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CNBC Sport, launched by reporter Alex Sherman, will add a weekly TV series and launch a series of long-form docs (starting with a Steph Curry special) in the coming weeks.
By Alex Weprin
Media & Business Writer
CNBC is throwing its weight behind its nascent CNBC Sport brand, bringing its sports business coverage to CNBC TV and live events in a significant way.
The company will launch a CNBC Sport weekend show CNBC Sport: On The Record, that features interview with sports business executives and newsmakers, and is planning a series of long-form CNBC Sport-branded productions that explore the intersection of sports and business, with NBA superstar Steph Curry’s off-court endeavors set to be the focus of the first such project.
“In an era where everything is time shifted or time delayed, sports is the one sort of appointment type viewing — that and the live market, by the way — so you have to be engaged,” says Max Meyers, VP & senior executive producer of strategic verticals & audience development, in an interview. “And that has inflated the value of these franchises, and there’s a natural scarcity to them as well.
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“That has brought a torrent of money from all around the world, whether it be from sovereign wealth funds, whether it be from private equity funds, whether it be from other types of Wall Street type, traditional investment houses into this space,” he adds. “And as a result of that, there’s a lot of money going back and forth. CNBC tells the story of money better than any network or any news outlet in all of its forms, so it made sense that we did it.”
According to Sherman, the idea came from CNBC president KC Sullivan: “His pitch was ‘look, sports is like a very large investable asset now.’”
“But in addition to that, the people that are the owners of these teams are largely already on CNBC, and so we talk to them about the markets, or whatever their main business is, and then we shoehorn in a sports question or two when they’re up on air,” Sherman adds. “We’ve shoehorned it in the past to some degree so his his idea was like, look, this is already here, we should have a platform for all this where we really dive in, because there’s so much appetite for it, and there’s so much crossover with what we already do.”
In addition to the CNBC Sport newsletter, CNBC has increased the amount of sports business coverage sevenfold since it launched, the business outlet says. And it has pushed into a weekly sports business podcast, which in turn will form the basis of its upcoming weekend show beginning March 29. Interviews filmed for the video podcast will be repurposed for the weekly series.
“If you think about the amount of wrings you get out of that media, it’s remarkably efficient, and it looks modern, it doesn’t look like cable news,” Meyers says.
As for the longer-form video docs, Sherman frames them as an extension of something he was doing previously, with YouTube and ESPN already being the focus of some of those efforts.
“The process of this thing that we’re going to do with Steph Curry will be quite similar,” Sherman says, adding that his crew followed Curry around for a few days around the NBA All Star weekend, with an extended interview taking place on a boat.
“The original conceit of it was that we were going to follow him into the Chase Center for the three point contest,” he added. “But then at the last minute, he pulled out of the three point contest with [WNBA star] Sabrina Ionescu, and they scrapped that plan. But we kept the boat ride.”
The first branded live event, CNBC Sport: Inside the Business of Women’s Basketball, is set for April 5, and will be sponsored by JPMorganChase.
“There’s a real desire on the part of the marketplace to partner and be associated with this content and this brand and how it lives in this space, and that was the goal,” Meyers says, adding that they are reaching the audience they intended to reach when they launched. “I think the thing that is sort of most interesting to me is the engagement that we’re finding with our content … we can see the email addresses of the people who are signing up for these and it’s all the people that we hoped to attract when we talked about this endeavor. It’s the commissioners, it’s the agents, it’s the sports bankers.”
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