People and Pop Culture
The Sit-Down: Angela Courtin, YouTube TV
World Series presenting sponsor YouTube TV will return in 2018 and 2019 after a successful run with MLB last fall. Angela Courtin, Global Head, YouTube TV and Originals Marketing, spoke about the deal, and the changing landscape of television, at World Congress of Sports this spring.
We’re not trying to eradicate the consumption of TV. But we want to make it available across all surfaces. So, whether that’s on the go with mobile, on your tablet, desktop or television, your traditional screen, especially for TV, it’s really about the ease of use.
[Our partnership with MLB] demonstrates the depth and breadth that a partnership can and should be. YouTube TV is a digital MVPD partner. There’s no box, there’s no contract. Fifty-plus channels and 100 DMAs. We’re really trying to revolutionize the way in which consumers consume TV.
We are starting to see the industry and the category of digital MVPD really lift in terms of overall awareness. Many of you who have launched any type of product or service, the No. 1 issue is really about awareness.
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The power is with the consumer. The beautiful part about what’s happening is there is an explosion of distribution opportunities. There are varying price points.
CAA was a big partner in driving [YouTube TV’s deal with MLB to be the presenting sponsor of the World Series]. We were looking at our consumer. We were looking at an insight, which is how do we make sure consumers understand that a digital MVPD is exactly like their cable company in terms of live TV, just cable free.
Live sports drives viewership. It is an unalienable truth right now. When we think about how do we communicate and overcome the obstacle of what a digital MVPD is, we immediately leaned into sports.
Leveraging the platform of YouTube [so] that we could bring a whole new consumer into the baseball landscape was a win-win for both of us.
This was a complicated deal because it wasn’t just about slapping our logo on something. It was actually about having a really meaningful conversation about what driving consumption and consumer and fan love and engagement around baseball should be.
It’s not just about doing a deal with MLB — we had to bring Fox to the table. For every promo that Fox ran promoting the World Series, we attached a six-second ad to that that was directly attributed to YouTube TV.
I challenge my team to be remarkable and unmissable. And I think we can all agree that the World Series was both remarkable and our brand was unmissable. A lot of that was magic and opportunity and luck coming together.
We want to change the way that MLS fans locally experience content. We became the exclusive distributor of LAFC local games that aren’t nationally broadcast. We partnered with LAFC to create basically a network, a channel on YouTube TV.
When you go on game day, we have a booth in the new stadium. We have our co-branded LAFC-YouTube TV booth where we are calling the game and that is live content. We are then shooting around in terms of fans, practice and athletes and really getting the flavor of the culture of the team and the fans and L.A. as part of that channel.
[Gambling content on YouTube TV] is an interesting conversation. But again, when you are not beholden to a hardware that needs to be pulled out of a wall and replaced to be updated or upgraded, I do think that we can move fast if that’s something that the industry and the consumers really want.
