Week 6 - Part 2

[00:00:12] Speaker A: 4 p97 welcome back to the second half of this week. We are going to be joined by Tori Peterson, who manages all the social media and digital content for the NHL team the Calgary Flame. She's going to be detailing the the rather unusual and difficult job that is dealing with the sort of production of hockey media from the team side. Maybe that's something that you're interested in. Maybe that's a field you've never really given much thought to. Maybe you yourself have run a social media account for an organization or a team and may perhaps you have a little bit of background about what kind of job that that is. But Tory shares a lot of amazing detail about what goes into a job like that. The Unique Challenges and I want you to think today during Tori's guest lecture, I want you to think about some of the challenges that exist with regards to the marketing of stars through media. Today's or this week's lecture has been about hockey media in general, and one of the common refrains we've talked about throughout the semester so far is that the game needs to grow by marketing its stars more. It's a common thing you're going to hear over and over again when addressing the industry as a whole. There are many fields of the professional hockey industry that involve growth and this is something you're going to hear over and over and over again. The question is, what does that mean? What does that entail? What does that look like if you're actually in control of this product? And that would be the way that NHL teams are and you maybe will develop more of a sensitivity for the difficulty that comes with just simply saying, oh, we need to market our stars better. Well, perhaps there are challenges that you might not have thought about when it comes to the marketing of NHL superstars as it relates to their team culture, team dynamic, and how the marketing of individuals affects the overall outcome from the actual team side as well. So that's something that I want you to be sensitive of when you're listening to Tory's guest lecture. I will meet up with you after the guest lecture here and I will ask you your audio response question for this week. Just a quick note. I've been extremely pleased with the audio responses I've been able to hear so far. I'd say the vast, overwhelming majority of you have been putting in some real thought. I know it's not it's not always comfortable having to talk on camera. I totally understand that. Or having to listen to your own voice. I hate it myself. I hate hearing my own voice recorded but but it is nice to be able to hear your thoughts and sometimes it is easier to talk these issues out rather than simply having to write over all these same responses over and over and over again. So hopefully it's been a beneficial process to you so far. The going through these some of these topics as an audio response I can tell they're definitely getting better as we're moving on. So I just want to commend you for the work you've already done and encourage you to keep doing awesome work. So I'll be I'll meet up with you again after Tory and I's discussion and we'll discuss our this week's audio response topic. But again, as we have been the last couple weeks, keep a note down of anything you find interesting. Note the time during the interview so I can go back and check. I've been appreciating you all doing that in your audio responses right now. So here is Tori. [00:03:11] Speaker B: We are so fortunate to be joined by Tory Peterson. [00:03:13] Speaker A: Tory, thank you so much. This is the manager of Digital and. [00:03:16] Speaker B: Social for the Calgary Flames. [00:03:18] Speaker C: Hi, how are you? [00:03:19] Speaker B: I'm doing fantastic. We're so lucky to have someone in your role and you yourself to come talk to us here in 4P97 at Brock University. Tori, if you can, just as we get started here, tell me about your your earliest experiences with hockey. How did you get into the sport of hockey in the first place? [00:03:35] Speaker C: Very stereotypical Canadian approach. I would I would say my dad is a huge hockey fan. He oddly enough an Oilers fan in Alberta out here, huge Oilers fan. Did not rub off on his children or his wife though my mother also a Flames fan and when we My brother is named after Yari Curry. Like that's how obsessive he is with the Oilers. Didn't tell my mother who was knocked out at the time named him Yari. So I have a brother named Yari who is a Flames fan. So I didn't actually play hockey growing up. I played soccer until my late high school years but always was around the sport. My dad played, all of my relatives played so I was around it on a day to day basis right from the get go. And then when I went to state ended up going to SAIT to start my post secondary career. My practicum was with the Flames at the time they didn't own the other teams at the time it was just the Flames. It was a two week practicum that ended up they just kept me on because they realized they needed the help. So I worked as basically a consultant or a contractor until I was done both my degrees and then they just gave me full time status. So it's kind of been a natural evolution through the sport. [00:04:46] Speaker A: Awesome. [00:04:46] Speaker B: Now tell me about the. When you first arrived as with. With I guess at that point was just the Calgary Flames, now the Calgary Sports Entertainment Group. What was the sort of, what was the, the. The level of engagement with in terms of digital technology when you first started there? [00:05:01] Speaker C: Very basic and that was the kind of the standard around the league. There wasn't a lot of investment in digital at the time that I was getting into it. I was very fortunate in terms of when I landed in that position and how my role has evolved because that is when the NHL as a whole and teams as individuals started to take digital more seriously and understand the impacts that it would have on when I started the league. We still use a very streamlined cms so that's why all the sites look the same. But back in the day they were all the same. But we were using a very rudimentary content management system and it looked like something you would build in Geocities in 1999. That's how I would describe the CMS at that time. It was not what I would call a visually appealing website for any of the teams because of that system we had to use. It has since obviously evolved into something much more robust and visually more pleasing. So I've been around since then. So that like I was at the tail end of that like really bad website structure into what we have now and that evolution and continued progress and in the digital space as a league and as a team. So really fortunate in terms of what my career has looked like because of the timing. [00:06:18] Speaker B: What a fascinating time to be part of sort of the digital space. So you would have been sort of a ground zero for an angel team, sort of recognizing, hey, the social media is probably not something that we should just, you know, play around on is now probably going to have to be a career for, for some people. How would you describe the sort of early experiments with social media that you experienced with the Flames when they were. They were just starting out? [00:06:42] Speaker C: Like most teams I think we just. No one really cared about it was like yeah, just make the accounts, whatever, do what you need to do. There wasn't a lot of emphasis placed on it for many years and that was the case with all teams. And I even think league, like as a league they didn't place a ton of emphas on it which is, it's unfortunate but we've. We've caught up. And as we're seeing now, more and more resources are being funneled to Social specifically. But at the time, it was just like, here's this thing. Figure it out. Do what you need to do. No one's really. There was no one looking over my shoulder at all at. At any given point. It was kind of just figure it out on your own and figure out what works. Which was an incredible learning tool. Looking back, especially now with how much social has evolved as a space and a career. Like, I know people in the league who've never done anything digital. They've only worked in social. That's their entire job is with the team social. They don't touch anything else. Which is incredible to me from where we started, which was here, send this weird tweet. Like we were. We were figuring things out on the fly, what worked, what didn't work. And looking back, I'm sure some of those early tweets are just horrendous and I would cringe if I had to go back and look at them and read them through. But we were figuring it out. The important thing. It's kind of like TikTok now. You throw things at the wall and see what sticks. And I've realized how important that kind of method is in terms of figuring out a strategy as we continue to see more platforms pop up every single day and figuring out which ones we want to use and how to use them. So those early days were like wild west, like, whatever, do whatever you want, figure out however you want to do it, just leave it be. Obviously now there's a lot more emphasis on it and there's a lot more eyeballs on Social internally and as a league. And there's a lot more revenue involved in Social. Now, as you see, a lot of things are part of partnerships with our clients, so there is a lot more emphasis on how we handle things in the procedure tone style. Back in the early days, hockey ops would never have commented on social. They wouldn't have cared at all. Now you'll see coaches and hockey ops have a lot of say in how teams handle their approach to tone. So it all depends on your organization. If your hockey ops are really hands off, you probably have free rein to do whatever you want. But a lot of teams do have really hands on coaches, GMs, assistant GMs, people who are looking at it and helping you guide the way. So that's. Oftentimes you'll see shifts too. When you see hockey ops shifts, like a GM shift. You'll see a shift in tone because of that hands on or hands off approach. [00:09:19] Speaker B: That's extremely interesting that that is. So you've, you've seen in the time that you've been there, regimes come and go, completely different backgrounds. You know, ex players, lawyers, people have been around the game 30, 40 years. You've seen, you've been a part of the Brian Burke regime. So clearly that, that's actually really fascinating to hear that hockey ops has a. As a say in that sort of the way that digital and social is presented. And you know, you were saying the early days of. Of socials was the Wild West. You did a good job. I was part of, I think your first 2,000 followers in 2009. I also followed several other accounts that I thought were the Flames that were called at NHL Flames that were not the Flames. And that reminds me of the early days of Twitter where it was just no way of knowing what anyone. I want to go back to this sort of split between digital and social just for the benefit of our, of our class here. Could you explain the sort of disjuncture or the sort of delineation between the sort of digital side of your job and the social side of your job? [00:10:13] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So digital refers, I would categorize it as app and website. Every team has an app and a website, usually run by the league. There's a few teams that have their own apps. All websites have to be within the league. That's part of our agreement with the NHL. So. And every website is different. When I go and look at their app and their content strategy and how they're handling things. There's some teams that hardly post what I would call editorial content covering the team. It's more like, here's your schedule, here's your ticket sales. Very basic stuff. Maybe because they don't have the resources, maybe because they've chosen to funnel all their resources to those certain aspects of their website. Not sure the reasoning there's. We try to treat ours as almost 50, 50. They're like core pillars for us in terms of, you know, you have your schedule, ticket sales, celebration, theme night, information, arena info, player info and stats. And then you have your editorial content and video content. So the stuff that we would consider kind of the core pillars of schedule, tickets and all of that, they're really easy to handle. It's not a huge burden in terms of resources and staffing. So that's just handled throughout the year on a minimal basis. The editorial content. We brought in content producers who Specialize in that. So Ryan Dietrich is kind of our lead writer. I, I hesitate to use the word beat reporter, which some teams do, because you're not really on the beat. You're not. If you're working for a team, you're covering the flattering aspects of the team. Your team might go 0 and 7 in a run and you're still going to be posting something positive because you are part of the team. But you have a lead producer who handles the bulk of that and the day to day content. We also have video host, we have multiple video hosts and they kind of jump around between teams. But our primary Flames TV host is Brendan Parker and he's been with us. I think this is fifth year. So his day to day is all Flames. In the summer he might do a little bit of stamps to spell off our stamps TV host. But for the most part he's all Flames. And that a big part of that is on the website. A lot of our hosted content lives on the website because we do know that it does better there in terms of traffic, web views, completion rates. Hosted stuff seems to do better on the app and the website for whatever reason. So we funnel it there. We haven't really figured that one out, but through analytics we know that. So his, his job is basically the same as Ryan's. It's day to day coverage with a positive spin no matter, no matter what's going on during the season. Whereas social is, is much more broad. I find it really hard to describe what social is for any sports team and how you cover it because some of it is editorial content from the website, some of it is video that you've done for the website as well. Some of it is social specific. A lot of it is graphic design. A lot of it is working with hockey operations for transactions. So even wording down to like how we word our transactions in a text only tweet is something that we work with hockey ops on. So there's a lot of different angles you're touching, a lot of different spaces and a lot of departments. Some teams really focus heavily on ticketing. If they have issues with ticketing and attendance, we're fortunate enough not to really have that burden on us. We do some paid ads, which all teams do in terms of ticket initiatives. Usually it's around, you know, theme nights or, you know, deals that they have on for certain packs, but nothing overly burdensome on us in terms of the resources that it takes. And then a lot of it is, is trying to almost act like a secondary source to your broadcast. So we don't want to live, we're not going to live tweet, we're not going to provide live play by play coverage of a game. We're going to give you complimentary items to that so that you can follow along on social. But you're not getting, you are also getting an added benefit if you're watching TV and have the play by play going. So there is. Social to me is such a massive beast in terms of what it covers off and what you do on a day to day basis that I find it hard to describe. Whereas the website is, is, is quite easy. [00:14:25] Speaker B: You did a great job describing it though. I mean that is incredibly onerous in terms of the way you're describing this sort of labyrinthian world of, of how to navigate social media platforms. And the hardest part is whereas, you know, when you started, I'm sure it was like, well, we need a Facebook page. Well, unfortunately these, these social media platforms, there's no real subtracting. There's only seems to be addition. Right. Where it's like you still have to worry about your Facebook page even though you know, the demographic on Facebook is obviously different than the demographic on TikTok. You know, I don't know what social media app five years in the future you're going to need to keep joining but you know, can you speak to the struggle of this constant multiplying of different sort of portals and different audiences and changing tastes and what I'm assuming is not an unlimited resource base in terms of people that get to do these things for you? [00:15:15] Speaker C: Yeah. So as I've gotten older and as social evolves as it has and grown, I've become, not that I wasn't before, but I've really dug into the idea that you need someone who is not doing day to day, who's handling social strategy for you and handling all the connections that you have with different departments, researching new platforms, understanding what audiences you have on each platform and how you need to tailor your content strategy for each of them. It's really hard to do that and do the day to day execution and content creation. It's almost impossible at this point. I think we've done a decent job in how we've handle that. However, I do now have a content producer who primarily works in social. He does a little bit on the web when need be. His name is Alex. He's, he's great but he does the day to day stuff and for him that's the focus and it takes up 8, 9, 10 hours of his day, especially on a game day like that's a 12 hour day some days. So you can't do that and be effective at managing and strategizing what needs to happen on social. It's just impossible. And more, more teams are realizing that for a long time social has been undervalued, I believe, not just in the NHL, but in sports. In terms of what it does for your company and what you pay people and the limited number of people that you have. We're seeing a shift in that it's slow progression. It's nice to see you're seeing teams add more social specific roles that only handle social. They don't have to delve into digital because they have enough digital people, which is great. The Rangers are a really good example. They hired two people who specifically make tick tocks. That's all they do like that. To me, that's. I can't even fathom that because I've been here for so long. And when you've been in the same space for so long, people depend on you for a lot of different things, which is great, but I just can't even fathom hiring someone just to make TikToks, let alone two people. But the demand is there and they understand the value of that platform and they. And every team is different. Maybe your audience is not great on TikTok, even though you put a ton of time and effort into it, so you focus more on other platforms. Clearly they've identified TikTok as a brand leader for them in terms of social platforms and they've invested there and that's great. MBA has done a really good job in terms of really dialing in and focusing on social specific roles. And I think a lot of that comes down to how you're able to translate the value of social to people in roles who wouldn't understand it but are making decisions. So a lot of VPs are older, as they would be. A lot of them are white males, I'll just be honest. And that's every sport. A lot of them are white males and a lot of them are not technologically savvy. And that's every organization, every sport. So you have to be able to understand how to translate the value of the work you're doing to them, not just as an individual and like helping yourself get raises, promotions, but in terms of what it does for the organization and the revenue it can bring in and the brand awareness and the intangibles that you're able to bring in. If you're able to do that, you'll see far more investment in this space. And the teams who've been able to do that obviously are getting that now. I think we've done a decent job. Our current VP is very dialed in and understands the value of social while acknowledging that this is not a space that he, you know, knows much in. He just knows that there's value there and trusts us to translate it for him. And we've been able to get more and more resources not just for social, but for digital as well. So I think that's where we're at is as a league, as a team. We're a small base, but I think we do good work for a small base. But you're seeing teams grow more and more and I cannot imagine that slows down. Especially with broadcasts going down. You're seeing broadcast numbers going down, but social numbers going up, up. So if you're just basic math there, if you're an executive who, you know, you're managing your social team, you're going, okay, well, we'll probably put more to where the eyeballs are, right? So as long as you can prove your worth it, it will pay off in the end. [00:19:30] Speaker B: It's a great point. And especially we brought up the NBA, which is a league that if anything, is almost too strong on socials and is trying to figure out ways of give, generating interest in the regular season product. And you know, it's interesting that you mentioned the sort of marketplace part of things. You know, Calgary is a city of a million people. There's, there's roughly a million people in Mississauga, for instance, as a matter of comparison, inside the, the Canadian landscape socials, the ways you've described it here seem to be a way of, of, you know, breaking down the barriers between, you know, the fact that there are only a million people living in Calgary and the fact that, you know, the hockey fan today is far more star driven than it was 20 years ago in terms of finding individual players. This leads me to my sort of, my next question about your, your role in terms of the way it works with the marketing of the product itself and the sort of challenges that come along with that. Because, you know, there's so much, so many more avenues to, to access your favorite players and things like that and socials being a large part of it. How much of your, your bandwidth is taken up by trying to market the individual personalities of these stars. Recognizing that, you know, that is an extremely valuable commodity in, in pro sports in general. [00:20:42] Speaker C: Absolutely. It's, it's one of the things that hockey in general, I think the women's game has done a better job, but especially the men's side hasn't been able to crack, is how to market their stars. And it comes from that hyper team mentality. I, I will die by that. It's this players don't want to be in the spotlight because they've been fed their entire careers and even back to like their junior days when they didn't even know they had a career. Have an like an inkling of being an NHL player. It's team first, team first, team first. Always you don't want to be the individual because it's, it's like beaten out of you. It sounds horrible, but. And there is a space for that. Obviously teamwork is a huge thing in life. Like you need to learn that. But when it comes to marketing, you start to see the downsides of how much that's hammered into players. No one wants to stand out. You're part of it. You win as a team, you lose as a team. That's the mentality. That's how it is and how it's always been. And that's what's beaten into people. And it's hard for individual personalities to shine when that's how you've grown up. And if you are someone like a Connor McDavid who's had a camera in your face since age 14 or younger, your personality is often beaten back because you have so much media training from such a young age, which is important because that's really overwhelming for a 14 year old kid, 15 year old kid to all of a sudden have, have a bunch of grown ups throwing microphones and asking you questions every single day. That's a lot. So there is a balance that's needed there. They obviously need the media training. It's very important. But that makes it hard to market stars based on personality. I think there's probably ways around that in terms of individual highlights, but even that can be tricky because I will not name names here. It's not our team, but there are teams in the league who don't want you, who have strictly forbidden the ability to shine light on individual player highlights even. It's like you can't just single out single players. This is a team sport. I won't name names. I'm sure you know, people will be able to deduce what team this is. But there's some very old school thinking in that regard in certain organizations, which again makes it hard. It makes it really hard. I'll give Daryl Sutter credit. People love to passion him because he's. They think he's old school. He's actually far more progressive than you think. He has no problem with that. But these players are very. We have a very veteran group of players on this roster. They're not young and they've grown up with that mentality of like, well, it's not all about me, it's all about the team. And even if they're great in front of the camera and articulate and answer questions really thoughtfully, the personality has been kind of dialed back for so many years that it's. It's impossible to ask those guys to all of a sudden be on and be a personality. You can't do that. That's not fair. So that's where you sort of start looking to your younger players and hoping that they have that personality. We do have a few, but the other issue is language gap. So a guy who has a ton of personality but the language gap is there would be like a Jacob Peltier. He's born and raised in Quebec. French obviously, very much his first language. He is self conscious about his English, even though it is very good. So when you have a language barrier, it takes down a little bit of the personality. And he has a big personality. Like I think people saw that when he was playing the world juniors and after they lost, he's staying on the ice and hugged every one of his teammates. Like, that's an endearing personality that you want to grow. So you have to start looking at how you can market the actions and perhaps not the. Not the face that sounds. It sounds counterintuitive. But you need to find ways and angles to market that work for the player and the team and that can change year to year. So maybe you have a new GM and they say, you know, do all this stuff, who cares? Like, you have all access. Some teams have been fortunate enough to have that. A lot of teams do not. Because again, you're still in that old school mindset and it is hard to market stars. Whereas the NBA, like they have no problem like it. Even NFL like it is, they're marketing single players for games like that can be really tough. In the NHL, that's a tough sell for a lot of teams to market a single guy, which sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but that is the way it is and that's the battle. We're slowly chipping away at it and you're seeing the younger players really embrace it like a Trevor Z. Grass. And Anaheim is a good example that Kid has no qualms about showing his personality at all. Love him or hate him, but I like that right. Like it is. That's who he is. And PK Suban was a great example. And he's older too, but he was an outlier. He was such an outlier, especially for his time to be that personable and be that outspoken and be able to maintain that personality through the length of his career. Outlier. So it's a struggle, but. But we're getting there, I think. And it's all about marketing, right? It's like you said, it's finding ways to work within the organization you're in and the players you have. [00:25:35] Speaker B: What a fantastic way of describing the. [00:25:37] Speaker A: Way you can do it though, by using actions. [00:25:39] Speaker B: First of all, that's an enormously helpful way of giving us a peek inside where you're saying, look, I'm actually get resistance to market. So that that again speaks to not a failure of understanding. That's part of the things that I want to push back on. Always when we're talking about, you know, the failures of marketing in the NHL more broadly is that it's not a. [00:25:57] Speaker A: Lack of understanding on the part of. [00:25:59] Speaker B: The people that do this kind of work. It's actually within the actual culture of the NHL itself and, and virtue of the fact that everything you just mentioned there speaks so truly to what we talk about in this course, about how the factors that are at play from players when they're 14 years old, by the time they get to the NHL, they're finished products. It's a lot to ask of anybody when they get that their dream job, right, that they are fighting every single day to keep that they will only have for, you know, four years or less in most cases. And then I'm supposed to like open up and become my true self. Like when you're in the most, like that's impossible. If from the time you're playing bantam hockey, you know, you're being told that nothing is more important than the team and all those things. Which is to say it's not like other sports don't preach the importance of teamwork. Look at football, it's a great example where, you know, that's the most sort of team centered, you know, sport I could probably imagine. But you're right about the NBA. Can you imagine not being able to post John Moran dunk highlights? Like, can you imagine like a sport like that doing that? I mean, do their entire marketing strategy is based around the idea that come see this for yourself. Like come See what you're going to see. So anyways, that, that is extremely helpful, Tori. And again I would ask you now just as we sort of wind up, wind down our time because you've been so generous with your time already, when you look to the ways in which things that are changing or things that you find that are succeeding in the way that the game is marketed either on digitals or social. You mentioned obviously TikTok being a platform that's extremely successful. How do you see the game sort of moving or changing within, within the next say five years as my students are going to be entering, heading into that industry and around that time frame, what sort of skills would you think that would, would be advantageous for them to focus on as they hit the job market? [00:27:37] Speaker C: I think from a soft skills standpoint is, and I always preach this because hard skills are easy to learn. That sounds, it sounds ridiculous. Just, I would have thought that was ridiculous. Like I need to know how to write a press release. I need to do, know how to do this. I need to know how to edit a video. Most people entering this space are going to be just fine learning new skills, new hard skills. Those things are easy to teach. I can teach you how to edit a quick video. I can teach you how to take a photo. Like those things are easy to teach. You have to be willing to learn, obviously. But the soft skills are where it's most important, how you relate to other people. I work with 20 to 30 people on a game day. Like there are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of people I have to talk to. So the ability to work in a team, as we talk about teamwork, the ability to work in a team is paramount to everything else. The ability to manage your emotions, that is a huge thing in sports. And I, I've, I don't think this is talked about enough. A lot of people go into sports with this dream. It's their dream job or maybe they want to work for a specific team and they get that role, they get in the door. This is their dream job. They're ready for their dream career and they 100% put that into their, that's their personality, is their job. That is so unhealthy. And that is the number one thing I try to tell people is you need to have a full personality. You need to have outside interests. You need to not spend 80 hours a week at work. And I think organizations and sports teams are finally learning this. You can't ask people to work 70, 80 hour weeks. That's unsustainable and that's why people leave, they burn out. And if your career is the only thing you have, which is very, very prevalent in sports, in any sport, it becomes you're going to burn out so quick and your emotional, your ability to regulate your emotions on a day to day basis will be shot. And that's not just for your job, that's for every aspect of your life. If you're, if your personality is tied to wins and losses, it is incredibly hard to function on a day to day basis. And I have seen this with so many people, especially young people, when they come in, they're like, you know, they're on an absolute high. If the team wins, if they lose, it is the end of the world. The sun's not going to come up tomorrow. They can't function, function, they're irritable. You need to be able to regulate how you see your job. And I think that is something that sports does not talk about enough. And as someone who has seen many people leave the sports industry because of burnout, this is or you know, almost change personalities. I know people who are still in it and they're just irritable to be around and it's because they were never able to figure out who they were outside of their job or the team they work for. And that's a huge issue. Do. That's the one thing I would say develop, develop a full personality. The other thing is, is oftentimes at any job, but especially sports, you're going to go in and you're not going to be paid the best money. That's just the, the hard truth. It's getting better. We've been able to bump our starting salaries up quite a bit from when I first started. It's incredible actually to see the change. And that's across the league, league very thankful for that. And it continues to grow as they realize that they need to be a competitive place to find employees, all sports. So that's good news. But you're still going to be on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of market value. Learn how to budget early. Because I know so many people again who've had to leave sports because they had completely unsustainable lifestyles to the money that they're making. These are really basic things and they could go for a lot of different industries but it's very prevalent in sports, sports. These three things, teamwork, the ability to regulate your emotions and have a personality outside of your job and your ability to figure out how to live within your means Huge issues when you're first starting in sports and I don't think those are talked about enough. The hard skills depends on where you want to go. Right. Like there's so many different avenues and sports that you can work in that the hard skills are going to depend on where you want to go. For me, a writing background has really helped me. Me being a strong writer and not just in terms of what goes out and is public for fans to see. The ability to write a good email, the ability to advocate for myself or my department, those sort of things. The writing background, huge. I'm a photographer in my like a wildlife photographer outside of my job. Again develop, develop other interests outside of sports. Very important. That has translated into me being able to hop in if need be. In terms of photography. I can do basic editing. Most people can. Understanding. I'm very good with numbers in terms of understanding analytics, not the actual math, but understanding what the analytics means and what it translate to in terms of where we need to go with content. So those are kind of, those are hard skills that have developed over time for me. But those soft skills are so important. So important. [00:32:34] Speaker A: Tori, thank you so, so, so much. [00:32:36] Speaker B: Everything you just gave us there was so important no matter what part of the sports industry you're looking for. Tory, thank you for your time. On behalf of 4P97 I want to thank you for joining us in this. [00:32:44] Speaker A: Class and we wish you well this season and every season afterwards. [00:32:48] Speaker C: Thanks baby. Everything is alright. [00:32:58] Speaker A: Uptight that's a discussion I had with Torrey Peterson at the end of the last NHL season. I think Tori has some extremely good advice there, not just about hockey media, but hockey in general. And she mentions that it's important to have a life outside of your job when it comes to your personal alignment with these sports teams. That's I think really good advice. No matter what side of the business you end up working on, don't become a person person that has become essentially personally connected with the team in a way in which their performance on a day to day basis affects your relationships outside of work. I mean this is something that can be very difficult in the sports industry where a lot of us enter as fans. And I think her advice is really sound there, especially if you think about living as long as you will in the sport industry. If you work for decades long, you're going to have good years, you're going to have bad years and ultimately and in very, very frequently you have no ability to impact performance on the field of play. And that's something that comes from working on the business side of things. [00:33:59] Speaker B: Right? [00:33:59] Speaker A: I mean, it's extremely frustrating. It can be emotionally exhausting. It can be a genuinely tough job to have, no matter what part of the business you're in. So that's good advice from Tori for the most part there. And I think she raised a lot of interesting points as they relate to the way in which the stars can be marketed and the way the media relates to them. And I think that that's a good way to sort of transition into a discussion of I just wanted to go over a few of the concepts raised in the slides that also are brought up in the article that you're going to be reading this week as well. So the slides this week, it's a little difficult sort of sometimes translating slides into digital courses. I wish that sometimes I could, you know, be there in person walking you through it. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the Hockey Night in Canada deal, and it's the broadcasting of games through Rogers and the way in which hockey is experienced by Canadians currently and how different it is throughout the history of Canadian media and throughout the history of Canadian hockey. They mention here that hockey and hockey in Canada are so embedded within Canadian culture that Jay Shearey and David Whitson in 2009 argue that access to the publicly televised broadcast of NHL games constitutes a form of Canadian cultural citizenship. But I think it's an interesting argument to make essentially that, you know, we speak frequently in academia about how Canadian identity is a difficult thing to define and it's difficult to sort of put your finger on and precisely what is Canadian. And yet Hockey Night in Canada for many decades was the closest thing to a unified form of Canadian monoculture that you'll ever find. So that's something that I think is really interesting about that, and then the way in which it relates to your experience of the game of hockey itself. Do you feel the same way? Do you feel that Hockey Night in Canada as a form of cultural citizenship the way that Whitson and Scheer described there? That's something that I want you to consider also as you're composing your written responses as well to the articles themselves. Moving through the slides here, I want to give you an impression of the sort of role that Hockey Night in Canada has played. And this is from a Norman article. In recent years, Hockey Night Canada has become increasingly interactive, active program that is produced across multiple interlinked media and access through various delivery systems, thus reflecting the digital plenitude of contemporary sports media landscape. This is Something that will be difficult to sort of gauge for many of you. As you know, you're only a prisoner of your own experiences in many ways. But I'm not asking you to have a detailed understanding of the way that Hockey Night Canada has been broadcast to Canadians over time. But it's something to consider the relationship of change that has occurred between Canadians and this idea of not just Hockey Night in Canada, but specifically the way that hockey is broadcast to Canadians more broadly. So the game itself as the way it's broadcast has become a sort of participatory act. When you watch broadcast, there's many invitations to join in via discussions over Twitter, previously in the last decade over Facebook. Now there is a difference between sort of lens that is applied to the broadcasting of hockey in terms of its participatory models, and that relates to gambling. I have a sneaky suspicion that it won't be like this forever, that perhaps massive changes may be on their way in terms of the way that hockey and gambling are related. Not just hockey, but. But certainly the way that you watch sports right now. The way that you consume the mediated product is different than it was five years ago, three years ago, even when it comes to its relationship to gambling. So media has an interesting sort of problem there. I think that in Canada, the crtc, which is the regulatory commission that governs how things are broadcast in this country, probably are going to take a long look at the way that gambling ads are integrated and invitations to live bet on games are integrated into broadcasts, mostly because it is an act that cannot be consumed by everyone. It is certainly something that you have to be to able 18 years old to do. And if there are invitations to drink beer mid game, I think that the CRTC would have something to say about that as well. So I think that the way we're watching broadcasting evolve in front of our eyes right now is different. But they mentioned here in the article that essentially it's becoming a far more. It's become a far more scattered product. It's available across platform. And there's a figure that I wanted to bring up here that I think it's very important to discuss. And it relates directly to the way that hockey has been mediated in Canada for many, many years. And that's Don Cherry. You may be familiar with Don Cherry. You may be familiar with a version of Don Cherry from his sort of later years. It has been a figure that I struggle with in terms of the way that we instruct this subject matter, mostly because there's so many versions of Don Cherry that have existed throughout the years that, that many of the younger students that are coming through right now are only familiar with a very, very, very small part of his career. And this, this part, the end here is sort of a cartoonish caricature of a man rather than actually who he used to be and who he used to represent to many people. And yes, his views were fairly consistent throughout his time. But it is important to note that the version in which Don Cherry that I find, frankly, a lot undergraduates of students are fairly protective of, and in a way that I wouldn't have expected before I started teaching sport management students, they seem to be rather protective of what Don Cherry, and this is a generalization I should note. I mean, it's not true for everyone, but I've noticed a reticence to sort of jettison what Don Cherry represents, this sort of notion of traditional hockey values, whatever that means to, to us. And that's fair. But it is important to note that Don Cherry, you know, when he had color in his hair and he was a bench boss of the Boston Bruins, I mean, he used to be somewhat of an innovator when it came to tactics. He was a fairly progressive in certain respects. He was a huge supporter of women's hockey, always has been. Remains so somewhat versions of women's hockey to this day. The version of his later career self was in some ways a bit of a retrograde notion of his earlier careers. He chose certain issues to be become extremely recalcitrant on, and he chose certain battles to pick that ultimately ended up costing him his job. I think that that's something that's important about Don Cherry. Crucially also, if you're not familiar with Don Cherry, I mean, he is essentially the most controversial figure in Canadian media, sports media, certainly he was a figure that would appear at the intermission. And I've included some clips of Don here in the. In these slides, but mostly I included four clips of Hockey Night in Canada. So if you download the slides themselves instead of looking at them on brightspace, if you actually download the slideshow, you'll see the hot links to the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast as a whole. And we'll return to Don Cherry in a second. But I want to show you the ways in which that Hockey Night in Canada product has changed and evolved from the first national telecast in 1958 to, I believe opening night in 2022 is the one I have up there queued up as well. But you can sort of see the ways in which this broadcast has shifted and I want you to sort of have a look at these things and I'm going to have you respond to it in your audio responses here as well. But I want you to see the change in the way in which the game is marketed, right? The ways in which Canadians are reached out to the way in which CBC and now Rogers have chosen to sort of represent the game of hockey. Have you noticed any alterations being made to the way in which the game is sold to then I have this other clip of Don Cherry here as well, which again, you can see the entirety if you download the slideshow. It's important to note that for many hockey fans, this has become a very, very, very important issue. Certainly this is a very localized issue to just Canadians, for the vast overwhelming majority of people outside of Canada are maybe not familiar with Don Cherry and what he represents, represents to Canadians. But I think that point is, is one that I is worth considering is do we really, when we have these sort of highly charged discussions about whether or not Don Cherry should have been fired or whether or not what he said is of any importance at all, or whether or not, you know, this is even a discussion worth having, are we really talking about the, the, the, the multitudes of things that he said over the years or anything, any one particular saying or, or are we talking about what Don Cherry represents to people? And I think that sometimes is easier to understand when we have these prolonged discussions about him. It's not so much about him. It's about this notion that there is a past version of the game itself that is being taken away from people. People can feel very protective of the notion of the way things were and this sort of changing of the guard. Now it's important also to note, and I've talked about this in previous years, in previous contexts, this is not, not anything new, right? This, this comes with the territory. Change occurs in sport every single game. It is a regular part of the way that sport evolves. So being protective of the way things were is not something that any one generation has complete ownership of. But it is important to note that the way the hockey has been mediated in Canada has certainly changed. So we talked to Sonny about the sort of long form, deep seated narratives that are trying to be explored by feature writing. But this is a sort of an alternation to this. This is the mass production of hockey and how it has been mediated throughout Canadian history. Returning to the slides, we're going to go into a little bit of detail regarding the way in which Hockey night in Canada has sort of been changed. Throughout Canadian history and how it is now broadcast to us today. This is from slide 7. Already reeling from a repeated funding cuts at the hands of hostile Conservative government, the CBC's iconic Hockey Night in Canada Canada property had effectively been eviscerated by the NHL's 12 year 5.23 billion dollar deal with the Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers Communications Inc. For all additional NHL rights across platforms beginning with the 2014-15 season. The CBC still owned its cherished brand, but no longer controlled the product upon which it was based. This is an important moment in the history of Canadian hockey and hockey media and general and the way the game is presented to Canadians as a whole. In the brief period between the confirmation of the deal and its public announcement, the CBC struck a deal, a sub licensing deal with Rogers itself. And the arrangement saw the CBC essentially loan the Hockey Night in Canada brand and time slot to Rogers in exchange for the right to promote CBC programs on hockey broadcasts across the Rogers network. This is a really, really, really unique arrangement and it's still in existence to this day. Essentially, CBC saw the writing on the wall and the CBC is a public broadcaster. And my thoughts on CBC are immaterial. But I believe that there is a need for a public broadcaster not just in Canada, but in many countries. But they have to serve a specific mandate. And that mandate does not include bidding 5.24 billion to outbid a somewhere where the private sector certainly has far more resources at their disposal. But one thing Rogers didn't have when they purchased the rights to broadcast national games was any sort of institutional credibility when it comes to the lasting brand value of Hockey Night in Canada. I mean, you're probably familiar with the notion of Hockey Night in Canada. If you aren't, it's an extremely valuable one day of the week broadcasting model that many other sports have looked to Canada to copy. If you read the books about ESPN or they talk about this with Monday Night Football or the way in which they've, they've tried to do Football Night in America, any of these sorts of things south of the border Hockey Night in Canada. And the CBC really has, has established a framework for other countries in terms of their one day programming of one sport. Now again, it starts in 1958. It's been a long time in development and it's certainly something that Rogers can't just materialize out of nowhere. So Rogers decides the best thing to do is actually just use the same brand. Pretty solid idea. The, the arrangement, the sub licensing deal. And this exists to this day. You can watch Hockey Night in Canada, Saturday Night game, both of them, the doubleheader for free on the CBC website. That is extremely unique. That is something that again, I try and describe to young people that if you go and try and watch Sunday Night Football NBC, the idea of it being given to all citizens of the country and CBC's website broadcasts every game game of the Olympics, every event in the Olympics for free as well, that is a, a value add for Canadian taxpayers. Certainly that is relatively unique among any other nation in the world. Now there, what does CBC get out of this sort of sublicensing arrangement? They get the ability to advertise. That's why on Hockey Night in Canada broadcast, if you're ever watching them, you get some pretty strange ad reads. Sometimes you'll get Chris Cuthbert reading ads for Murdoch Mysteries and certain the some programming you would not see south of the border in terms of the ad reads themselves. And you know, when the deal was struck, it looked like CBC was just getting table scraps thrown to them by a much more lucrative arrangement between the NHL and Rodgers. It looked like, you know, is CBC really going to get anything of this arrangement? Is this really the end for CBC Sports? And I think certainly in 2014, I vividly remember that discussion. Well, is CBC ever going to broadcast anything again? Is there really any place for a public broadcaster in broadcasting sports? A broadcaster that has done so much for the development of sports like the Great cup and, and the Stanley cup, certainly in Canadian history, I mean, is this the it they broadcast the Olympics, all sorts of sporting events. Basically the question was, does this Rogers deal put a nail, the final nail in this coffin? And more importantly, I mean, now is there going to be a situation which even the original programming, which in some ways was, Was floated by the revenue generated by Hockey Night in Canada, is that now in jeopardy? And in 2014, 2013, certainly even the years previous to this, I mean CBC had had a rather relatively un. Un. Unlucky streak of. Of developing original programming. And yet I think in 2023, 2022, 2021, we now see ourselves in a position which CBC has developed gigantic. Their largest hits they've ever developed have come out of this period. And this isn't a class on television history, but it's important to note the way in which these broadcasting deals have arranged. Now, is it a coincidence that Schitt's Creek was. Has developed the level of fame it did on CBC with this advertising deal? I mean, perhaps. I mean, is it necessarily related that the advertising deal and the ability to advertise CBC programming coincides with a huge boost in CBC programming. Maybe the shows are just good for once and that's why people are watching them all. All these things may be true, but it is very difficult to argue that CBC hasn't been able to benefit with these new original programs in terms of their advertising deals. On the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast. It's difficult to argue that it hurt the product of Schitt's Creek or Kim's convenience or any of these products that you see in advertisement. Hockey Night in Canada broadcast, not just on CBC, but on Rogers on their streaming products all the way or all the way around the world. Even if you're illegally pirating the game, you still get a CBC ad in there. So you see the effect here. Now, is there a cause and effect relationship there? None that I've seen explicitly proven. That being said, if you're cbc, you can look at this and you see we still have a Saturday night program. Maybe we don't get the ad revenue from it necessarily, but we have seen an enormous growth in our, in our original creative works as well. So is possible that you could look at this and then say this has kind of worked out for cbc. Certainly it looks a lot better now in terms of their overall health of their programming than it did when the Rogers deal was signed. But when this deal was signed, there was genuine consternation about what this means for CBC in general. So it's something to think about in terms of the way the game is marketed. [00:49:03] Speaker B: Right? [00:49:03] Speaker A: I mean, there's another way of looking at this as well. And that's the way the game is actually presented on Rogers versus the way it was on cbc. CBC had a broad based approach to things. It's important to note if you ever were able to watch the opening montages, which is something I used to like when I was a younger hockey fan. I mean, the CBC montages were legendary. They're available on YouTube, some of them. But the CBC was able to use a distant archive of footage all the way back from the history of Canada that they would intersperse with their, with their montages. You'd see Roberta Bondar, you'd see the Avro Arrow, you'd see all these sort of bits of Canadian history interspersed with a Jets game or with a Flames game or Canucks game or Leafs game. It was an interesting tool. All that's kind of gone away, to be honest. It's now very much like a hockey sort of montage. At the start. It looks like the opening of a traditional Video game for the most part, and it's still okay, but it's certainly not as ambitious as the CBC ones were. It's just an example there of the way in which the game used to be presented in a certain way. And I'm trying not to sound like a person who's like, oh, bad. Before it was so much better and now it's so much worse. I'm just trying to point out to the fact that it is different. It is certainly different. And that changes the way you consume the game as well. Right? It changes the way you, you being in this case the consumer consumes the product. And in so many ways we are talking about this through hockey media. We're talking about the way the game is covered with the Sunny discussion and we're talking about the way the game is marketed with this discussion with T. So with that said, let's move towards your audio response question. This week's audio response question asks you to evaluate what you've heard from Sunny and what you've heard from Tory. It has to do with the way in which the game is marketed through hockey media. Drawing on what Sunny told you about feature writing and the sort of in depth issues related to hockey and what Tori's told you about marketing individual stars and running team accounts and things like that, what do you believe is the biggest barrier to a more robust and expansive marketing of hockey superstars to a wider Canadian public? That's what I'm looking for in your audio response. What do you believe the largest barrier is to a more robust and holistic marketing of NHL superstars? Basically what I'm asking you is if we know we need to market the game better, what does better look like to you? So I would love for you to draw on specific things that you heard from Tori and Sunny to help inform your opinion. Right. What I don't want is, well, you know, I think we just need to like give them a microphone and let them go for it. That's probably not exactly. If you were able to read between the lines in terms of what Tori told you or even what Sunny told you, that's not necessarily always the best strategy. So we know perhaps that the game does not market superstars very well. Here's your chance to tell me how you think it should be improved drawing on what you've heard heard from Sunny and Tori. So that is your audio response task this week. You have another form response that's also going up right now on Wednesdays. On Wednesday. I look forward to listening to these audio responses. And I hope you have a great rest of your week. [00:52:19] Speaker C: Everything is all right outside? Clean outside.