Episode 193 Snippets: Jamie Mottram

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 193 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil
chatted with Jamie Mottram, President of BreakingT.
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the
full interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast
platforms and at www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 193: Jamie Mottram

Jamie’s Career Path
Grew up wanting to be in sports media, including writing his college essay about his
love of baseball & journalism
Went to college wanting to become a sports anchor a la SportsCenter
After graduation, Jamie didn’t want to work his way up the long sports reporter tree,
and ended up joining a company called Wall Street Sports [thanks to a job posting he
saw on Monster.com]:
“Wall Street Sports was like this fantasy sports stock exchange. Kind of like NBA Top
Shot but without the video highlights. Because you could buy and sell shares of players,
and gain or lose [value] based off market activity and their performance on the field,
and hype around guys… (the site is defunct now)

“Just finding that job on Monster put me on this sports, digital media path that I wasn’t
really on until I got out of college....Going from Wall Street Sports put me on a path
that led me to AOL…
“AOL was thriving at the time. They had 25 million paid subscribers...They had 25
million people paying $24 a month for dial-up Internet...I was just focused on sports
content. Initially it was not sports, it was concert reviews...But I got in a sports editing
role and, again, that was another springboard into something different. Now it wasn’t
just about Internet...it became about blogging.
“I got into sports blogging and podcasting at AOL just as a result of what was going on
with digital content at the time and what AOL’s needs were. That led to creating this
large-scale group blog called FanHouse, that was kind of a big deal for me. It was a big
deal for me, it was a big deal for AOL at the time…

“And it caught the attention of some industry people, in the sports media world. Notably, Dave
Morgan, who was heading up Yahoo Sports at the time. And Yahoo Sports was battling ESPN
competitively on the journalism front...and then also on the audience front as measured by
Comscore media metrics. ESPN was always number one, and Yahoo Sports was always
number two.
“And Dave looked at what we were doing at FanHouse and was like ‘You know we’ve got all
these great columnists and reports…’ (Jamie notes how many big name reporters they had at
the time). They were like ‘We’d love to combine what you’re doing with fan blogging.’ At AOL,
which is a little bit more commentary and humor and web culture...do that [at Yahoo Sports].
“I went to Yahoo to do that in the late 2000s. It did really well, we started beating ESPN every
month in audience [Jamie talks about the company taking pride in outdoing ESPN at the
time]. (I) did that at Yahoo, but as times changed blogging started evolving into social media. I
had been blogging actively or otherwise since 2003, but it made a lot less sense to blog once
Twitter came around. And then a lot less sense when Instagram came around. And on and on.

“So the work I was doing at Yahoo started to blend more into social media
content. And I ended up going from Yahoo to Gannett, which owns USA Today
and about 100+ other papers throughout the country...And at that point was
like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post and other notable digital publications kind
of blossoming...and it was all about content that could be distributed and
discovered socially. And then as things evolved further, could be just consumed
on social platforms. So it became this era of distributed content.
“So a lot of the work that I did at Gannett and USA Today, still in sports media,
but the methodology and the consumer behavior kept changing, so it became
more about how can you engage audiences and inform and entertain audiences
where they are — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc…”
From Gannett, Jamie went to Breaking T where he’s the President today

On thinking social first and balancing that with older business models of pushing to
site
“That’s such a tough terrain to navigate — do you want to pull everybody onto your
platform where you can control the relationship with the user and the time spent is
more highly monetized, and maybe you got a subscription aspect to it that can bolster
your business? Or, do you want to make it easy for everybody and give them what they
want where they want it? It’s tough.
“Gannett was a legacy media company; it is a legacy media company, born out of print.
And it's hard for Gannett or any legacy company with its preexisting business
conditions to say instead of getting a million views for this article at a cost per thousand
views of $8 or whatever it is on our own website and our own app, we’re just going to
let people read it on Facebook Instant Articles. Or we’re just going to let people watch
this video on Instagram, where it’s either not monetized at all or it’s very lowly
monetized.

“At least you’re serving and engaging the user, and creating a stronger relationship with the
audience that maybe could lead to future earnings. It’s just so hard to strike the right balance with
(that equation), especially competitively. At the time I was at Gannett...Bleacher Report, for
example, was putting a lot of their content on the platforms. That could be highlights, that could be
graphics, articles, whatever. And they could kind of afford to do that. Because they were less of a
legacy publisher, they were a digital-first publisher. They’d been acquired by Turner.
“It’s just a whole different equation. It’s not that the playing field is imbalanced, it’s just everybody
is kind of bringing something different to it and trying to get something different out of it. For a
Bleacher — and I’m speaking out of turn, I don't know what their strategy was — maybe their
business was more about building up large followings, building up engagement, and hoping to
monetize those relationships down the road.
“Whereas an ESPN might’ve been about protecting the egg, protecting the cable subscription
business that they had and trying to shepherd toward a direct-to-consumer relationship with
streaming services...MAybe they didn’t want to give it away on social. So they were going to
encourage you to click onto the site, click onto the app, go behind the paywall to get what you
wanted…

“The 2000s and into the teens were pretty clean — you kind of wanted to get as
much traffic as possible to your website; that was an obvious objective. But then it
became a lot more confusing over the last five to ten years.”
“You’re always looking on the other side of the fence, trying to keep up with the
Joneses. And the Joneses could be Buzzfeed; like ‘Oh my gosh, this is incredible.
They manufacture virality and get millions of views on their stories.’ Or it could be
Bleacher Report; it’s like ‘Oh my gosh, House of Highlights is just an Instagram
juggernaut, they've just created so much engagement on that platform, it’s wild.’
“Or the Joneses could be the New York Times and look at how successful their
subscription business is. You can’t keep up with everybody. Keeping up with the
Joneses is for the birds. So you just have to pick what you’re good at, and what it is
you’re going to focus on and go after, and differentiate with, and find success
with.”

On the fleeting value of real-time stories and how to maximize the moments
“There’s ongoing debate about whether (Woj) — should he be doing that on
Twitter, should he file a story first? It’s kind of become obsolete; if you have
news to break, you break it. It’s about building up the brand, and he’s done
an incredible job with that...It’s different across the board. ESPN might tuck
one of his columns behind the paywall, because there is a specific and unique
value to that. To his writing. Somebody else might be writing a column, but
it’s a different style and substance; it’s not commodity.

“I think for an ESPN or anyone that cares about the subscription business, you do have to be
strategic about what you’re going to tuck behind that (paywall). And I think at this point now, I
hope, consumers can understand and respect that. This is not free. For a long time, we expected and
demanded our content on the Internet be free. And I think behaviors are shifting to acknowledge
that this stuff is expensive, and unless we just don’t want there to be news outlets, media outlets any
longer, in some cases we have to pay for it.”
“What’s interesting, though — (as I) mentioned we’re used to everything being free on the Internet;
I think that’s because everything started out as being free on the Internet. And now it kind of
shifted; you expect to have to subscribe to the Washington Post, to the New York Times or the Wall
Street Journal, or the New Yorker, or ESPN — eventually you expect to hit these walls. And by
eventually, I mean not that far down the path, like your fifth click…
“You’ve come to expect that with written content. And you’ve come to expect it to an extent with
video content, with streaming and all the different subscriptions we all have. But the outliers here
are podcasting and social. I don’t pay for anything with podcasts — I listen to a ton of podcasts and
it’s all ad-supported and I skip past all the ads, if I’m being honest. I feel like we’re conditioned to
expect podcasting to be free. And social. You can follow anybody on Twitter, Instagram ,whatever.
It’s interesting, I bet those things will eventually in much the same way.”

Keeping up with the real-time nature of sports news, conversations, and the zeitgeist
“When I was at Gannett, one of the first things that we did there was we launched a
website called For The Win. And For The Win, if you were to bubble it down, was
kind of like the Buzzfeed of sports. And maybe it still is, it’s still going strong...The
tagline was ‘What fans are talking about.’ For The Win was social content that was
all inspired by trending moments, what’s going viral, what the traditional water
cooler topics are in sports.
“It was all about content that was really relevant on social, especially Facebook and
Twitter at the time. And it was about producing that content, covering those stories,
those moments in a way that was really shareable, so our audience can distribute it
on social. And really digestible and easy to consume on phones. This all seems like
old hat at this point, but we launched the site in 2013 and it was on trend at the
time, and became really successful.

“We modeled out how we could For The Win across all sorts of subject areas,
across all sorts of markets. We never really got there — I think it’s sort of a
shame, but working at a big corporation across several different organizational
lines, you can’t always get what you want. But we had success with For The
Win...But when we were making coverage choices, we didn’t really care about
staying power. It’s like ‘Oh Aaron Roders is hosting Jeopardy! Tonight?
Awesome. What’s the moment, what’s the hook? Let’s do a story about that
(where) someone can get the gist of it and pass it on, in a delightful way.’
“So we didn’t really think about that [lasting power] at For The Win. But now at
Breaking T we’re kind of doing a lot of the same stuff, but in a totally different
format. Instead of articles or Instagram videos, it’s graphics to be printed on
apparel — t-shirts, hoodies, sometimes mugs, other drinkwear.

“And we have a much smaller team [at BreakingT]. At For The Win...we had
multiple editors and we had different writers for each sport and we had a larger
content organization that was really thousands of people large when you zoom
out. And we used some tools to make determinations (on content).
“But at Breaking T we don’t have thousands of people. We have a small team that
uses a social data platform that we’ve developed called CrowdBreak to identify
things that are bubbling up and some times things that are boiling over. That’s our
trend monitoring, our content discovery — is CrowdBreak. It doesn’t matter if it’s
something happening in the WNBA or in college football or an Olympic sport — if
something is happening, we’re going to know about it early on. And then our team
can make a determination out of that much smaller subset of the larger universe.

“Part of that determination is staying power. If a team (or a player) has a
moment and it’s game two of the World Series, we just know as humans that’s
not going to have the same staying power as a moment in the deciding game of
the World Series. Or if a player does something, but they’re brand new to the
team or league — or maybe on the other end, their contract is about to expire
and they’re expected to leave. We know as humans that that affects things, that
affects the shelf life, that affects the expected market impact.
“So it’s this combination of social data analytics and editorial judgement that we
use to tee things up for our creative team. And then we can capture whatever the
moment is creatively, in a way that fans are going to want to buy and wear it,
and think fondly of their new favorite t-shirt for a long time to come.”

What it’s like when a moment does break and it the process to commoditize gets going
for BreakingT
Jamie talks through the Julian Edelman retirement news as an example: “We get the
CrowdBreak alert either before or right around when everybody is discovering (the
news) per the usual ways. Our product development team tees that up in Slack — here’s
something on the NFL front we need to do. Breaking T happens to be licensed by the
NFLPA, so that license enables us to use the name, image, and likeness of all players
across the league.
“”So it’s teeing that up. The moment in this case is a legendary Patriots player, his time
there is done...But that doesn’t make it very easy what we should do creatively. So the
team kind of spitballs — what are people saying on Twitter? What were the biggest
moments of his career? Did he have a great nickname? What’s the iconic imagery of
him?...

“What we ended up doing was commemorating the catch that he had in the
Super Bowl, where it was an impossible catch. Our product team tees that
up for our design team. Our design team comes up with a great graphic. We
all kind of agree that it looks good and is ready to go, and we submit that to
the NFLPA for approval within hours of the news breaking...Our goal is to
go to market within 24 hours of something happening.
“In 24 hours of that news breaking, we’re selling…’The Legendary Julian
Edelman’ is the name of the product. We’re selling that on the website,
we’re pulling all the levers for distribution to get that in front of the right
fans, and we’re talking to our different wholesale partners, so brick-and-
mortar retailers can have it in their stores while it’s still hot.”

On what comprises the sales channels for Breaking T
“There’s a lot of variation, a lot of nuance. To speak in broad strokes, most of our sales
come from ecommerce — from direct-to-consumer online sales. We used to be almost
entirely ecommerce. It has shifted over time as we’ve matured and developed more
wholesale relationships to be a little bit more split between ecommerce and wholesale
to retailers. But just talking about ecommerce, specifically — there are a bunch of
different channels. We are not 50%+ anything…
“We have a bunch of different organic sales channels. We have a really large customer
database, people that have bought from Breaking T and we know their buying
behaviors. If you bought a Patriots shirt from us before from us, you’re going to get an
email about our new Edelman shirt. That’s just a very simple thing that we do with each
of our launches — we segment our customer database.

“We have our own social followings, we have our license partners. So
the NFLPA might be amplifying what we do. The players themselves
might amplify what we do. Customers sharing our stuff on social.
There’s a lot of organic behavior (on social) because everything we’re
doing is very fresh and timely. Every day around the calendar year,
there’s probably some number of people that are Googling ‘Julian
Edelman t-shirts’ but that number spikes on the day we happen to be
releasing it because that’s in the news.

“So we’re aligned really well with user behavior on search. We’re
aligned really well in user behavior on social. Think of all those
Boston fans that are repping Edelman in the wake of this news, so
they’re kind of distributing, too...So there’s a lot of organic behavior
on organic channels — email, social, search, sometimes we get media
outlets...It’s not uncommon for local media to cover our product
releases because it just adds to the story.”

On the present and future of shopping within and via social media
“I think we get a very high level of organic performance with social, because it’s
surprise and delight, you know? Like ‘Oh my gosh, this guy just threw a no-hitter
and here’s a t-shirt in my timeline!’ (It’s) a lot of impulse purchases that happen
organically…
“We’re not really using any of the native shopping tools (in the social platforms).
There are different reasons for that. Not speaking with any great specificity about
one platform or another, but sometimes you might not own that relationship with
the customer because you’re using the native tools. Or maybe sometimes, there’s a
portion of the revenue that is being taken out of the transaction. There are just
different aspects to it that don’t make it totally attractive. Or put you over the edge
to do it in the first place.

“But...another big ecommerce channel is paid. We’ve started doing
more paid social and search. We really took the opportunity during
the pandemic to start doing that. We had never done anything paid
until last year. We just had more time and we had a greater need to
drive ecommerce revenue. So that was something that we undertook
last summer during the pandemic that has helped us be stronger on
the other side.”

How the BreakingT model could expand beyond sports
“We’ve done some different things where we’ve crossed over into non-sports.
Especially when the pandemic hit and live sports just stopped. We were
getting real creative. We started doing classic moments. We became licensed
by some different alumni associations, so we could do things like the time
Nolan Ryan got in a fistfight, that sort of thing.
“But then we also started doing Tiger King-inspired product and Hamilton-
inspired product...It was still tied to the news cycle, but it was not necessarily
sports. And then sports came back and we kind of got distracted. But
everything we do could be extrapolated and applied to different verticals…

“I think what we do works really well with pop culture. We should be
partnered with Saturday Night Live. We should be working with NBC
and doing whatever the SNL sketch du jour or whatever the one-liner
of the week is — we should be working on that together. There’
opportunity there; there’s market opportunity, there’s creative
opportunity. There’s just an ecommerce opportunity, another revenue
stream and another marketing aspect to what SNL or The Bachelor or
any original Netflix programming...that we could apply our model to
and we think it would work really well.

“We’re [just] still realizing the opportunity with sports, so we want to
focus on that. And it’s just so clean. Every moment, every trend kind
of maps to a market or a team, a fan base. There’s group licensing
dynamics that cover every team or every player. There are sports-
specific retailers, there are in-venue retailers. There are all these
things that work with sports that we’re still exploring…

“A lot of the things I just said work really well; like Breaking T would work
really well with politics. But you kind of gotta pick a side. I think it’s really hard
to play both sides. It’s certainly hard to play both sides in any sort of authentic
way. But even if you wanted to be inauthentic, it would be hard to play in the
political realm without picking a side or just trying to drive down the middle,
which is hard, too.
“But everything we do with our social data, our creative process, our
operational capabilities — everything, it just goes on and on — could be applied
to politics. It’s just a thorny area.”

About how they’ve expanded beyond apparel
“Well I’m drinking out of a Breaking T Yeti right now. And my iPhone
case has a Breaking T logo on it and my Macbook is covered in
Breaking T stickers. So there’s all sorts of product categories and
extensions. We don’t think of ourselves as a t-shirt company. We don’t
think of ourselves as a sports company, we don’t think of ourselves as
a t-shirt company. We think of ourselves as a real-time merchandise
company.

“And I might even modify that because we started creating NFTs...We did our first NFT
series a week or two ago. And that’s just digital art; it’s transcending the tangible. We
look at ourselves as real-time merchandise — and it doesn’t have to be sports, it doesn’t
have to be t-shirts. But the reality is, no matter what we do, it always seems like about
80% of our sales comes from sports t-shirts. It’s just such a great format for capturing
these sort of moments and merchandising them.”
“We are very experimental, we’re very nimble. Not just going to market within 24
hours. But if some opportunity emerges, we’re very quick to hack and try it out, and try
it on. That can lead you to some very surprising places, and that’s part of what adds to
the excitement.”

The sports moment that Jamie would
most want to be able to wear
“We launched a classics collection last
summer and we included a Will Clark
1989 shirt. Will Clark is my all-time
favorite athlete. When I was 12, he was
a god, I had his poster in my room. So
we did this Will Clark shirt, we actually
did it — I have it and Will Clark himself
wore it and sent in some pictures. That
was my childhood dream come true.”

Jamie’s favorite[s] among Breaking T shirts over time
“My favorite modern player is Juan Soto. And when they made that
World Series run...the Soto Shuffle became a big deal. So we did a
shirt — ‘Do the Soto Shuffle’ and it shows him shuffling, we sold that
at Nats Park. I just love that t-shirt. I love Juan Soto, my daughter
loves Juan Soto. I want Juan Soto to be my son-in-law and I’ll wear
that t-shirt under my tuxedo at the wedding.” (haha)

“Part of the reason I love that one is it
was so specific. He’s always done the
Soto Shuffle, but when they got on the
national stage, it became a national
thing. And that’s when we did the
shirt, it was in the moment. But we
created it in a way, we captured that
in a way that it’s evergreen. And it’s
always going to be one of my favorite
shirts. I’m always going to wear that.
It’s going to be a conversation starter
in the year 2029, it wasn’t just 2019.”

The most memorable FTW story from Jamie’s time there
“This is a weirdly memorable (story). It ties back to the (conversation around) native
content (on social)...We started dabbling in Facebook video and I don’t even know how
we got our hands on it, but it was a video from the UK of a soccer game, but the game
was like you kick the ball and a giant dart board the size of the side of a barn — the ball
would stick to the velcro board like a dart would stick to the wall. A stupid video.
“And we posted it on our Facebook Page, that didn’t have that many followers, and it
did...50 million plus views. This was at a time (when) everybody was trying to figure
out what to do with native video, like what’s our strategy? And this popped off in such a
big way, and it was such an anomaly...it sticks out to me because it was so silly and so
meaningless. But it became this thing that was probably on corporate pitch decks for
the next year.”

Jamie’s favorite sports media outlet(s) today and why
“That’s so tough. The only one I subscribe to is the Washington Post because
they happen to cover all of my favorite DC sports teams. And then I kind of
cheat, I use Twitter and the Nuzzle app to consume all of my content. It’s more
about the people I follow.
“I really like The Ringer. The Ringer hits on a lot of my interests. So I’ll go with
The Washington Post, The Ringer, and all of the randos I follow on Twitter.”

The most memorable game Jamie has attended
Jamie recalls George Mason over UConn out in DC to go to the Final
Four and Jamie’s brother was an undergrad at George Mason at the
time
“We were both at AOL — he as an intern, I as a content producer. So
we got media passes and we were front row for that game...it was just
an unbelievable moment…”

The social platform that performs the best for BreakingT and the
platform or platform feature he’s highest on for the future
“I would say Instagram. We really only operate on Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram. And of those three, Instagram is the one where we do both
organic and paid...Whereas Facebook it’s a little bit more paid
focused, Twitter is more organic-focused, and Instagram is where
those both overlap.

“My thing that bugs me about Instagram is I come from the generation
where I’m more of a Facebook (and) Twitter guy, and a blog guy. Where
things are very shareable, linkable, they exist on the open web and can
kind of go off. Whereas I feel like Instagram, especially anything Stories
or with Fleets on Twitter — to me, it’s very closed off. Even though it
might be consumed and get a ton of engagement, there’s something I
can’t quite adhere to. I’m much more, like, I need a link; give me a link…
“I blame Snapchat. Snapchat was the first social platform where I was
not really participating. And now it’s TikTok. I think now I’m just on the
downside of the hill.”

The best meal to get in Wilmington (NC,
where Jamie lives) and where to get it
Jamie says to go to a town called Southport
and go to a place called Provision Company:
“It’s in a marina where the fish boats come
in and out. And they have a very small menu
of fresh seafood. You order at the counter,
they bring it to you on the deck. If you want
a beer you go to grab it out of the cooler.
PRovision Company in Southport, South
Carolina is my happy place.”

The college or pro sports team with the most rabid fan base on
BreakingT
“Right now it’s the Padres. The Padres are just so hype. I really hope
this season goes well for them because I’m hyped for them as a fan.
We’re doing great Padres business. Their organization is great on the
field and off. And it’s funny because a year ago the Padres would’ve
been our 30th team in baseball alone. But they’re going off right now.”

Jamie talks about the Slam Diego phenomenon during the 2020 season when
the Padres hit a grand slam four games in a row and the team branded
themselves ‘Slam Diego’ on social media
“We did a design that night, had it to market online the next day. And the team
all wanted it for BP [batting practice] the next day...Let’s say it happened
Thursday night, they wanted to be wearing it on Saturday. So we hustled, we used
a local printer in San Diego. Our team just made it happen; made the magic
happen. The whole team was wearing Slam Diego shirts during BP. And
(Fernando) Tatis (Jr.) went on SportsCenter [for] The Big Interview with SVP
(Scott Van Pelt) that night and he was wearing Slam Diego. The whole thing was
just so beautiful; I love it. It’s sort of silly, but we live for it, that’s magic.”

Jamie’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“I’ll go with Jason Concepcion. I already mentioned The Ringer, he’s
moved on (from there). But I love @Ntwrk, I love the way he looks at
sports and culture, and give you a funny and informed and thoughtful
and caring point of view on things.”

Where to find Jamie and BreakingT on digital/social media
Jamie is @JamieMottram on all platforms and find @BreakingT on
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their website

Thanks again to Jamie for being so generous with his time to share
his knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.

Episode 193 Snippets: Jamie Mottram

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