World Cup, Walled Gardens And The Future Of Local Sports Advertising

The World Cup may be the biggest event in global sports, but for local advertisers it's also one of the toughest places to buy media. Premium inventory is scarce, streaming is reshaping how rights are sold, and the next World Cup could look very different if platforms like Netflix enter the bidding.

On the latest episode of In the Vicinity, Tim Hanlon and Madhive's Anthony Campanella break down how broadcasters, streamers and local advertisers are navigating today's sports media landscape—and why the lessons extend far beyond soccer. 

From the future of MLB and NBA local rights to the growing importance of streaming, programmatic buying and ZIP-code-level targeting, they explore how live sports could become the catalyst for the next generation of local advertising.

Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Tim Hanlon: Come on over. You're In the Vicinity. How are you doing? My name's Tim Hanlon, the founder and CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, and I'm your humble and congenial host for our little weekly sojourn into all things local media. Thanks for coming on by, and happy to have you along as we welcome back Madhive's VP of Inventory, Partnerships, and Operations, and dedicated sports guru, Anthony Campanella.

It's been a couple of months since we had him on to explore and decipher what's going on in the realm of sports, and certainly a lot has happened since. And this week is no exception, as we dig deep into probably the biggest sports media property out there at the moment. Of course, that's the World Cup, which continues on as we record this and as we drop this on a Tuesday during anticipation of two high-quality semifinal and ultimately final matches later in the week. Anthony will help us break down the unique scenarios that bedevil local advertisers when it comes to major events such as the World Cup, the limitations of inventory and the local idiosyncrasies of the available inventory, that kind of stuff.

And we'll also do some speculation as streaming becomes more of a literally and figuratively mainstream component to these sports rights, and maybe how that might change and maybe either further complicate or maybe greatly aid local advertising when it comes to these major events as streamers become more dominant in delivering these games versus, say, broadcasters like the Foxes and the Telemundo NBCUniversals that we know today as being the historic deliverers of such things.

And we'll also get a little bit into reading the tea leaves about what s- leagues like Major League Baseball and the NBA are thinking about doing as they look to rehab their local media offerings in the wake of the collapse of regional sports networks and the like. A full plate.

Let's get to it now. Here's my chat with Anthony Campanella from Madhive. Please, as always, enjoy.

Remind our audience how and where you sit in the Madhive firmament, and the sports stuff that you are especially exposed to and/or supposedly expert in 

Anthony Campanella: Yeah. So again, Anthony Campanella. I'm the vice president of inventory operations here at Madhive. I oversee all of our inventory partnerships, but also our inventory-based products, and that includes live sports.

So we have our live sports marketplace. I do all of our negotiations, if you will, as well as making sure that we set up individual sports products to ensure that we're actually running in live broadcasts 

Tim Hanlon: So let's get into it. Let's talk specifically about what's been going on with respect to the World Cup, because unlike, say, the local sports broadcasters taking over for whatever's collapsing in our sense, and we'll come back to that because there were some new things that have happened since we last talked on that front.

But maybe you can describe the, quote-unquote, "local dynamic" here, because the Fox and Telemundo English slash Spanish respectively rights holders. There's a component of both that are networks, and there's a component of those that are local TV stations. And in the case of Fox, there is also a cable component to it too, which has some local flavor to it.

How do you break that down for, shall we say, the sports uninitiated advertiser that wants to be part of this World Cup thing, but maybe doesn't understand the dynamics of how these games are being delivered here this year? 

Anthony Campanella: Yeah, I think one thing too right off the bat to discuss is like when you talk about soccer in general, and especially even the World Cup, there's limitations on scale even though viewership increases.

So I'm sure everybody's noticed the water breaks, which is relatively new. Those are TV timeouts, right? Those are advertising dollars coming in, and I think we all know that. I think even the common viewer understands that's what those are for. But that being said, when we talk about it running in the US, who actually carries the rights, in this case, Fox for the English broadcast, NBC with Telemundo for the Spanish.

They are not only making it available for national and big box type brands, they also are making it available to local. The biggest differentiator though than I would say say your standard MLB product or an NBA or a game that's happening more often, this happens every four years, they are really tightening up on what is actually able to be resold, what's sold programmatically, and then of course, their focus is on the direct sold, right?

So they give rights to their affiliates, okay, to sell this and package it within their local market ascent, and that's directly sold. A lot of it is IO-based. It's hosted on their ad servers. It's hosted through programmatic guaranteed deals, and that goes also for the Spanish language as well. We do see folks like DirecTV still have some carriage rights, but it's minimal.

We're seeing more, I would say, Spanish language available for purchase programmatically. But really, at the end of the day, a lot of this has been sold out months prior. So though the access is still there locally, getting in there is really more of a direct play. It's not necessarily that programmatic play that we've been discussing in the past in other conversations.

But because of how it is broken out for the cable providers, how it's broken out to the local stations and of course, Fox National, we are looking at it from ... There is access, but you have to go directly to the source in this case and buy it directly from the publishers to actually scale this out.

Tim Hanlon: So especially the Fox television broadcasts and the Telemundo national broadcasts, right? We're already limiting ourselves to local availability to the proverbial two or three minutes worth of, not even that, probably even less, right? In the traditional television network/affiliate or O&O avail split, right?

The vast majority, right? Unlike cable, which has a little bit more inventory. But the Fox Sports 1 thing adds at least a cable element to it, but you're only nibbling around the edges because that's only the English, and it's only on maybe 35 or 30% of the inventory.

Same with Telemundo with their Universo cable thing for the knockout game final, the final third games of each of the knockout rounds, right? So yes, some cable exclusivity, if you will, for these games, but that inventory is a little bit more available, but also probably very limited.

Anthony Campanella: Correct. And again, to safeguard the publisher who owns the rights who paid a lot of money to host this, right? That's why they're protective, especially for, think back when NBC had the Winter Olympics, now we're talking about Fox having the FIFA World Cup.

They are intentionally gatekeeping, which they should in this case. It's the rights that they have. Again they're making it available within the networks to where they can sell it at a local level as well as the cable providers. Like you mentioned, even though it is a smaller chunk, it's still scale, right?

And it's still a national broadcast in the sense of like we're simulcasting these games, but there is an allotment for that local delivery that gets digitally ad inserted ahead of time. It's paced out. It's broken out, and this is another reason why it's also important that they're selling more that's direct instead of the real-time programmatic offering.

Yeah. 

Tim Hanlon: All right. So tell me how streaming this time you think might have an angle or a role or a lever here in all this, right? Because Fox Sports with their Fox One platform has been very elegantly streaming these games, either authenticated through cable or MVPD packages or as a subscription product.

And same for Peacock on the Telemundo NBCUniversal front, right? Both are different in terms of the way they go to market with advertising but have you been able to discern, take advantage of, or at least anecdotally hear perhaps if there's newfound inventory there, or is that another way to get into getting some more impressions that wouldn't ordinarily be available should they not be streamed and simulcast in that fashion?

Anthony Campanella: Yeah, I think any time you have a streaming landscape programmatic becomes more prevalent, and when it goes unsold, you can have access, right? That's the nature of any of this moving to streaming, right? There it creates more supply, creates more opportunities for your ad bits.

Here again, it's still very tight. Programmatic is very much like… We sell it programmatically but it is something that we say it shouldn't be a standalone, quite honestly, because scale's limited if you're buying it programmatically. That said, though, I think the bigger opportunity here is not necessarily looking at the scale available, but if you're buying this directly through the streamers, you get new KPIs, right?

I think in the past, everybody felt like attention when we talk about linear, when we talk about reaching in the moment. But now there's measurement, right? You have that real-time measurement that you may have not had before with linear TV. Streaming allows for more audience development.

It allows for more data points to be passed and, in turn, also gives the advertisers more information to actually process beyond, "Hey, I had X amount of eyeballs watch my ad," right? And I think that's the biggest play that Fox and Telemundo's pushed out here is that it's going beyond the viewership.

It's going through, am I getting a lift in sales? Am I driving people to my website to purchase? Am I getting inbound leads for my car dealership outside New York? Whatever it may be. And It's also allowing for true audience extension around the World Cup. So maybe you're not necessarily getting access to the live broadcast, but now you're building on additional data sets, additional geofencing within the area.

We saw it in New York just on the immediate host markets, right? New York was kind of number one. They had 1.7 million households on average tuning in to the opening rounds, and those are areas that in bars, those are in households that you can also target through mobile and through desktop.

So going through the streaming landscape instead of the traditional linear, you're gonna have more touch points, you're gonna have more informed data, and you're also gonna be able to hit more KPIs than just audience reach. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, I think people forget that shoulder programming is a big part of this mixture.

So for example, on the local front here in Chicago watching games on the Fox owned and operated station historically known as Channel 32, WFLD, whether it be through the stream on the authenticated app or through my cable provider, right? I do see Chicago Fire MLS ads but mostly in between the games or during the shoulder programming not during the games themselves. So number one, it's not just about the games themselves. Of course, that's the highest value stuff, but there's plenty of shoulder and pre- and post-game kinds of stuff as well as extended programming.

The James Corden midnight show and all these kinds of extra stuff that Fox at least has been putting to market. But I think it's also important to recognize too that with major tentpole events like this there is a distinct lack, we haven't said this word but I'll throw it in there, scatter in the mixture, right?

It's not, all of a sudden, a couple of weeks before the big event you start to recognize, "Oh my God, we're gonna have this is a great opportunity." But there may not be that much inventory to get in the first place because much of those tentpole kinds of things have been effectively bought out and probably most benefited by those who have official sponsorships, and they get first looks at this kind of stuff, if not even guaranteed media as part of these packages.

Anthony Campanella: No, it's 100% accurate. And I think if you want to be part of the moment, you have to, in this case, look beyond the live broadcast. And it doesn't mean you can't deliver an ad while somebody's watching the game, it's just not necessarily gonna be on the broadcast itself. And I think that's where good packaging, good planning, and the foresight to understand that hey, this is still an engaged user who's obviously watching the game, but also maybe looking up stats on espn.com, or looking up their favorite player on Fandom, whatever it may be.

And going that route and making sure that they are being part of the moment and not necessarily having to be part of the live play. And I'm a big proponent of you need to be clear too on what you're packaging. We're very clear on what we package, right? If it's not live, it's not part of our live broadcast package.

But we have the sports genre, we have the soccer genre. There's ways to target around it but it has to be also informative. You can't just say, "Look, here's the World Cup." If I'm an advertiser buying and I hear, "Here's the World Cup," I'm expecting to see my ad on the World Cup broadcast. So you need to also understand what you're buying, and the partners like us need to be very clear on what we're actually selling to these advertisers.

One thing I wanna bring up around that too, and I think it's important, is because whenever there's big dollar signs because this costs money in there, there's always going to be those bad actors. We saw the US Department of Justice actually get involved on an ad tech thing with operational sides.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. 

Tim Hanlon: Describe some of the background around that. 

Anthony Campanella: Yeah. So I think it's pretty interesting that, you got these massive media companies like Fox and NBC said, "Hey, this is a problem." It doesn't start with just "Hey, maybe we should look into this."

It's the publishers leaning in as well too. So they teamed up with Tag. Tag and the DOJ identified 400 pirated sites that were doing it, shut them down, and that not only protects the publisher and their brands, but it protects the integrity for the advertiser, it protects the integrity of the broadcast for FIFA, and it protects the integrity of data or technology pipes like Madhive and other DSPs that are going out to market with this saying, this is how you have to do it to perform well.

So it was really nice to see prior to the actual broadcast or even a little bit into it, them identifying and blocking that. So again all this shows is that there are limitations in live sports. There is a limitation in scale, there's a limitation on how many ad units are here. But then when you stack it on every four years, plus the minimal amount of actual ad breaks during the game, you have to be creative but also clear on how you can actually enjoy that moment, and not necessarily have to buy the live broadcast while you're in there.

Tim Hanlon: Okay. Let's put that aside for a second, and riddle me this scenario. So as we record this, FIFA has not yet opened up the conversation around what the 2030 or 2034 tournaments, which might be bundled together again. It's been certainly heavily reported in the industry trades that Fox essentially got a sweetheart deal for these rights, effectively underpaying for them for a whole bunch of reasons related to lawsuits and that kind of stuff.

Some, God forbid, FIFA being untoward in their business dealings. Can you imagine? And that's not gonna happen again, right? And now the speculation is can Fox or even NBC/Telemundo even afford to bid what will likely be at least double if not more expensive rights and stuff.

Now, here's the question: enter in this looming streaming competition. And the biggest rumor in the streaming world is Netflix might decide to make a play for it. Let's assume for just for this argument, and I'd like to hear your opinion on this, that a streamer gets either or both the, let's stick with the United States, US English and/or Spanish rights and effectively takes it away from what we know generally for big sporting events to be broadcast and/or cable and/or, in certain cases, local stations, that mixture, right?

At least we talked about the limitations of inventory and all that kind of stuff, but at least it's the devil we know, right? All the idiosyncrasies, we've had decades of experience trying to figure out how to rigmarole coverage for advertisers and that kind of stuff, official, unofficial, whatever.

Now take all that, put that aside, and let's say Netflix has all of it. Let's just say it's English. How does that dynamic change? Because some of the things we've talked about before, it almost resets how they would go to market not only for national and endemic advertisers of the FIFA label, but also how even local marketers could access this.

And maybe perhaps even more via programmatic pipes. I'm projecting here, but what do you think about that dynamic? Does that excite you or worry you more? And how do you think that maybe plays out if that happens? 

Anthony Campanella: I think it's both exciting and worrisome. You gotta love the fact that the value of streaming is being recognized, right?

The value of being able to buy the rights to this stuff, push it out there, monetize it, be creative on the type of ad formats that you also can do too. We've all been watching a live Netflix or an Amazon Prime where we see a specific type of ad unit that actually plays during the event.

We see it at Thursday Night Football, we see it on Netflix during NBA games, Christmas games, et cetera. You're going to see that type of creative delivery of ads, right? And that to me actually could help create more supply. But at the same time, you have to have very specific relationships and connections to those pipes.

What I just named there are two very much kind of walled gardens, right? Amazon Prime only being available through the Amazon DSP, and Netflix only available on a handful of DSPs, and they're looking to mostly in-house a lot of what they do, as they should, because that's what most of the streamers are doing.

But when you do have that walled garden that's not available widely you do in turn hurt the local advertiser. You're going to always prioritize national first in that case. You also have to look at what is being sent in the bid request itself. Netflix is going to be very protective of their data.

Maybe they're not going to allow those third-party measurement pixels. And that can in turn hurt the delivery as well as the results of buying a very expensive type of campaign with the World Cup. So to answer your question, yeah, I see it going that way. And we also know, too, Netflix, Amazon Prime, NBCU, like just on Peacock, they're willing to spend more just to capture it and figure it out later, and that makes it a lot harder for the traditional broadcasters to compete with.

Tim Hanlon: I'll go one step further. I think there's also a lack of sophistication that these major streamers have, perhaps in that order when it comes to, quote-unquote, local, right? A lot of the streaming local stuff is largely programmatic driven and not downstream professionally sold, so to speak, right?

So there's a plus and a minus to the Netflix environment for a World Cup, et cetera, right? The plus is that, okay, literally the zip plus four is king, and you can make and slice and stuff. But the reality is that's gonna be very hard to offer as a self-serve when you've got endemic advertisers or FIFA-branded advertisers or that paid for the rights for the title that need to be satisfied or at least first looked protected.

I guess that's the really interesting thing. So let's assume that one of these two major streamers do enter that mix. It almost seems like they would have to truly get their local ad sales proposition figured out way in advance of that. And it seems to linger out there that this is a latent opportunity that these major streamers have really not yet gone that next level down to understand the local marketplace, right?

Maybe it's an acquisition or two away, maybe that's a Madhive. There's a solution there that can make that happen. But I think that's an open question, and that's not just for big sports. But if that were to happen, I think they'd have to immediately or quickly gravitate towards more of a, at least having some portion of the inventory being a more locally sold environment that is not just a free-for-all in do it yourself programmatic.

Anthony Campanella: Yeah, I also think these streamers are different phases too. Netflix is what? One year and a half of having an ads business at least where they're actually selling programmatically as well too, but just having ads in general. Someone like ESPN, Hulu, Disney bundle, right?

They do have a local strategy. They also leverage ABC Local. And then you have Paramount Plus that's leveraging CBC, CBS local, Peacock, NBC local, et cetera. So they have that, right? So when you have the arms of a local broadcaster as part of a larger streaming service, I think the strategy's in place.

Someone like Netflix, which has always been a national type of brand, yes, that has to be a focus if they really want to play in that, in that space. But everybody knows you wanna find revenue, you find it at local. Local is consistently growing. There is obviously a ton of dollars in national, but it becomes flat eventually.

So if they're going to do this, they also need to tap into those local markets, and there's no way in my opinion you're gonna make that type of investment, especially four years from now, without having that local strategy. So yes, they might be at a disadvantage right now, but I would think that if they do go that route, they understand that sports are local at its best, and they're gonna need to have that local strategy in place before the next tentpole or the next major event that they purchase.

Tim Hanlon: And I also think there's a level of maturity that local can evolve to when you throw in streaming either mixed with the traditional local delivery assets or not with. This ability to sub DMA target, to regionalize, to allow an advertiser to buy maybe only through their own proprietary mappings of their own locations, for example, if they're a retailer, right?

Which belies the traditional DMA or holding your nose if you're a political candidate and then a gerrymander, right? You wanna get more specific, and that fungibility really I think is a huge opportunity for both sides, right? To evolve the traditional linear local product, which is take it or leave it.

And the programmatic self-serve thing, which is people step up and add some secret sauce, but it's a free-for-all, right? Without sort of some professional hand-holding or frankly local knowledge on the street. To me, it just feels like one big giant opportunity, and sports maybe is the catalyst.

Anthony Campanella: Yeah, I also look like we can plug Madhive obviously with this as well too. That is why the larger streamers that we are partnered with really love working with us, because we unlock for them that local revenue without them having to have, feet on the ground, if you will, right?

So we're built for local, that zip plus four, the geo-recency, being able to target DMA, state, regional, whatever it may be. Having that built specifically for local is an advantage to work with Madhive. And those who are still focused just on the national, I think they're starting to see that through conversations that we have internally, what's out in the news, what with acquisitions that are happening where there is a local for an SMB focus.

It is becoming more and more of a table stakes that you need to have a local strategy to continue to grow, especially in this space. 

Tim Hanlon: Okay, let's wrap up with this not so elegant segue. I hinted at it before as we got our microphones hot and running here. Both Major League Baseball and the NBA have recently hired new heads of quote unquote local media, and both of the leagues have their own idiosyncrasies.

The Major League Baseball thing is tied up not just in media rights, but also potential lockouts and players and all that the union stuff, to the point where there might not even be a season next year if you believe in the negativity of all that. But the NBA in particular is a little bit more solid in terms of those deals. But both still have this major issue to figure out. How do you think they are going to approach this national into local or local into national harmonization strategy? Because it seems like baseball certainly is much more polyglot than even the NBA is.

But even the NBA with the collapse of most, not all, the regional sports networks, right? There is a desire, with the NHL sitting on the sidelines, to harmonize better national rights and local rights in a way that is a little bit more understandable for not only viewers, but also the advertisers involved in this.

Because it's been just nuts trying to find out where a game is or following your team or whatever. And on those local rights, right? If you wanna follow your team and be a religious follower of the club, it requires a spreadsheet just to keep up. What do you think these leagues have in mind for local when it comes to how to solve for all of this?

Anthony Campanella: I know we discussed it kinda high level too, and then kinda if we had to do a crystal ball, where are these gonna go? And I still feel like having these, the MLB.TVs and then having distribution partners that can have national reach but with local focus, right? MLB.TV is a really good example with the ESPN deal.

I see more of that. I see that happening also with NBA and NBA TV maybe keeping some of their rights and then going out and selling and saying, "Okay, we're gonna air these on NBA TV," but it may be a distribution through an Amazon, it may be a distribution through ESPN, and getting more scale that way, but also, allowing the in-market to sell still, right?

So long way of me saying is they need to reduce the, I would say, rigidity of the viewership, right? There are so many different options. But if they have one app that they can download or one place that they can go and they know that I can swipe through and I can find my in-market game, or if I'm located here, I know I'm gonna get my in-house team, that is gonna make it easier, and I think that's where the focus is going to be. How do we not only maximize the dollar, which is still gonna be the biggest driver, but also how do we keep it in maybe three or four spots instead of 50, right?

Because that's really where it's at right now, is there, and especially with the RSNs, I think it's gonna be really hard for a YES Network to give up the rights to the Yankees or to then outbid it. But every market's not like that, right? So you're still gonna have your biggest market teams that are going to push to keep a lot of their stuff at the regional sports network.

But the smaller markets, the big national match-ups, that is gonna be where they get a lot more sophisticated, and I think they're gonna start leveraging their own in-house apps, their own in-house platforms to actually scale that way, and then use the traditional partners like the ESPNs and Fox Sports, et cetera, to push out the additional distribution.

And I'll give you a really good example, too, we talk about what's going on with Roku and Fox purchasing that. That to me is 100% a distribution play for sports, first and foremost. And I think that's also where they're gonna go back to the leagues now and say, "Hey, great, you wanna use your app, all this," whatever it may be, "let us still be your distribution arm."

And I think that's where a lot of this is gonna move to. 

Tim Hanlon: Okay, let me let me ask you this in a different final kind of way. Do you think that potentially extends into full-on league-owned and operated game production as well? I see a number of leagues, secondary leagues or whatever, as they go to market and maybe they don't have the premier rights and stuff.

Yeah, you get as much more key rights as you can getting an ESPN/ABC, Disney or whomever, and they're responsible for not only the sales of the advertising, but also the production of the matches and games, right? But you look at, say, things like USL Soccer which is second and third division soccer here in this country, or Major League Soccer with their Apple TV thing, a little bit different.

That's a national upon national kind of thing, right? But it feels to me like there's almost a strong desire or stronger desire to control perhaps the production so that at least that comes across uniformly in, quote-unquote, "local environments." And maybe at the edge, allow broadcast teams and, ancillary reportage and maybe camera angles and that kind of stuff atop that.

But it almost feels to me like one of the major solves for this is to unify the local production quality components graphics, that kind of stuff, and then discern what the unique local appendages should be, and not have to rely on an RSN coming or going, or a local station coming or going, and force them to have to learn how to do this, and worse, add to the variety of experience that consumers have to experience.

For an NBA you've got three national rights holders, I think, and the local thing, right? So three plus, let's say, one common local delivery environment. That's only four environments I gotta get myself attached to, right? Versus further dissipation. I don't know, maybe I'm just dreaming about that, but what do you think?

Do you think they're gonna get aligned to that? 

Anthony Campanella: Yeah, I think you started answering your own question there, which I love, right? Because that's where my brain was going. 

Look, it's one of those things where I think automation in general is not just about automation in ad operations, it's not automation in content.

Automation in production is a real thing. You see it in Hollywood, you're gonna see it more when it comes to, how can we do cost to savings efficiencies? What can we set up that standardizes the experience that still doesn't feel dull? But I'm looking at us right now, right?

We're in two different states. We're literally set up in a templatized, ready-to-go type of format. Why can it not also be that way to eliminate some of the overhead costs where you have positioned cameras? You're able to flip through as you go. You minimize the amount of overhead that's needed there, and you have your producers that are literally, or your hosts that are literally logged in, you're in front of the camera, speaker's ready to go, and they're calling the game in this system that is built in-house.

That is not a stretch to think that is possible, and becomes more cost efficient than these big productions that a TNT or an ESPN are putting on right now when they buy these rights and to have these broadcast rights. So I think if that's where they go they can find a way to not only make more money and keep more of the share, if you will, but also still have a really good experience with a lot less of the overhead.

Tim Hanlon: Okay, here's my last question, and I'm just curious as to what your take is. I don't wanna put you on the spot, but I'm gonna. NFL RedZone, right? We know that is a must-have for most NFL junkies if you have availability for it and they just started to allow some forms of advertising in that mixture.

It's a whip-around. It literally goes to all the games and stuff and we've seen nibbles of the same kind of idea, the whip-around show elsewhere. But it's really starting to get a little bit more mainstream interest, right? Especially as ESPN now has purchased all the media assets of the NFL, and has promised or threatened to bring that wraparound type of technology and coverage that the NFL has perfected into other sports that ESPN has to carry, like college football and college basketball and the like.

MLS does it with their MLS 360 and Major League Baseball has their thing called Big Inning. But I guess the question is, are we gonna see more of that? I think the answer is yes, and is that also attractive enough for advertisers, or is it too distracting and ADD, or is it maybe more so because it's so essential for comprehensiveness of coverage of a league?

Anthony Campanella: Think about the why on this too, right? We have a new generation of sports fans that are coming through that have grown up on the Facebooks, the TikToks, the Instagrams. Their attention spans are smaller. They wanna get straight to the action. I think the advertising experience, if done properly like you're gonna have people like me who have had RedZone for over a decade that don't wanna see an ad pop up when they're watching their game.

You're going to have this new generation that's kinda used to that interruption to understand that they need to go through this as part of the actual experience. I think that it could enhance it because of where we are as an audience, right? And, you have Goal Line for NCAA football, you have RedZone for NFL, you have the NBA what's it called? Hard Floor or Hard Court, I can't remember the exact name. But you have these specific ones for each sport, and that's because the consumption is now, "I don't wanna see all the in between." The actual action in a football game is maybe 20 minutes, right? So it's a no-brainer to monetize that with not just subscription, but also the advertising dollars.

And I think you're gonna see, again, it's gonna become one of the staples when people go out to market and do their media plans for live sports to have these types of wraparounds, still live broadcasts, but really just in the action, and that's gonna come with a very tremendous CPM as well too. 

Tim Hanlon: I would imagine so. I think you're dead-on with that because if you're a real fan certainly your local team becomes your passion and your obsession. But there's really something that can't be beat when you really see what's going around in the league. And maybe your team's not playing, but it's a real good pulse take of what's going on.

And it's the closest thing to being in every game without having to go to every game, right? I don't know, I just, I think you're right. I think the allure of what consumers are looking for, especially the younger ones who've grown up on social first. Yeah, we'll see. I'll take a flyer on that.

But yeah, I think some of the ad opportunities there are extant and maybe that is a way to segue to, from pure subscription for these kinds of things to maybe ad-supported. And hey, look, all the major streamers did it, right? Including famously Netflix, who said they'd never go to advertising, right?

Anthony Campanella: Exactly. 

Tim Hanlon: So Anthony, thank you very much. We'll look forward to seeing you in a couple more months' time, and we'll know the World Cup winner at that point, and maybe we'll have a little bit more clarity about what the local propositions are for these leagues and some other news and nuggets too.

So thanks. 

Anthony Campanella: Thanks, Tim. Appreciate you having me.

Tim Hanlon: My thanks to Anthony. More sports stuff to come in the weeks and months ahead. We look forward to having him and others back as sports continues to outpace, I think everything else that's going on in the media world, and maybe even dictate where all forms of media, local included, are going.

Our thanks, of course, not only to Anthony, but the entire team at Madhive. Jim Wilson, of course, Stephanie Nerby, and others. And of course, the magnificent staff at TVREV that helps create the environment for us to do these podcasts for you each and every week. Melissa Hourigan, of course, and Jessika Walsten, the great Jason Damata, and of course, the inimitable Jerry Payne, whose audio excellence behind the boards enables us to sound somewhat coherent each and every week.

We thank you for listening, telling your friends, and having them tell two friends, and so on. And we'll see you next week here In the Vicinity. Take care.