Nearly seven years ago, founder Brian Verne and chief content officer Mack Sovereign launched Wave Sports and Entertainment, a media company focused on building the brands and social media presence of athletes and other prominent sports personalities.
The firm, which produces original programming with commentary, expert analysis and behind-the-scenes stories about the players and events that are shaping the world of sports, serves over 130 million highly engaged fans globally. In addition to its original programming, Wave partners with over 100 rights holders and sports properties to provide always-on programming to followers of the largest and most engaged social communities on the internet.
“When we started this company, it was a pretty unique moment in time within the media industry at large, certainly sports media, in that the landscape was evolving. More specifically, just the way that younger fans were watching and talking about sports was very, very different from how even Mack and I grew up watching ‘SportsCenter’ and ‘Baseball Tonight’ and ESPN on rerun 12 times a day, in that a lot of that consumption was just shipping to people’s phones and different social media platforms, YouTube, certainly audio as as a medium now,” Verne told TheWrap.
“From Day 1, we took this very internet-, digital-, social media-first approach. In the first five years of the business, Wave was very intentional in going fandom by fandom and building these very large sports-centric communities and becoming experts in short-form video and building up those pipes, so to speak. And then that same mindset has translated to our originals business starting with ‘New Heights’ and expanding across the network of shows.”
Since launching in September 2022, Jason and Travis Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast has gone on to reach over 2.4 billion views and 2.35 million subscribers on YouTube, 4.1 million TikTok followers, 419,000 Twitter/X followers and 2.5 million followers on Instagram.
“We’ve seen really strong growth from the day we launched that show. Really within a few weeks, it was high on the sports chart and within that first season No. 1 on the sports chart. That first Super Bowl that Jason and Travis played against each other, the show is the No. 1 overall podcast,” Sovereign told TheWrap. “That’s just really a testament to the chemistry those guys have, the unique perspective. So really from the get go, these guys have found an audience and really built a connection with fans around the world.”
Other notable Wave programming includes “Podcast P With Paul George,” which boasts 30 million monthly views across all social channels and over 1.5 million followers on the show’s social channels, including 670,000 subscribers on YouTube, and “7 p.m. in Brooklyn” with Carmelo Anthony and the Kid Mero, which became the fastest show to reach over half a million views for a single episode. In 2023, its slate of original programming accumulated 12.6 million followers, 2.5 billion short-form views and 200 million engagements across social accounts.
“Some of the best creatives, creators and most impactful people that we’ve worked with at the company are from nontraditional backgrounds in a professional sense,” Sovereign said. “But creators who have embraced the internet and have put the time in to learn all the details that separate good from great or 100,000 likes from a million likes on a social team and finding those people and empowering them has been a difference maker for us.”
Check out the rest of TheWrap’s Office With a View Q&A with Verne and Sovereign below.
What’s your process for finding and building up the following of the sports talent you work with?
Mack Sovereign: It’s a little bit of both of us proactively identifying current or former players that we think might make great personalities in the space. But sometimes, they end up coming to us — their agents, managers or themselves express an interest and are out looking for partners in that regard.
In the first five years of Wave, we built up a massive distribution engine of 100 million-plus followers of sports fans in different verticals. And then building up those pipes in that distribution, we also built an in-house team of experts we feel like are the best in the world at understanding how to create content, package it, edit it, all the little things that help make a post go viral. So we felt like we had this great existing fan base and marketing engine and content creators who can get their hands on any piece of content and package it to stand out on a social feed. That was a great recipe to then pair with this long-form programming. So we set out to find personalities with a unique perspective and the desire to kind of lean into the media side. That’s been the playbook so far.
What does your work with sports leagues and rights holders entail?
Brian Verne: When you have the idea of becoming experts in community building on social and short-form video, part of that thesis was you have all these amazing leagues and rights holders and sports properties around the world that have some of the most incredible IP across all different sports and fandoms. But maybe it’s been under-utilized in terms of tapping into that Gen Z and young millennial fan on social.
So we’ve worked with about 100 or so odd partners where we’re utilizing their highlights, we’re utilizing archival footage or existing content libraries to turn that around into highly resonant and certainly highly digestible short-form video formats. It ties back to this thesis that short-form video on social is not only incredibly paramount in terms of building and cultivating fandom, but then for these leagues and these rights holders, that also contributes to their overall enterprise value. The stronger that fandom is, the greater value there is that exists within a particular entity.
What’s an industry trend that people aren’t paying enough attention to?
Sovereign: I don’t know how much of a secret it is necessarily, but certainly the shift and consumption of podcasts into the video format and YouTube being a preferred podcast destination for so many consumers presents an opportunity and challenges. That’s a slightly different type of monetization and an opportunity for people to get better at selling the video side of it and also the social distribution touch points that come. Podcasts infers audio only, but obviously, it’s so much more than that these days. So we’re trying to really lean into the video side from all aspects of the business.
How do you plan on staying competitive as the industry continues to evolve?
Sovereign: I think just an open mind contingently, a willingness or even a mandate that we hold ourselves to continue to try to innovate and be testing formats. We’ve obviously found something that works very well … But we don’t want to rest on our laurels. It’s definitely a very competitive space. There’s always a new podcast that’s announced every single day here.
So, of course, we want to continue to find talent that we can build around, we want to keep investing in the current shows that we have, find ways to maybe expand that IP or bring those shows to events to connect with fans in real life. But I think beyond that, a willingness to try other formats and look at the past to some extent, formats that have existed for several generations. How can we innovate and adapt those for the short-form platforms? So just thinking about ways we can expand outside of talk and commentary and build on the base.
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