We’re mid-way through the NFL and college football seasons, and gearing up for the start of the World Series next week. FOX Sports has some incredible rights in sports media, but Michael Bucklin, VP of Digital Content, says they pride themselves in giving people all access to those events. He leads a nimble digital team that represents FOX Sports content across all digital properties.
We sat down with Michael to walk us through his background, storytelling philosophy, and the stories behind some of the best-performing digital content on FOX Sports.
On being a sports fan, serving other spots fans:
We feel like we’re just sports fans representing other sports fans. We’re fans serving fans. It’s something we try to think about. We don’t want to serve fans on a high horse. We don’t want to be seen as the producers who sit in the air-conditioned sky box that criticize down at the field. We really want to celebrate with fans and if we’re fans first and we are not sitting on our high horse, we really listen… they’re going to give us a lot of cheat codes on how to serve them.
On getting people to engage with your content:
These are earned media platforms. The more people that engage with your content, the more people you reach. If you engage with our show, then you essentially expose us to your timeline and your millions of friends and followers. We want to be creating engaging content because we just think that’s better content, very subjective. But objectively, we need to be engaging people to reach people. What better way to engage than to say hey, we’re listening. If you engage with us, you can be on our show.
On going behind the scenes with digital producers:
We really pride ourselves on taking people behind the scenes of those events. Giving people all access to those events. We were in Dallas at Red River and we had producers on the sidelines, mobile phones, all access. The beauty of having a digital producer on site is they’re very mobile, they have that phone. We had best shot from Jalen Hurst putting on the golden hat and that’s the kind of access that we like to provide to these marquee events.
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