YP and the VP

The other day I had the opportunity to attend a meeting sponsored by the ESPN Young Professionals, which is a group of driven young men and women working within the ESPN community who are truly the industry’s best and brightest. The guest speaker for this meeting was none other than the Executive Vice President for Sales and Marketing, Sean Bratches. I’d just like to say right off the bat that Mr. Bratches was one of the best public speakers I’ve ever had the privilege to listen to and it was really enlightening to hear him speak on so many diverse topics I didn’t have a large amount of knowledge about.  I don’t usually gush like a pre-teen girl who’s just seen Justin Bieber, but I can confidently say that every person around that table was enthralled with what Mr. Bratches had to say.

                In an increasingly changing market characterized by the rise and fall of competitors and new technological innovations that radically redefine business plans, ESPN must continually be willing and capable of change if it is to remain at the top of the industry. One of the most striking things about Mr. Bratches was that he knew an astounding amount about the business and how it has been evolving, while many of his peers at companies like Comcast or NBC frequently ask themselves how advertising dollars translate to Tweeter. The mobile and digital mediums of advertising and marketing are on the up and up as people today have so many portable options to carry with them throughout the day. Whether it’s an iPad, iPhone, or simply a laptop we consume more now than ever on the go and working at ESPN we are more conscious than most about the fact that people need access to information anytime, anywhere.

               Developments like WatchESPN and the Scorecenter mobile app are tailored specifically for a generation of people constantly on the move so that sports fans around the world never miss a single moment of their sports teams. In my last post I mentioned the Euro Cup which was a major event that WatchESPN covered among its 24/7 programming of live events, and in the month of June during the tournament 5.3 million viewers tuned in, racking up 862.2 million minutes of viewing while ESPN apps hit 1,555,906,950 minutes. According to NCTA Cable studies, in 1977 only about 6.5 million people had cable television. So in one single month WatchESPN achieved almost as many viewers which really just goes to show how these industries can evolve quickly. One of the things Sean Bratches mentioned was that in this day and age, in order to achieve the desired 10% annual growth ESPN would have to have to expand its market by over $1 billion. In order to hit those numbers every year, new radical innovations need to be implemented and ideas like WatchESPN and mobile apps are exactly what this era calls for. As an intern who focuses on largely digital sales and marketing, I was informed in my first week that at ESPN the television side of sales and marketing makes over $4 billion each year whereas digital and mobile only take in about $300 million. The main difference here is that television has been in households worldwide for over half a century, while the internet and its application to mobile devices is relatively new technology and so digital and mobile markets are growing significantly faster because there is the most room for innovation and change. Ten years ago the way people used the internet was radically different from how people use it today and men like Mr. Bratches see that this growth in the market is where ESPN needs to be.

               Mr. Bratches left us with one last point, encouraging us to all go out with the same attitude as Steve Jobs in his creation of Pixar and Apple. Nothing can be off the limits and nothing is guaranteed, we need to all go out there and constantly be looking to change instead of accepting what is around as an inevitable truth because as Steve Jobs proved, we can improve, innovate, and succeed even when others are so sure we'll fail.

Here is a link to WatchESPN http://espn.go.com/watchespn/index