Welcome to draft week for the NFL. As sports channels gear up with coverage throughout the week, the league announced the NFL Network will offer a record-high 51 live hours of coverage starting Thursday. Programming will include reports from at least 15 War Rooms with draft expert Mike Mayock and host Rich Eisen headlining talent. Ahead of the start of the first round, NFL Network’s Melissa Stark and host of The Insider Kevin Frazier cover the Red Carpet with interviews as each of the 23 prospects attending the event starting at 1p. In addition, the channel will bring in Stanford head coach David Shawb, head coach of national-champion Florida State, Jimbo Fisher, and Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Tom Brady, NFL Media’s VP of Content, about the event, the state of upcoming digital network NFL Now and how big data is affecting programming choices.
On the past year: It’s been a really exciting year for us. Now that we are fully distributed on the NFL Network side, we continue to see really strong growth in our audience and, more importantly, we are putting more high quality content out there. We have been delivering more of what our fans want even as they consume content in so many different ways. Some of the great wins for us were that we found and created content that may have started on digital and migrated to TV, or started on TV and moved to digital. A perfect example is Fantasy Live, something that started as digital-only show and has grown into something that is even more successful on the television side. So we strive for as much content as possible to live in both places. Of course, the biggest win for us in the past year was the Thursday Night Football deal and how that will grow for us and how we will work with CBS to grow that and make it mean something greater even than what it is today.
On challenges: Some of the challenges that we face and what we regularly test ourselves on are for content creators to not get complacent about how they have always done their job. Be smart about the way that our users are consuming content and always remind yourself about that. A great example of that is how content producers are always thinking about the television medium, but as more people shift over to digital and do something on demand, we have to make sure that we are producing and creating content thinking that they are going to do it on a different screen. We have been thinking a lot over the last several years of creating for the dotcom, but so much of that migration continues to move over to mobile, whether that’s mobile web, mobile app as well as tablet. So we are focusing our efforts to make sure that all of that content has a great and immersive experience across all of those platforms.
On analytics and data: One of the screens on my wall is dedicated to real-time metrics and data. What’s been fun to watch there is the top stories on desktop, mobile web, mobile application, top videos for each of those categories. The other side of that are the visits, the repeat visits, the page views, and the video views. Those are things we get and see in real-time and watch them change. The cool part about it is that when we watch and see things hit and do well for us, we are going to make sure that we make programming decisions accordingly. The thing that is fun is that with the ability of big data, you are able to get that instantaneously. So in some ways, what we see in digital and the metrics we pay attention to not only helps inform us of the decisions we make on digital properties, but on television properties too. Then of course, we follow up, rinse and repeat.
On NFL Now: When NFL Now launches, and we are still targeting a late July launch, we are going to see in short order, not only how people are consuming that content, but how they are personalizing that content. NFL Now is all about creating content how you want, when you want and what you want. That should certainly turn things on its head a little bit in that instead of being more laid back (which NFL Now can be as well) where you can seek out the specific content you want. So from a data perspective, we are going to be watching, minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour, what we’re giving not only to a massive audience on scale but in 32 different ways. When we see certain things pop, we will understand why it is not only popping on a national scale, but if it is popping in a local or segmented market and we make adjustments accordingly.
On TV plans for draft day: The way we looking to approach this is for the fan to receive an all-inclusive experience around the NFL draft, regardless of the platform. On TV, where a record 51 hours of coverage that will be providing starting Thursday is unlike anything that we’ve ever done before. But the cool part about draft week is that it will actually start on Monday, in addition to NFL Total Access and Path to the Draft, we will be doing the NFL.com live mock draft with all of our different talent that participants in this final mock that is moderated by Mike Mayock. The next night is the unveiling of Mike’s final mock draft on Wednesday night at 9p as well. It is interesting to people throughout the draft season to see where guys fall up and down the draft and where those mock drafts fall. The other piece that’s pretty cool on the TV side is that we continue to grow the Access piece of NFL Draft coverage. We will be in at least 15 war rooms with live coverage, and we are still hopeful that we will get more, as well as coverage from 22 different draft parties. To get the reaction at a local level is something that we feel that we can provide and we are wall-to-wall.
