The Players’ Tribune will launch a new weekly show on Twitter on Monday night in which star athletes will answer questions from fans in a live direct-to-camera format.
The show, called #Verified, will kick off with Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver A.J. Green at 7:30 p.m. ET, followed by Minnesota Timberwolves center Karl-Anthony Towns, Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Mohamed Sanu and Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker T.J. Watt in the weeks following.
The Players’ Tribune views the show as a twist on the traditional post-game press conference, with fans able to ask athletes anything from their performance on the field and league news to something completely unrelated, such as their personal lives. The company seeks to humanize and personalize star athletes by taking out the middleman — beat reporters — and letting athletes display their personalities.
For the most part, an athlete’s appearance on the show will come as they’re still in season, often after they’ve played a game over the weekend, which The Players’ Tribune hopes sparks questions around timely league storylines.
“Anything is basically in bounds. The beauty is it’s real-time in nature,” Raphael Poplock, EVP of Brand Partnerships and Business Development for The Players’ Tribune, said in a recent interview with SportTechie. “If you’re an NFL player and you played on Sunday, there’s going to be a lot of fan interest in what happened on the field. This season has been filled with a lot of storylines that I’m sure fans will want to delve into with respective players.”
This won’t be like ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption, which has a debate-style format. Rather, it’ll be single athletes, appearing on the show one at a time, staring directly into the camera and having “a more intimate conversation,” Poplock said.
The Twitter show is part of the company’s expansion of its content offerings into new mediums, something Poplock said The Players’ Tribune will continue to pursue as part of a goal to generate “disruptive or premium content wherever there are large audiences” by leveraging the access it has to major players and showcasing “who they are as individuals.”
“We want to be disruptors,” he said. “We’re going to continue to double down on not only outputs but diversity of formats.”
The 30-minute show will stream from wherever the athletes are located at the time, starting from Green’s homebase of Cincinnati.
It’ll be funded with sponsored media segments that’ll be sprinkled throughout each episode, with American Family Insurance kicking off the series as the presenting sponsor.
