Tom Gleeson, ESPN

9 July 2009 | By Matthew Wall

curriculum vitae

• Name
  Tom Gleeson
• Title
  VP digital media, ESPN EMEA
• Age
  45
• Education
  Marketing MBA, Kingston University
• Career
  1996-2001: Chief financial officer, John Brown Publishing
  2001-03: MD, IFG Magazines
  2003-04: Chief operating officer, Dennis Publishing
  2004-07: CEO, Cricinfo

Earlier this year ESPN, the Walt Disney-controlled sports network, rebranded its roster of websites with a view to becoming the global leader in digital sports content. Flagship website Cricinfo - the world’s biggest cricket website which ESPN bought from Wisden for around £30m in 2007 - was relaunched as ESPNcricinfo.

new media age met Tom Gleeson, VP digital media for ESPN EMEA and former Cricinfo CEO, at Disney’s HQ in Hammersmith, where a large, sequined effigy of Mickey Mouse graces the foyer. It seems a long way from the Long Room at Lords. Gleeson, a tall, urbane Zimbabwean, whose pin-stripe suit hints at his early start as an accountant, acknowledges the apparent contradiction but explains ESPN’s strategy. “The reason ESPN bought Cricinfo is that it wanted to become a much more international business,” he says. “Cricket was a big missing piece. We’re now part of one of the world’s largest sports media businesses with an ambition to become the biggest.

“Being part of ESPN provides us with access to technology and resources, and increases our credibility with players, managers and administrators,” Gleeson adds. “The ESPN brand gives us access to top names, such as David Beckham and Barack Obama. We can then use ESPN-generated content on our sites, and have the chance to syndicate that content to newspapers.”

In an advertising-funded business the game is all about brand strength, scale and reach. The stronger the brand credibility the better the access to sport’s top-flight figures. This leads to more popular content and growing user numbers in a kind of virtuous circle. Gleeson says Cricinfo’s unique user numbers are still growing by 30-40% a year, and now stand at 10-12m. About 4m of those live in cricket-obsessed India and 3m in the US.

While some other sports sites have more users, Gleeson argues that ESPN sites enjoy a higher level of user engagement. For example, the average user spends 50 minutes a month on Cricinfo. “The kind of willy waving about user numbers that the newspapers indulge in has the effect of devaluing these metrics,” he says. “It’s not just about numbers, it’s about depth of engagement.”

ESPN’s digital media division also includes ESPNsoccernet, Scrum.com and ESPN360, a pay-per-view broadband channel. After Cricinfo, ESPNsoccernet is the next largest ESPN site outside the US with 7-10m users. The importance of football to ESPN was shown last month when it won the broadcast rights to screen 46 live Premier League matches next season that previously belonged to Setanta. It also scooped a further 23 games for three seasons from 2010 in a separate deal.

Gleeson reckons these deals should have knock-on benefits for ESPNsoccernet, even if ESPN doesn’t yet have rights to stream games live online. Fans watching live matches on pay-TV could be tempted to check out scores from other matches on ESPNsoccernet or their mobiles, as they do with the Super Bowl in the US. While the ink on the deal dries, there’s much discussion at ESPN about how to make this cross-fertilisation happen. “Becoming a broadcaster of live games clearly will gives us a brand and market positioning we don’t currently have,” Gleeson says. “It’s still too early for us to be fully committed to a plan, particularly on the digital side. We’re exploring the rights and how we’re going to use what rights we have.”

For Gleeson, the Premier League deal fits into ESPN’s overall strategy of localisation. Indeed, the Cricinfo rebrand is the first stage in a strategy to create a global network of nationally relevant sports sites under the ESPN brand. But such a strategy, with its emphasis on quality content, requires significant investment in staff and development. “It’ll mean a lot more home-grown content,” he says. “We certainly won’t repackage wire stories. There’s simply no substitute for good content.”

Scale is also crucial for monetising content on other platforms, such as video and mobile, says Gleeson. But he admits, “Outside the US, it’s difficult to find a piece of video that enough people will watch. Similarly with mobile, while we have around a million mobile content users - and this is creating some interesting advertising opportunities - the scale isn’t yet enough in individual regions to make much money from it.”

Despite Rupert Murdoch’s kite-flying talk about charging for content, Gleeson doesn’t see this as likely in the short term for ESPN, leaving aside ESPN360. And yet, it’s having to distribute its content via channels such as Facebook and Twitter to suit its clientele without any clear idea of how to monetise that traffic. “We used to be obsessed about keeping people on our website,” says Gleeson, “but we realised we have to be platform-independent content producers.”

In a sense, things have come full circle for Cricinfo. It was launched in 1993 by cricket enthusiasts wanting to share scores and statistics using instant messaging. “With Twitter and Facebook, people are now essentially doing the same thing,” says Gleeson. “We Tweet cricket scores, for example, and we’ve noticed a big increase in people using mobiles to access our content.”

The rebrand has also been a success, with traffic yo ESPNcricinfo up during this summer’s cricket season. Gleeson says his expansion plans for the ESPN digital media team have already been approved. “The global economic situation has had an impact on our advertising revenues but I’d be more worried if we were losing users,” he says. “The economy will bounce back and the money will return, so we want to be in the strongest position to capitalise on that when it does.

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