Former
NFL Network and
NHL Network executive
Charles Coplin knows three words of Russian: “da,” “nyet” and “spasiba.” The only time he visited the country before last month was more than two decades ago when the Goodwill Games were in St. Petersburg.
But Coplin is the executive who the Russian company Gazprom Media hired to help it launch Match TV, a 24-hour terrestrial sports network in the country, just three months from now. Coplin is not moving to Russia but plans to spend a lot of time there over the next several months leading up to the channel’s Nov. 1 launch.
When I caught up with Coplin last Tuesday, he had been in the job just four days. Speaking from his Moscow office, the experience was so new that Coplin had just come out of his first meeting to set up a program schedule.
“This has all happened extraordinarily quickly; I’ve been here since July 24,” Coplin said. “The first time I met with these guys was three weeks ago.”
Coplin’s journey from running programming departments at NFL Network and NHL Network to helping a group of Russians launch a 24-hour sports channel behind the former Iron Curtain speaks to the strength of the relationships Coplin has developed in the business.
Gazprom Media received a license to launch a terrestrial channel on June 1. Shortly thereafter, its executives approached NBC Olympics President Gary Zenkel to find someone to set up the programming, production and marketing for the network. It was natural for Gazprom Media executives to reach out to NBC, a network the Russian company got to know well during the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games.
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Charles Coplin is helping Russia’s Gazprom Media launch Match TV.
Photo by: COURTESY OF CHARLES COPLIN
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Zenkel told the Russians to contact Coplin, a longtime friend who lives in the same town outside New York City. Coplin had left the NHL in the summer of 2013 to set up his own production shop, doing work for companies like IMG and CBS. He has experience with network launches, having been part of NFL Network’s launch in 2003. Plus, he was tasked with relaunching NHL Network in 2010.
“They emailed me, and we arranged a phone call,” Coplin said. “A couple days later, they asked me if I could fly out to Moscow. We had three days of meetings and conversations. They made me a proposal to move here for a year. I said that I don’t really think that will make sense for my business. So we came up with the structure where I will come in and help them with the setup and launch phase.”
To say that Match TV still is in an embryonic state is an understatement. It does not have a studio or set design yet. Sports TV basics like graphics packages and music have not been picked. There’s no talent on board yet — daunting tasks for an executive who has to have the channel up and running by Nov. 1.
“There’s a challenge with launching a network anyway between the branding and the infrastructure and the online media piece in a very short time frame,” Coplin said. “Then there’s the language and the culture, which are very different from the U.S. culture. It’s complexity upon complexity upon complexity.”
Coplin said he plans to use ESPN’s model as a blueprint. That means securing live sports rights and setting up studio and shoulder programming to complement the live events.
“That model is probably the most replicated model,” he said. “But the cultural and media environment here is so different, that if you just took the ESPN template and blindly followed it, you would fail. The culture of sports here is very different.”
Coplin did not get into specifics — he still is learning the market. But he expects that a KHL hockey game will anchor at least one night in prime time. His rights wish list includes European soccer leagues, Olympic-style sports and fitness programming. He said he already has reached out to U.S. leagues about securing their Russian media rights.
“Believe it or not, biathlon is apparently very big here,” he said. “I could see UFC and some of those other fighting sports, like boxing, being popular. I’ll learn more as I go.”
Similar to the U.S. market, Coplin says younger people are not watching as much television in Russia. The challenge is to create programming to attract them. He believes better production values will help.
“One of the biggest challenges is to get younger people to embrace televising sports and upgrade the standards of production, which is where I’m hoping I can bring some of my American colleagues in to help,” he said.
Just as Coplin is learning the Russian media and sports scenes, he is teaching his Russian colleagues about U.S.-style marketing. During one of their first meetings, he showed the Russians spots from ESPN’s “This is SportsCenter” campaign. One of the ads featured Washington Capital Alex Ovechkin as a Russian spy.
“They thought that was brilliant,” he said. “Russia doesn’t have the individual sports stars that we have, like LeBron James or Tom Brady. That’s something we’re going to have to do in terms of working with the leagues to market the sports to cultivate that tribal sense that’s a big part of American sports.”
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.
