How Front Office Sports is leveling up its branded content business through educational courses

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Born out of a college class project in 2017, Front Office Sports is entering its fifth year with an eye on growth.

Earlier this year in February, FOS got a round of funding from Crain Communications, which bought a 20% stake in the company on a $25 million valuation. Founder and CEO Adam White said that the company is on a path to profitability this year between the investment and the success it’s seen in revenue streams like its year-old learning business. In total, FOS is projected to earn eight-figures of revenue this year.

On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, White talked about using the influx of revenue and investment to grow the FOS team, which is now at 40 full-time employees, including the recent hire of Lisa Granatstein as its chief content officer from Adweek where she served in the same role. Earning 99% of its revenue from advertising still, Granatstein will be responsible for finding more sponsorship opportunities on editorial projects, as well as growing the Pro subscription product that’s still in its beta phase.

Below are highlights from the conversation that have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Hiring a chief content officer to connect editorial to business

This is really about operationalizing and connecting the dots between editorial, sales, the subscription business, everything, right? So the newsletter drives the business right now and is the biggest area that we’ve invested in. The site product is continuing to be really high quality, we’ve seen a lot of really good success there. We’re doing a million-plus pageviews a month [on the website]. On the newsletter, we’re doing 25 million opens per month, and on social we’re doing over 200 million impressions.

Now, it’s really about how do we operationalize and package everything. Bringing Lisa on, you start to look at her background, and she was at Adweek for about 10 years and a few other places before then, and so her real remit is, how do we take the newsletter to the next level? How do we take the site to the next level? How do we bring our content to life through events – that’s an area that we tested, and saw early success, pre-pandemic, [but] haven’t gotten back to that. So how can we find more success and start to build out and bring our editorial product to life through events. You look at the pro business, you look at some of the other opportunities from a podcast standpoint that we can look into.

And then having her be able to operationalize and work with a cross functional team that is saying, how can we find ways to work with the sales team to package things around key tentpole moments, like Title Nine is a big opportunity that we’re working on right now that we’re focused on. How do we package a Title Nine opportunity for brands across …read more

Source:: Digiday