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People and Pop Culture

Hangin' With ... Shout TV Founder & CEO Darl McBride

DARL MCBRIDE is the CEO and founder of Shout TV, a social media platform that engages fans before, during and after live events with trivia games and contests. Shout is free for users, and rewards contestants with prizes as they submit correct answers and accumulate points. Prizes range from $5 Amazon gift cards to TVs and Ducati motorcycles, which are paid for -- and sometimes provided by -- advertisers. A percentage of Shout's advertising revenue goes into a fund to provide the prizes. The company, which was created in late '11, has taken off in recent months thanks to a three-year partnership with Real Madrid. The deal with Real was signed last summer, and the partnership initially launched in November before going fully live in March. McBride declined to reveal the financial details of the agreement, but said that each week, Real sends two to four posts to its massive network of followers on social media, providing them with access to links where they can participate in Shout TV contests. As part of that deal, Shout is currently available for fans via Twitter, Facebook and Real Madrid's official mobile app, and there is also a web version that is accessible from any browser. The impact of partnering with Real has been felt immediately, as Shout TV has grown quickly -- increasing its int'l presence from six countries to 203. McBride chatted with SBD Global about the origins of Shout, working with Real and his big expectations for the brand's future.
 
On associating with Real Madrid...
Darl McBride: It's very powerful. You see how Shout is embedded and wrapped around the Real Madrid experience. If you look at the Forbes rankings, Real Madrid is the most valuable brand in the sporting world globally. You go in and showcase and show how the most valuable brand in the world vetted everything around globally and ends up working with a company in the western half of the United States. ... Over the last couple of months, the player experience is really booming. Now we're in discussions with dozens of clubs and teams, and celebrities and even some TV shows that are interested in embedding this experience into their world. We have more opportunities that we can tackle and we're now in the process of going through some serious growth expansion as a company to deal with the demand that we have for people wanting to work with us.
 
On how the partnership benefits Real...
McBride: The way Real Madrid and a lot of other clubs look at their revenue is in three buckets. They look at it first of all, from gameday revenue, which obviously starts with tickets, but then you have concessions and everything happening at the match. The second bucket is the broadcast rights that they have farmed out all over the various places around the world. The third bucket is sponsorship sales, and obviously Real Madrid gets a lot of that from Emirates. ... Then they view this as their fourth revenue stream that augments these other three that they have. It's a new way to generate income for the club. There's not a club that generates more income than Real Madrid.
 
On what Shout provides for fans...
McBride: The big thing that we offer is we're a fan engagement company. We give fan engagement on steroids, if you will. The way we do that is we connect brands and fans around live events. So what does that mean? We have a game that you play, you answer questions about what's happening on the court or on the field and if you get them right, you win points. Points can convert into prizes. Prizes can start off as small as an Amazon $5 gift card, but as you move up through a ladder of contests, you could actually drive home on a new Ducati 696 motorcycle. What we do is we not only "gameify" the fan experience, but we "prizeify" it. If you're going to play a game, there needs to be something on the line, is our theory. ... Every sponsor wants to get more connected, more socially connected, more tied into the fans. What we do is we bring the sponsors to the party with a big social game. Then these sponsors will either pay money directly to us and then we "prizeify" it, or the sponsors themselves in some cases will "prizeify" it. What happens is very magical. When fans go into a Shout app, they don't shy away from mobile advertising, they seek it out. When's the last time you went into Twitter or Facebook and said, "Show me an ad"? But our users don't think of it as looking at an ad, they look at it as, "Where's the prize?" But to get to the prize, it's associated with the brand, it's associated with the product and it's associated with the whole series of actions the fans take around that brand.

On attracting users...
McBride: How do you get the message out? How do you get people to download? How do you get them to play? The reason we've adopted the model we have is that if you go where the fans already are, then it's much easier to attract the user. That's why you see our technology approach is we take the game to the fan. If they're inside the Real Madrid app, we're there. If they're inside of their Facebook pages, we're there. We also did the programming so when you see this app inside of Real Madrid's pages, it looks like it's a Real Madrid property. So it's not a jolting experience that takes them away from the beloved Real Madrid brand that they know and appreciate.

On how Shout combines his interests...
McBride: I know how to raise money, so we have that. I have my expertise in technology, and especially personal gadgets and applications. My love is really around sports. I was the 12-letter varsity guy in high school. I kind of topped out, I didn't really go on to play college, per se, but still had a great love for sports. So you kind of bring all those together and that ends up becoming the brew, if you will, of how Shout was formed.

On if he has been surprised by Shout's success...
McBride: When I first started this, if you would have told me at this stage of the game, we're going to be in 203 countries around the world, which is all of them, we're going to be wrapped inside the largest sports club in the world that promotes this two or three times a week to its user base -- there's 500 million Real Madrid fans, there's 120 million inside their social pages -- that would have been surprising to me. But now we're there, it's the new reality. The summarization for me on this whole experience is, typically when you grow a tech business, you start something, you get it, you land a small deal, and then you go to a bigger deal. ... And then some decades down the road, you start expanding internationally. In our case, our very first deal just happened to be the largest, most connected club with the most fans in the world.

Hangin' With runs each Friday in SBD Global. 

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