Best Of Content: FOX Sports

On my team at FOX Sports we had a group of incredible producers, editors, and designers who were pumping out over 10,000 pieces of creative content each month across 19 different sports verticals. Naturally, it’s impossible to highlight all of the strong creative work that was produced, but here are examples of some that I found particularly impressive or unique to FOX Sports as a company:

Gus Johnson’s Call of the Game – One of our core beliefs was in the value of building up and highlighting our FOX Sports-exclusive talent. Gus Johnson is one of the most iconic voices in sports, so each week after his college football or college basketball broadcasts (our top game each week), we would draw attention to his best play call of the game with a fun, fonted social video:

The Hustle — This franchise was our narrative storytelling video series around athletes’ journeys of hard work and dedication. This widely-known example is how Shannon Sharpe, one of our top personalities and one of the largest sports personalities on social media, made it to the NFL:

Random Shoutouts — One of our more fun video series, in my opinion, was Random Shoutouts, where we had famous athletes name their favorite celebrities, products, teammates, cars, and more to give fans a peek into their personal lives. The content was designed to be very positive and light-hearted:

Cartoon Highlights — Using digital tracing, we would take the best highlights from our top broadcasts and turn them into cartoon art:

Radioactive – Every race, NASCAR drivers were mic’d up throughout the course of our broadcasts. After each race we released an audio compilation of raw, unfiltered sounds and commentary from drivers from the most interesting moments and happenings of the week. It was often explicit, but gave the fans exactly the juicy stuff they wanted as you could really feel the intense emotions from the drivers:

More Than A Game — This video series was designed to tell feel-good and emotional sports stories beyond the field of play:

“Klatt Back” with Joel Klatt – Joel Klatt, FOX’s top college football broadcaster, loves Twitter. Each week during the CFB season we would have him respond to fan tweets that he disagreed with and wanted to refute. He got really into it, which made for terrific video:

Everything That Happened Since… — Giving fans context for events is so important, and so is keeping up with internet and meme culture. One of our favorite repeat executions was “Everything That Happened Since…” recaps. These were videos designed to be informative comedy — we would script a meme-loaded sports history leading up to our latest tentpole event. A great example — Everything That Happened Since The Last World Cup (ahead of the 2018 tournament):

Game-ified Content – We tried to get fans involved in unique ways, and we created several interactive concepts around trending topics in sports:

Skip Rides The Troller Coaster — Undisputed host Skip Bayless has an unbelievable fan base on social media (he was the 4th most-mentioned sports media personality on Twitter in 2018, according to the platform) and he really believes in connecting with those fans. So we worked with him to create a long-form Q&A opportunity with fans, where he “could answer the types of questions he would never be able to within the confines of the debate show Undisputed,” per Skip. For each Q&A session -- dubbed “Skip Rides The Troller Coaster” — our team sourced through tens of thousands of fan questions submitted via social media and handed them off to Skip for thoughtful, unfiltered responses: