Welcome to Brand Story Inc. I’m your host, Jay Sharman. Every week we sit down with smart folks to talk about innovative ways they are creating content to connect with their audiences. I’d like to say every company can be a media company, and this conversation hopefully it helps you understand why.
Jay: Today it’s my pleasure to introduce Joe Favorito to the podcast. Joe has over 30 years of strategic communications in PR and marketing background, an illustrious career working at places like the USTA, the New York Knicks, and one of those guys that if you’re in the inner circle of sports media, everyone knows Joe. Joe is the human Rolodex. We’re excited to have him on the podcast. Welcome, Joe.
Joe: All it means is that I’m old.
Jay: And I forgot to mention the most important thing, right? I mean, you’re teaching at an Ivy league school right now. You’re teaching at Columbia.
Joe: Bottom of the barrel scratched. So that’s kind of how those things happen. I mean it’s just, there’s a line from the movie Broadcast News where William Hurt says to one of his colleagues, “What do you do when your dreams surpass your realities?” And it was Albert Brooks he said it to, and Albert Brooks turns to him, and goes, “Don’t tell anybody.” So anyway, I kind of feel that way. I mean, I think I’m very lucky having been on my own now for the last 12 years after we folded up our tent in our mixed martial arts venture, and sold it to the UFC. I’ve been very lucky to work with a lot of really interesting and smart people, and I’m also, not to blow any smoke, but you’re on that list, Jay. So congratulations.
Jay: Thank you. I pay you well.
Joe: Speaking of the bottom of the barrel.
Jay: Yeah, exactly. So appreciate that, Joe. Let’s start there. You have such a unique perspective. You’ve worked with so many different clients, and I truly mean that. And Joe’s one of the good guys out there. So you get to look behind the curtain of so many different entities, startup leagues, teams, brands, the whole kit and caboodle. At Brand Story Inc., we’re really focused on pulling the curtain back on how organizations do it, right? Whether you’re a team, a league, a brand, how you’re acting and thinking like a media company to engage your end consumer in a way that you can really make use of the tools and the platforms that are out there. Talk for a second about how you’re talking about this at Columbia in terms of what you’re seeing from your students, and what you’re teaching. So let’s start there, Mr. Ivy league.
Joe: I’ll give you probably a little bit of a broader example. But since he was a Columbia law school graduate and was on the board of trustees, he really fits into what my class specifically does. So I was lucky enough to last few years to spend a lot of time around David Stern. And for some reason, he really took me a little bit more into his inner circle, which has been interesting, and really we developed a pretty good relationship over the last two or three years. Much better than when I was at the NBA, but that’s a different story. And David constantly would say when he would go and talk to groups, especially young people looking to figure out what to do, or partners that he was trying to bring in, and he would always go around and say, “There are two things that businesses do very poorly these days. One is sell, the other is tell their story.”
And I think that’s probably very true. And that’s how we developed the class that I’ve been teaching now for 12 years, which has really evolved into a storytelling class. And the essence of content is really having really great stories. And ironically, I was driving yesterday and I heard Kevin O’Malley. Kevin O’Malley is the shark tank guy. And he was on the Aspen Ideas Institute podcast. And he talked about how so many brands and young people, and any kind of company looking in media fail, because they cannot effectively tell their story in an elevator pitch, 35 seconds to a minute. And the ones that have a chance are the ones that know who their audience is, who they’re trying to reach, what meaning they’re trying to reach and are trying to use media… no matter who they are… correctly at the same time.
So, I spoke at American University last week, and the first question I asked a class of about 15 students was, who’s the media? And you know, they rattled off Fox News, and NPR, and Comcast. And I stopped them and I said, “No. The media is anybody who’s holding a phone.” So if you have a mobile device in your hand, you are the media these days. You look at citizen journalism and how it’s all played out, and who’s reporting on stories, and if you have a phone, you have the ability to story tell. Now, whether that’s a personal story to your kids, whether that’s a business story, whether you are a media company aggregating people to put together pieces, whether you are a gambling company, it doesn’t really matter. But the goal is that you have the ability to tell a story, and there are thousands and millions of stories out there that haven’t been told. Now how do you monetize them, and how you put them on the right medium and with the right audience is the question.
Jay: Who are you seeing right now that are doing interesting things? NBA gets a lot of love as kind of being a forerunner, but who are the people that might be below the radar. Who do you think is doing a good job of directly connecting with their consumer?
Joe: Well, I think the ones that do a good job sometimes are the ones that, like you said, Jay, you don’t really know a lot about, but you see them, and they’re willing to try things to be disruptive. The biggest problem when you get to the four biggest leagues… and I wouldn’t even put MLS as the fifth or NASCAR in that group, or the PGA tour, or the ATP, or the WTA… is because when have the hammer and you’re the four biggest leagues, a lot of times you’re very risk-averse. And you know what the power of what it is that you have is. So you’ll go to a company and because your shield is so powerful, or your logo is so powerful, they’re coming to you and they’re handing you cash. And you want the cash because you have owners that you need to answer to.
So the amount of the ability of disruption is sometimes a little bit clouded. Now, I think when you go a step behind that and you put the properties out there, or the media companies out there that are the what ifs. What can we do? So when Nathan Lunberg is out there selling Twitch to the G League, and Nathan works for Twitch is one of the head sales people at Twitch and one of the had marketing people, it’s what can we do that’s a litmus test, to see where this is going to go in the future in terms of fan engagement? When you are the XFL and you’re miking everybody in sight, you’re trying to figure out what the path is where you can generate some buzz, but also create platforms or opportunities that are sellable to your salespeople. So if we do a coaches behind the scenes listen in while Norm Chow of the LA team is calling plays from the press box, is that something we can sell down the line? And is that something that’s interesting to people? I think those things are really cool.
I think that you look at properties like National Lacrosse League, and what they’re doing with Bleacher Report Live, and miking everybody in sight, and putting mics on referees as they’re talking to replay officials. And there was a really interesting heated discussion that went on about an overturned replay in an NLL game, on Bleacher Report Live on Saturday in Calgary. That was an amazing look inside how these things go on. I think that’s really valuable. I think the WNBA has done a great job of storytelling in the last couple of years, because they have the ability to do that. I think the NWSL has a tremendous opportunity now that Budweiser has put money into them, and they have a new commissioner in Lisa Baird, who understands how to sell and how to story tell, where they can go and do disruptive things now.
I think for the four major leagues it’s just sometimes hard because when you’re in a risk-averse business, and you’re making so much money, you don’t really want to boat rock. And sometimes you do. I think the NBA has tested a lot of things in there. They’re so much, I think in my opinion, more ahead of most of the other leagues in testing things and seeing what the fans are saying, and how they can listen to the fans all the time and adapt, because they have to be constantly nimble. I think that’s pretty valuable. I think MLS is getting away from some of the traditional now, where it’s worked for a while, but the audience is there, but they want more and they have to figure out how to give them more.
So, hopefully you’re going to see some innovation on the media side and in the broadcast side there. The one place that I think it always kind of makes me scratch my head, and it really surprises me, is that with few exceptions, I think the college space is largely untapped and I think part of that comes with finances. But when you look around college campuses, and even high schools, and you’ve got lots of innovative, disruptive thought on campuses, the traditionalists at the top of many universities, especially on the athletic side, do not go there. And I, for the life of me, can’t figure out why.
Jay: And what do you mean by go there? Where is there?
Joe: They don’t do things like, you have the ability to stream. So you know, we know we’re trying to recruit and I’ll give you an example of one that it’s worked pretty well. So, University of Pennsylvania, men’s basketball team has a Chinese player. Last year, two Chinese students came to them and said, we would love to stream games in Mandarin. They let them do it. I don’t know why other schools don’t do that. If you’re trying to recruit from all over the world, it doesn’t cost you anything to be doing streams in seven different languages. If you can find people to do it. And by the way, those people are the students. It becomes buzzworthy and it becomes sellable at some point. Plus, you’re speaking to an audience, literally speaking to an audience, that you don’t have the opportunity to speak to a lot of times in their language. So, I mean that’s just one example. I think that colleges are still extremely, extremely conservative in the way they look at media.
And I think that comes from athletic departments, athletic directors, who for the large part are not focused on that, and they don’t have a lot of professionals around them sometimes. They farm it out to people who are able to sell and bring them in money, and they take a check, and they sit back, and they fundraise. As opposed to being diverse, really interesting thinkers who can say, “Look at all these smart people around this on campus. Why don’t we go and talk to them and figure out what we can do to be innovative and disruptive?” Now there are schools, Northwestern being one, Clemson being another, that look at it and say, “How can we create a Petri dish, and really reimagine how people are consuming our brand, our athletes, our sports, especially on the women’s side? And what can we do to be more and more diverse?”
Jay: You know, it’s interesting, I want to jump in there. I think the 800 pound gorilla in the collegiate space, is name, image and likeness, right? And for those that aren’t familiar with it, a landmark court case is going on right now, and the tea leaves would suggest that it’s sooner rather than later that an individual athlete is going to be able to monetize their own image, right? So commercial endorsements, whatever that may mean, which opens up a can of worms because of Trevor Lawrence, who’s the star quarterback at Clemson, would presumably get a lot more money than a women’s field hockey player. And there’s all sorts of a morass there. And we work with several colleges and conferences, as you know, and I feel that they, in general, the landscape is so unprepared for when that box opens up. I’d be curious to get your take on where you think things are going in there around that topic.
Joe: So I think the creative and the disruptive will help rule the day, a step below the major athletes who may or may not be able to engage. So if this was taking an athlete from five years ago and going five years into the future, the amount of money Johnny Manzell could have made off of Texas A&M with all the shenanigans that he pulled was probably pretty substantial. I look at a guy like, and I can’t remember his name, the kid from Stephen F. Austin, who made the shot to beat Duke (*editor’s note: that player’s name is Nathan Bain). And it turns out that his family was devastated in the hurricane last summer in Jamaica, and he wanted to use it for fundraising. I think that there are plenty of creative, disruptive athletes, who also are students on campus, who can say, “Hey, I’m going to design a T-shirt, and hey, I know how to sell it.”
And I think that’s where you’re going to see some really fun and interesting things happen. And I don’t think it’s just going to be the big names. I think it’s someone who’s going to be smart enough to grab lightning in a bottle for a couple of weeks realizing that this is their moment to shine, and they’re going to be able to do it. I mean, UNBC is the perfect example of what happened a few years ago. Think about how much money that those kids could have capitalized on by coming up with some pretty cool ideas when they’d beat the University of Virginia in the first round. So I think you have to be smart enough to do it. I think a lot of it exists and kids just don’t… They step back because they know the specter of the NCAA is going to beat them down.
And I think once the gloves are off, I think there’s going to be a lot of surprises. I think you’re going to see Columbia fencers who win the NCAA tournament come up with something cool. And they’re not going to make a fortune, but they’re going to develop something because they know how to develop marketing plans. I think what you’re going to see is really smart students work together with other smart students who also happen to be athletes, to really exercise some pretty diverse marketing platforms that will both create an ROI and set up a business going forward. And that’s how it will grow.
Jay: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, I remember in Entourage, God, I don’t know, it was probably seven years ago now. I’m terrible with dates, but there was that cliched scene with Ari going in and talking to celebrities, and it was like, “You are a brand.” Right? When he was talking to a prospective client. It was like, “You are a brand.” And that notion of individuals becoming brands is a powder keg right now. I mean, you and I both know Dan Reed, who runs global sports at Facebook. And I remember talking to him three or four years ago about this, and I was running some things by him just to make sure that I wasn’t crazy, which is a loaded question. But he told me, he gave me a great metaphor and he said, “If you think of anybody within a sport, or it doesn’t have to be in sports, but any individual on Facebook, just using that platform, who has a substantial media following, right? Half a million, a million followers. Whatever it may be, it’s really kind of almost a modern-day cable affiliate, right?”
So if that person’s a lacrosse player, or a basketball player, or whatever they may be, they could be a musician it, Facebook, he told me, is rewarded to whoever the center hub of who’s creating that content. If you think of that as almost like the national cable television signal, and those are the affiliate channels. That was kind of a framework to think about. And I’ve talked about that because you look at people like Roger Federer who has 15 million Facebook followers, and even some of the… I think one of the famous cases was Alex Morgan, and they ran a professional soccer game on her Facebook page and it got 400,000 viewers, which is, as you know, that’s better than most things on ESPN in primetime, right? That’s crazy numbers.
And it, I’m curious to what you think the tipping point is, when those things and those strategies start really becoming more, instead of experimental, the norm. What’s it going to take?
Joe: I don’t know if they’ll ever be the norm. I think you’ll have exceptions. I think one of the things that people look back, and especially now that you can get analytics pretty clearly as to the who, what, when and where, it’s how do you sustain these things? I mean there are all these, it happened 10 years ago with MMA, it’s happening now with “e-sports”, although e-sports is another misnomer in a lot of things. Where you talk to the major players in the gaming world, and they’re like, “Look, yeah, we get 12,000 people once a year for our world championship. But in a lot of ways we lose money on those events. Those are marketing events that we use to sell pieces of our game. And you know, everybody walks in, they say, oh, it’s 12,000 people. Yeah, well putting on events is really expensive. We have to figure out the other verticals where we can make money for the long-term,” and that’s kind of how it will grow.
In reality, the best “e-sports events”, if you go to riot games and you watch an event in their arena, their arena is 400 seats. That’s the audience. It’s not 20,000 people. They know that they can’t do that. And I remember talking to the UFC and it was a model for the WWE for years was, especially the UFC would never go to the same city other than Las Vegas two years in a row. Because they knew that there were 12,000 diehard fans, and then there’d be another 5,000 people that would come in, look at it, and wouldn’t come back or they would come back in a smaller number.
They became fans. They would follow the ultimate fighter, they would buy some pay-per-views, but not 19,000 people showing up at every event, the same people all the time. So you have to figure out what that churn rate is and figure out how to grow it. Now I think going forward for media companies, you need a massive audience to be successful. That’s never going to change. There are niches that will work and that will be monetized, especially people who can speak directly and story tell directly to their audience, and their core audience. Never forget that core audience. But then, if you want to retake global audience consistently, not a one off. Now again, Alex Morgan streaming a game on her page gets all those views how many times? If she goes and streams, the Portland Thorns every week, I don’t think she’s going to get that many followers.
I think it’s, how do you build that audience, and then by the way, how do you take that those 400,000 and make sure that you’re capturing the data, and then coming back to them with something else that’s interesting to them? So that you understand who they are? That’s really the case. I see a lot of problems, like NWSL will get 10,000 people at a game after the world cup. And then the question becomes, “Oh, did you capture their data? Did you ask anything? Did you do a casual gaming with them? How did you get all the data of everybody who’s in your stadium?” And they’re like, “We didn’t do that.” So it’s lost. The value is in the aggregate data and what you do with that, to get from step one to step two. And that’s the challenge, and that’s where this is all going to evolve going forward I think.
Jay: Yeah, I mean I agree with you, I think. I do believe, though, there is a ton of value to your point that direct to consumer, if you, regardless of what sport you are and regardless of how niche it is, right? If you have two million people’s contact information, and you know they’re lacrosse fans, in that space, that’s extremely valuable. It’s highly efficient, right? It’s not going to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but to the right people and the right profile, to leverage that is really that value. And I’d love to get your take on this. You and I know a lot of the linear TV folks in the transition, I just feel the transition, I’m surprised at how slow it’s been, but when you step back and look at follow the money, right? Turner Sports is going to bring in a billion plus dollars on March madness, right?
You look at the dollars and TV’s reach is still significant. What’s fascinating to me is that the value proposition, especially for second-tier and third-tier brands who may not have the monies of the first tier brands, the Cokes, the State Farms, I’m still surprised at how it seems that value in that example I just gave, which is totally made up, the national lacrosse league, that direct to consumer… How the value still hasn’t seem to have gotten to a place where brands are all in on leveraging that. It just seems to be much more efficient. I’m curious to get your take on where you think we are in this shift in the sports marketing world of linear to digital.
Joe: So, I think there’s a couple things. One is, I think the buyers, or the people who are selling with budgets are still very, very risk-averse. If you go to your boss who is a 65-year-old white guy, sitting in an office, and you are based on a commission-based business, and you go to him and say, “I’m going to go and buy ESPN.” He says, “Oh great.” If you go to them and say I’m going to buy ESPN+, or Bleacher Report Live, or Hello Sports, because this is a really cool audience and it’s growing, he better be right, or she better be right. Because if they’re not for the short-term, and that’s kind of the problem, is that you’re still dealing with a very short term business when you’re based on commissions, to figure out how you can do that and making sure that you’re spending in the right place.
So you take that and then you take a company like, and I’ll use Anheuser Busch as an example. And under Nick Kelly, they’ve changed some of their focus. Now, they’re not getting away from their big deals. But they’re saying, “You know what, we’re going to take a flyer for four years on women’s soccer, because we think it’s going to grow. And not only that, we’re not just going to give them money. We’re going to make sure that they’re set up for success. So we’re going to put the athletes in that league in partnership with other athletes to let them tell their story and let them grow together.” So then LeBron James can say, “It’s kind of cool that I’m hanging out with…” Whichever women’s soccer player you want to talk to. I’m trying to think of a second tier player that would make sense.
But I think that will help. And that will help raise the boat, when peer to peer, it’s interesting that they see growth. And over time, depending on how you’re measuring growth is another piece of success that is still kind of amorphous. And you look at what NBC has done for several years now with what they call TAMI, which is total audience measurement indicator. And that measures the amount of people engaged for properties like MLS for a little while. But for the NHL and for the Olympics across every possible platform, it’s not a Nielsen rating. It’s measuring sentiment. It’s measuring share a voice. It’s measuring all the other pieces that are valuable today. But it’s still pretty premature when you go to a senior person who doesn’t understand all that, and he says, “Well, what’s the Nielsen number?”
The Nielsen number is important, but it’s amazing how much it’s talked about when the number is down. When the number is up, people kind of forget about it and they say, “Oh, of course it’s up because that was the Superbowl.” Well, I think when you’re dealing with a handheld device and people engaging on many different forms of media, it’s not as easy to measure anymore. And it’s always been said that all politics are local. I think a lot of sports now are becoming more and more local, and if you can impact me directly and I like that and I go and talk to my friends and say, “You should go watch that.” That amplifies your message, and sometimes you don’t know that, and you can’t measure that right away. It just takes time. But at the end of the day, the advertising business is still very risk-averse and until that changes… and I think it’s slowly changing because people are seeing new opportunities… it’s just going to be a challenge.
Jay: I’m talking with Joe Favorito, a sports marketing and PR legend. If you haven’t, go and sign up for his newsletter. It’s Sports Marketing and PR Roundup, sports publicity, marketing and brand building in a new age, and it’s JoeFavorito.com.
Let’s go two places. You yourself have become a little bit of a media company. You have a ton of content at JoeFavorito.com, you’re pumping out content consistently. You’ve got your newsletter, you’re tapped into everything. You’re extremely active on multiple platforms, on social media (*editor’s note: you can follow him on Twitter at @JoeFav). Share how you look at yourself as a brand, and what you’ve done, and how it’s impacted your business.
Joe: I don’t really look at myself as a brand. I think when I look at myself, I’m very much of a believer in sharing positive stories, and that’s kind of why I do what I do. Part of it is, having learned from a lot of people that for every piece you give, you get 10 back, and I really believe that. And it’s still, I mean I have a good amount of clients that come in and out and appreciate the ability that I can help them story tell or meet other people. But I think really the goal is to get people aware of some of the better practices that they’re not focusing on. And that was the principle of the newsletter, and how we came about it is it’s like, here are 10 things to read that you may not have seen.
Here’s a podcast we do, here are some not-for-profits looking for help. Here’s a Latino story that you don’t know about. And let them go and take that and share. I mean, I don’t do the newsletter to make money. I actually do it because it keeps my mind thinking about what’s new and fresh, so that I don’t get stale in what I’m doing. It helps me look at a lot of different things, get a first look at a lot of different things. And it helps me amongst the audience, and the newsletter goes probably on Sunday mornings to about 40,000 people now. It helps them hopefully get a little bit more interested and engaged in things that they weren’t focused on, because their heads are down and they’re in the silo or the weeds that they’re in, and can’t get a breath. And this, hopefully it becomes a little bit of a fresh breath and helps them think about things differently.
Jay: Oh, that’s incredible. 40,000 people. I mean, that’s just astounding, right? And I mean, think about that. That just underscored the point I was trying to make before with the national lacrosse league. The 40,000 people that you have, it’s not just that you have their name in emails, you have their trust, right? Your open rates are really high. It’s because people trust you and you’ve earned their trust by… It’s funny, it’s simple in concept, hard to execute. But I still believe that curation, your ability to curate content and that concept in general, is something that most brands could be doing in their own marketplace to build the trust. “Hey, I’m doing a service for you.”
Joe: If they wanted to. And I think that again, people are so focused on today that they don’t take a breath and say, “Well, this is great, but what are we doing to keep things moving forward?” And the problem, as you know, Jay is if you’re not thinking about what’s down the line, at least for a portion of your time, it passes you by right away and suddenly you’re screwed. I think my goal is to always be looking ahead and figuring out how you put the pieces together. Now I don’t know, I’m not smart enough to know how to put all those pieces together and people say, “Well, how do you know what to put in the newsletter?” I always use the analogy of Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, where-
Jay: My favorite movie.
Joe: He looks at an equation, and he sees things that other people see, but he would look at a piano and know how to play it. And it’s just something when I look at an article, or I’ll hear something… And listening is a big part of that by the way, which we don’t do enough listening sometimes. I just listen to something and I’m like, “Oh, there it is.” And I literally just grabbed a quote out of an article yesterday that I saw. I just thought it was… It wasn’t my words, but it was kind of profound, and I have oh, there’s my quote for this week. And I know over the course of 72 hours how to curate all that stuff and drop it in, and then I send it off to a really good partner in SmartBrief, and they make it look beautiful, and it goes out on Sunday morning.
Jay: Well that’s awesome. Well, let’s bring it home here with, you talked about looking ahead to the future and you have your own Petri dish right? At Columbia. You have Tomorrow Stars Today. Share what are the topics that we’re talking about that are most resonant, right? You’ve got podcasts and gambling, all sorts of things going on in the wild, wild west of sports media. What’s bubbling up in your classroom?
Joe: I think the one thing that we see more and more is measurement, and how measurement is going to continue to evolve, and how you can use data to, to create not just a fluid fan, but how you can use that to really engage beyond what you’re doing now. And part of that is driving new revenue sources, and also being more and more personal to people who you’re trying to get discretionary dollars from. So what does that audience look like? Who’s doing the best job? Who’s listening to people, who’s doing good jobs and storytelling? What brands are selling the best and why are people buying them? I think all that’s important. When you look forward, there are areas that I look at that I think are just going to keep growing. Gaming, not, not e-sports, but gaming overall and personal gamification I think is going to be a big one.
And it’s continuing to evolve. Part of that is gambling, but part of it is just talking amongst your peer group and growing your peer group globally, if you’re watching the game. I think what ESPN has done with the Megacast, you’re going to see more and more of those types of things where people can pick and choose how they’re watching, and when they’re watching it. So there’s that. I Think health and wellness is going to continue to grow. There is a gaping hole in this society right now around mental health, and I think that that’s going to be another topic that big pharma is going to be involved with, and is going to be spending money against, because it’s from the pressure that the teens are putting on themselves, to the highest level of professional athletes. People like Kevin Love and other people who are okay to talk about that stuff. I think there’s a business there.
You look at cannabis and CBD, I think that’s going to be a big business going forward. I think in the short term there’s going to be more money spent there than against gambling because gambling is going to take a longer time to play out. I think the whole NIL issue is going to continue to grow. And I think one of the things that we tell students is there’s really a few things that you need to do. You need to number one, be a good person. You need to be socially conscious. You have to understand cause and cause marketing and how that fits into everything.
I think you have to have an understanding of coding, even a casual understanding of coding because analytics and data is going to become more and more, no matter what business you’re in. Whether you are a groundskeeper, making sure that you’re watering the field enough, whether you are working in a concession stand and making sure that you know all the product that is flowing out is flowing out at the right time. Whether you’re a general manager picking a team, I think all that is going to be based on how you reach the analyzing, and use data that comes in properly and efficiently.
And then the last thing that we talk about is time management. How do you manage your time best with everything that’s out there, so that you’re not wasting time, and that you’re learning every day? It’s so important to be learning every day, and kind of weeding everything, figuring out what it is that can take you as a person, and as a professional, to move ahead. And I think that’s really important. My class, we start my class every day off with… And I learned this from my then four year old, now six year old twin nieces, because they said it to me once. We start off my class, and I ask them all one question, I had no idea. So we go around the room and ask them what is the one thing that they learned from the past class that they had no idea about?
And they can talk about what subway they took, why it’s important to put queso on something that they ate today. Or why a certain player is wearing sneakers, or someone dedicated to a cause, and it gets them to think about things. And I think that’s really valuable. And I could go 20 minutes without saying I had no idea about something. And I think that’s important for us to be introspective, and look at those things, and figure out how it applies to where we go and don’t go.
Jay: Love the nonstop learning from Joe Favorito. @JoeFav on Twitter, JoeFavorito.com for the newsletter. Joe, thanks so much for joining us today, and you just triggered a, heard a Nelson Mandela quote yesterday that kind of speaks to this, and he said, “I never lose. I either win or I’m learning.” And I think that sums up you pretty well. So really appreciate the time and insights, my friend.
Joe: Thanks Jay.
Jay: Thanks for listening to Brand Story Inc. We’ll be back next week with another conversation digging into the ways companies are becoming like media companies. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and give me a follow on Twitter, @_JaySharman, and on LinkedIn.