Kelly Mosier, Director of HUDL Studios, Social Media

Rick Alloway Author

10/12/2020 Added

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[00:00:05.760]Our guest this afternoon is Kelly Mosier,
[00:00:07.930]who is the director of HUDL Studios here
[00:00:11.420]in Lincoln and alum of the college of journalism
[00:00:13.680]and mass communications, former student staff member
[00:00:16.910]for 90.3 KRNU in the college of journalism
[00:00:19.459]and the broadcasting major.
[00:00:21.330]Kelly, thanks for your time this afternoon.
[00:00:23.040]I appreciate you having me with you.
[00:00:24.900]For folks who are new
[00:00:26.300]to Nebraska and may not know exactly what HUDL is,
[00:00:31.600]could you give us the elevator speech
[00:00:33.160]on what the organization's about?
[00:00:35.120]For sure.
[00:00:35.953]Yeah, HUDL is one
[00:00:37.280]of the world's leading sports software companies.
[00:00:39.708]Imagine that based right here in Lincoln, Nebraska.
[00:00:43.330]Really, we have products that span every corner of sports.
[00:00:46.020]So we go all the way down to the youth sports level
[00:00:49.020]and then all the way up to the elite of the elite.
[00:00:52.770]Some fun facts on that I like to tell people is we have
[00:00:55.725]for instance, amateur quiddish teams
[00:00:59.620]on the platform that use the platform.
[00:01:01.322]We also have all
[00:01:02.733]but one NBA team and major league deals with, you know
[00:01:07.485]the English premier league, the Buenas League, a bunch
[00:01:11.020]of very large professional sports leagues too.
[00:01:13.280]So really, really runs the gamut on what we do.
[00:01:16.333]The primary products that HUDL provide is video analysis
[00:01:20.720]for sports, more or less.
[00:01:23.600]It gives coaches
[00:01:24.433]and players the ability to watch their film back from games,
[00:01:27.229]provide analysis and contextual information on top of that.
[00:01:30.570]And then with
[00:01:31.403]inside of that, we also have a sort of a light social media
[00:01:36.280]for amateur athletes in the United States geared more
[00:01:39.650]towards high school athletes where athletes can get on,
[00:01:42.541]share their highlights for recruiting purposes,
[00:01:45.070]create highlights for recruiting purposes,
[00:01:46.605]but then also engage with content and consume stuff
[00:01:49.997]about how to get better, how to get noticed, and just
[00:01:54.420]in general, how to use video to get better at sports.
[00:01:58.570]So what I do within the HUDL Studios team
[00:02:00.925]is we program that content
[00:02:03.101]in for our athletes.
[00:02:04.973]Like I said whether that's just helping athletes get noticed
[00:02:08.077]all the way to helping them with their hand technique
[00:02:12.140]as an offensive line, all those kind of run the gamut
[00:02:14.900]of things that we try to do.
[00:02:16.998]If memory serves me the high school component
[00:02:20.109]of it was kind of the starting point for HUDL, wasn't it?
[00:02:22.630]Yeah, for sure.
[00:02:23.463]So we started, technically,
[00:02:25.370]we started in the NFL, but after a few years
[00:02:28.670]of not getting a lot of traction with what was at the time
[00:02:31.850]essentially a digital playbook and going to a number
[00:02:35.290]of conferences where they'd have high school coaches say
[00:02:37.190]hey, if you could do this at the high school space,
[00:02:40.080]we'd love it.
[00:02:41.069]They went back
[00:02:41.902]to the drawing board a little bit, and we were actually one
[00:02:44.420]of the first companies to go fully on the cloud,
[00:02:47.068]which is what allowed us to scale into high school.
[00:02:49.570]So we took our software that traditionally
[00:02:52.380]at the elite levels,
[00:02:53.840]whether it's professional or collegiate, are run
[00:02:56.540]on internal servers that are restricted
[00:02:59.030]to the building.
[00:02:59.863]In order to scale up to high school
[00:03:01.900]to lower costs because high
[00:03:03.580]schools don't, most high schools don't have a ton
[00:03:05.380]of money to go buy their own server farm
[00:03:06.892]for their own sports programs.
[00:03:09.133]We moved it all to the cloud, meaning that coaches
[00:03:11.910]and athletes can access it anywhere in the world
[00:03:13.147]they have an internet connection.
[00:03:14.710]And that's really paid off for us.
[00:03:17.197]And really the biggest expansion point
[00:03:20.530]for us was when we got into helping athletes
[00:03:22.829]on the recruiting trail, allowing them a product that to get
[00:03:28.400]into HUDL, edit their highlights, create a recruiting reel
[00:03:31.220]on HUDL, and then send a digital link to coaches.
[00:03:34.420]I gotta remember before that everything
[00:03:36.270]was being burned onto DVDs or even VHS is if you're
[00:03:39.293]if you've got as much gray in your beard as you and I do.
[00:03:44.360]You probably remember that as well.
[00:03:46.029]Getting all that stuff online really exploded the market,
[00:03:50.460]made it scale.
[00:03:51.920]So we do have a pretty heavy emphasis
[00:03:53.690]and we call it competitive in the high school space.
[00:03:56.537]My team deals almost exclusively in that space,
[00:04:00.710]in the high school space.
[00:04:02.340]Okay, so how long have the, has the structure of the
[00:04:05.720]HUDL Studios been in place
[00:04:07.340]and how did you morph into that gig?
[00:04:10.090]That's a great question.
[00:04:11.114]But I'm honestly not 100% sure of.
[00:04:13.360]We've had an internal video production staff for
[00:04:16.877]quite a few years.
[00:04:18.509]In fact, a good friend of mine who's also a J School alum
[00:04:21.900]was one of the first people to really start
[00:04:24.550]doing that for HUDL.
[00:04:26.657]Our current iteration of HUDL Studios has been around
[00:04:30.210]for about three years,
[00:04:31.650]I'm in my second year at HUDL.
[00:04:34.813]So, we're trying to learn to how to be a media company,
[00:04:38.460]being a publisher, how to be more like ESPN
[00:04:42.410]and less like Microsoft Office.
[00:04:44.870]And we're getting closer to that for sure.
[00:04:48.025]But really we're only there years into it,
[00:04:50.320]so pretty early on.
[00:04:51.810]Okay.
[00:04:52.670]I got to ask you, are there professional quiddish teams,
[00:04:55.130]since you mentioned the amateur ones?
[00:04:57.480]I know the Ivy League.
[00:04:58.393]I don't think that they are sanctioned NCAA sports,
[00:05:01.280]but I know the Ivy League does have a quiddish league.
[00:05:04.429]Prior to your coming to HUDL, this is kind of where
[00:05:06.920]I want to get in the back story of your career.
[00:05:08.780]You've had a long career with the athletic department
[00:05:11.810]at the university and worked in Husker Vision
[00:05:15.700]for a long time.
[00:05:16.740]One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you today
[00:05:19.370]and have you visit with our students
[00:05:20.860]in a writing class was that you were somebody
[00:05:23.860]who fairly early on recognized the power of social media
[00:05:28.109]as something other than just a toy,
[00:05:31.625]that there could be ways to leverage
[00:05:34.173]the value of social media to help build brand,
[00:05:37.140]to help extend in your case Husker Nation beyond
[00:05:40.950]the borders of Memorial Stadium.
[00:05:43.370]So walk us through a little bit about how you went
[00:05:46.040]from being a rank and file Husker Vision fan,
[00:05:49.577]or not fan, but employee, and doing all the things they do
[00:05:52.380]on game day and when it began to sink in on you that
[00:05:56.810]maybe there was something going on with social media
[00:05:58.930]that we needed to pay a little more attention to.
[00:06:00.940]Yeah, for sure.
[00:06:01.860]I really came in at pretty much the perfect time.
[00:06:04.425]When I graduated undergrad that was right when
[00:06:08.890]Facebook was starting to scale across the country.
[00:06:11.790]So, for those that don't know,
[00:06:13.960]Facebook started just at Harvard
[00:06:15.736]and then they very selectively expanded across colleges
[00:06:18.930]across the country.
[00:06:20.008]And I remember the first Facebook account you had to have
[00:06:23.537]an @UNL.edu email address to even get into it
[00:06:25.945]because they were restricting it to just
[00:06:28.600]to within college kids.
[00:06:29.960]So, shortly after undergrad entering the workforce I went
[00:06:34.311]and worked full time for Husker Vision after having
[00:06:37.250]worked there as a student too.
[00:06:39.130]And Husker Vision is also a very innovative
[00:06:44.410]and forward thinking organization that's on campus too.
[00:06:48.345]We're actually, UNL was actually the first college
[00:06:51.500]to have a video board in their stadium
[00:06:54.985]for a college only football program.
[00:06:57.465]And so, when I got to Husker Vision it's sort of
[00:07:01.740]on the tail end of that being new and innovative.
[00:07:04.697]And a lot of other colleges were starting their
[00:07:07.640]own departments, own video departments,
[00:07:09.127]putting in their own big screens.
[00:07:10.950]And so a lot of the Husker Vision people that I knew
[00:07:14.530]that were just a couple years older than me
[00:07:16.441]they were all going out to Oklahoma, or the Houston Rockets,
[00:07:20.620]or Baylor, or the New York Nicks,
[00:07:22.745]all these places and running their big screens.
[00:07:25.760]And what I started noticing pretty quickly
[00:07:28.260]is that we were starting to hit a saturation point
[00:07:30.121]where most of the big jobs,
[00:07:32.450]the big school jobs, big team jobs
[00:07:34.890]were starting to get filled and filled by people my age,
[00:07:39.380]so relatively young people.
[00:07:41.135]And so I knew that my career path for progressing
[00:07:45.340]in my career was probably gonna have to be
[00:07:47.910]somewhat nontraditional from a big screen production path.
[00:07:51.159]The more I got into graduate school and the more
[00:07:55.620]I got to learning more and more about
[00:07:57.375]media operations and media business I started
[00:08:00.380]noticing that, okay, this seems like another avenue for
[00:08:06.372]expansion of media and we're in the early embryonic stages
[00:08:11.500]of it at the time where you can only post text to Facebook
[00:08:15.534]and maybe 140 character tweet.
[00:08:19.600]But it wasn't nearly what it is now, which is a
[00:08:21.970]full multimedia just attack on the senses
[00:08:25.729]when you get on the digital media space.
[00:08:28.910]So early on I kind of saw that for me selfishly this might
[00:08:33.870]be a way that I could grow my career that way.
[00:08:35.996]But then also, being from Nebraska, being passionate
[00:08:40.270]about Nebraska football I also knew that we have
[00:08:43.410]our own very real challenges, particularly with recruiting
[00:08:46.655]and other areas.
[00:08:48.892]It's 2020.
[00:08:51.129]Most of the people watching this were probably not alive
[00:08:53.911]the last time Nebraska won a national championship game.
[00:08:56.499]And the further away we got from those championship years
[00:09:01.290]I knew the harder it was gonna be to reach that younger
[00:09:03.310]audience if we didn't meet them where they were at.
[00:09:06.480]And where they were at is online.
[00:09:08.020]And so it made a lot of sense to shift resources that way.
[00:09:13.492]The other thing that I think really helped
[00:09:15.751]me personally, again selfishly out
[00:09:17.900]is I came to social media with a video background,
[00:09:21.130]and not with a writing background primarily.
[00:09:23.721]Obviously as we're gonna talk about there's a lot of writing
[00:09:26.260]that goes into video production too.
[00:09:27.619]But I was trained primarily as a video producer.
[00:09:31.337]And what that meant was as social media grew
[00:09:35.690]and expanded from being text only to supporting
[00:09:38.570]full multimedia environments I was already
[00:09:43.200]ready to create content without having to go ask
[00:09:45.940]someone else for help in doing that.
[00:09:48.190]So we could be pretty quick to shift our practices
[00:09:51.703]once the platforms shifted.
[00:09:53.910]They allow photos, great.
[00:09:55.350]I know how to work with photos and put photos online.
[00:09:58.040]That's a piece of cake.
[00:09:59.151]Now, they know how to use animated GIFs.
[00:10:01.820]Even better.
[00:10:02.653]I know how to take video and turn in into a GIF
[00:10:04.550]and I can put it online without having to go ask
[00:10:06.904]out creative services department to do it for me.
[00:10:08.991]And that just allowed us to move a lot faster
[00:10:11.940]than some other schools that hadn't been investing
[00:10:15.850]in that space before.
[00:10:17.260]Or where their social media person might have been
[00:10:19.830]more of a marketing background
[00:10:21.316]and less on a creative background.
[00:10:23.967]So all of that stuff kind of combined to be one
[00:10:27.090]of those perfect moments, the perfect storms.
[00:10:29.361]And couldn't tell you the exact year,
[00:10:32.650]but while Coach Osborne was our athletic director
[00:10:35.750]he moved me from Husker Vision and asked if I would be
[00:10:39.480]willing and able to run a digital component,
[00:10:41.681]digital department inside of athletics.
[00:10:45.470]Which started out as just me and an intern.
[00:10:46.979]But when I left two years ago we had our own office.
[00:10:51.033]There were about eight or nine of us full time,
[00:10:54.310]and then another eight or nine students that worked there.
[00:10:56.630]And it really turned into not just the afterthought,
[00:11:01.340]not just what these kids are doing and playing
[00:11:03.410]off on the side that nobody else is paying attention to,
[00:11:05.480]but really the core of the communication strategy
[00:11:07.703]for the department.
[00:11:09.495]That's quite a shift because I can remember when
[00:11:12.443]Twitter in particular was starting to take off
[00:11:16.849]that some of the colleges that I was following
[00:11:20.890]when we get there weekly notes about the upcoming
[00:11:24.140]game that weekend were trying to limit the number of tweets
[00:11:28.750]you could sent out from the stadium on a game day
[00:11:31.730]saying that it can't be play by play.
[00:11:34.700]You can't do game action.
[00:11:35.940]It can only be just a reaction or a comment.
[00:11:39.120]Which I assumed at the time was to protect
[00:11:41.260]the play by play rights and the other things that
[00:11:43.030]were going on.
[00:11:44.370]But I think most of them figured out very quickly
[00:11:47.060]that was a fools errand that when you have a stadium full
[00:11:49.850]of people all on their phones, trying to limit the number
[00:11:53.455]of tweets somebody can send out was just unenforceable.
[00:11:58.460]You couldn't make that work.
[00:11:59.988]And I thought it was interesting that partly because of your
[00:12:04.020]masters work that you did that you were able to say,
[00:12:07.525]you know what, there's a lot going on here that we can
[00:12:10.140]really take advantage of.
[00:12:11.340]Talk to us about the thesis that you did
[00:12:14.000]and how you were able to get all the tweets from a
[00:12:16.010]bowl game and look at how those happened
[00:12:18.369]and when they happened and the value that you could
[00:12:21.700]assign to a team from that.
[00:12:24.130]Yeah, for sure.
[00:12:25.280]I still reference that thesis almost weekly,
[00:12:28.370]which I don't know if that's sad or if that's
[00:12:30.850]a credit to the work.
[00:12:32.262]But, this was early days of Twitter.
[00:12:35.980]And I pulled it back, my thesis back up just a couple
[00:12:38.450]months ago 'cause I was curious to look at the data
[00:12:40.454]on it again.
[00:12:41.839]And I think the thing that stuck out to me most
[00:12:44.508]is just how much Twitter has grown just in sheer volume
[00:12:48.633]since then.
[00:12:49.697]But despite that growth
[00:12:52.970]the same fundamental rules still apply.
[00:12:55.900]So the thesis was all about looking
[00:12:57.860]at these online communities and how they function,
[00:13:01.080]how they work with sports and particularly with a game.
[00:13:05.001]How do people tweet?
[00:13:07.050]What are those tweets about?
[00:13:08.160]Are they tweeting about the game?
[00:13:09.850]Are they tweeting about what they see?
[00:13:11.750]What else could they be tweeting?
[00:13:13.718]So, at the time you were able to scrape Twitter for tweets.
[00:13:17.590]They don't let you do that anymore.
[00:13:19.290]But at the time you could set up a program
[00:13:21.570]that would sit there and just listen to Twitter
[00:13:23.870]based on keywords, different keyword searches
[00:13:25.860]and it would just pull all those tweets
[00:13:27.830]and throw them into an Excel doc and then you could
[00:13:29.690]do various things with them to see
[00:13:31.865]and kind of analyze what was going on.
[00:13:36.290]And a lot of what that showed, that analysis showed
[00:13:40.900]me are still rules that I still apply today.
[00:13:43.730]And it's essentially that, not surprisingly people like
[00:13:47.240]to talk about sports in real time.
[00:13:48.960]They talk about the things that are happening
[00:13:50.430]right in front of them.
[00:13:51.725]If there's a touchdown you see a spike in Twitter traffic
[00:13:54.410]because people want to celebrate the touchdown.
[00:13:56.129]At halftime you see that traffic goes down
[00:13:59.938]but the length of tweets go up because people are
[00:14:02.230]trying to have a conversation.
[00:14:03.270]They want to talk to their friends about the things
[00:14:04.920]that they're noticing and have a conversation
[00:14:07.780]back and forth about what's going on
[00:14:09.290]because they're not glued on the TV watching the action
[00:14:11.720]as much, so they have more time to engage in those
[00:14:13.970]sorts of conversations.
[00:14:15.170]Things like you'll see an on ramp of increased excitement
[00:14:20.280]in the amount of tweets going out leading up
[00:14:22.440]to a game that crest right a kickoff like you would expect.
[00:14:25.978]And then throughout the course of the game
[00:14:28.040]if you're looking just at the volume of tweets
[00:14:30.270]you can actually just by looking at the graph usually
[00:14:33.650]pinpoint exact moments in the game
[00:14:35.700]where large moments happen that shifted the outcome
[00:14:38.890]of the game, or at least the perceived outcome of the game.
[00:14:42.047]All of that stuff really still applies.
[00:14:44.645]The platforms have gotten a lot more
[00:14:46.880]sophisticated and a lot of the things that they are
[00:14:50.900]doing now complicate some of those trends,
[00:14:54.410]but the same basic trends still exist.
[00:14:56.125]Which, like I said are essentially that people like
[00:14:59.280]to talk about the game that they see in front of them.
[00:15:02.061]They don't want to do deep analysis
[00:15:03.930]while the game's happening.
[00:15:04.870]They want to do that at breaks or at halftime or
[00:15:07.780]after the game.
[00:15:09.022]And even beyond that to a large degree,
[00:15:12.757]people just really like talking about sports and
[00:15:15.180]they like talking about sports online.
[00:15:16.677]And they like finding new people to talk with
[00:15:20.448]about sports.
[00:15:21.600]And those people that can command those different audiences
[00:15:25.674]they can become influencers to connect these different
[00:15:28.330]communities together in really interesting ways
[00:15:30.780]that can help spread messages well beyond
[00:15:34.260]the confines of Nebraska.
[00:15:35.487]And that by leveraging those influencers,
[00:15:38.300]those notable influencers on the network you can
[00:15:41.370]really affect the overall media narrative
[00:15:44.970]coming out whether it's about a game,
[00:15:46.920]whether it's about a coach,
[00:15:47.753]whether it's about anything and really leverage those
[00:15:50.480]points to get your message out
[00:15:52.340]to a much much wider audience.
[00:15:54.630]Did you have any, I'm not asking you to reveal anything
[00:15:57.130]confidences, but how were your interests
[00:16:00.660]in this met within the athletic department.
[00:16:03.620]I know Coach Osborne was very forward thinking
[00:16:05.930]on a lot of things as you mentioned.
[00:16:07.581]We were the first college stadium in the country
[00:16:10.140]to have big screen replay boards.
[00:16:11.700]And that's all on him.
[00:16:13.010]He went to the bowl games and looked at the Diamond Vision
[00:16:16.360]and Jumbotron boards at the pro stadiums and said
[00:16:18.580]we've got to have that in Nebraska.
[00:16:20.270]And I remember people went, ha, it's never gonna happen.
[00:16:22.757]But nobody said no to Tom Osborne very often.
[00:16:26.150]So I'm guessing he was probably
[00:16:27.890]interested in the case you made when you said
[00:16:30.090]you know there's a way we can actually turn this
[00:16:32.280]hobby people have into a way to really help build
[00:16:35.640]our brand and extend Husker Nation
[00:16:37.877]as well as build our recruiting base.
[00:16:40.470]Yeah, for sure.
[00:16:41.700]Honestly it's been, in my time there it was met with
[00:16:44.190]just uniform support all the way up and down.
[00:16:47.880]Every administrator I work with, whether top AD
[00:16:52.250]or beyond that at the chancellor
[00:16:54.280]and president's level, total support all
[00:16:58.510]the way down the chain.
[00:17:00.258]Which has been great to see.
[00:17:01.091]I think part of it is, especially once you get,
[00:17:04.066]breaking apart coaches from athletic directors,
[00:17:07.610]they kind of have slightly different motives there.
[00:17:10.040]For athletic directors they recognize just the general
[00:17:13.550]notion of media rights
[00:17:14.990]and that there's value to media rights
[00:17:17.060]and that being able to own those media rights
[00:17:19.308]has a lot of value to it.
[00:17:22.150]Digital ownership though is not something that,
[00:17:24.893]it's not like physical ownership.
[00:17:26.944]Just because we are Nebraska and we were the Nebraska
[00:17:30.340]athletic department doesn't mean we get to own the
[00:17:32.360]conversation about Huskers.
[00:17:34.190]The only way for us to influence that conversation
[00:17:36.260]is by being active and participating in it.
[00:17:38.869]And by doing that then you can claim some ownership,
[00:17:42.010]which then allows you to be frank,
[00:17:44.510]to monetize that as well in certain ways
[00:17:46.970]whether that's from, you know, direct monetization
[00:17:50.850]of posts, or even when you are negotiating your
[00:17:53.360]third party rights,
[00:17:54.193]now you have this new shiny toy,
[00:17:55.930]which is your social audience and engagement
[00:17:58.610]metrics, which you can then leverage
[00:18:00.709]to get more out of your media rights partners as well
[00:18:03.509]in those negotiations.
[00:18:05.690]For coaches everything, especially in college
[00:18:08.320]revolves around recruiting, period.
[00:18:10.550]I don't know very many coaches that actually
[00:18:12.732]enjoy recruiting, but everything evolves around recruiting.
[00:18:15.960]And they all understand, especially when they're
[00:18:19.670]at Nebraska that they need some way to get their
[00:18:22.590]message out beyond the borders of the state
[00:18:25.197]and compete with the Alabamas, the Clemsons,
[00:18:28.653]you know, the top performing programs
[00:18:30.744]that have all this free media that falls
[00:18:34.300]in their lap.
[00:18:35.290]And so they all recognize that social was a way to do that.
[00:18:40.360]And also to be quite frank it's really in the
[00:18:42.317]nuts and bolts of it it's really more about relationship
[00:18:45.710]building than necessarily building cases.
[00:18:48.400]It's more about getting coaches just to trust you
[00:18:50.550]that you know what you're doing and that you've
[00:18:52.210]got their interests in mind.
[00:18:54.240]And then once you get past that trust point they'll
[00:18:57.119]let you do just about whatever you want to do.
[00:19:00.562]I don't know that I ever got stopped walking into
[00:19:04.290]a locker room, a meeting, places I probably
[00:19:08.650]didn't need to be in that I could walk right in
[00:19:10.920]and sit down and no one would bat an eye
[00:19:13.070]because they knew that everything I heard there
[00:19:15.300]I was going to be filtering and using that
[00:19:17.710]information to help them do their jobs better.
[00:19:21.210]And that's really really a hard thing to get through with
[00:19:25.020]some, especially coaches that are very, you know,
[00:19:28.850]they like everything controlled they way they
[00:19:30.370]like it controlled.
[00:19:31.710]But once you break through that that's really when the
[00:19:33.570]fun can start happening.
[00:19:35.060]And then the more success you have the more times
[00:19:37.470]you're able to show the value in it
[00:19:39.370]the more access you get.
[00:19:40.940]And then the next time you ask a coach if they'd
[00:19:42.650]be willing to do something for you
[00:19:44.310]you can say well, when we did that Harlem Shake
[00:19:46.180]video we got 300000 views on YouTube for that.
[00:19:49.200]And look at this great Bleacher Report article
[00:19:52.200]that was written about how much fun you are.
[00:19:54.790]And then they're like okay, fine.
[00:19:56.310]We'll do whatever you harebrained scheme is
[00:19:58.720]at the time.
[00:20:00.362]We can try that too.
[00:20:01.195]And it's really about just constantly building that case
[00:20:03.740]and making sure that you built that trust up with them.
[00:20:07.344]You get a viral thing like the team Jack touchdown
[00:20:10.920]during the spring game and it just becomes
[00:20:12.970]the ESPN moment of the year and stuff like that.
[00:20:15.700]That's, those are some viral things you can't structure.
[00:20:19.400]They just happen.
[00:20:20.580]And the fun thing is after a while
[00:20:22.640]you can get the coaches to help you on that too
[00:20:25.540]where you're not the one having to come up with
[00:20:26.870]the ideas all the time.
[00:20:28.480]Team Jack, that didn't come from us.
[00:20:30.360]That came from a coach.
[00:20:31.648]That was a coach who wanted to do that and kind of
[00:20:33.540]understood the ideas around, you know, going viral
[00:20:36.720]and what that would mean.
[00:20:38.047]And fully supported trying to spread Nebraska's message
[00:20:42.820]that way.
[00:20:43.653]Right, so you're self avowed video editor first
[00:20:47.420]and then a writer second.
[00:20:48.850]Though clearly as we all tell our students
[00:20:51.500]there's writing involved in just video editing as well.
[00:20:53.830]Writing doesn't mean purely script and dialog.
[00:20:56.530]There's also your editing decisions
[00:20:58.720]and your scene selections and how you structure things.
[00:21:01.835]When you started working on social media
[00:21:04.389]and you were looking at all of these tweets,
[00:21:06.600]many of which are pretty horribly written
[00:21:09.140]what did you decide you wanted to do in terms
[00:21:11.750]of building some best practices for you and your
[00:21:14.301]social media teammates at the stadium would develop?
[00:21:19.460]Yeah, for sure.
[00:21:20.293]I think the most important thing about social media it
[00:21:23.490]to remember that what people are looking
[00:21:25.280]for is authenticity beyond anything else.
[00:21:28.500]They just want to make sure that they're getting
[00:21:29.850]an authentic look at whoever's talking.
[00:21:32.781]What that means is you got to throw the
[00:21:36.650]AP Style Book away a little bit.
[00:21:38.430]Which, I'm sure will pain some people to hear.
[00:21:41.599]Social media writing is all about conversation
[00:21:45.240]and making sure you know your audience.
[00:21:47.710]And really the first thing that we did was just evaluate
[00:21:51.380]who we were wanting to talk to and thinking about
[00:21:55.520]who that person was and then from that I could
[00:21:58.440]create personas for all of our social accounts.
[00:22:01.000]And those social accounts could then have
[00:22:02.797]personas that included things that they were
[00:22:04.780]interested in, just their general personality.
[00:22:07.600]Are they more of a humorous person?
[00:22:09.710]Are they a little more serious?
[00:22:11.458]And then the type of language they used,
[00:22:13.770]specific words, just general structure of the tweets.
[00:22:17.488]I always think, especially when you're writing on
[00:22:20.520]social media, it's not just about the words.
[00:22:22.789]It's also how the words look in the feed.
[00:22:25.734]Because so many of our ques for when we read things
[00:22:28.840]are based on formatting.
[00:22:30.330]And being able to correctly format,
[00:22:33.840]I say correctly as if there's a right way.
[00:22:35.320]But format in a way that gets people to look at
[00:22:38.380]the parts of the message you really want them to look at
[00:22:41.030]as their just scanning through that profile.
[00:22:43.396]Those are all the sorts of hacks that you're
[00:22:45.470]really trying to figure out from a writing perspective
[00:22:48.110]on how to capture people's attention and make sure
[00:22:50.565]that they know that what they're reading is authentic
[00:22:55.070]and comes from a real person and isn't
[00:22:56.818]from some robot somewhere just writing scripted messages.
[00:23:02.600]For my time when I was at Nebraska what that meant is
[00:23:05.570]I took our main @Huskers social accounts
[00:23:09.350]and I made them pretty reflective of what my own
[00:23:12.040]personality is, which is born and raised in Nebraska.
[00:23:15.500]Grew up as a young kid watching Tom Osborne
[00:23:17.670]play and win national championship games.
[00:23:20.290]Been a while since that's a case, so you have to have a
[00:23:23.381]but of humor.
[00:23:24.352]You have to have a little bit of understanding
[00:23:26.107]for just the broader culture of Nebraska.
[00:23:28.813]And we wanted to be a little bit more playful
[00:23:31.520]from that account.
[00:23:33.020]That what opposite to some degree, a large degree
[00:23:36.740]with our football account, which was much more
[00:23:38.810]focused on recruiting where were much more,
[00:23:42.790]the verbiage and the writing style was much younger,
[00:23:46.040]more Gen Z than millennial,
[00:23:48.245]and also was much more braggadocios, without being
[00:23:52.540]overly braggadocios.
[00:23:54.110]Nebraskans are not ones that like attention
[00:23:57.230]even if it's positive sometimes.
[00:23:58.956]Where, @Huskers was a little bit more
[00:24:01.390]shy and careful on how we would phrase bragging
[00:24:05.050]type content, the football account would be
[00:24:07.890]unabashedly look how great are because all these reasons
[00:24:10.890]and look how great this is.
[00:24:12.320]But that was because we were operating
[00:24:13.950]under a recruiting mindset
[00:24:15.060]and really trying to reach a very specific
[00:24:17.320]demographic there.
[00:24:18.840]So, I always encourage people when they're thinking
[00:24:22.050]about social campaigns that the first thing that they
[00:24:24.548]need to, my mic just died.
[00:24:27.270]I hope that doesn't mess you up here.
[00:24:28.720]No, it's okay.
[00:24:29.553]I can hear you.
[00:24:34.825]There we go.
[00:24:36.177]The first step.
[00:24:40.125]I'm not hearing you.
[00:24:41.673]You got me now?
[00:24:43.280]Now I got you.
[00:24:44.200]Okay, perfect.
[00:24:45.707]Apologies for that.
[00:24:46.540]No problem.
[00:24:47.373]One of the downsides of spending all day
[00:24:49.320]on your headphones on Zoom.
[00:24:52.730]But really the first step when you're creating
[00:24:54.805]your social account is to understand who you're talking to.
[00:24:57.490]And then once you understand who you're talking to
[00:24:59.240]then you can start thinking about
[00:25:00.350]how you want to talk to them.
[00:25:01.710]But unless you know who you're trying to talk to
[00:25:04.280]it's really really hard to figure out how you
[00:25:06.003]want to talk to them in the first place.
[00:25:09.000]And it depends a little bit too whether or not
[00:25:11.390]you want a social media comment to be a standalone
[00:25:16.720]or you want it to be something that directs you back
[00:25:19.330]to a site.
[00:25:21.010]'Cause I've seen a lot of tweets that give
[00:25:22.590]everything away in the tweet and there's no reason
[00:25:25.923]to link to the place they're asking you to go to,
[00:25:27.700]so being playful and leading people on,
[00:25:30.190]but not giving them too much could be important right?
[00:25:33.270]100% yep, 100%.
[00:25:34.710]And really understanding that every tweet needs
[00:25:38.700]to be a standalone tweet in some fashion
[00:25:40.970]because you don't know who's retweeting you.
[00:25:43.350]And the people seeing it from that retweet
[00:25:46.250]or that share if it's on Facebook.
[00:25:48.230]or just from screen capping it and posting it that way
[00:25:51.290]they won't have the context of any other tweets around it.
[00:25:53.973]If it's in a threat or whatever,
[00:25:56.400]all they will see is that one message.
[00:25:58.800]So writing for social is a very unique
[00:26:01.560]and interesting challenge
[00:26:03.180]because you have to be writing things that fit inside
[00:26:05.430]of a larger context that are performing
[00:26:07.990]very specific goals based on what your company is.
[00:26:11.296]HUDL obviously has much more of an interest
[00:26:13.820]of driving traffic back to HUDL.
[00:26:15.770]At Nebraska, yeah, we have a website,
[00:26:18.160]but really the marketing value
[00:26:21.980]from having that information out
[00:26:23.410]in the wild is greater than the website views we would get.
[00:26:27.410]So really we would be okay
[00:26:29.309]with having more of that content out there.
[00:26:31.720]Now at HUDL we definitely do a lot more
[00:26:34.009]of trying to create environments where
[00:26:36.090]we do try to find ways to drive people back
[00:26:38.110]to the main site every once in a while.
[00:26:40.620]And it's a hard thing to do.
[00:26:42.140]And it does definitely take a little bit
[00:26:44.310]of having your brain in a couple of places at once.
[00:26:46.758]Now, you've talked about, we've spent most
[00:26:49.620]of our time here talking about Facebook and mostly Twitter
[00:26:51.820]but I know you delved into other things as well
[00:26:55.088]with Huskers, with Snapchat
[00:26:57.510]and all the other things that are going as well.
[00:26:59.170]What do you see
[00:27:01.434]as the trends in how social media is developing?
[00:27:05.570]And as you're all everybody's trying to get
[00:27:08.620]to this illusive younger audience all the time.
[00:27:11.122]What do we, what are we doing wrong
[00:27:13.700]and what do we need to do a better job
[00:27:15.010]of in reaching that group?
[00:27:16.900]Well, there's probably two parts of that question.
[00:27:19.260]There's the ethically, what are we doing wrong?
[00:27:22.042]And then there's the business objectives,
[00:27:24.550]what are we doing wrong?
[00:27:25.383]And those two things don't always align to each other.
[00:27:28.080]I think just in general, what we're seeing
[00:27:29.560]on trends from social media is it's getting heavier video.
[00:27:32.328]I think we'll probably hit an inflection point.
[00:27:34.910]I think we've probably already have hit
[00:27:36.270]that inflection point.
[00:27:37.816]But the general story of the internet has been because
[00:27:43.133]of, you know, limited bandwidth,
[00:27:46.470]slow modems back in the day,
[00:27:48.157]all of these sites have always started with text, right?
[00:27:51.940]Start with text.
[00:27:53.080]Then you start with simple images.
[00:27:54.610]Next thing you know
[00:27:55.443]you're dealing with multi media images
[00:27:57.169]and then kind of your final stage is full fledged video.
[00:28:01.373]And that's really where we've seen social media evolve
[00:28:04.870]to where the reason why I think
[00:28:07.550]we've probably hit our inflection point is now
[00:28:09.860]with TikTok, and you could argue that Vine
[00:28:12.480]may have been this before that, but TikTok is really
[00:28:15.860]the first social media network solely focused just on video.
[00:28:20.559]There's really no way, at least good way,
[00:28:23.130]to natively create content outside
[00:28:24.706]of having video to create that content with,
[00:28:28.000]which would be unimaginable, you know
[00:28:30.560]even just six years ago, to have to devote
[00:28:33.240]that much entity energy into just creating video.
[00:28:36.510]So I think a lot
[00:28:37.343]of these trends from a technical perspective are driven
[00:28:41.210]by technology as technology increases.
[00:28:43.317]Everybody's got a camera
[00:28:45.400]in their pocket now, and then eventually
[00:28:47.300]already has a video camera in their pocket.
[00:28:49.570]As these technologies get cheaper
[00:28:51.180]and more mass adoption, you see these networks respond
[00:28:53.570]to that by creating these systems that exploit those new
[00:28:57.840]and additional technologies.
[00:28:59.660]So we're like I said
[00:29:02.070]I think we've probably just about maxed out what most
[00:29:04.650]of that really means from a technology perspective.
[00:29:07.600]What's really going to be interesting
[00:29:08.580]to me is more from a sociological perspective
[00:29:11.929]you're starting to see a lot more people get burned
[00:29:14.300]out from social media, from just the constant push
[00:29:17.630]of media in your face, and really seeing people get away
[00:29:21.270]from the public mass social medias as much
[00:29:25.620]and really fragmenting more
[00:29:27.180]into these private networks more so.
[00:29:30.450]I'm sure most
[00:29:31.850]of your students know what Discord is.
[00:29:33.754]Discord has very quickly become
[00:29:35.808]arguably the most important social media for youth.
[00:29:40.370]And most of that conversation is really happening in silos
[00:29:43.570]within Discord.
[00:29:44.749]I have a 13 year old son.
[00:29:46.760]He's old enough now for social media.
[00:29:48.968]He's in all that stuff.
[00:29:50.820]He has a Twitter account.
[00:29:51.930]I watch him pretty carefully on it.
[00:29:53.230]He never posts.
[00:29:54.350]His Instagram account,
[00:29:55.850]I don't even think he's opened Instagram
[00:29:57.720]in a year and a half or so.
[00:29:59.540]He's on Discord every night talking to his friends.
[00:30:02.426]So I think this,
[00:30:04.070]you saw it a little bit with Snapchat.
[00:30:05.950]That's when I kind of had first had these alarm bells that
[00:30:08.997]you know, media had been going more mass
[00:30:12.114]with everybody pushing towards everything
[00:30:14.810]being public and everything available at all times.
[00:30:18.240]And you know, people Instagramming their lunch every day
[00:30:21.410]but that was the direction earlier.
[00:30:23.181]We've now gone, started snapping back the other way
[00:30:26.600]with platforms like Snapchat, which is more
[00:30:29.230]of a messaging platform that really a social media
[00:30:31.190]but that's how their users want it to be
[00:30:34.320]where they can be more private with it.
[00:30:36.760]Discord, all of these services
[00:30:39.330]are really starting to break that
[00:30:41.270]down to go the other direction where
[00:30:43.410]things are starting to get more private.
[00:30:44.930]So I think from a communication standpoint, we need to think
[00:30:48.090]about that too, and think about how we create media
[00:30:51.170]that is shareable,
[00:30:52.397]not just from our own accounts that we run,
[00:30:58.146]but also make it shareable in ways that I can enter
[00:31:00.920]into these closed vertical systems that we see
[00:31:04.290]and be highly shareable inside of those systems too.
[00:31:07.020]Because it's not like what you're saying is the only way
[00:31:08.790]into a Discord discussion is if somebody does a screen cap
[00:31:12.650]or otherwise grabs your content, there really isn't a way
[00:31:14.880]for the Huskers net to plow their way
[00:31:18.300]into somebody else's Discord conversation is there?
[00:31:21.090]For sure.
[00:31:21.923]I mean there are some public forums
[00:31:23.260]that you can get involved in.
[00:31:25.138]But I know a lot of people have, you know
[00:31:28.500]their private Discord servers where they're doing more,
[00:31:31.000]it's more like group texting group chatting
[00:31:33.128]than really anything else.
[00:31:34.780]So we did a little bit of that with Reddit back in the day.
[00:31:39.660]I was a big Redditer at the time.
[00:31:41.120]So I kind of always just kept an eye on
[00:31:42.530]Reddit as a passion project.
[00:31:44.220]And every once in a while we would log
[00:31:46.512]in to Reddit as the Huskers and play
[00:31:48.930]with people in there and have fun with people.
[00:31:53.230]But really Discord is essentially the same thing as Reddit.
[00:31:57.310]It's not exactly the same thing
[00:31:59.020]but it's, that's probably the best frame
[00:32:00.350]of reference for it.
[00:32:02.156]Right.
[00:32:02.989]It's interesting as it's going back more private again.
[00:32:04.663]I remember a friend
[00:32:05.496]of mine who was taking his not old enough to drive daughter
[00:32:10.393]to the movies
[00:32:11.780]and she, they picked up two of her friends on the way.
[00:32:14.940]And so he's driving with three pre driving age girls
[00:32:19.240]in the car and they're all on their phones.
[00:32:21.560]And they're texting.
[00:32:22.826]And my friend said to his daughter, you know
[00:32:25.630]you have friends in the back seat
[00:32:27.970]you could be talking with.
[00:32:29.060]And she said, Oh, we're texting.
[00:32:30.871]And he said, you're two feet away from each other.
[00:32:33.570]Why are you texting?
[00:32:34.957]And his daughter's response
[00:32:36.780]which chilled into the bone was because you can't hear us.
[00:32:39.830]Exactly.
[00:32:40.663]Yep, exactly.
[00:32:41.580]So was that private sort
[00:32:42.740]of network even in the car, the dad wasn't part of.
[00:32:45.800]And the interesting thing is how
[00:32:48.050]those private networks are now mingling
[00:32:50.090]with the public ones.
[00:32:51.480]Because, and this is not going to be groundbreaking
[00:32:53.790]for the people in your class
[00:32:55.040]but people, young people today, Gen Z, they care very much
[00:33:00.420]about on average, having a very curated social presence.
[00:33:04.870]They want to make sure
[00:33:05.703]that their social presence reflects their
[00:33:07.663]the values of who they are.
[00:33:09.735]And they are constantly curating it.
[00:33:12.703]For millennials in my generation, for us
[00:33:16.370]it was you just
[00:33:17.575]you just throw stuff out there.
[00:33:18.408]'Cause get it all out there.
[00:33:19.690]And then all
[00:33:20.610]of those messages combined to create your online persona
[00:33:24.265]and tell your ongoing story of who you are.
[00:33:28.500]But because of some of the risks from that,
[00:33:32.290]from having, you know, post show up from when you were 13
[00:33:35.310]now that you're 35, a lot of people have decided
[00:33:39.270]that that's, not the smartest thing in the world.
[00:33:41.690]And so they make sure that they keep pretty tight control
[00:33:43.830]of what is publicly viewable to people outside to make sure
[00:33:47.620]that they're preventing from, you know
[00:33:49.300]having that bite them in the butt
[00:33:50.550]when they go job hunting time.
[00:33:52.940]So those sorts of dynamics now are
[00:33:55.150]are very, very interesting and definitely is a change
[00:33:59.673]from digital media where it was at least five years ago.
[00:34:03.931]We've had discussions online
[00:34:06.787]and elsewhere about the differences in the way that the
[00:34:10.465]next generation of folks are watching sports
[00:34:14.889]and the discussions about whether long form studio kinds
[00:34:20.260]of things are of interest.
[00:34:21.330]We took our learning community students a couple
[00:34:23.270]of years ago to the Big 10 Network studios in Chicago.
[00:34:27.800]And they were nice enough to light the set
[00:34:29.470]for us and show us how they do all their onset pieces.
[00:34:32.610]But then their head of their production department said
[00:34:35.140]now how many of you actually watch any
[00:34:36.700]of our half hour onset shows and nobody did.
[00:34:41.290]And he said, see, we're aware of that.
[00:34:42.740]We know that we've got to start looking
[00:34:44.322]at very short, consumable little chunks that we can send out
[00:34:50.057]through more of the media social channels
[00:34:53.753]because that's where you're watching it
[00:34:55.430]on demand essentially on your own time
[00:34:57.960]rather than when we decided to put it on BTN.
[00:35:00.099]And I know you've had some discussions online recently
[00:35:03.710]about the differences in what you're seeing
[00:35:05.730]in research about how the next generation
[00:35:08.620]of students is not less interested in sports
[00:35:10.960]where they may be less interested in watching live sports.
[00:35:13.630]Tell us what you're learning.
[00:35:14.950]Yeah, for sure.
[00:35:16.110]Do you mind if I share my screen and there's a card
[00:35:17.963]that'd be helpful too.
[00:35:20.200]So this first one that says I'm
[00:35:22.750]you'll have to enable it for me
[00:35:24.170]it looks like.
[00:35:25.003]Hang on, let me jump down here and,
[00:35:31.594]da da da da, see if I can
[00:35:33.120]lower screen is locked here for some reason.
[00:35:35.730]So I'm having, let me see if I can minimize.
[00:35:37.447]There we go.
[00:35:39.030]I can minimize you just enough
[00:35:40.270]that I can get to that share screen.
[00:35:43.160]And I can do multiple participants can share simultaneously.
[00:35:48.281]Now you should be able to do it.
[00:35:49.430]All right.
[00:35:50.263]There we go.
[00:35:51.096]Now we're good to go.
[00:35:51.929]All right.
[00:35:52.762]Then I just have two charts that
[00:35:53.595]I think are pretty illuminative.
[00:35:54.428]And this first one is just viewership trends
[00:35:55.480]in millions of these major events.
[00:35:57.200]So Daytona 500, World Series, NBA finals
[00:35:59.630]and the Super Bowl.
[00:36:01.340]So your Y axis here, the thing on the left, that's static.
[00:36:06.376]That's 100 million viewers all the way down
[00:36:10.305]to 20 million.
[00:36:11.138]And what you'll notice are there are some kind
[00:36:13.693]of interesting just general trends
[00:36:15.769]on how the Super Bowl has grown so big.
[00:36:18.090]Meanwhile, the Daytona 500
[00:36:20.390]appears to have fallen off a cliff
[00:36:22.510]and the NBA finals has sort of been a little bit middling.
[00:36:27.210]Why?
[00:36:28.194]I think this is mostly interesting
[00:36:29.380]because once we start looking at these sorts
[00:36:32.130]of trends over time, you got to remember if you were 15
[00:36:35.040]and watched the Super Bowl in 1970 that means
[00:36:37.950]you were 65 when you watched it in 2020.
[00:36:41.879]People age, right.
[00:36:42.826]That's me.
[00:36:44.023]Exactly, and so we have to take those sorts
[00:36:46.634]of things into account as we're looking at this too
[00:36:48.360]and not only do people age, but the overall population
[00:36:51.180]of the United States should go up every year as well.
[00:36:54.380]What that means is you would expect
[00:36:57.309]to see a natural increase in viewership.
[00:36:58.960]If everything else stayed the same, just
[00:37:01.360]because of population growth, you should see an increase
[00:37:04.210]in viewership over time for all of these sports.
[00:37:07.270]So the more important question is not, you know
[00:37:11.780]why are people not watching it as much as they used
[00:37:14.869]to, but what are the factors that are contributing to that?
[00:37:16.910]And I think you could probably argue
[00:37:19.220]you also got to remember here 1970.
[00:37:22.233]That's not too far from when sports first got on TV too.
[00:37:26.370]So a lot of this growth that we're probably seeing
[00:37:29.456]in these early years
[00:37:30.541]between 1970 and 2000 comes from growth in TV sets.
[00:37:33.510]There are more TV sets that are, that were being sold.
[00:37:36.760]You went from maybe having one TV set in the house in 1970,
[00:37:40.380]to about the time when I was a teenager in 1995
[00:37:44.493]we had at least three, maybe four TVs in the house.
[00:37:49.209]And now I think we have five or six in the house
[00:37:51.735]if you count all of the devices that you can stream onto.
[00:37:53.970]So when you take all of these trends,
[00:37:56.861]add them together and then you index them by population
[00:37:59.660]what you start seeing is this, which is from about 1980
[00:38:07.087]to about 2005.
[00:38:08.520]Your index of viewership to the population
[00:38:11.500]it approached zero, meaning that it was getting
[00:38:16.500]even with the population, but right around about 2010,
[00:38:21.080]2008 or seven or so you start seeing that fall off.
[00:38:25.090]And so what's going on here is you're seeing more
[00:38:29.781]than just people being less interested in sports.
[00:38:32.757]There are technological things that
[00:38:36.332]are driving this adoption in various ways.
[00:38:38.799]I mentioned growth in TV here
[00:38:42.548]in these 20 years leading up to the 2000s.
[00:38:44.930]But I think it would also be hard to just ignore things
[00:38:49.579]like growth in digital media, phones,
[00:38:53.070]being able to watch a game on your phone, as well
[00:38:56.560]as being able to follow a game without even watching a game
[00:38:59.070]which is, or even listening to it,
[00:39:02.189]something that would have been unheard
[00:39:03.353]of 20 or 30 years ago.
[00:39:04.774]So where are you seeing the largest fall
[00:39:06.300]off in these viewership numbers when you break it out
[00:39:09.687]by demographic is really amongst the younger viewers.
[00:39:12.590]Younger viewers are spending less time watching TV.
[00:39:16.072]There's probably two factors that are going
[00:39:17.790]into play there.
[00:39:18.632]One is, as we move our ability to measure viewership from TV
[00:39:25.640]to digital environments
[00:39:27.060]you're going to see a change in those numbers
[00:39:30.444]just because of how we measure them are different.
[00:39:32.570]In the old analog days, it was all, you know
[00:39:34.610]Nielsen self-reporting and then through statistics, they
[00:39:37.941]they build those members that way.
[00:39:40.729]With digital viewership
[00:39:41.562]you're actually seeing every individual
[00:39:43.070]person that's logging on.
[00:39:45.410]The same thing happened in the early 2000s
[00:39:48.170]that really affected the newspaper
[00:39:50.419]industry around advertising.
[00:39:51.620]Once advertising went from print to online
[00:39:54.170]you saw the per dollar price for advertising
[00:39:58.190]fall off a cliff
[00:39:59.139]because you could very easily target very specific people.
[00:40:02.797]And it completely upended the
[00:40:04.630]traditional advertising market.
[00:40:06.210]And it really, really affected the newspaper industry
[00:40:08.250]because they were not able to generate as much revenue
[00:40:11.880]from digital advertising off of your analog advertising.
[00:40:15.600]And that was because of those measurement systems,
[00:40:17.840]how that measurement changed over time.
[00:40:19.697]We're seeing the same thing with TV and viewership.
[00:40:21.655]So that's one factor.
[00:40:23.470]And then the other factor that's
[00:40:25.030]really hard to ignore is just the increase in cord cutting,
[00:40:28.620]and especially as you get to younger demographics.
[00:40:30.436]I have never had cable TV in my adult life
[00:40:34.043]since I graduated high school or college
[00:40:37.780]I should say.
[00:40:38.613]I had it for a few years in college.
[00:40:39.948]We did have cable TV when I had roommates
[00:40:42.670]and could afford it.
[00:40:43.503]But once I got
[00:40:44.704]out of college was right around the time that 2007,
[00:40:48.433]2008 time, when you could start getting more content online.
[00:40:52.005]You could have a Netflix subscription
[00:40:55.150]for $15 and have a large amount of content
[00:40:59.060]to pass your time that you didn't need to spend $80
[00:41:01.990]for cable subscription.
[00:41:03.112]So those cord cutting numbers have increased.
[00:41:06.667]Along with that, new trends,
[00:41:10.500]and I'm going to pull this article up so I don't miss it.
[00:41:13.380]This is actually from 2018
[00:41:14.797]but the Pew has been tracking how people consume media
[00:41:18.730]for quite a while.
[00:41:19.563]And they put a study out in 2015, that said 31%
[00:41:23.704]of all adults said it would be very hard to give up TV,
[00:41:29.060]which is a low from 44%,
[00:41:33.300]which was the first time they started measuring it in 2006.
[00:41:36.730]So what we're seeing is more and more people feel less
[00:41:39.110]of a connection or a need to have their TV.
[00:41:42.197]And that's because they're able to get
[00:41:44.150]so much more information online now.
[00:41:46.190]You see the exact opposite trend happening
[00:41:48.140]for things like the internet,
[00:41:49.530]where in 2006 TV and the internet both scored a 43%
[00:41:53.051]on people saying it'd be very hard to give it up.
[00:41:55.991]Well, now that number for the internet has jumped
[00:41:58.380]up over 50% where people say would be very hard to give
[00:42:00.964]up the internet.
[00:42:01.950]So people are more connected
[00:42:04.260]to the internet because it's providing more
[00:42:06.010]of a value for them to access the information.
[00:42:09.212]Where I think we start getting
[00:42:10.990]into trouble is we have used TV viewership as shorthand
[00:42:14.880]for interest in something for a very, very long time
[00:42:17.402]because that was the predominant way people engaged
[00:42:19.355]with whatever it was, whether it was a presidential debate
[00:42:23.357]a game or just a TV show.
[00:42:24.466]That viewership number has had a lot
[00:42:28.340]of importance and weighed very heavily
[00:42:30.180]on how we think of how people are interested in things.
[00:42:33.070]That's not the case anymore.
[00:42:35.090]People can be very interested
[00:42:36.300]in following LeBron James, and they can do it all
[00:42:39.840]from their phone and never have to turn on ESPN once
[00:42:41.950]and probably have better access to LeBron James
[00:42:45.650]through their phones than they would get from ESPN as well.
[00:42:48.540]So for all
[00:42:49.373]of these things, sort of combined
[00:42:50.460]to create sort of a perfect storm
[00:42:52.340]where these TV viewership numbers
[00:42:53.649]have gotten to be increasingly less important as a measure
[00:42:56.770]of the value that we place on sports and
[00:43:00.993]the drivers that are driving those
[00:43:06.070]numbers down tends to mean that there are people
[00:43:08.016]out there who try to make broad sweeten points about sports
[00:43:12.063]and we'll use those viewership numbers to make those points
[00:43:14.392]without actually analyzing the
[00:43:17.520]underlying longterm trends that we're seeing.
[00:43:19.837]Which is dangerous.
[00:43:21.200]Very dangerous.
[00:43:22.580]Yeah, okay, you've been at the forefront of a lot of this
[00:43:26.760]for a long time.
[00:43:27.640]Where do you think we're going next?
[00:43:28.974]You said you think maybe we're
[00:43:29.810]at an inflection point on video.
[00:43:32.591]What do you think's next?
[00:43:34.544]And knowing that there may be another just amazing
[00:43:37.781]video platform or social platform come along next week
[00:43:41.175]we've never heard of.
[00:43:43.422]I mean, everybody knew about Periscope
[00:43:45.990]and nobody remembers Meerkat that came
[00:43:47.824]out like a week before Periscope did.
[00:43:50.320]And then the Meerkat guys are like, well, we're done.
[00:43:53.430]So what do you think's next?
[00:43:55.165]I think, I mean, it's really hard to pick, you know
[00:43:58.410]what is the next platform going to look like.
[00:44:00.490]I don't think anybody would have guessed
[00:44:01.750]that musically would rebrand itself
[00:44:03.276]and then become the hottest thing in the world right now
[00:44:06.610]as TikTok.
[00:44:07.617]That really came out of nowhere.
[00:44:09.807]But I think looking back
[00:44:12.600]at it, Twitter, Twitter got a big boost from sports,
[00:44:16.940]because Twitter is for live content.
[00:44:18.312]That's really where Twitter thrives.
[00:44:20.779]Facebook really just has got a boost
[00:44:23.030]from putting photos online.
[00:44:24.525]Same it's a large degree is Instagram.
[00:44:26.890]So I think, and I haven't spent enough time to really think
[00:44:29.363]about this to probably answer your question carefully.
[00:44:31.130]I think I would encourage people to think
[00:44:32.590]about what are the,
[00:44:34.010]what is the next area of our life that hasn't been impacted
[00:44:36.268]by digital media in that way yet?
[00:44:39.798]And because that's where that next thing could really take
[00:44:43.810]off that provides utility
[00:44:45.307]for people to do something that they've been wanting to do
[00:44:49.153]whether that's engage with music and create funny videos,
[00:44:51.958]follow along with sports, whatever that might be.
[00:44:54.990]Those are the factors that are going to bring
[00:44:56.880]out this, this new platform.
[00:44:57.720]I think just in general though
[00:44:59.772]we're going to see more, more and more channels shift
[00:45:05.199]to individual influencer or athlete channel.
[00:45:09.130]So specifically for sports
[00:45:10.830]I think you'll see a lot more content being driven
[00:45:13.810]by the athletes themselves
[00:45:14.809]to the point where you're starting to see a little bit
[00:45:18.050]of it now, but large professional athletes
[00:45:19.663]they're going to have their own
[00:45:20.810]media rights deals that will be separate
[00:45:22.730]from the, their leagues
[00:45:23.890]and their teams where they will actually have just
[00:45:26.412]like LeBron James is doing,
[00:45:28.930]they'll have an entire staff dedicated
[00:45:31.020]to their own owned media channel
[00:45:34.200]that they own and operate and programming content
[00:45:36.860]for those channels separate from the teams and the leagues.
[00:45:39.377]So it's just going to be more and more content
[00:45:42.061]which means you're going to continue
[00:45:44.280]to fragment the audience and continue to have more and more
[00:45:47.360]of these niche audiences and more teams and leagues looking
[00:45:51.060]for ways to bring all those niches together.
[00:45:52.440]But that also means more perspective jobs
[00:45:55.438]for our graduates, because they're going to be looking
[00:45:57.730]for the people that know how to write
[00:45:58.960]for social media, know how to edit video
[00:46:00.472]and know how to be nimble enough to get this stuff
[00:46:04.140]out the door fast.
[00:46:05.230]Because none of this ages very well, right.
[00:46:08.140]I mean it's just, you're, you've done one now you're
[00:46:10.250]onto the next one.
[00:46:11.590]And who remembers what we tweeted about yesterday
[00:46:13.315]because we're so busy trying to keep
[00:46:15.410]up with what's on our stream right now.
[00:46:16.909]Yeah, for sure.
[00:46:17.810]I think it's very likely that video producers, writers,
[00:46:21.670]social media writers, photographers are going
[00:46:24.730]to more and more increasingly be making content
[00:46:27.770]for athletes, which means you can just run the numbers.
[00:46:30.880]That's an exponential increase
[00:46:32.760]in the number of potential jobs there
[00:46:34.492]because the reality is both most athletes
[00:46:36.426]they really don't care about that stuff.
[00:46:38.470]They're really focused on the game, being the best
[00:46:41.780]at their sport, especially at those elite levels.
[00:46:43.389]They don't have a lot of time to mess around
[00:46:45.730]with other stuff.
[00:46:46.806]They're really, really focused
[00:46:48.148]on their game and getting stronger and faster.
[00:46:51.068]So they need people to run that stuff for them.
[00:46:53.097]I know there are some people including myself
[00:46:57.150]at times, I get a little bit itchy as stuff shifts that way.
[00:46:59.870]Cause it feels like the, there will be less jobs
[00:47:02.967]but I think the exact opposite is going to happen.
[00:47:04.900]We're going to have far far more employment opportunities.
[00:47:07.664]The one thing I do worry
[00:47:08.820]about is that you're gonna see a lot more gig workers
[00:47:10.780]in the space, a lot more freelance work, which is a really
[00:47:13.485]really just it's a hard profession to be in.
[00:47:16.087]It is.
[00:47:16.950]Yeah, in terms of, you know,
[00:47:18.060]you're paying for your own insurance
[00:47:19.610]and you're, if you're taking a vacation
[00:47:21.210]and means you're not making any money and yeah, it's a --
[00:47:23.194]So I really encourage all
[00:47:24.931]of the younger professionals that I always talk
[00:47:27.890]to is when you're 25, it's a great time to be freelance.
[00:47:32.040]It's a great time to do all
[00:47:33.250]of these really fun, cool things.
[00:47:34.975]But don't forget that
[00:47:36.336]at some point you're going to be 35 and you might look back
[00:47:40.619]at whatever the next TikTok is the same way that you
[00:47:43.756]and I looked at TikTok the first time we saw it too,
[00:47:46.700]and didn't quite necessarily understand it.
[00:47:48.630]And so make sure
[00:47:51.373]that you are thinking longterm and building your skills
[00:47:54.620]out in ways so that you have a career opportunities
[00:47:57.787]beyond just being cool and making trendy content
[00:48:01.120]because everyone gets old and uncool.
[00:48:04.830]Yeah, freelancing is usually as fun when you're 22
[00:48:07.277]but when you've got a 13 year old
[00:48:08.840]at home, there's now into social media on his own
[00:48:10.880]you gotta be thinking a little bit longer game there, so.
[00:48:13.376]Yeah.
[00:48:14.209]100%.
[00:48:15.042]Well, great advice to all of our students.
[00:48:16.260]Kelly, we thank you so much for your time.
[00:48:17.830]You've built yourself a terrific career
[00:48:19.025]and we look forward to following you along down the road.
[00:48:23.050]I appreciate it.

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Kelly Mosier, Director of HUDL Studios, Social Media

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