Gen Z: Ryan Spoon

Ryan Spoon oversees ESPN’s digital content strategy. He guides the creation of original content for ESPN’s social accounts, which include 33.8 million followers to the main Twitter account, 19.3 million on Facebook and 12.3 million on Instagram.

— As told to John Ourand

At ESPN, we need to keep four tenets core to all of our offerings. While this is relevant to all fans, it is more critical when serving Gen Z because expectations are particularly rooted in speed, accessibility and mobility:

Choice

The fan drives the experience — the device, the platform, the format and the timing. We have to be easily accessible in all of those settings. We must enable choice rather than fear it. That means offering new ways to watch a particular event (such as the College Football Megacast), interact with a particular brand (such as SportsCenter on Snapchat) or even access ESPN and ESPN+.

Personalization

Users expect experiences to speak directly to them. Each logged-in fan’s experience with our digital properties is unique and accounts for an ever-growing array of inputs.

Off-Platform

Making our brand, our content and our talent available across platforms other than our own is critical to reaching other audiences. We need to do it in ways that are native to each platform to effectively engage those audiences. On Snap, we reach Gen Z audiences each day with our “SportsCenter” and “ESPN Daily” shows that are specifically crafted for those audiences. We have similar efforts — and successes — with other formats including Stories, Instagram TV, Twitter Live shows, etc. We deliver billions of impressions each month through these executions and think carefully about the audiences, the platforms and how to drive engagement and usage around our own properties.

Quality

Quality always wins. We are all lucky to work in sports where the experience is generally live and fandom is always rooted in passion. We need to capture those foundations in all that we do — across all platforms, treatments and audiences.