rugby league player who is also a household name. As a player in the 1980s and 90s, he had an extraordinary impact on the game, scoring over 500 tries during his rugby league career, making him the highest try-scoring English player of all time, and now features in a statue of great rugby league players outside Wembley Stadium. Born in Hackney, London, Offiah w...

Gareth Balch co-founded Two Circles in 2011 when he 28 years old, and the business has since become one of the most influential sports marketing agencies to emerge over the last decade. They came to be seen as the defacto data agency that works with many sports rights holders, from the NFL, the Premier League, Uefa, Formula One and Wimbledon, among others. We talk about what this really means, and...

Today we talk to Brett Gosper the chief executive of World Rugby about how his career in advertising frames what  sees as the role of a governing body. As a player in the 1980s, Gosper was a talented centre who had the misfortune to play in the era of the Ella brothers, who dominated the back line of the Australia teams at that time. We talk about Gosper’s decision to move to Paris to play for the...