There’s quite a bit of news to cover in the last week, and the main one is what’s happening in sports media. The topics this week focus heavily on the media side of the business, followed by a quick check on planning for Q4 that may be important to any brands and businesses getting ahead of the holiday season.

For quite a while now, the sports media landscape has been fracturing and we’re watching it in real time. From legacy outlets shifting their contracting in broadcast deals, to talent been removed from platforms, analysts replaced with personalities, to athletes platforming themselves.

There’s been a lot happening in this landscape and with money being a common denominator across a lot of the discussions, you can also see that the audiences aren’t necessarily justifying where that money is being spent actually correlating to the proper talent in place.

As sport viewers and professionals working in the space are noticing, athletes-turned-media personalities are taking their audiences from the media machines of network television to their own platforms and audiences in social. Most recently, Ryan Clark, former NFL safety and ESPN analyst, launched The Pivot Sports in partnership with NFL Films to YouTube. Giving an entirely new platform and experience for sport fans looking for their preferred personalities and analysis, while also combatting the barrier most creatives face which is the licensing of authorized game tape film on digital media platforms.

This is a moment in the sport media space, not only because of what it means for former athletes and creatives on a digital platform, but it also signals the importance a question that applies in most business areas: where are you buying attention and where does your audience meet you?

There’s a few other areas that this is worth discussing about like the increased firings and layoffs happening at major broadcasts, increasing streaming and subscription issues that exist in sports, and the continued battle between local broadcasting and non-local broadcasting. Maybe we’ll talk about those at a later date or as we follow these stories.

For now, this is part of the sports media conversation we are having and understanding how it applies to understanding how people and brands control their own narrative and audience.

Two professional sports and a collegiate sport window still available. The baseball Postseason push remains with team’s coming in town.

_{✦ This Week}
Use now - October to build your Q4 offers. For the next three months, the hospitality industry is in its highest-margin of opportunity in the event marketing calendar. Some brands already have plans being built, others are just getting started so let’s highlight over the next few weeks how to get ahead of this.

Beginning with using the window now to stress-test any Q4 hospitality packages, offers, or necessary inventory needs. What could this look like?

These two areas can help you determine the first step of what an offer and overlap with your business could look like. Once these are identified we’ll tackle the process of follow-ups and building out your strategy or sequence to continued engagement.

Tell you which events carry the right audience for your brand and if you want to know exactly how much and where consumers are signaling in the market.

You read to the bottom. That means this week you’ve prepped, but you still need to win your matchup. Invoid helps brands, businesses, and creatives turn intelligence like this into activation that actually converts - newly creative, not replicated.

Reply to this email and let's figure out what that looks like for you.

Always remember, Be Boundless.

The Invoid Team 🔮