How the Bengals Kept Their Fans Engaged During Lockdown

How the Cincinnati Bengals Kept Their Fans Engaged During Lockdown

We interviewed Seth Tanner, Director of Content for the Cincinnati Bengals to see how they managed to create content during lockdown.

Brendan Kelliher:

What is your role?

Seth Tanner:

I am the director of content. I oversee all the video production. I oversee digital and social platforms, and everything else in between.

Brendan Kelliher:

So you do video. Do you work on post production?

Seth Tanner:

I am primarily video background which is why they brought me in – it’s my forte. I have an expansive video production skillset.

Brendan Kelliher:

So, does that carry over to editing as well remotely? Or is that going to be in house? What’s your view on that?

Seth Tanner:

We are actually shopping options right now for remote workflows with AWS to see if that becomes an occurrence in the fall to where we’re staying at home again for an extended amount of time, as we’ll have different sponsorships that will need to get done. I just had my first conversation with the AWS team. We’re looking into cloud based solutions in terms of computing and also disaster recovery and storage.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

So obviously, the NFL hasn’t been playing any games right now, but what kind of content have you been producing while in lockdown and now going into phase one? I know you had mentioned sponsorships. Have there been any kind of interesting projects? How has the adjustment been? Did you have to stop creating some kind of content or did you have to fast forward into something different because of the lockdown? Tell me a little bit about that.

Seth Tanner:

Interestingly enough, my first day with the Bengals was March 16th. Everything shut down on March 14th. So I’ve worked from home starting day one with the Bengals. We started creating new content, right off the bat.

With all leagues, football is a year round sport due to the draft and schedule release. We began to focus heavily on digital and social. A lot of teams leaned into live production for live parties and such. We leaned into that a considerable amount ourselves, but our greatest successes came from listening to our audience base and producing the content that they wanted to actually consume.

We’ve gotten very analytic while being strategic in how we approached the content to be produced. We are currently working with limited resources. Our team didn’t have access to the office, which meant the office server was unobtainable. It was inaccessible. We do have a VPN to get to it, but it wasn’t an efficient solution. For a while, we were pulling individual files in a very restrained kind of way. That made things really tough, which is why we’re starting to look at cloud solutions.

We had to be very calculated in the content that we were creating because with our limited access, we needed to use the content that was available to us. We started relying a lot more heavily on the fun stuff during the pandemic. A lot of teams were leaning into coming together as a community and we noticed that type of content wasn’t performing as well for other teams as they had expected it to. We didn’t want to waste the little resources we had into doing the same thing that everyone else is right now.

Even Popeye’s Chicken has a COVID-19 response video. You know what I mean? We decided to just keep it fun. We agreed to keep it lighthearted, and we started producing fun, hype videos based off of the draft, based off of Joe Burrow, and everything else in between. We took a lighthearted approach while leaning into our digital and social platforms to make a fun distraction for people.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

How big of a team were you managing during all of this? Were they able to adapt? How did that work out?.

Seth Tanner:

I have a staff of five currently and we’re looking to expand in the future. Much of our day to day collaboration was done via video chat. The team was used to working in the office, so like many, they hadn’t had much experience with like Teams and Zoom, so it took some time for everyone to get used to that.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

I know you weren’t personally using the VPN, but were they going in through the VPN?

Seth Tanner:

Part of this transition, will be getting the server into working order for us to have the best SAN in the future. Right now it’s a tad disorganized, so whoever knew where a file was would be the one to retrieve it.

Especially, I didn’t want to go in there and like one by one pull these files that I can’t watch and not know what they are. I became very reliant on my staff to access that footage via the VPN.

Brendan Kelliher:

Do you reuse your content? Do you reimagine? Obviously you’re stuck indoors, you can’t do too much. Or are you looking for remote shoots with video cards, that type of thing? What’s your status there?

Seth Tanner:

Remote shoots? No. Even when talking to players you want to minimize their exposure. There was talk about seeing if we could get a camera operator into a players house, if we had a strong feeling we were going to pick them. Optics are so important when it comes to this business. We want to make sure that we are being socially responsible to the community and exposing players in any additional way, just is a deal breaker for us. So we haven’t looked into remote shoots or anything like that.

Many teams have started doing Zoom calls in place of their press conferences. We wanted to make sure that we’re documenting our first year with the new draft picks in the proper way. So how are we going to actually improve that? One of the solutions is robotic cameras. We’re looking at PTZ cameras that we can utilize.

Brendan Kelliher:

All right. So you’re going to reuse content where you can maybe, if they’ve got not so much Facebook, but maybe Twitter. They’re not going to be on LinkedIn, but some of your, maybe YouTube or social channels or what have you, then you can kind of ingest that information and then reuse, re-imagine it, and maybe kind of publish that the best you can until you get on those live feeds, right? Or those live shot?

Seth Tanner:

Yeah.

Brendan Kelliher:

Makes complete sense. Okay. That’s interesting. You also mentioned you have five staff. Is that five staff working with you from an editorial perspective? They go out and hunt? They’re going out and being creative? What kind of capacity are they?

Seth Tanner:

My social media coordinator is the one that’s normally the one that’s going out and finding that stuff. He’s the one that best utilizes those channels. But I also have a team reporter and she has pretty good rapport with the players. So if I want to get interviews or anything on Skype or anything like that, then she’s the one that usually hunts that stuff down. It’s typically those two that are looking to do that. I mean the other folks have different skill sets. Those two seem to know the social back channels the best.

Brendan Kelliher:

So when you are taking this information and you need to edit and put a piece together and then publish it, do you have any initiatives right now from your team or from what you want to do to get obviously the information out to the public? Do you have any deadlines that you’re coming up against? Do you have any areas that you’d like for people to understand with the rookies coming in, what camp may look like, etc?

Seth Tanner:

We’re in an interesting position because the league canceled voluntary workouts for players. Usually this time of year, we’re pretty busy with the first set of voluntary practices, but they’ve moved that to being  just a virtual Zoom chat, for all the coaches and players. Unfortunately, we don’t have that practice footage. It’s just a ton of stuff that people want to see. Joe Burrow out on the field for the first time. I like to take a conservative approach when there’s no content to be created, I don’t want to manufacture it from nothing. I want to do it based off of the stories that are available to us and the content that our fans are going to consume.

A  lot of teams have many idle hands right now working from home and it’s because their day to day job has been not as busy as what it would be if they were at their stadiums or at their practice facilities. So, for lack of a better term, useless content is getting pushed out and you’re seeing fans not react to it. They’re kind of just ignoring it and moving on.

What we’re trying to do is to take a very tactical approach in the stuff that we’re putting out. If there’s a story there, then we’ll do something with it. We recently did a hype video paying homage to Carson Palmer and Chad Ochocinco. And now we’ve got Joe Burrow throwing to Tee Higgins. So you just take the opportunities that are provided to you during this time. We won’t try to manufacture content out of nothing but instead will take the opportunities as they come to us.

Brendan Kelliher:

So I would imagine that an archive or a library of content that you can get to pretty quickly, easily, and be able to kind of get in there, kind of review it and be able to share that and maybe collaboratively edit on that, maybe a strategy that could be helpful for you guys in the future?

Seth Tanner:

Yeah, most definitely. And that’s why we’re starting to look into cloud disaster recovery, cloud media asset management. We’re trying to figure out, like I said, speculation is not the business of the NFL, but I’ve got to prepare for every likely scenario. We have to be ready to work remotely at the drop of a hat.

Brendan Kelliher:

That’s the way to do it though, you got to get ready, like you said, right? Preemptive or proactive as opposed to reactive. So you’re doing it right.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

I love the story about the hype videos and that you didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing. So I kind of wanted you to dig a little more into that of possible. What channels do you push out to? Where are you putting this content? On your website? Who’s watching it?

Seth Tanner:

It depends on the content that we’re pushing out. There are different demographics for each a channel that we utilize, but we are really trying to stand out in a field where it seems like everybody is trying to get out the same message. Part of being with the Cincinnati Bengals is we had one of the smaller channels in terms of audience size and we’re trying to grow it before we get to the summer and before we get to the fall. There’s an added value to digital and social during these times. There’s higher traffic going on. There’s higher engagement going on, and we want to make sure we’re capturing or capitalizing on that.

We just want to stand out. We want to make sure we’re not giving everybody the same content. We’re trying to capture college fans. We don’t know what the college season will look like in the fall, so we’re trying to capture those college fans that might be looking for something to do on a Saturday or Sunday. The best way to do that is by simply standing out from the rest of the teams.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

That’s a great idea. I love that. So now that you’re slowly starting to come back into the office, as you are right now, how is your workflow going to change? Is everyone going to have to get used to coming back into the office again? Do you think it’s going to slow down your production times? Speed it up? What are your feelings?

Seth Tanner:

The production time is going to speed up. I have direct access to the server now, so that’s nice, but I think we’re still doing most of our meetings over Zoom or Teams. It’s different not being able to go into somebody’s office and not having face to face conversations with them. We’re basically in here kind of working remotely still, but just being in the office is nice. The production time is sped up just because I have direct access to the server, but like I said, I don’t want to go back to the old way. I don’t want to end up back to a dribble when it comes to producing content; so, that’s why we’re planning for the future.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

What kind of content are you most looking forward to producing once this is all over?

Seth Tanner:

I just want to get player content. We want to manufacture real content. I want our fans to have player interaction. People care about, hearing from the players themselves. I’m really excited to start getting to showcase the team in person and let their voices be heard out on our channels rather than us just making something flashy that people like. I mean, you’ve got to do that stuff too, but quite honestly, we want to get back to paying attention to football.

Gabrielle Skidmore:

So one last question from me. You actually gave us some earlier, but if you have any others, tips or tricks for anyone else, who might have to be stuck at home for a little longer, if they haven’t yet went into phase one. What helped you and your team get through it? Was there anything that you tried to do that failed and you learned, well, we’re never doing that again, or anything that worked amazingly?

Seth Tanner:

It seems like there’s still a cap on live streaming in terms of how big it can get for you. We produced a live streaming show, and then we did a very much less produced version of a live show just based off of resources and timing going into that moment, and they performed basically about the same. I think a lot of people are learning about the tools that are available for live streaming. And there are some fantastic tools out there which are relatively inexpensive, including vMix.

It’s definitely a whole genre of digital, social, content creation that is highly valued, but you’ve got to be strategic during these times. You don’t want to inundate your fans with content  they don’t care about. So just be thoughtful and strategic going into that.

**Edited for readability