Ari Chambers from Bleacher Report on creating content while sports are on hold

Brian Bosché:
Hi everyone. This is Brian Bosche with CreativeBTS. I am here today with Ari Chambers from Bleach Report. Ari welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for joining.

Ari Chambers:
Thanks for having me. I love any type of human interaction.

Brian Bosché:
Oh man, with the lockdown? Yes. Endless Zoom meetings. We're good to have some interaction right now.

Ari Chambers:
Right.

Brian Bosché:
So I'd love to learn a little bit more about your background as we kick this off. I know you've been a professional cheerleader, you've been a reporter, you're now at Bleacher Report, so I'd love to just hear a little bit more about your background.

Ari Chambers:
Yeah, like I tell everybody, I'm born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina and so we have a K yeah, legacy. So I used to take field trips to NC State Women's basketball games and my love for it came there at elementary school. Then it furthered in high school when I was the girl's basketball manager and my best friend played AAU and so I would travel with her team and they all ended up going to high D1s and some of them in the league.

Ari Chambers:
So as I was professionally cheerleading, I noticed that there was barely any media coverage. And I was like, "Why don't people cover my girls? What's going on? Back then I would put up my phone against like an actual phone in the conference rooms of the away team hotels and I'd record them and put them on YouTube. Howard McDonnell from High Post Hoops gave me a job and had me writing a little bit and doing some on-camera things, still YouTube and still all social. Then Bleacher Report found me and the rest is history. But I am a new communication media major and I have a degree in English as well.

Brian Bosché:
So for Bleacher report, your focus is specifically on House of Highlights, is that right?

Ari Chambers:
Okay. So HighlightHER is the brand that I'm starting, by myself organically. Whereas sub-brand of House of Highlights and House of Highlights as a portfolio brand of Bleacher Report. So basically it's like a feed of sorts, so Bleacher Report is a big umbrella. Then obviously we have BR Hoops, Gaming, Gridiron Football, House of Highlights is one of those portfolio brands. Then as a sub brand we have HighlightHER.

Brian Bosché:
Obviously Bleacher Report is one of the, what is it, the most engaged sports media brand in the world?

Ari Chambers:
Yes it is.

Brian Bosché:
Is that the tag line? Amazing. So I'd love to start off just talking about the brand a little bit. So most engaged sports brand, media brand in the world. What is kind of the mission of Bleacher Report? What's kind of makes Bleacher Report unique?

Ari Chambers:
So Bleacher Report is the intersection of sports and culture. So a lot of times when people are focusing just on sports, we assimilate it into the cultural aspect. We involve music, any given day rappers are running through the office. We noticed that sports and music are both intertwined so they influence each other. And so we capitalize off of that. And specifically for House of Highlights, we do sports and youth culture. So that's a lot of viral videos, UGC, which is user generated content. So we go look for those wild videos that some children are recording themselves just all about the rawness of it. That creates the engagement that you wouldn't have at a normal generic sports media company. Right? So we just add a little bit of flavor to everything.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. So the user generated content is amazing, you see all the dunk videos, all of the high school kids who are doing it. Have you seen, just huge submissions as you've grown the brand and people wanting to get on House of Highlights?

Ari Chambers:
Oh my God, House of Highlights has an endless supply of DMs every day. We have a whole team that filters through them.

Brian Bosché:
How do you pick?

Ari Chambers:
It's just the ones that we're like dang, we can't stop looking at. It's the ones that we want to see more from, have it on repeat and basically the ones that you want to show your friends. So way I say it to people is the most engaging content is going to be the kind that you want to send to your group chat. So that's when we filter it through because we see a lot of people who are trying and then it's just kind of misses the mark, but the ones that you're like, "I haven't seen this before, this is dope or this is so crazy, why would you even do that?" Those are the things that get on the page.

Ari Chambers:
With HighlightHER, we're the women's side of that.

Brian Bosché:
Got it, got it.

Ari Chambers:
So you see women crossing up men, crossing up their girls or some crazy trick shots from soccer players that you're like how did your feet even do that? Those are the ones. I put a girl who had a hoverboard and she was doing a back bridge-

Brian Bosché:
I saw that today.

Ari Chambers:
And she just didn't stop, my back would have broken. So just things like that, that you're like, "How did this even happen? How do you even realize you can do that?"

Brian Bosché:
Is there a selection committee? How do you actually... what group actually decides this?

Ari Chambers:
There's a team of programmers and programmers sift through the DMs and check out explore pages and we use various websites and algorithms to see what's already gained traction organically and gauge it from there. Again, me personally, I'm a one person team so I'm the one answering the DMs and seeing like, hey, what's on my explore page day? Has anybody posted this? We also... timing is really important. You want to be the first to do it because say you posted an hour after your competitor, everybody's already seen it, everybody's already shared it. So the timing very, very essential.

Ari Chambers:
Then you have to stay on your phone, you have to stay on your socials to keep up with the trends. Trends are also a good thing, especially when we started with the Coronavirus, social distancing and self isolating. We started the #inhousechallenge where they would have something like a three point contest or a shooting contest that we got Trey Young to do and then everybody gathered around and did their own and submitted. So it's just a matter of staying on top of the trends and gauging interest from there.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. For HighlightHER as you go through that as a one person show building that, it's Instagram only for now, is that the channel you're focused on?

Ari Chambers:
It's Instagram and TikTok-

Brian Bosché:
And TikTok.

Ari Chambers:
Our TikTok's actually verified already at three videos, which shouts to BR for that.

Brian Bosché:
That's amazing.

Ari Chambers:
My main focus is Instagram and just getting that organic audience. That's the main thing that we've wanted to do for HighlightHER, we wanted to make sure that it's something for women, by women, for all appreciating women in the sports and culture space. So yeah.

Brian Bosché:
That's pretty amazing. You mentioned the #inhousechallenge and that's one of the topic, I'd like to discuss that a little bit more is these are all user generated content. This is all media surrounding sports and we don't have sports now. I think it's been around three weeks since all sports have been postponed, WNBA just got postponed. So I'd love to learn a little bit more how you think about what do you do now when there isn't an actual league to cover? How do you produce content?

Ari Chambers:
I think it's really, really dope that everybody has a chance to shine now. Typically we would post highlights with mixes of UGC, but now we're elevating our frequency with UGC. So you have people more excited to engage because they want to get featured. So you have people channeling their creative juices in order to just be highlighted. I think that's a really fun way to build an audience during this time. People are starving for content. We're at home, we're bored, we're scrolling on Instagram aimlessly. So this is the time where you need to film your stuff. You need to make life interesting and capitalize off of that.

Ari Chambers:
Live sports, it's sucks that we don't have it at all. Why not shine like history? That's another way. Especially there's Hall of Fame happening now. You can post the various inductees' highlight reels from back when they were playing. I think it's a great time to just reflect on like dang, sports are really important. This is why they're important and just deliver it in a way that's fun and makes life less miserable and the fact that we're all isolated.

Brian Bosché:
Yes. So when you're coming up with these different ideas for content, what's your process like of brainstorming through team or with yourself? Where are you finding inspiration?

Ari Chambers:
Me personally, outside of UGC, I love talking to athletes, right? So I noticed that, hey this time last year I was at Tampa watching Baylor win their national title. Then I thought self, I can get DiDi Richards because I've always been really interested in her puffs and she just won Defensive Player of the year. So let's get DiDi on teaching me how to do her puffs, which that's why my hair is in ponytails right now.

Brian Bosché:
That's amazing.

Ari Chambers:
Then talk to her about how is it when your season abruptly ends and you don't even have the chance to get a back to back championship? How that feels? So getting that raw motion while still making it fun while still adding that sense of here's what happened last year. It's all about tying it in and staying fresh and innovative and connecting with the audience because we're all going through the same thing. Then showing them somebody who, hey, this is an accomplished athlete. We want to see her. We can't see her in this space on the court, but we can see her on the screen.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, I mean following you for awhile, one of your specialties that you're amazing at is these personality pieces.

Ari Chambers:
Oh thanks.

Brian Bosché:
I feel like now more than ever it's, okay, there is no actual game to cover, there is no actual tournament. So let's get to know these players behind the teams a little bit more and what they do in their off time and what makes them humans rather than just what's their stat line for the night.

Ari Chambers:
I 100% agree. Especially in a place where you know the W's newer than the NBA. You have women's basketball in an upward trajectory and you just want to fall in love with the athletes so you can follow her story throughout NCAA throughout the WNBA, so there's built up excitement. I know a lot of people just based on her talent alone, fall in love with Sabrina. They love the fact that she's just really, really great.

Ari Chambers:
But I love Kennedy Carter, she's coming into the W, she declared for the draft and I love her mentality. I love her bark, so you say. She told me two years ago that she's a dog and she has a dog mentality and ever since then I've been following that dog mentality. It's just a little things off the court that you can get from players to make you fall in love with their story and you want to support them.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. This is the perfect time for that when there's nothing else really to cover.

Ari Chambers:
Nothing else.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. So how do you think about content that you produce for more immediate release? So you know, while everyone's at home, a lot of the stay at home orders versus planning for the future. How are you kind of breaking that down as a team or just yourself?

Ari Chambers:
As far as like the current events that are going on, there's a lot of movement within the W with free agency and anticipation in of the upcoming season and the virtual draft, which I'm sure we'll get to, but those are the topics that I like to release as like news in breaking stories. I just got off a conference call with the LA Sparks and we just produced a quote card for Derek Fisher, something you said about Candice Parker, they knew that was an ongoing tension from last season carrying over and then it was cleared up today.

Ari Chambers:
So there's still things that are happening that don't necessarily equate to games, but there's still just as juicy. You see Augustus going with the Sparks. I know all of Minnesota was heartbroken but that's news you can report on. And as far as the future, we have things to look forward to, like get those personality pieces out now, because like I said, once they get to know the player and their personality, they fall in love with them and want to follow them through their season.

Ari Chambers:
So I think it's all about a healthy balance of the now with the future and then creating pieces that are timeless. So last August I interviewed Snoop Dog and he said his favorite player was his favorite player was Cheryl Miller-

Brian Bosché:
Causally.

Ari Chambers:
Stop.

Brian Bosché:
I was just talking to Snoop Dog.

Ari Chambers:
I work at Bleacher Report. His favorite player Cheryl Miller and HBO. HBO released Women of Troy last month. We were able to use bits of that interview for content that's very right now. So that's another thing I like to keep things wide open too, you can deviate from the normal line of questioning so that you can use it for the future.

Brian Bosché:
At creativeBTS we go behind the scenes on different campaigns and different projects that are going on. So I'd love to go a little bit deeper on the in-house challenge. Was that a Bleacher Report challenge itself?

Ari Chambers:
It was a House of Highlights challenge.

Brian Bosché:
House of Highlights challenge.

Ari Chambers:
We had a creative brainstorm on Zoom like we all are having and we were like, how can we get the kids were engaged, let's throw out ideas and that's what we landed upon. It's just a matter of getting a noteworthy person involved and then it makes it cool. Right? So then other people are going to want to get involved and then it almost gets to a point where they don't know where it originated, but they know that they want to do it.

Ari Chambers:
Then you're going to go to the main sports pages, which House the Highlights is the number one sports media page, numbers wise outside of a league. So you're going to want to submit it to House of Highlights. The possibility of getting on the page just keeps getting... fueling the energy. So that's how that came about. We got Trae Young, we love Trae Young for some reason, he works with us often. We got him to post it and then Dwyane Wade, Turner fam, so he got in on it with his family in a just blew up.

Brian Bosché:
That's amazing. People don't often understand how small groups can be or how big groups can be when they're doing these brainstorm sessions at Bleacher Report House of Highlights. How big is that group? That's actually going through that brainstorm.

Ari Chambers:
We have a group of 14 people, but mind you that's just House of Highlights. Our company, our New York office, one of the locations has about 200 people. So we all go in, there's production, there's programming, there's an edit team, shooters. There's a lot that goes into it.

Ari Chambers:
As far as the 14 that met to come up with those ideas. That was a programmer is with the producers. So that's just basically what we did. We threw out ideas and a lot of times, I love the way the House of Highlights works because it's just like try it, see if it works. It's all about trial and error and you can't be afraid to fail. If it fails, just take it down. If it fails, just that simple.

Brian Bosché:
There's no risk.

Ari Chambers:
You just have to know your audience. I think that we have a really good understanding of our audience and what they expect from us. We're like a well oiled machine. It just keeps going and going. So we know that if our audience responds negatively, don't try to push back on it, just listen and then adjust. By adjusting if it doesn't work, don't do it anymore.

Brian Bosché:
Yep. Yep. So you have kind of the 14 people on the brainstorm session, all representing different parts of the team. Love just the dynamic, "All right, let's try this, let's go for it." Type attitude holds a lot of other teams back, just the the fear of pushing forward.

Ari Chambers:
Yeah, that's what I love that our GM is so, Doug Bernstein, he's so trusting of us. He understands that we are the culture. We are the youth, so we're going to be the ones to be able to push it, we're going to be the ones who come up with these ideas. We have this genius on our team, Samuel Grubbs. He's a viral sensation in his own right. So he's on our team and he just comes up with the wildest ideas that we're all looking at him like, "What?" But it always works, it always works. The GM's a good example of, "Hey, I don't know what you're doing, but I trust you." He delivers every time.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. A lot of teams very much envy that position where the GM is so trusting of the person's there. Any advice for teams on how to build that trust? What are some things that you've done, historically that have cemented you in the, "Okay, go for it. Go try it."

Ari Chambers:
Yeah. I've always been a little bit of a rebel so I'm going to do it anyway regardless of if it has VR or if it doesn't. So a lot of times with me, I do my own content and test it on my Twitter and see how it does on my Twitter and it's not a testing for... I'm not going to take it down if people don't like it because my Twitter is mine. If it does perform really, really well on my Twitter or on my personal IG, I'm going to be like, "Look Doug, here's what's going on here." And he's like, "Just go for it." So the trust, it's like literally like a raw understanding of what your audience wants and what you know they need.

Ari Chambers:
A lot of times I'm shifting myself a little bit because I'm more of a reporter than anything, but after running Highlight Her, I've learned to be a programmer that understands that people like viral videos. I'm not necessarily the one that loves a viral video. I don't find comedy in a lot of it. I want to know the stories of players. I want to sit down and watch a 20 minute interview with a player. But a lot of people don't. They want three seconds of craziness, just like things falling from the sky, Grubbs I think threw a chair in the sky and it almost hit him in the head. I'm like, "Okay, I don't get that."

Brian Bosché:
That went viral? Yeah. If you just look at what goes viral on TikTok now, it's like, "Wait, that has 15 million views?"

Ari Chambers:
Exactly. TikTok is the easiest way to go viral and to know if something works. But yeah, so it's all about being lenient and being open minded to new things because you do have to know, you have to deviate from yourself a little bit in order to please the massive audience that you have.

Brian Bosché:
a big part of that trust comes from being accountable. So how does House of Highlights, how do you at HighlightHEr, what are some of the metrics that you track? How do you know that something is actually successful that you can bring back up to the GM and say, "You know what, this was amazing. We should keep doing more stuff like this."

Ari Chambers:
House of Highlights, they know within the first 10 minutes whether it's going to be successful or not.

Brian Bosché:
Is it views? Engagement.

Ari Chambers:
All around engagement, but we look at the views standard and then typically if a post doesn't get to two million now, we're like, "It's not really like a successful post." I can't speak too much on those numbers because House of Highlights is, I'm not as involved with them as the actual team would be, but for HighlightHER, I don't necessarily focus too much on numbers. My thing is how many DMs, the engagement, how many DMs were sent of this, so forget the likes. How many times was it sent? How many comments does it have? So I want to know that you're talking about this post with your girlfriends or your friends in general. I want to know if you have something to say about it, if it causes a reaction. I don't care if you like it or not. I just want to know if it causes a reaction. A lot of times our views are good indication but sometimes it hits the explore page more than not. So mine for HighlightHER specifically I look for the DMs, it's the extra view insights that I look for.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. So for the in-house challenge, what are some of the things you sent back and be like, "This was amazing. We knocked at out of the park with this one."

Ari Chambers:
I don't know if this is what you asked, but I really liked the grandma's doing it. I thought it was great.

Brian Bosché:
Once it hit that level, you knew it was successful.

Ari Chambers:
It performed horribly, but I personally liked it. But a lot of people really liked when the families did it together. A lot of in-house challenges that go well because they've branched off from just the shooting to families doing things. A lot of them were with a daddy and a daughter, that's what we did well on both platforms.

Brian Bosché:
For that actual challenge, what were some of your challenges as a team trying to get that into the world?

Ari Chambers:
It wasn't really challenging after the first day, it kind of blew up because like again, you take a notable figure, an athlete, you're wondering, "Hey, what's going on with the Hawks right now? What's going on with Trey Young right now? Oh he's over here doing the #inhousechallenge. I'm going to do it with him." We strategically made it happen so that it could blow up the way it did. For the women's side, it took a different way of going about it. I posted Leah Church, she plays for UNC Women's Basketball and she was doing the backwards shot and she's a pro at it. She's done that before. But like the fact that she was in her house doing it, I was like, "Okay, this is a good tie in. That initial posted well, so let me repost this of her doing it in her house." Of course it did well and it blew up. Then what happens is other bigger sports companies repost that too and they accredit us and give us that.

Brian Bosché:
Any takeaways or learnings you would tell other marketing creatives on the success of that?

Ari Chambers:
I think that again, read the room, know your audience with #inhousechallenges. Be a step ahead. Right? So before the #inhousechallenge came about, people were just making I guess TikTok videos. But now they have something to intertwine with sports. So sports with the comfort of your own home, it's the accessibility of it. Anybody can do it. You don't have to be super athletic to aim a piece of paper into a trashcan. So accessibility is really important. Visibility is really important and relevance is really important.

Ari Chambers:
So sports aren't there. What can we watch that's something like sports. How can it grow? How many people can be involved in this? Will they feel included if they are? Will they feel like they want to do it? Can they do it? Because it was so universal and blanketed like that, then it grew to what it was.

Brian Bosché:
Know your audience.

Ari Chambers:
Read the room.

Brian Bosché:
Read the room. What other challenges or even social formats like IG Live have you really enjoyed since everything kind of shut down on the sports side?

Ari Chambers:
Okay. Outside of sports, I'm going to go outside of sports. I love the music challenges. I love the producers, this is what I've done and this is what I've done. I love the face off. Yeah. I love the face off.

Brian Bosché:
IG Live is a perfect format for that, because stacked on each other, it's unbelievable.

Ari Chambers:
Exactly, and DJ D-Nice and his house parties had been super fun. I don't know if you checked out House of Highlights, we have had two lives since then. Our last one was with Toosie with Drake had the Toosie slide that he just released, I want to say three days ago. That's another thing with being ahead of the curve. We had already been in contact with Toosie to be on our live, so by the time that that rolled around, it's just still fresh and we already had it yesterday. So it's really, really important to stay on top of it. But the lives are a great way to feature people. Again, everybody wants spotlight to be on them. So we allow people to call into our live and be featured doing the slide and then the artist or talent is happy and we're all happy because the numbers are generated and it's the trust between the company and the talent too.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, yeah. Just reacting right away, being dynamic, being able to change quickly or hop on a trend. I saw the WNBA challenge where they did the broadcasts or you could actually use their audio on TikTok and then put it over one of your clips. Did you see that on TikTok at all?

Ari Chambers:
I have not, no

Brian Bosché:
I love that one.

Ari Chambers:
How did I not see that one yet.

Brian Bosché:
I was digging back for old video clips of me in high school playing basketball, trying to find something I could match to like Elena Della Donne's game winner and it was amazing. Yeah, that was a really fun one.

Ari Chambers:
Oh my God, I did not know. I've got to check that out now. Like you're putting me on or something.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I saw it for the athletics where they had their broadcast person say, "Send me one of your home videos and I'll do an actual professional broadcast off of it." That type of user engagement, knowing people want to do something while they're stuck at home and then being able to interact with the teams has been pretty incredible to see.

Ari Chambers:
It's all about feeling important. If you have a broadcast over your old highlights, it's feeling important.

Brian Bosché:
Yes, Joe Buck doing a voiceover of anything that I do. It's almost funnier if it's a less significant thing like throwing a tennis ball in a cup or something or the ping pong ball challenges.

Ari Chambers:
We actually have a new content piece, Broadcast Boys affiliated with House of Highlights. If you guys want to check them out, they kind of do something like that and it's hilarious but it's a little bit more satirical.

Brian Bosché:
Broadcast Boys?

Ari Chambers:
Mm-hmm. Broadcast Boys, HOH. They're hilarious. It's very dry humor. So I wouldn't say it's necessarily for like a 10 year old, it's definitely like 20 to 35.

Brian Bosché:
Got it.

Ari Chambers:
Just throwing that out there. But it's hilarious.

Brian Bosché:
Do you anticipate that things you've learned while sports are shutdown or just that everyone is stuck at home and having to consume so much more, any content strategies changing longterm? Like do you think IG Stories are going to take off more IG Live is going to take off more things that will have more sustainable impact than just right now while everyone's at home?

Ari Chambers:
IG Lives can be very uncomfortable to me like personally speaking, if there's silence, but I think for musicians it's a really great way to utilize, hey, I want to be more connected with you guys. Athletes, they've always to me have done lives and stories but if we see it on a grander scale. IG Live I'm not sure the sustainability of that once everybody starts back because it's awkward when you tune in to something that has little amount of numbers with the audience. But IG Stories I see really shooting up once everybody returns back to everything. We're getting more and more comfortable with being nosy and sharing, oversharing. I thought we were there before this, now it's getting even more steep with that. But I think that more in the moment things are going to be important.

Ari Chambers:
TikTok is, this is the best time for TikTok, so everybody has a TikTok, so I think that's going to be the next complete boom if it already wasn't before this whole thing because now everybody knows all the dances. Everybody's on TikTok and so that's going to be an interesting to see how to TikTok and Instagram exist in the world together. But I know Gen Z is way more directed toward TikTok as opposed to millennials on Instagram. But my thing is with the millennials viewing TikTok is the same routine over and over again. So it's just a matter of, I think it's going to be divided once everything goes back to normal with what people want to see.

Brian Bosché:
It's almost, especially just seeing on my Twitter feed and Instagram feed the number of people who didn't have TikTok before shelter in place, who are now finally like, "Oh my first TikTok, I'm actually downloading for the first time." It's really forced people to adopt it a little bit more because they're bored and they want to create their accounts.

Ari Chambers:
It's addicting. I had an account last year for work and I spend five hours a day on it. I'm like, "How did this happen?" I see a cow walking down the street and then I see somebody cooking or baking a cake, I can't even cook, so I don't know why that's on my algorithm, but TikTok is a way to, you can grow organically faster on TikTok. Instagram the algorithm is against the people. TikTok, they haven't necessarily put that out yet. They haven't restricted people in the way Instagram has yet, so people feel a new sense of freedom. But TikTok is a new sense of rawness and you can just be yourself as opposed to Instagram is all about being polished for personal. But as far as keeping up with your favorite sports teams and everything, I think that's going to be Instagram and Twitter all day, all day.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. The TikTok is one of the few things I've seen where your first video can get a million views. You can have no presence and it can take off.

Ari Chambers:
Right. My friend just combed her grandma's hair and got 10,000 followers off that and I was just like, "Okay girl, I don't know."

Brian Bosché:
So fast.

Ari Chambers:
I don't know.

Brian Bosché:
It takes years on Instagram, I've been doing this for years on Twitter and Instagram and it grows so slowly and then TikTok something and it just take off so fast.

Ari Chambers:
That's why people are capitalizing off of now.

Brian Bosché:
So WNBA is coming up. This will be the last topic because I don't want to keep you too late, but draft is coming up. They haven't paused that they're going to a live, the actual virtual live draft. So anything planned around the WNBA draft, one of the few things that are actually happening right now in sports?

Ari Chambers:
I'm planning on either doing a live or a Twitch situation with it. I would love to broadcast doing it.

Brian Bosché:
Oh nice.

Ari Chambers:
Me and a few others are going to try to get together and make that happen. This again doesn't have anything necessarily to do with Bleacher. I think that my Twitter audience will appreciate it more]. Then as far as Bleacher Report goes, we were working on something with maybe collaborating with HighlightHER. We haven't figured that out yet with reaching out to players. So once that's under wraps we'll be able to launch it.

Ari Chambers:
But yeah, just again, the connectivity between the players and the public is at an all time high right now. So I want to capitalize off of that. Everybody is starving for live sports and so this is going to be a live situation where futures will change and it's a big league. So hopefully that would be the best thing.

Ari Chambers:
It's interesting because the W is the pioneer of this virtual drafting. The NFL has the luxury of doing it after, so it's going to be interesting. I know that they're going to be calling in. I know that there's going to be some prerecorded segments, but it's going to all merge together and hopefully it will be seamless, so we can see the future of how this is going to have to be until we're not in isolation anymore.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, I think it'll actually be to their advantage and they'll get a lot more views from it because-

Ari Chambers:
They're on a main channel now too.

Brian Bosché:
Thank God they switched it over to ESPN.

Ari Chambers:
Right.

Brian Bosché:
The backlash of being on ESPN 2 is so fast. I'm glad they switched it over.

Ari Chambers:
I think original programming had it on ESPN 2 because nobody anticipated this. So they were expecting and something else to be on it. Now is the fact that it's going to be on the main channel and now the chance of everybody being able to watch is great. I hope that people tune in and support because nobody has anything else to do. Why not? Why not?

Brian Bosché:
Well, and they had the star power with Sabrina being projected number one overall. And that's exactly what you're saying, is those personality pieces, getting to know the players, where you're excited to see where people land that makes a huge difference in those things.

Ari Chambers:
You have a very different dynamic of players coming into the league this year. It's like not just Connecticut, love Connecticut, but not just Connecticut. So you have very wide range of people throughout the country. I wish there were more ACC, but not a good year for ACC like that. It's going to be fun to see how people engage with this. I know they're going to be a lot of online discussions, a lot of Twitter debates, a lot of posting about it. So I hope that that becomes more universal and not just niche to the WNBA Twitter community.

Brian Bosché:
Yes, exactly. Can branch out a little bit more. So we're at time here, Ari but any parting shots for social media fans, marketers, creative sports out there?

Ari Chambers:
Read the room, deliver it in-

Brian Bosché:
Read the room!

Ari Chambers:
Deliver it in unfiltered way you can. Because everything used to be all about Polish and all about making it pretty, don't make it pretty, just make it happen.

Brian Bosché:
I love that. Don't make it pretty. Just make it happen. Thanks so much Ari. I appreciate it.

Ari Chambers:
Thanks for having me.