I had an interesting conversation with Dude Perfect CEO Andrew Yaffe — in spite of his Duke basketball fandom — at SBJ’s Brand Innovation Summit earlier this month. I wanted to share some of my takeaways from his thoughts about the sports fandom of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Both groups are of particular concern to many in the sports industry.
Family friendly
Dude Perfect’s family-friendly slant is ideal at a time when parents (including me!) are almost universally concerned about what their children might stumble upon while perusing the web. Dude Perfect has foregone sponsorship dollars from alcohol and sports betting companies and is pitching its app as a safer online space, which, again, as parent, is a compelling argument even if I understand how it benefits Dude Perfect to play within their walled environment.
Many sports properties would say they’re not in a position to shirk sponsorship deals with alcohol or betting brands, but it hasn’t hurt Dude Perfect.
I’d interpret family-friendly in another way. Family is often the most fruitful breeding ground for lifelong sports fandom, and the first seeds are often sewed at a live event. Apologies for sounding preachy, but the sports industry can’t let live sports become the domain of just affluent adults.
Social media
Yaffe, who was formerly an NBA EVP overseeing social media, digital and original content, was blunt in his assessment of sports properties’ social media: They’re doing a bad job. To be fair, the individuals working on social media teams are handcuffed by a risk-averse industry. But the lack of creativity, whatever the reason, is unavoidable to Yaffe’s eyes.
Yaffe: “If you put a YouTube native creator in charge of those assets and said, ‘Hey, come back with 10 ideas that could generate millions of views on YouTube,’ they would look nothing like what teams and leagues and properties are currently putting on YouTube. Too much of what happens on social and digital is really just a re-created version of existing content elsewhere, and it doesn’t work.”
Younger fans’ consumption
Yaffe does not subscribe to the “kids have no attention span these days” theory that is widely held by non-kids.
Yaffe: “The good news, and I truly believe this, is that there’s no shortage of sports fandom. Kids are not any less interested or excited about competition and sports. The way they consume it is totally different. The way kids are consuming sports looks a lot more like Dude Perfect and Jesser and Mr. Beast than it does sitting down and watching a two-and-a-half-hour game, and just pumping out more of that is not going to change that. It’s really on leagues and properties and teams and sports to figure out what are the connections we can make, what are the stories we can tell, what are the formats that work to fish where the fish are. ... It’s not about shorter; it’s about finding the right format that audiences are actually consuming.”
