EPISODE 237: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Rollo Goldstaub

The Big Questions!

Saksham Sharda: Alright. That’s the end of the rapid fire. Now we’ll go on to the longer questions, which you can answer with as much time and ease as you like. Yeah. The first one is, you’ve had an impressive journey from YouTube UK Sport to leading Global Sports Partnerships at TikTok. How has your experience in the technology and content industries shaped your approach to working with sports partners today?

Rollo Goldstaub: I think what I’ve learned since being in this part of the sports sector is that everything you do needs to be backed with data. This is something I really encourage from my teams is that you’re speaking to one of your partners, and you don’t have a data point or evidence of a fact; it can be written as factual of any kind, it’s just your opinion. I’m a strong believer that you need real factual sides to back up what you’re trying to do. And platforms like TikTok have amazing data analytics sources or case studies that we’re about to launch one with DAZN, for example, around the Club World Cup, which has clear proof points why you should do something. I think that’s a really important part. And then maybe the second one, I noticed throughout and from various social media platforms, is when a company really signals intent that this is our priority. And when they also match that with the users demanding it, there’s clear interest, and they tell any sort of media partner, creator, or public figure that this is what we’re going to do. Those who jump on it first, the early adopters, they’re the ones who win. They get the biggest growth, the biggest advantage, just like, you know, which leagues joined TikTok first almost seven years ago, that kind of thing. And so one of the ones for us right now is we have clear data to show that all types of fans, of sports fans on TikTok want to see match highlights, whether they watch one hour a day or 16 hours. Those fans, we have this matrix, and they might, you know, athlete content is interesting, behind the scenes, funny, comedic content, training, but across every single fan type we found, match highlights are number one. So we take that user interest and we work on how do we look at more match highlights from partners quicker for the final whistle of different formats, different types, the more creative spin that TikTok can be. And so we work with our partners explaining that. So great way of seeing an example where we lean in, and it’s amazing when partners come along with us.

Saksham Sharda: How do you balance the fast-paced tech world with the more traditional world of sports organizations?

Rollo Goldstaub: I think one of the beauties of sports is, you know, the calendar for almost the next 10 years. You know, La Liga has started and finished at roughly a similar time. You know, the World Cups, 8, 12 years ahead, the Olympics, the Winter Olympics. And so with our partners, we can plan further ahead. We can give them as much time and indication of what we want to do, which is a real, I think, superpower in the sports industry, which is that you can schedule out that calendar. So with that, we’re already planning with various partners what we want to do for the Winter Olympics or for the World Cup. We’re working out what that unique value proposition is for broadcasters, for the athletes, for the teams. And so, sometimes in the tech world, you can move really fast and try to do things really quickly, but actually, you need to match and marry up that pace with the cadence your partners are working to. And so with that, we’ve learned at TikTok that we can plan two years out for a tournament and build incredible products, which we’re doing right now, that I’ll be demonstrating later in the talk. We have these kinds of match hubs where you can come through from the view page where the most viewership is, where the highest traffic is, and we can link through to broadcasters. So when the game is live, there’ll be the match score. And if you click through that, you could go through to NBC in the US when watching Olympics content. And at the same time, when the game is not live, you can add the match information to your calendar. So we know that we can build those products that also meet our partners’ biggest needs. So although your question was around how do we marry the pace or maybe the tech world, we are, importantly, especially at TikTok, we are solely focused on being the best partner and most valuable partner we can be to those publishers.

Saksham Sharda: Are there any other examples of the unique value TikTok brings to sports leagues, federations, and broadcasters compared to other platforms?

Rollo Goldstaub: So, I think what we’ve worked on since February, actually, we’ve worked on building products that are designated just for sports partners. They are made first and foremost and designed with leagues, teams, and broadcasters to drive the exact value they’re looking for. This is incredibly rare and almost unheard of because we’re changing the app, the user experience, and the publisher experience just for one vertical. And so in doing so, it means that the outcomes and outputs of those products are perfectly designed to the needs of the partner. The page I was just describing, these kinds of match destinations, which can drive tune-in. We’ve had a survey that shows that 42% of TikTok users are more likely to tune in or stream a live match after watching sports content. So we know there’s that natural behaviour, but now we have direct attribution where we can track how many people click a deep link that goes straight into the live broadcast. That is our partner’s core product, live sport. Whether you’re the broadcaster, the league, or the team, that is what is so important that people are watching. Whether you’re 55 plus or Gen Z, whether you are international or from the market that that sport is from, that is their key need. And so these products are very unique. And then the second point is linked. We’re okay driving users off the platform, which is almost unheard of when in the current world everyone wants to stay time and maximize customer lifetime value, all these kinds of metrics. For us, we’re confident and comfortable that, for example, with DAZN for the Club World Cup, five hundred thousand users went through to DAZN’s website or app, and those five hundred thousand users can sign up and then watch that competition. The value there is really clear. We also the confidence that we know those users will come back to TikTok. Their daily active user numbers don’t change. And we know that they come back because TikTok’s this cultural engine and centrepiece that conversations are starting first on TikTok. The discussion around a certain team, a certain league, the trends that might pop up around the show, the summer I turned pretty, and American football teams making content about which team they support out of that TV show. Our confidence comes through that we’re the first place they go. Therefore, we can create this cycle.

Saksham Sharda: Would you say that Instagram was built on the philosophy that everyone has to be locked in to that environment, and hence links don’t click, and now TikTok is moving away from that?

Rollo Goldstaub: I think if I just look at it from a TikTok perspective, we’re flexible to what our partners need. And for another vertical, this might not be the exact use case or another part of the app where it has different functions. So the purpose of what we’re doing is all about then looking, how we get those partners more interested in posting all of their match content, or at the final whistle or even live during the game, the clips, as a very fair and interesting balance. And so that’s, without comparison to others, it’s just our openness to be adaptable. 

Saksham Sharda: What are the key challenges that sports organisations face when trying to engage Gen Z and younger audiences? How does TikTok address those challenges?

Rollo Goldstaub: The reality is just that the next generation of fans isn’t showing up as much in the traditional destination where live sports have previously dominated. That doesn’t mean to say they can’t. And as I was just describing, we’re looking for ways how we can drive that behaviour. It’s the fact that around that live match, the key moment, we can find the demographics that maybe aren’t there on the traditional means. So that could be the fact that 46% of all sports content viewed on TikTok globally was viewed by women. So almost half of all content was for female viewers. That doesn’t exist in any stadium on earth. It doesn’t exist on any broadcast feed, on any other platform. It is really unique to TikTok. And we know that we can utilise and support our partners in growing female fandom. It’s the same with the youth demographic. It’s kind of well-documented that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are discovering new sports on TikTok. They may never have watched basketball before, but they see a piece of fan creation and decide to follow the NBA or EuroLeague. So we have that kind of superpower in terms of being able to access what partners aren’t necessarily accessing elsewhere, but also being open to directing them directly back to the key area they want them to be.

Saksham Sharda: Given all this rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape, what key skills should the next generation of sports marketers develop to thrive in this environment? 

Rollo Goldstaub: I think of my original question, being data-driven and backing your decisions. So we have Fox Sports in America has been live-streaming all of the build-up to their Euros matches and the Copa America matches. And they’ve done it, and what they do is they leave the first five minutes of the game live on TikTok for some of the most important games, the final, for example. They’ve done the same with the top of the first innings in baseball. And they’re looking to do that more. They just noticed there was a clear correlation and data they could use to show that by doing so, they were driving users to Fox’s main destination. So there was data there. There was a willingness to experiment and innovate around live. And then there’s, for TikTok especially, there needs to be this curiosity to be creative. The foundation of the fact that TikTok’s trends start and the cultural side of the view page, it all comes from users, creators, athletes, but also broadcasters or teams being really creative with their content. The BBC, during the Euros, as an example, would have split-screen highlights where it would have the manager’s reaction and then the actual match action below. During the Super Bowl, Fox actually, again, had Jimmy S. Winston, a really brilliant quarterback, active in the crowd, mic’d up, commentating on the game. So you would have both the match action and then his immediate reaction in the crowd. We’ve gone so far from just the landscape match livestream to a point where broadcasters can be really creative. So data-driven, willing to innovate, and also that kind of creative side.

Saksham Sharda: So you play football every Sunday night. How important is personal passion for sports in your professional role? And do you think it influences your strategy at TikTok?  

Rollo Goldstaub: I’m delighted that Avondale Park, eight-a-side match, which I’ve been playing for almost  30 years, 20  years, 25 years, I think, is getting in here, which is great. So in terms of how it plays a part, obviously, I have a passion for football, for sports as a whole. And I think just in life, if you are working on something you have an affinity for and you love that subject matter,  it makes doing the tasks, even the most boring parts and the most difficult bits, it makes it more enjoyable. However, I do also think like, you know, I’ve never played ice hockey. I grew up in London, and I’ve not been to a match, but we have an amazing ongoing relationship with the NHL. And I can appreciate the beauty of amazing content there as well. So it’s not a prerequisite, but it is definitely helpful. I think the other part is when you have grown up with just inherent knowledge of being able to know, you know, as a Chelsea fan, what the team was like in 1987. You can have just like a built-in encyclopaedia understanding of certain sports. And so I rely on that so much. So my team has a person in LA who just knows everything about basketball. Someone in New York who knows everything about American football. So I can utilise those amazing skill sets and understandings.  

Saksham Sharda: Do you think this is going to become an important thing as apps start getting more into niche areas?  

Rollo Goldstaub: Maybe explain that question a bit more to me. So, in terms of the knowledge as employees,  like that important for the niche of the apps?  

Saksham Sharda: As to what extent will apps start trying to get into every niche, and for that reason also to employ people good at that niche?  

Rollo Goldstaub: Okay, I see. I think, I don’t think it’s critical to employ people with a love of the specific niche. I think they just need to love the overall sports because I think you can appreciate and learn so quickly another sport as long as you put the time in. And so I think,  especially from a TikTok perspective, we work with absolutely every sport on earth. And that’s our goal. So when any user comes to TikTok, they can find, from canoeing to Kung Fu, they find their favourite team, their favourite athlete,  the content they want, anywhere, any place.  So it would be impossible to then hire like your canoeer and your Kung Fu maestro. And so I really think it’s more about just loving the overall medium of sport.  

Saksham Sharda: So, as you’ve been saying, TikTok is known for its rapid data-driven approach to content. How do you use data insights to shape sports partnership strategies?  

Rollo Goldstaub: All the time. So we are continually prioritising that kind of calendar event I was talking about in terms of, you know, you could work with everything in advance. We look at various tedpoles that we try and work out what has the biggest impact in each market, what drives either consumption or supply, the amount of pieces of content on TikTok, but also the number of people wanting to watch it. There are a ton of different metrics,  but essentially it comes down to just prioritisation of the resources. A lot of the products I’ve spoken about require, you know, engineering and R&D hours. So it’s trying to match up your resources with what you want to get out of it based on those priorities. When we speak to our partners, we use data the entire time. We run regular business reviews with leagues and broadcasters, and teams, which will go through their performance on TikTok. So we can explain to them that a certain format, maybe a split-screen highlight I was mentioning, is performing really well. And so we can encourage them to look at whether there’s an opportunity to do more of that. And throughout those processes, we learn as well. We learn from our partners who are incredibly good at looking at their own analytics and have such a great finger on the pulse when it comes to what’s performing on sports as well. So overall, it’s a continual process. I think every doc we have will have some sort of, you know, chart or table in it. And it’s just key. It’s almost just a whole language that you have to include.

Saksham Sharda: How do you ensure long-term strategic alignment between TikTok and its sports partners, beyond short-term campaigns or viral hits?

Rollo Goldstaub: Super simple, actually. Our mission as a team is to be the most valuable platform for sports publishers. And so everything we do is geared towards that. And so if we’re always constantly trying to drive value to our partners, we should therefore always be aligned to short-term, medium-term, long-term, and super long-term goals because everything we’re doing will adapt towards their priorities. Some of the other products I’ve mentioned, we have something called the comment Easter egg, where anyone who comments on a video with a specific term, it’ll create this kind of animated experience that comes up. We’ve noticed that on accounts where we’ve done that, whether it’s the Champions League, whether it’s March Madness in America, or the Women’s Euros, the amount of comments on a video goes for 10x growth. So it could go from 4000 to 40000. And so we’re driving mass engagement. We know that for our partners,  when their biggest events are on,  the finals, the big temple, they want everyone to be aware of it. So this is a key area that we can just drive that engagement.  And again, you can see that the focus for us aligns with what they need.  

Saksham Sharda: Let’s talk a bit about publishing. How do you partner with publishers to enrich the sports community on TikTok itself?  

Rollo Goldstaub: It’s a good question. So I think from a publishing perspective, there are different parts of it. One is those business views I was mentioning, where we can describe to our partners organically the kind of content they should be focusing on based on data. But also, we have these products, which feed into the types of content they can publish. So these destinations can take a specific match highlight, which will link through to the broadcaster’s external page. And also, we can provide weekly reports on what’s trending as well. So we can let them know that this kind of moment, this conversation is happening on TikTok. And we can explain to them that their content and adaptation of it, towards it, will benefit and be a great way to grow. We work with athletes as well. One of the recent partnerships with the ATP where at the US Open, where we had a joint goal of onboarding a large number of tennis players. That went really well. We had 11 join the platform, some really big names in the US. And so part of that,  we are just broadening out the ecosystem. So, from a publisher and athlete perspective, sports or tennis just got better. Tennis had a really great moment, cultural movement, I think, on TikTok. All the players, straight after the US Open, Alcaraz and Sabalenka are making funny videos with their trophies. They’re going on the Today Show, and they’re joking and having a great time. The one thing to not forget is that throughout all these threads, when advising publishers on content, it’s about still having a personality, still adding a unique twist to TikTok. Whether that’s using traditional content or film natively for TikTok, you can always add a creative layer that can drive it forward. So really, we give advice, we give tools, we give products, and we just kind of pave the way for our partners to create more and do better with it.  

Saksham Sharda: How do you convince the athletes to join?  

Rollo Goldstaub: Various different ways, but a lot of the time it’s explaining that similar audience opportunity. So I spoke earlier about all sports content having a 46% female audience.  Athlete content jumps massively to 75%. So, three in four people globally watching athlete content are women. And so from a league perspective, team perspective, and athlete perspective,  if you want to drive female fandom, that is an incredible way to both encourage your athletes or them themselves to kind of dive into that. So there’s that kind of audience play, but then also there’s all sorts of branded content they can work on and a way to also monetise their traditional sponsorships and previous relationships as well. So it’s a mixture. We also have promotional programmes that we can try and support them with. And really, if there are any athletes watching this, I know our teams are incredibly open to working with more and more to facilitate them on TikTok.  

Saksham Sharda: So, what does a typical day look like for you as the global head of sports partnership at TikTok?  What are the biggest priorities you focus on daily?  

Rollo Goldstaub: So a typical day is just speaking to a lot of people, start to finish. Whether that’s my own team who are absolute rock stars, speaking to the biggest and most important publishers, sports publishers around the world, wider publisher teams who are the ones we work with on building these tools, on the programming and resourcing to make it all happen, or across TikTok, different parts like TikTok Shop, TikTok Live, various parts where we can connect and do more. And then our partners, speaking to our partners a lot. So throughout that chain, what I’m trying to do is really just create opportunities, reduce any blockers, and make sure my team and others have the best chance of success while sticking to that mission I was talking about of whenever a fan comes to TikTok, they find what sport they’re looking for. And then that important part from my team specifically, that we’re driving absolute maximum value to sports publishers as well.  

Saksham Sharda: So the last question for you is of a personal kind. What would you be doing in your life if not this?  

Rollo Goldstaub: Good question. What would I be doing? Not this. Interesting. I had a history of working in gaming. So it’s going to be tangentially close. So I’m not going to suddenly say like a football player. I’d love to be a superstar actor, but not quite me. But I’ve worked in the space of both sport and gaming. And I could see myself definitely leaning into that gaming side, whether at a platform, a publisher, a developer, or back into similar social media as I do now. I personally enjoy video games as well. So that could be something that I know I would, as we spoke about having a passion for the topic, I could lean into a passion there. And also, there’s a great crossover between sport and gaming, whether that’s EAFC, Madden, or 2K for the NBA.  All of these different sports have fantastic gaming communities. And it’s a great example where you have this intersection between gamers, you know, posting content, but also the sports, the athletes, the creators on the other side, and they can make content together. So I would say something in the gaming industry.  

Saksham Sharda: It’s interesting because so much of what we do now is gamification. I’m sure TikTok is itself a bit of gamification of how one interacts with. That comes in there as well?  

Rollo Goldstaub: Yeah, we actually are. The biggest thing we’ve done so far in terms of development was the last Olympics in Paris. We had a gamification page, which allowed users to come to the Olympics page, which is promoted in a vast array of different ways, which are highly effective. And when they were there, if they took certain actions, they’d win points. And at the end of the Olympics, those points could be transferred into prizes. But the actions could be something like follow three accounts and win the points. So people were coming back each day to that return usage. And so at first,  they followed the Olympics account, NBC if they’re in the US, or Warner Brothers, or BBC if they’re in the UK. But after that, they’d come back and start following the athletes. And there was this one athlete in Team GB who grew 40000 followers without posting a single video.  When he realised he started using it,  and he now has brand deals and various uses of the platform,  he’s earning more,  far more from TikTok than he ever did as an Olympian. So there’s that brilliant example, I think the Olympics channel doubled their follower count, their lifetime followers, so from 9 million to roughly 18 million. And TikTok was by far the largest proportion of social media followers for the Olympics. The key bit there is sometimes with platforms or TikTok, people might be like, okay, a million, billion,  two trillion views, like what does it actually mean? And what’s the action? And what’s the next thing? We’ve spoken about TuneIn driving to live, but on this occasion, it’s specifically driving the action you want from those million, billion, or trillion users. One of the ones for the Olympics was posting a piece of content with Let’s Move. And that’s their key kind of CSR initiative to get people participating in sport. So it was spreading that information really well, and users were choosing to do it organically. So yeah, good question on gamification. That’s, it ties into what we’re working on very much.

Let’s Conclude!

Saksham Sharda: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Rollo Goldstaub, who is the Global Head of Sports Partnerships at TikTok.

Rollo Goldstaub: Great to be here. Thank you.

Saksham Sharda: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.