Paul Bae, Director of Social for the OKC Thunder, on growing a social team

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Paul Bae is the Director of Social Media for the Oklahoma City Thunder, a professional basketball team in the NBA. Paul has previously worked in a number of different industries outside sports as well at companies like Google and CBS. Brian and Paul go behind the scenes to talk about social media in sports, managing the growth of a social team, capturing ROI, and innovating with new technology solutions.

Full Transcript

Brian Bosché:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Creative BTS Podcast. This is Brian Bosché, your host. And today I am so excited to bring on Paul Bae, the Director of Social at the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team. Paul, welcome on.

Paul Bae:
Hey, Brian, how are you? It's great to be here.

Brian Bosché:
Thank you. Well, it's fine. Just fires and pandemics and social injustice movements and just everything going on in the background. But these little pockets of being able to talk to people like you make things a little bit better.

Paul Bae:
Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting actually, with all of the craziness going on in the world, I feel like over the past couple of months my sort of desire to connect with people and check in with people has increased. So I guess that's a good thing coming out of this.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. You can't see people in person really anymore, so at least digitally through things like this, it makes it a little bit easier. It makes you do it more.

Paul Bae:
Right.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, go ahead.

Paul Bae:
No, I was just going to say it's great to be on with you. I appreciate the invite.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, absolutely. So let's start out, if you want to give the audience just what's your role, what's your background? How'd you get to the Thunder? This is a pretty prestigious role. A lot of people would like to go for it, even if it's not the Supersonics, which I'm from Seattle, so would love to see them come back. I had to throw that in right away.

Paul Bae:
You had to go there.

Brian Bosché:
For the record, I'm on record saying OKC absolutely deserves a team. You proved it when the New Orleans Hornets had to come up there. But would just love to see one in Seattle too, but would love to start out with just your role and background and how you got to your current position.

Paul Bae:
Sure. I've been here in this role with the Oklahoma City Thunder for two years now, a little over two years, two and a half years or so. And just prior to that, I was leading a startup, founded a startup called Snap Advice, and I know you and I sort of, that was one of the reasons we sort of connected on Twitter was because you're a startup founder as well. So we've got quite a bit to talk about and share learnings and whatnot. And I think we can relate to a lot of things just coming out of that experience. I had an exit in 2018, the startup was acquired. And at that point I was sort of trying to figure out what I wanted to do for the next few years.

Paul Bae:
A big part of me wanted to jump right back into it with another idea, another product, another thing that I wanted to build, but then this opportunity came about. A mutual friend put me in touch with my current boss, who has a background in broadcasting and worked at CBS Television for a while. I had quite a tribe from that world, having worked at CBS television myself. I was at CBS, working direct before digital for CBS television stations who have put the digital arm of that reporting to New York. But I was based in San Francisco working out of the local owned and operated station out there, in San Francisco.

Paul Bae:
I did that for five years and that was one of the gigs that I've had along the way that I've really loved and learned a lot at. And it was one of the first positions where I was sort of the early days of social, when not everybody was using it for business or to represent their brand or as part of sort of an organizational marketing strategy quite a few years ago. And I played a role in bringing that into the organism and sort of experimenting with it as we were working with ... A lot of the brands that I was working with at the time, Tyra Banks, America's Next Top Model, Gossip Girl was one of the favorite brands to work with. I did that for probably three, four years. Smallville won an Emmy Award for a national campaign that we did with Smallville.

Paul Bae:
Just kind of experimenting with social in the early days and then with paid social as that kind of became a thing. And since then, I've kind of been all over the place. Worked with the record label for a while. Worked at Google for a couple of years sort of on the technology side of things. And sort of always been lucky to be at the intersection of creative and storytelling and technology. I think that's kind of how I ended up here.

Brian Bosché:
What drew you to sports specifically? You've had a background across a lot of different industries. What excited you about the move to sports?

Paul Bae:
Yeah, a couple of things. One, just being a huge fan of the NBA and wanting to be in a space where social audiences are tremendous, just in terms of sheer numbers, but in terms of how dynamic it is, how interesting it is. I think S.M. Sports, not just in terms of the brands, but in terms of the passion that the audiences bring and sports and NBA fans bring to Twitter in particular, it's just a fun space to be in. I would say in a lot of ways, it's sort of the cutting edge of social media. And specifically, one of the things that I was really hoping to accomplish and learn from in this role and in this space was to work closely with platforms. Just again, knowing how important as some sports is to Facebook as a platform, to Instagram, to Twitter. And knowing about some of the great folks at those platforms, working closely with professional sports teams and brands in this arena.

Paul Bae:
I knew that that was going to be something that was going to be really interesting, a great learning opportunities, to see it sort of from that side of things. And that's played out the way I hoped it would, working closely with our reps at Facebook and Twitter, with great guys over there like Nick Marquez and Dave Herman at Twitter and working with those guys and getting sort of first dibs and firsthand looks at stuff coming out of TikTok, hearing from them on the trends that they're seeing, the campaigns that they're working on, that we might get a little heads up on ahead of time. So that's been really fun.

Brian Bosché:
The Sports Creative Slack that Matt Desmond has started, they had a Friday happy hour where the TikTok sports partnership person came in and gave those previews. And it is a really amazing community where I was at the Twitter Sports Summit a few years ago in San Francisco. And it was basically every social representative from every team across NFL, NBA, most North American professional sports. And you're right, I haven't seen a social community, maybe I just haven't gone to the events, but of all of the best practice sharing ever, it just really felt like a really strong community where the teams are competing on the field, but all the social teams know each other. They're good friends with each other. They're sharing best practices and ways to innovate. And it's really cool to see. It seems like a really fun industry to be in.

Paul Bae:
It's a fun industry. It's a fun community of professionals in this space, as you've said. When you get creatives and when you get people committed to their craft, you're going to get competition. It's competitive, but it's definitely friendly competition and everybody's eager to help each other out and share. And it's a great group of people.

Brian Bosché:
This is a question that a lot of different businesses and organizations face, where they're trying to understand what the role of social is within their organizations and within their marketing team in general. What do you kind of see in sports? What are some of the roles and goals that the social team, the content team have in sports organizations specifically, and then we can go into kind of how that compares to maybe some other industries.

Paul Bae:
I think it's all over the place, just like in any industry, there are different organizations in different markets, different parts of the country. Got one in Canada. I think it would be weird to not be very specific to your local community and not to have a strategy that serves a very unique brand and organization. Now, having said that, of course, there's going to be some commonalities. You've got, again, when we're talking about sports fans, you've got tremendous engagement. That's always going to be high on the list of your goals, in terms of providing that engagement, particularly now with this pandemic that we're in and what all professional sports teams are trying to navigate right now for the most part, without fans at live events currently.

Paul Bae:
So that sort of virtual engagement is going to be huge part of any marketing team or any sports business team's mission and strategy. I think going beyond that though, there's teams that are more focused on revenue and I've found that a lot social teams are set up differently just in terms of structure. It's very common to see sports teams. And this is true in other verticals and other industries, but you've got social teams that are a part of the marketing department. But then you've also got social teams that were sort of born out of PR. I think, in my personal opinion, some of the best situations I've seen are when social teams are a part of a more modern structure, where you've got perhaps a chief of digital, a chief digital content officer, perhaps, or just a chief content officer. And social sort of sits within a digital team and that is tied to marketing or broadcast or something like that.

Paul Bae:
So it's kind of all over the place. But I would say the big things that you're looking for are engagement and you're trying move the business forward. You're serving so many stakeholders, really, if you think about it, season tickets, group sales, court partnerships. And with all that sponsored content to try and bring in revenue in the digital space, you're looking at community relations, social impact, which is so important, particularly now with a lot of teams just kind of realizing how important this is, not just for a season or for a few months or during the pandemic, but this is something that we're really need to think seriously about and figure out are we resourced for this? Do we have the right people at the table? And sort of committing for the long haul. So yeah, we're in the midst of all of these areas and all these conversations, which is part of what makes social so fun, right?

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Well, the difference between the digital team being separate from the marketing team is really interesting, because I've seen that trend as well. What do you think are some of the advantages of splitting that out and what's the difference between them?

Paul Bae:
Yeah. There's pros and cons to every situation, but I think the biggest difference and the strengths of doing that is that you can resource it sort of differently. I mean, marketing, when you're thinking about marketing, you've got traditional marketing, you've got graphic, you have to serve so many different functions and you're creating signage for live events. And especially when you're thinking about sports, that's a ton of signage that you need. Going forward, there's a whole world of like, stand here, like X marks-

Brian Bosché:
Yes, exactly.

Paul Bae:
And let's keep our distance and new instructions that you're going to need at live events, when we are ready to attempt this next phase. And all the interesting technology, sort of innovations and new things that we're going to see going forward. The pandemic is going to accelerate contactless payments at live events and leveraging technology to make everything more efficient in terms of just sort of the ins and outs of keeping people safe and keeping things moving at a live event. So the marketing support that is required for that type of thing is tremendous. I think if you are an organization that has realized, hey, there's a whole nother world of digital that is so big today, but also something that we need to resource for the future. And not just in terms of resourcing sort of the nuts and bolts of do we have the right staff, do we have the right processes in place, but really thinking about what's going to equip us to be competitive in the future and to really solve for problems that we don't really even understand today.

Paul Bae:
I think that's when it gets really exciting, when you're not just hiring cool videographers that can work on creative sports content and covering games, but also doing compelling storytelling around sponsored content and client sponsorships and whatnot. Now, when you're thinking about resourcing digital teams properly and really having social teams and digital content teams that are sort of designed from the ground up to be innovative. And I think personally that is what is really required in order to be equipped for the future.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. I mean, one of my first podcasts, we had a couple of the VPs at MKTG, Elliot Gerard and Keith Steckler. And we talked all about building out virtual experiences for sports organizations and what kind of innovative digital experiences you can give to fans, especially when the pandemic started. So you're right, having a team specifically dedicated to that and having it as their mission, maybe it's even one of their goals is to continuously look for new technology and new ways of bringing fans in and accomplishing those goals. It's a lot different than just their traditional marketing mindset and executing on those live event deliverables, not to discount for the marketing team, but it is a different type of mindset, approaching that goal.

Paul Bae:
Absolutely. And again, there's pros and cons to every situation. And it just depends on who you are as an organization and what you're working towards. But yeah, I agree with you. I think for me personally, I feel like the sweet spot is when you're able to sort of design a team from scratch that is specifically focused on digital, and you're really looking to hire talent that has been native digital consumers, native digital thinkers. And you're basically trying to bring together sort of an A-team that you know can really innovate because they're freed from some of the other responsibilities that more traditional organizations are trying to deal with and adapt towards, I think.

Brian Bosché:
I have another big question for you, which try to answer this one succinctly. How do you get the organization aligned for what social should produce? This is a question that always comes up, of having the organization set goals and then how does social interact with them? It seems like sports teams do a better job of this than almost any other industry I see. But what are some best practices you've seen from your experience on ... It could be even getting resources for your team, executing on the campaigns you want, maybe it's investing in new technology. How do you make sure that you're aligned with the rest of the organization and how do you actually basically get enabled to do what you want as a social organization?

Paul Bae:
Right. Yeah, it's a great challenge, but I think you're right, sports teams probably do have it better than many organizations in other verticals and other industries, because we're oftentimes able to have so much fun with what we do, with the content that we're creating and then the way that we engage audiences. And some teams more fun than others, but the challenge of aligning an organization for us, for me, in my experience, I think that the components that really work towards that, you know, there's some basics that you have to have in place. You have to have great leadership that gets it. You have to have culture that empowers the right people in the right departments, where there's a ton of potential and energy and traction.

Paul Bae:
And I think empowering sort of the right leadership in those different departments and to resource them well is a part of it. Great communication and great collaboration, obviously, and those kinds of things. But for me, to get specific, what's been important are a couple of things. One, I think for social teams to come in with the mission of serving stakeholders, serving the other departments, as opposed to kind of social teams going, "Hey, here's what we want to do. Here's what we're supposed to do." And then everything else is sort of secondary or at worst, a distraction, and that's not a good place to be in terms of alignment and bringing everybody together.

Paul Bae:
So if you have the perspective and just the attitude of we're here to serve corporate partnerships, we're here to serve social responsibility or social impact. We're here to serve local youth outreach in community activations. I mean, I think going into it with that approach will get you a long way down the road in the future, in terms of helping everybody to understand the value of social, and everybody wants social to be well resourced and leading in many cases. Even if you start out serving some of these other departments or stakeholders, you end up leaving a lot of times because of your passion and because of your expertise and knowledge.

Paul Bae:
The other thing that I think that is critical is for people who are working in social, particularly in matrix organizations and complex organizations is mastery of the data. So to really be able to tell the story of the impact that you're having on your audiences and on the business. So to really invest to the right tools and to understand, to be equipped, to be able to analyze data, to pull insights, not only for your day-to-day so that you know how to move forward just within what you're trying to accomplish, but throughout the organization, so that you can tell the story of the impact that you're making to highlight the growth and to highlight the ROI on, whether it's an ad spend or whether it's an investment in staff or equipment, here's the impact that it's had.

Paul Bae:
For example, let's say six months ago we invested in this new video equipment and bought a bunch of lenses and with the goal of doing X, Y, or Z. And six months later, here we are today and I can show you the impact that that's had and how we've accomplished that X, Y, and Z and really met those goals. And I think doing that and kind of having that be part of your culture and your daily language really helps to build those relationships where people understand what's going on and the value of social, but also can help to bring people together just because you're providing yet another level of service of explaining like, here's what's happening. Here's how we're moving forward. And I think, yeah, data goes a long way.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. I mean, I think about that all the time. Cause one of my roles at Smartsheet is how do we get customers, how do we get companies access to that data so they can start measuring ROI and they can start telling that story. So do you have any best practices on how you actually pull that together? Because there's so many channels, there's so many platforms. It's hard to quantify a lot of the stuff you do on the actual production side. So do you have any best practice of maybe how you've seen this captured well and presented well?

Paul Bae:
Yeah, I think if you've got a reporting team or a BI team, get friendly with those guys.

Brian Bosché:
Yes. Yes. Very much so.

Paul Bae:
Right. Yeah. Become friends with them. If you're not a data scientist yourself and you've got data scientists in the building, you want to become friends with those guys and build some bridges. And I think just carving out time to have conversations about, hey, is there a way I can get improve on these reports that we're getting? What are you actually looking at? What is helpful and what are you ignoring? And just having those conversations around those kinds of things. For me, I think because of my background, I've got an affinity for data and I love spending time in data. So it's easy for me. It's like any chance to dig for insights, I'm spending time in the tools. But I think if your skillset is more towards creative aspects of social, copy and video and storytelling and whatnot, then I would say my piece of advice would be to get in the habit of asking, how are things really performing?

Paul Bae:
And I don't know if this really answers your question, but maybe we can circle back around to it. But what I've learned is that a like on Twitter or a like on Facebook often doesn't tell the whole story. There's different types of engagement, as we all know. Like watching more than three seconds of a video, especially one that autoplays as you're scrolling, is a totally different level of "engagement" than going through the trouble to actually click the like button, which then also is not the same as commenting on something or sharing something because you really liked it. So there's all these different levels of engagement and how much of an ass are you making to the audience person, the person who is consuming this content.

Paul Bae:
For me, I think a lot of times I start by asking, what do we really know about the videos that we're producing? And any time there's a lot of time going into something, obviously there are certain large campaigns and sort of bigger stories, like the start of a season or a playoff campaign that you're working towards that is, you're going to do that. And you're going to spend a lot of time, put your best work forward for those kinds of things. But any time I see video videographers editors working on projects that I know a lot of energy and a lot of effort is going into it, or people on my direct team where we're spending a ton of time just in Slack, back and forth. Like, "Does this look good? Am I getting closer? Should I change this? What if you changed that?" And you're just spending a ton of time doing things and you have to ask yourself ... You have to prioritize all the time and you have to ask yourself, where do we kind of decide that this is enough?

Paul Bae:
But I think taking a higher level of view, a bigger picture view of content in any given period. So whether it's a week or whether it's a quarter or segment of a season, you want to kind of look at those things together and try to figure out, okay, hey, Facebook natively, for example, and Twitter natively gives you the analytics to see ... It's measure essentially your retention, where are people dropping off, how much of these videos are people watching. And I think that's a great example of the questions that people should be asking. And I would say any discussion about sort of best practices around data and reporting and leveraging that to kind of get to where you want to be and to get buy-in from the organization needs to start with those kinds of questions.

Paul Bae:
Because here's the thing, other people in the organization are asking those questions as well. They may not be bringing that up at the all hands meeting, or maybe you don't have the communication in place to really dive into that together. But people are asking that kind of on their own, they're scratching their heads and they're thinking about it. And especially if they feel like, hey, my corporate partnership, my sponsorship, a bit of content, we don't feel like we have got the same amount of attention as some of this other, more fun content, for example, organic content. People are scratching their heads and asking those questions too. So I think the more informed you can be and just even having, sort of being willing to ... Because it's a scary thing. Sometimes you don't want to know those answers, man. I've looked at content that I've felt strongly about, maybe it's something that I've produced on my own and I spent 10 hours editing. And sometimes you don't want to know because when you see like what percentage of people actually watch beyond 25% of that 62nd video, or even shorter, it can be really disheartening. But I think that gives-

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. A lot of shame.

Paul Bae:
Yeah. Right. And there's always different reasons for doing things and putting time and energy into a piece, but being willing to ask those questions, for me, in my opinion, it's a practice that also in sort of humility and sort of being open to feedback and self-analysis of like, is this making a difference? Is this working? Are people watching? What percentage of people are actually watching these? Are there actionable insights that we can take away from it? Do we need to cut to the chase sooner? Do we need to experiment, like do some A/B testing around what this logo looks like or is it a copy problem where we're not really providing enough information on what this video is supposed to be doing? So I think analytics can really help you to really just have a different perspective on being willing to be open to those kinds of possibilities. Does that make sense?

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, I think that's a great best practice where you have ... We have so much data. You're right, there's so many insights you almost need a BI team or become a data scientist yourself to look into everything. And not everything matters. We have thousands of data points and it's constantly taking a step back assessing what your goals are, what it's trying to accomplish and deciding on what data points actually matter and what you want to report up and what actually moves the needle. So, yeah, I think that's a great insight and it's really hard to do because you're right, it can be scary looking at it and actually reporting back on it, especially when you spend so much time on it or believe in it so much.

Paul Bae:
Right.

Brian Bosché:
That's a tough question. I think we're still at the very early stage of companies truly being able to understand ROI on what they produce. There's so much data ... Yes, that's a fact, but there's still so much data we don't get, especially on the production side, how much time went into this? How long did the review cycle take? What types of content are faster produced, but give us more ROI, but maybe don't have as much impact in this other area? So it still feels like we're at the very tip of the iceberg on this of truly understanding ROI. And then a lot of stuff is just not measurable either. A lot of it's subjective and you can't always make decisions on data. That's why we have creative people that can come up with concepts that blow past whatever your analytics may say.

Paul Bae:
Absolutely.

Brian Bosché:
Some other very tough questions for you, solving the social team's problems or the social industry's problems in one podcast. How do sports teams-

Paul Bae:
Come on. Give me an easy one, man. We got to take a break.

Brian Bosché:
Nope. This is a hard one to take a break. How do sports organizations produce so much content? And this is, I'll break it down more practically. I've seen a lot of sports teams where let's say baseball, for example, they're doing like in game graphics. Every home run, they have a graphic out in seconds. And there's a lot of templating upfront, but things like that, where ... Do you have best practices where you've seen in sports where you do produce so much content and you're like, how do they do that? Are there things like that templating up front before the season starts do you can just kind of auto-fill in or take a photo on the field and route it up to the social team? Are there some things like that, that you've seen that maybe other organizations, other markets can borrow from, where you have hit that scale and you can do it fast.

Paul Bae:
Absolutely. And I think that's, when you look at high performing teams, that sort of preparedness and having the right tools in place to help you to be successful in the moment is key. There's all kinds of tools and software now that will sort of auto-generate templates. And I think the best teams probably are sort of still leery of that a little bit, but you can do a lot of that manually in house, on your own and prepare those things in advance. You're just turning it ... Any time you have downtime, you're turning out variations of graphics for every possible use case. And all of that, it still needs to be in the moment creation and iteration and improvisation that happens for those things, because that's just a lot of times, stuff that's canned will feel canned in social because our audience is too smart and it's almost like they can smell like a template as opposed to something-

Brian Bosché:
You have NBA Twitter. NBA Twitter is ruthless.

Paul Bae:
Exactly.

Brian Bosché:
They are smart, educated, and they will go after you.

Paul Bae:
Yeah. I think really the only answer is you have to be a magician. You have to be truly gifted. You have to hire wizards that can be inspired at any given moment and turn things around. I mean, at the end of day, that's how it is. I mean, to be serious, I mean, there are ... I'm getting hit up by vendors every day. There are tools for everything from, like, hey, here's a smartphone app where you can load up all of your templates for different aspect ratios. You've got your whole library of things for overlays, for Instagram stories and a whole another library within that app for Twitter. You've got the different aspect ratios optimized for different platforms. You've got the tools like that and there's a lot of sophisticated tools that are really improving by leaps and bounds every few months. The NBA has a partnership with a tool called WSC that has all these video tools where you're clipping videos in the moment, you can crop them and throw the lower thirds on them and things like that kind of quickly. So yeah, there's a lot of tools that we're lucky to have and really fun to play with.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Working with Adobe over the last few years, through Slope, the startup and now at Smartsheet, there's so many advances in automation and automated content, even the auto-reframing stuff you see where it will actually put it into the different ... If you need a TikTok video versus your YouTube or versus Twitter. There always will be a place for the creativity, but automation, you're right, there's so many tools now that are removing all the manual work that no graphic designer wants to do, no video editor wants to do. It doesn't have anything to do with creativity. It's just executing on a manual tooling process. So yeah, it's pretty exciting to see the technology innovations there.

Paul Bae:
Yeah. And what I've seen as generally a great combination of just trying to figure out what are the tools that we need to help us out a little bit. But at the end of the day, we're still going to try to be as creative as possible. And a lot is still done manually. So I think it's why we're starting to see so many conversations on Twitter with this community. People are really just starting to talk about mental health and burnout and just smart kids. You're seeing it really young, right? Young kids talk, just being smart and trying to you're out, like how do I prevent burnout? And then you're seeing young managers thinking about it and thinking about it for their teams. And the reason why is because that's part of the requirement and is you just kind of have to be a machine.

Paul Bae:
And I think those are the people that we're looking to hire and that's kind of what's required. And a lot of times creatives, people who are accomplished at having turned out great videos and having published great content and having a great track record of that generally are workaholics. I mean, you've started an edit and next thing-

Brian Bosché:
And they love it.

Paul Bae:
... you woke up and ... Yeah. And you've been sitting there in front of your computer for 12 hours straight working on an edit and they love it. Yeah. And you wouldn't have it any other way. So I think it's tough because you love it, but it's also like, can be very bad and you need to take a break. We all need to take a break very badly.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. I don't know. My sister in law, Skyla works for the Sounders and she's just so thankful there's only one or two games a week compared to some of her friends that work in baseball, where it's just every day, there's a new game. And basketball, you'll have four games in a week or four and five nights. And yeah, it can be really hard. But to go back to, we have a couple of great listener submitted questions here around how do you speed up that pace. What's the scope of pre-approved material that can go out without permission and what needs to be vetted by senior team execs? So yeah, how much leeway does your social team have to just fire things out versus what do you actually need to get approved?

Paul Bae:
Right. Obviously, that'll be different for every organization. For us, we're very lucky to have a great network of trust and pretty good set up. I think part of it is I'm the director of social media and basically, we designed this team from the ground up a few years ago. Many other teams have kind of had social, like maybe a formal social department longer. But there's also a lot of teams that are sort of kind of ad hoc, kind of came together. And I think for us, starting out with a clean slate, trying to think through like how do we want to be set up for success helped us get to a place where we've got a lot of autonomy. So that helps. The other thing for us, I think that helps us to be able to really have a lot of freedom, let's say, is building a great relationship with basketball operations and making sure that we have a real ... Just on a string, you're connected, you're hearing from basketball op regularly.

Paul Bae:
And if that relationship doesn't exist, then it's a scary place to be because you can post something thinking that this is safe and it's probably approved, but maybe it's not, it's going to sort of work to deteriorate the trust and kind of get you in the place ... Move you in the wrong direction, let's say. I think the most important thing you want to do, anybody in my situation wants to do have is a relationship with sort of the chief storytellers and the chief PR folks over on the basketball operations side that are communicating to you, that understand the importance of social and that got a great relationship where they understand what you bring to the table, but they understand that we're going to be able to serve as them better the more information they give us. So periodically checking in with ... Obviously, you do it at the start of the season. Like hey, with this group of guys that we've got. We've got some new talent, some new draft picks, or there were some trades in the off season. With this particular group, this season, we want to emphasize this, this and that, speed and basketball IQ or whatever it might be.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Interesting.

Paul Bae:
And you do that just like with any great marketing campaign, you want to almost build a creative brief around the season-long messaging, but then also check in regularly with here's what's going on. You're never going to get a ton of detailed, specific information. Nobody's going to say, "Hey, well, so-and-so secretly on the trading block." So we want you to stay away from those rookies or whatever it might bit.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Exactly.

Paul Bae:
You're never going to get that. But at a high level to get some sort of messaging direction and guidance on a regular basis. The more you seek that out and get that, the more equipped you are to kind of make decisions on your own, as long as you're keeping those things in mind. For me, I've got some messaging and strategic direction kind of plastered all over the place, digitally and kind of really on post-its in my office, on my whiteboard. And I'll identify themes and sort of quarterly campaign type themes and messaging in places. So I'm kind of thinking about that. That allows us to have a lot of autonomy and we've been lucky to be able to kind of run with things and not have to have a ton of things approved in advance. Obviously with bigger campaigns and things that directly impact ... We're not going to go off on our own and go, "Hey, Dennis Schroder is up for Sixth Man of the Year award."

Brian Bosché:
You have to campaign that.

Paul Bae:
Yeah. We're going to spin up our own campaign and nobody needs to see it. We're going to start posting it tomorrow. We're not doing that. But for smaller things.

Brian Bosché:
He was my pick, by the way. He was my pick. I thought he got robbed.

Paul Bae:
Yeah. I mean, obviously Lou Will and Harrell, I mean, those guys are-

Brian Bosché:
Trez was the seventh man. I've had this argument with friends. You can't have two people on one team, both nominated for Sixth Man. One of them is the seventh man. Just like the technicality.

Paul Bae:
That's so funny. Right. No, actually I think Dennis himself tweeted that at one point. He was like, "Wait, I'm up against two guys on the same team. Does that make sense? Mathematically, does that work?"

Brian Bosché:
But that's a great insight. I just didn't quite realize how much like ... You're right. Basketball operations, they're kind of building the team and their vision, and they're giving that vision to you and you can help kind of advance those different messages they want. And I didn't realize how close that could be or how ... There's a vision for how this team wants to play so we need to reflect that in social. That's super interesting.

Paul Bae:
Right. Some organizations are very much in sync. Other organizations are not. And you have the whole gamut, the whole spectrum. I have friends that work with other teams that have a great relationship with basketball ops. I have friends that work on other teams, I can't tell you which, that don't have great relationships with basketball ops. And I think, if you can seek that out and just again, sort of approach it as like, hey, we're here to serve. We're looking for direction from you guys. You guys let us know. I think that's a great place to be.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. The real problem seems to be, maybe social needs to give some feedback and review to the GM's tweeting, which seemed to have gotten NBA in more trouble, but we'll avoid that topic so I don't get a cease and desist from the NBA.

Paul Bae:
All right.

Brian Bosché:
Next listener question. How does the team voice develop and what impact does it have on graphics, for example, or the language in your tweets themselves, if they're all lowercase or all upper case, how do you do develop that voice? Is it kind of the same extension of the vision of the team or are there other factors that go into it?

Paul Bae:
Absolutely. I think what we just discussed and the vision of the team from sort of here's the makeup of the team, here are our goals and here's how we think we're different. All of that is important. Other things ... At the beginning of every season, we work closely with marketing and sort of the design department or the art department, to do some ideation and to really do some work around inspiration and to try ... And I think generally our departments and marketing departments will come up with sort of a brand book for the season. A lot of times that's really helpful on a season by season basis. The other thing too, I think, is really trial and error. And it's not something that you want to do on a day in and day out basis and be all over the place. But in terms of we talk a lot about templates, for example, in terms of that kind of work, where you're ... Somebody needs to have sort of a 50,000 foot view of your art and your look and feel.

Paul Bae:
And with the NBA, you got 82 games and you can kind of unwittingly kind of end up in places. And you can be like, oh, this looks really cool and we want to go in this direction. And then the next one this night or a week from now, for some reason, it's not really working out. And it was like, oh, maybe we went a little too far in this one direction. Now we need to pull back. So you need some leadership that is kind of having sort of a bigger picture view of what's happening. And I think just to have those discussions, again, with different teams, different departments, design, video, coming together. Off-sites are really helpful to do and it's something that we try to do a couple of times a year, is really get together off-site and bring your ideas and bring inspiration.

Paul Bae:
And these are fun sessions where you open up your creative folder and you've got things from other teams and other leagues and other industries and creative stuff that you can draw from. And that's when you get an opportunity to kind of learn from other people, still like an artist and kind of design things. And I think doing all that work in advance whenever possible, again, before seasons, before campaigns. And then you have that as a backdrop upon which you can kind of improvise on a day-to-day basis.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. A couple of more questions here as we round this out, have to ask about working with the athletes. You have one of the most exciting products on the court that you actually get to market, and you have usually, especially with basketball, a lot of the players are celebrities themselves. So how do you typically work with the athletes? What are the demands on them to help with social? Where do you try to draw the line? What is it like working with these superstars?

Paul Bae:
Yeah. Every season is potentially very different because you've got different chemistry. Even just swapping out a couple players, I think, can make a huge difference in terms of the vibe and player expectations and sort of the working relationship overall. So it's hard to say. I think every team is going to be different. Some teams have players that are playing to the camera more. There's a culture where social maybe has had more access for a longer period of time. And they're looking towards the creative people, the cameras that are nearby to help them and to kind of work together. And then there are other teams that don't operate like that. So this really depends on the team that you're with.

Paul Bae:
I think, for the most part, all social teams would probably agree that you're there to simultaneously serve, but also be invisible. You don't want to inject yourself into the story. You don't want to be changing the story or forcing anything. So you're there to serve the characters and the wonderful personalities of the players that are on the court, that are training, that are in the tunnel, trying to bond before they take the court or as they're working in the community and reading books to kids or whatever it might be, you're there to serve them and to let their personalities shine through it. You're there to shine a light on the comradery that's happening there.

Paul Bae:
So I think all social teams would agree, in our space, would agree that you're there to simultaneously serve, but also be invisible and try not to make yourself a part of that story. I think that's been a formula of success for us. I like to say it's really different and it's fun because you never really know what you're going to get. You might have a lighthearted moment with a player as they're warming up on one day. On another day, you may not, but that might provide opportunities for you to really gather other types of content. So it's been something different every day really.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. It must be exciting because you definitely have new players every ... You have a lot of players every year or they evolve and. I just like, especially with the Thunder, one of my favorite pieces that I still remember was just this like off-hand ... It must've been on social media, but Steven Adams every day after practice, like trying to get the ball back in the ball rack. And even if he tried like 75 times in a row and made it on the 76, he'd yell out, "First." And then he'd leave practice. Just those little stories that you get from the players and getting into their personalities are so fun. And it just sticks with fans so much.

Paul Bae:
Absolutely. I think it's great that you called that, that one example and I love your New Zealand accent, your Steven Adams interpretation. But it's great that you called that example because it's a good example of I guess what I was trying to say is you need to look out for those opportunities. You need to figure out what makes players unique, what do they love to do, and to be looking out for them and trying to highlight those things. So whether it's certain players playful or whether it's Chris Paul wanting to shout out HBCUs, historically black colleges, doing sort of in the tour, his "tour", featuring HBCUs on his walking attire, the shirts that he was wearing. That kind of evolved over time, but we saw that quick, being up close. We were like, hey, this is something that's close to Chris's heart and it's something that he's starting to do more and more of. He just started taking shape little by little throughout the season.

Paul Bae:
He wasn't doing that day in and day out in the early part of the season, but he was doing it occasionally. So then we start to look out for those opportunities because we know that that's important to him. So then you're looking to serve that, just looking out for the unique characteristics of your team and being there to serve and highlight those things that are important to the players themselves.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. I just had Alexis Robinson on last week to talk about athlete branding. And from hers perspective, when she's working with our clients, she loves when the teams can help and contribute and help those athletes get those brand deals, whether it's for the walk-in fits or using photography from the social team to help pitch them for their endorsement. So very much appreciated on the athlete side too, which I think just overall makes them feel more welcomed on the team and like a part of it. Last question. Go ahead.

Paul Bae:
No, I was just going to say, yeah, we love getting requests from the player's people, like their personal management or their ... Very few players have them, but a few do, their own storytelling team or their own videographer kind of. And to work closely with those guys, it's always.pleasure to, again, to serve them, but it'll take you in new places because all of a sudden you're not working for the team and showcasing the player, but you're seeing sort of the goals that their team may have. One of my favorite moments from this past season, which was, it seemed like it took 20 years because it was an 11-month long season for us, with the hiatus in there.

Paul Bae:
But one of my favorite memories, it seems like a long time ago was All-Star and being out at All-Star and watch and being at this wine bar, Melo set this up. It was him, Dwyane Wade and Chris Paul just talking. We got a lot of that on video and I don't think it ever came out. I think he's working on some longer piece thing that they're still putting together, but man, the conversations they were having about Kobe and LeBron and just their friendship, those three guys. It was an experience that I'll never forget. And I've got some footage of that on one of my hard drives too, that I've been waiting for them to put that out so I can go through my unique bits there.

Paul Bae:
But anyways, I wanted to say it was an opportunity to see how much Melo values his personal brand and what he invest in that. So the storytellers that work with him on his team and they had just the first class shoot there, just in terms of the number of cameras and the lighting and the expertise there to put that, just to document that. It was pretty awesome to be able to see a player who is taking it that seriously, but also has a strategy in mind. So just again, just to say we love hearing from players and their teams just so we can kind of see what their goals are and see it from their perspective as well. That's been fun.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah. I think you're going to see a lot more athletes having storytelling teams behind them. Because life after basketball, life during basketball, that's how they make a lot of their money and that's where they can start setting up those partnerships.

Paul Bae:
I'm always surprised and disappointed that more players don't have it today, but you're absolutely right.

Brian Bosché:
They'll get there.

Paul Bae:
Exactly. They'll get there.

Brian Bosché:
Last question, which I do on every podcast, it is the parting shot. So it's the one thing that you want to leave the audience with. Maybe a little nugget of wisdom, maybe personal thing that you want to share with everyone. Just what is your parting shot for listeners?

Paul Bae:
Let's see. No dad jokes come to mind. So I will leave you guys with a little bit of advice I gave a friend of mine recently. And it comes from a personal learnings. And that's usually the best advice you can give, something that you've experienced. And I think it would be to tell young creatives, particularly ones that are working in social. Excuse me. To look out for opportunities for growth as much as possible because, as we've talked about, the pace is so quick and so demanding and people in this industry work so hard and are so good at what they do. You can look up and a season's gone by and you've worked on 200 videos. And that's okay because you're the video guy. But don't let too many of those seasons go by without you looking up and looking for new and unique things to work on.

Paul Bae:
A lot of times, those new and unique opportunities come in the way of collaboration with other people. Because if you're working on your own, oftentimes you end up doing what you do best over and over again, which can work out for you, but maybe you're not growing in a different kind of voice. It's something that I didn't do enough of and I didn't get that advice when I was younger is because a lot of us also, we're also introverts, creatives oftentimes, they love working alone. Especially if you're that type of person, I would say push yourself, be uncomfortable, look for opportunities to collaborate and work on things that ... And let somebody else lead from time to time, so that you're pushed to think differently.

Paul Bae:
And then the other thing too, is that I would say young folks need to ... Young creatives should look for people to mentor them and also look ... And sometimes young managers need help or reminding like, hey, you're there to manage. And I think what happens is in sports so many people, they want to work in sports. And they're like every open video editor or social coordinator position literally gets three, four, 500 applications. I've seen this firsthand, in terms of the hiring that I've done. There's so many young ... Everybody wants to work in sports so we can kind of pick and choose and a lot of organizations are cherry picking tremendously talented creatives that are just out of college and they're really good at what they do and they're really good people, but a lot of times they're shitty employees because they don't know any better because this is their first job in some cases, right?

Brian Bosché:
Yep. Exactly.

Paul Bae:
And then you have young managers, who've done that for a few years and then they're managing these new guys. So I think it's a tough one situation. And as a veteran or as a kind of a senior manager or a leader, you need to ... That's the number one priority should be kind of thinking about people and thinking about supporting your staff and how everybody's doing and are people growing and collaborating well and things like that. But a lot of times, left to their own devices, young creatives aren't thinking about that. So my advice, again, to young creatives, would be look for opportunities to grow. And sometimes you have to take it upon yourself to say, "Hey, I need help with this. And I need my manager to help me with this. Can you help me to be more efficient or smarter about how to prioritize or how to try different things? Or am I like ... Give me feedback. Show me the metrics and show me like how things are performing and can we talk about that?"

Paul Bae:
And I think if you're not getting that, sometimes you just need to seek that on your own and kind of go after that advice. I've had the great joy of working with smart young creatives. And I can think of one in particular recently, who used to seek out that advice, not just from his own manager, but ... And especially if he wasn't getting that enough from his manager, he would build relationships with other mentors in the organization to try and kind of get the leadership and kind of help along the way. So that would be the thing that I would ask people to do.

Brian Bosché:
Yeah, that's great advice. Thank you so much for coming on, Paul. We appreciate it. So many great learnings from this. And I hope you enjoy a little bit of the off-season after this 11-month season.

Paul Bae:
I plan to, man. It's going to be a while until the NBA season starts back up. I'm going to enjoy the playoffs or watching the playoffs, that is. And then I'm going to enjoy the off-season. I feel like there's so much more to talk about as well. Maybe we can do this again and do a part two.

Brian Bosché:
I know. I need to do a part two. I have so many more questions, but we'll figure something out.

Paul Bae:
Yeah. It's been fun now. I appreciate it.

Brian Bosché:
All right. Thanks, Paul.