CONTENT SPECIALIST
FROM CONCEPT TO RESULTS
My professional vision to see sports content from every angle, package it, and sell it can be consolidated into one term: Content Specialist. In the over-saturated sports media space, we are constantly fighting an uphill battle to earn people's attention on a tiny screen and convert that into views, clicks, ad revenue, etc. For example, I know that only about 3% of people who look at my site will click on this page, expand the text box, and read this sentence. You are in rarified air, my friend. With that in mind, I kept most of the text on this site collapsible, so that visitors are more likely to stay engaged and keep scrolling to the things I want them to see. This level of awareness and attention to detail is what I bring to my work on a daily basis. No matter how good our content is, it doesn't matter if we can't sell it. In traditional terms, here are a few of the day-to-day tasks I have professional experience with: content planning and discovery, video production for web and social, original written content, aggregated written/video content, video and text editing, SEO optimization, YouTube production and strategy, podcast production and strategy, social media strategy and posting, email marketing, website development... But I knew you weren't gonna read all that. So I like to say "Content Specialist."
MARCA x NETFLIX: REBEL MOON
REPRESENTING STAR ATHLETES AS 'REBELS' TO CROSS-PROMOTE A BLOCKBUSTER FILM
After establishing success by producing engaging social media videos for Marca, I spearheaded our partnership with Netflix through creative direction of this campaign: Here were my guidelines: Choose three athletes who became legends from their accomplishments in the past year. Present them through the lens of "Rebels daring to be great," which is central to the film. To ensure traffic and engagement, I chose three athletes who already have huge audiences: LeBron James, Lionel Messi, and A'ja Wilson. I played the producer role in this campaign. I wrote the scripts for the videos, which required some creative license to describe these established legends as "Rebels." I then sent the scripts to my co-worker in Madrid, who recorded the videos at Marca's state of the art studio. I finished the project by editing the videos in the style our online audience had grown familiar with - quick, engaging, and text heavy - while putting extra emphasis on the central messaging of our rebellious campaign.
YOUTUBE STRATEGY
3 UNIQUE BRANDS
3 UNIQUE AUDIENCES
3 UNIQUE GOALS
MARCA
GOAL: BRAND AWARENESS
When I joined the team, Marca English had 8 subscribers. Here's how we changed that Marca's strong brand identity and infrastructure were key leverage points in our strategy. Because Marca is strongly associated with soccer worldwide, that was the initial focus of our content. I produced a daily series called "The Buzz" which focused on the hottest topic of the day in soccer. Our method was almost entirely focused on vertical, 1 minute YouTube Shorts, because they are favored by the algorithm. This strategy sacrificed watch time, engagement, and ad revenue in the short-term in order to grow faster and establish our brand. Once a foundation was built, I helped shift our focus to establishing Marca as an authority in the English-language, American sports market, which was the overall goal. I played a role by producing semiweekly on-camera NFL content in a series called "The Huddle," (featured in this section), which accelerated the channel's growth in Fall 2023. After starting with 8 subscribers on my first day, August 3rd, we crossed 1,000 subscribers on September 14th, and reached 10,000 by January 4th. The success was certainly not all mine, but I played a key role by working daily with Marca's in-house social media team on our strategy.
D1BASEBALL
GOAL: MONETIZATION
I turned D1Baseball.com's stagnant YouTube channel into a new revenue stream in less than 60 days. I served as a Content Specialist for D1Baseball for almost two years during my time at Helium, a digital sports marketing agency. As the leading source for college baseball news (they create the national Top 25 poll), they were already making great content, but they needed someone to leverage it correctly. Since D1 did not produce any video content and had no interest in doing so, I built a strategy around taking their industry-leading podcast and live streaming the recordings on YouTube. When I took over, they only needed about 300 more subscribers to reach monetization, which came quickly thanks to the influx of consistent, high-quality content from the podcast. From there, we prioritized engagement over subscriber growth, because watch time is the biggest factor for revenue. In contrast to Marca, D1 was less concerned about the size of the audience because of their robust preexisting market share. The success of my strategy was illustrated by the stats my first month in charge. Compared to the first month of the college baseball season the year before, views actually decreased 30%, but watch time and number of new subscribers both boomed by over 1,000% from the same period the year before. At the end of the 2022 season, I had tripled the subscriber count in 3 months and established a steady revenue stream. The growth then leveled off noticably after I left my role as their Content Specialist.
MY CHANNEL
GOAL: SHARE MY VOICE!
This was truly a one-man show, unlike the others, but it taught me many of the hard lessons I applied in the future The two strategies I dedicated myself to were consistency and being myself. I made videos about my favorite leagues, teams and topics, even when they didn't fit perfectly with the rest of my content -- such as trying vlogs, live streams, Q&As, other sports, etc. Every video was one I wanted to make, which was crucial to staying consistent. I knew that as long as I made videos with knowledge and passion, eventually like-minded people would find my channel and subscribe. The more often I posted, the more chances for that to happen naturally. Along the way, I experienced the boom or bust nature of the Almighty Algorithm. I included this video about the best streaming services because when I made it, I had no idea it would become my channel's most popular video. It had more views than the rest of the videos on my channel combined --until I made Part 2, which ended up dwarfing the original. Those two videos account for more than half the people who subscribed to my channel, even though I have no other videos like them. It was a lot of trial-and-error, but when you start from zero and do it all yourself, you learn applicable lessons that can take bigger accounts to the next level, since they have more resources to grease the wheels. I made videos consistently from May 2020-June 2021. These days my channel is just a repository for my broadcasting work, but I would never count out a return...