Finn Bradshaw, the ICC’s Head of Digital, has one of the most high impact jobs in all of cricket.
He oversees the ICC’s massive social channels, website and digital platforms, and reports directly to the ICC’s CEO. So he’s perfectly positioned to help grow the sport’s global audience and revenues.
And fortunately for the cricket world, Finn and his team are extremely passionate about what they do.
Finn is also extremely well qualified for the role, having previously run digital for Cricket Australia and Tennis Australia. In addition, he was a successful print and online journalist for many years.
Most importantly, Finn is extremely thoughtful and articulate about how to develop the sport.
Our conversation covered a wide range of fascinating topics, such as
- how his team leverages the ICC’s unparalleled social presence,
- The relentless growth of cricket through digital channels,
- The recent Men’s T20 World Cup and the impact it had,
- how his team helps deliver value to the ICC’s sponsors,
- And he also shares the ICC’s strategies for creating content that gets millions of views.
We learned a lot from Finn, and we promise you will too.
If you care about the future of cricket, this episode is for you.
Join us as Finn shares his insider’s view into this critical area of the ICC.
03:05 – What areas do you oversee?
04:26 – Where does your department fit within the ICC structure?
06:44 – What is the ICC’s strategy and objective when it comes to social media?
08:32 – Are you happy with your Instagram reach, considering a billion cricket fans in South Asia? What are your ambitions for growth?
11:42 – What type of content works best for you on social media?
17:46 – How important is it to grow the ICC’s female audience?
24:18 – Do we have enough personalities in men’s cricket?
31:16 – Can you tell me about the ICC TV initiative and how it went?
38:20 – How impactful was the recent T20 World Cup across your channels and regions?
44:25 – How do you see the sport and the ICC’s role growing in the US from here?
47:39 – Do you believe there’s no such thing as too much cricket, or are some markets reaching saturation?
54:02 – Can you share examples of how digital activations have boosted returns for the ICC’s major sponsors?
59:25 – What drives Cricket Australia’s digital success, and how are you applying that to your role at the ICC?
01:03:20 – What insights did you gain from your time at Tennis Australia?
01:06:35 – How did your journalism career shape what you do now?
01:10:36 – Who do you admire in cricket’s digital space?
01:14:13 – Which cricket executives do you look up to?
Transcript
Zee: And we’re here today with Finn Bradshaw, Head of Digital of the ICC. So excited to have you, Finn. Thank you so much for joining.
Finn: Thanks for having me, Z. It’s a pleasure.
Zee: And Finn, you know, as we’ve discussed before, you know, I am very passionate about what you in particular do in your area. I can talk about this stuff for hours and hours. So, you know, I look forward to, you know, to this conversation and speaking to you over the next eight hours.
Finn: Great. Yeah. The guys from acquired are going to have some competition when it comes to length.
Zee: So, Finn, let’s, why don’t we start with, everyone knows the ICC, but let’s start with your role and your department within the ICC. but just at a high level, what are the areas that you manage or you’re responsible for?
Finn: So broadly, like I always say, my team has the best job in the world, really, if you love cricket. We get to wake up every morning and work out how do we help people love the game a little bit more? And we do that using technology. So, my team is responsible for all the, what we call fan -facing technology for the organization. So that’s the website, the app, but also all the content that goes on there, but also all the content that goes on social media, all the clips and opinion pieces, all of that stuff that you might see on Instagram, Facebook, et cetera.
We also have responsibility for, I guess, you call some emerging technology. So Web3, a couple of years ago, we still have partners in the Web3 space. Apple Vision Pro, anything that’s new,
We take a hard look at new platforms and we’re trying to work out whether they’re appropriate for our mission, you know, and try and use all of those platforms together to both grow the number of people that love cricket, but also for those who already love it, you know, help them delve a little bit deeper into the game that they’re in love with.
Zee: Great. And just as a quick follow up, where does your department sit within the overall ICC organization? Because that’s always helpful to sort of understand how an organization views a function.
Finn: Yeah, so I report to the CEO. So, the digital function is a standalone department within the ICC. It also includes the IT department that services the organization itself from an enterprise level. And so I mean, but in digital, you’re off on a silo by yourself, right? You you’re there essentially as an enabling function to help everyone else deliver on their strategy, whether that’s working with the marketing and communications team around, you know, the positioning and the brand of the ICC, whether it’s working with the commercial department, with sponsorships, with the media rights department to assist them in what they’re trying to do. We work alongside every single department of the ICC, but we are our own standalone department, which is quite unique. Most other organisations will have it as a subset of another department.
Zee: Yeah, I was going to say that actually is unique and I was not aware of that and that’s a pretty powerful statement about the importance of this area to the ICC.
Finn: Yeah, that’s right. was created when I started here. really, you know, was about a year or so before we launched our new strategy that is the one that drives the organization forward of which digital was going to be one of the key pillars of that new strategy. And I think it was really a statement of intent by the organisation to say, you know, it’s one of those things that you kind of if you aren’t all in on, then it’s one of those it’s easy to kick the can down the road or it’s always someone else’s problem and I think the organisation wanted to make sure that there was people thinking 365 days of the year about essentially how can technology help us deliver on our strategy and that’s definitely most effective when you have a department solely focused to that.
Zee: Great, so let’s dive into the specifics of some of the areas you oversee, they’re all so exciting, so we’ll talk about each of them. Let’s talk about obviously the one that is, I guess, probably most visible to most of the world that they interact with most, which is your social presence, right? Your gigantic social presence. What is the ICC’s kind of strategy and objective when it comes to social media and the various platforms – you know on Instagram you’re north of 30 million followers and TikTok is probably something similar and Facebook something similar. You’ve got such broad reach. What is your goal?
Finn: So yeah, so it’s a couple of things. Broadly, it’s about reach. Like we want to use, you know, those platforms are the greatest marketing platforms ever developed in human history. know, their ability to reach and target people in such an effective way. And nothing has ever compared to that. And so we want to reach people to one you know, make them more aware of cricket, but then most specifically in our case, make sure that they’re aware of the events we have coming up.
You know, we have three major events a year. You know, we want to make sure that people are aware of it, that they have a passion for it, that, you know, they want to go and seek out the broadcast on TV. So, you know, that’s the, you know, the, the first and foremost sort of use of the social media platforms. And then secondly, there is, you know, commercial aspects that, so, you know, obviously we have sponsored posts and
And that drives it, a value for our sponsors because we know that there’s a section of the audience that may not consume as much on other traditional channels. And so we want to make sure that all of our partners are able to leverage our huge audience to achieve the outcomes they want by being a partner of the ICC.
Zee: So, I mean, let’s dig into your, before we sort of, have all sorts of questions about sort of your content and how you create it, what works. But before we dig into that, so let’s talk about your reach, right? Which again is massive, right? Like I said, 30 million on Instagram. Are you happy with that? Or the other way of looking at it is, you know, there’s a billion fans of cricket just in South Asia.
Right? There’s the, it’s the second largest. Like what is, what is your ambition for how big that reach can be? And ICC is obviously the center of a lot of cricket. So where do you want to get to versus where you are?
Finn: Yeah, so that’s a really good question. So I think, you know, all sports are wrestling with this issue that young people are not consuming media the way their parents did the way that I did growing up. And so you can’t rely on just having a good relationship with TV broadcasters and, and they’ll do a lot of the promotion for you. And so we do want to make sure that that audience keeps growing, you know, on the channels that young people in particular use and so, you know, that does tend to be Instagram
But also more recently, Roblox has been really important for that. and, know, and we are a bit skewed compared to other sports because TikTok isn’t available in India. So we’re probably a rare sport for which TikTok doesn’t play a huge strategic role for us. But definitely Instagram is the big growth engine.
And so, yeah, we want to make sure we’re reaching those audiences and that cricket is still part of their lives and they know when these events are on. But we have to balance that, right? Because, you know, all sport, you know, requires revenue to exist. And, you one of our key remits for our members is to, you know, generate revenue from our tournaments. And we need to respect the people who pay the bulk of that and that’s our broadcasters, you star in India, sky in UK, Amazon in Australia, Willow in US and so on. And so you really don’t want to give people the feeling that they, that there’s no need for them to go to a broadcast, you know, that they can get the full experience by just staying on social media. And so, I mean, I actually don’t believe there’s risk of that.
I think that the excitement of seeing something in the, you know, in the moment, you know, you can’t recreate that by watching a clip on Instagram later, but, we do want to, you know, we do want to make sure there’s a balance. There’s a balance to be struck there. And, you know, we, we’re very much, you know, the, see our sport as the events we put on the, the elite of the elite. Yeah. There’re other sports out there that have a lot of content.
And so they can probably experiment a bit more with sort of, you know, they’ve got different challenges, I suppose. So, they might put more out there. Whereas, you know, we need to find that balance where we keep using the great power of social media to promote the event, but also that when, you know, making sure that people understand the best way to follow it is to go to a broadcaster. So, you know, it’s a tightrope to work well.
Zee: Well, let’s dig into some of what you said what are the kinds of content approaches, subjects, whatever, what’s the content that works best for you on social? Because it’s not that obvious, right? Like you’ll have a highlight clip that does incredible or you have a highlight trip that doesn’t like you had Burj Khalifa clip the other day that got three million views, right? mean, you just, you never quite know. So in your experience, you know, what’s working for you or what are the patterns that you see?
Finn: The thing I’d say is you just have to keep experimenting. You know, the big shift in social media, you know, I guess over the last 10 years has been towards, you know, everything’s an algorithm driven platform now. Like that, that figure of 30 million followers isn’t so meaningful anymore because even if people don’t follow you, they’ll get your content served to them. I would say the, the big trend that we’re seeing is a response to sort the more organic kind of content creation than the pure like in the past it really used to be the highlights clips out of broadcast they still do really well and they’re the backbone of any sort of content you know strategy you know make sure that when there’s a must-see moment that people see that moment but the if you look at the most recent the last 12 months some of the stuff that’s really done unexpectedly well for us has been things like, you know, the celebration to the Indian team filmed by someone with a phone on the ground. You know, it’s, just using the phone. It’s not a, you know, high spec sort of production thing. It’s just in the moment capturing it there kind of like you would if you were capturing that for your mates. And then some similarly to that, we’ve started doing a lot more stuff with influencers and creators and
Yeah, that’s not all of that hits for sure, but when it does, that stuff goes ballistic. And again, it usually is when you’re a creator, create a very real, very human moment with a player or with a few players and the fans see them in a different light to what they’ve seen and that will really exceed expectations. And then the last one that we really started experimenting with in the Men’s T20 earlier this year was working with Star to grab sort of, I guess, sort of almost unexpected moments out of the Hindi broadcast. Definitely in the past, we’ve sort of been very focused on the English broadcast. Star does a phenomenal job broadcasts in more than 12 languages, but, you know, working with them to sort of get the very best out of the Hindi feed, which might be different moments to what’s on the English language feed. And, you know, it might be a stump mic, sort of banter between.
Indian players or things like that. But again, you know, if you’re trying to find them, there are moments where they’re a bit more human and, you know, it’s a bit more organic. And that stuff’s done really well. And so, you know, I think when we look forward at the moment, it’s a lot more about what are we capturing in the stadium from somewhere with a phone in hand, rather than purely the broadcast stuff. Broadcast stuff is still needed, but, you know, I think… That’s been a big change in the last 12, 18 months.
Zee: which I think is critical and needed, right? Because it’s like you said, the automatic assumption is okay, what works on broadcast is what we should put on social and therefore like, let’s be careful. But social is different and what works on social is different and no one’s going to go onto Instagram and try to watch a whole mess. That’s not even the point, right? The stuff that works has got to be culturally appropriate for the platform right and by culturally I mean like what works for the youth that are playing around with it what they expect in their feeds and right
Finn: Yeah, that’s right. And, you know, because I think there’s, you know, when I sort of talking earlier about what is the, what does the social media do for the ICC? There’s definitely an element of it. You know, it’s a brand building. There was some element to that. And, you know, you know, that you’re going to be in someone’s feed with stuff that might be created by Mr. Beast or I show speed or, know, like these people who are creating stuff very specifically for that social media audience and who are really good at what they do, right? You just have to look at their results. You know, can’t argue with that. And so if people are flicking through that kind of content and loving it, and then all of a sudden they get a bit of content that feels like it’s created for their dad, you know, that probably isn’t going to be great for you long -term. And so, you know, I think…
That’s something that you definitely think about, but you you still want to remain true to the sport and what makes the sport great. So that doesn’t mean you’re going to go out and create a, you know, squid game style. You know, because like, think sometimes people get confused by that and then want to create something that’s so, there could kind of be any content. It’s not related to the sport and that’s fine.
But it’s sort of a sugar hit because people aren’t going to be left with anything that makes them want to come back to the core of the sport. And so again, it’s sort of all a balancing act and it’s, know, getting those ingredients right is difficult.
Zee: Let’s talk about demographics for a second, especially on your social. know, every cricket brands, socials that I look at, the analytics, right? There’s cricexec, there’s a couple of others that we run 80 to 90 % male, right? Somewhere in that range, right? And so, you know, we’ve got the Women’s World Cup, right, upon us. What, how, if you can speak about it what is the demographic skew gender wise of what the ICC does? How much is it a priority to sort of increase the female side of it?
Finn: It depends what platform a bit, but that 80 to 90 % is about right. On website and app, we tend to see a little bit higher proportion of women audience, which is interesting. But we don’t want to speak a bit to the algorithm, sort of pushing it down the throats of people who are already cricket fans. Then, I think there’s two things, know, that, you know, when you’re talking about sort of women and women’s cricket, we absolutely want more women to love cricket. And, you know, we think about that a lot and, you know, trying to work out.
How do we make sure we get into their algorithms on social media, but also, know, how do you create an environment at the grounds that is welcoming and, and all the things like that, that, will make someone’s first or second experience with cricket a really welcoming, joyful experience. The, then there’s the other job to do around women’s cricket. You know, we, we think there’s a huge opportunity there with women’s cricket, you know, that a lot of growth, the sport will be driven out of women’s cricket. But that’s not necessarily going to come 100 % from women following the game. You know, the great thing about women’s cricket really for the cricket fan is it’s more cricket that’s meaningful. You know, it’s if there’s one thing that our fans tell us like that they love World Cups, they love sport with meaning that when people where they love events where people are competing to win the ultimate prize.
And that’s what women’s world cups are. And so you’re going to see that initial growth of women’s cricket fandom come from existing men. Probably far more than it will be necessarily from women, just because they’re already familiar with the sport and you’re just offering them greater cricket. Now we need to do a job about making them, you know, the players household names and the game is different, but I think it’s, you know, in a good way. it’s, you know, it and how we can understand that and really appreciate those differences is a job that we have to do. But, you know, like it’s, you know, when I was at Cricket Australia and we launched the Women’s Big Bash League, you know, the best thing we could do was target the dads in the household. Because if you’ve got a daughter,
What do want to do? You want to take her along and show her women playing cricket? Cause you know, like that combines the two great loves in your life, right? Your cricket and your daughter probably don’t want to ask men too much how you rank them, but you know, they’re the two great loves in their life. And we’re offering them opportunities to combine that. And, you know, and that was sort of the power of that product. And you think of all the flow on benefits, you know, as the generations go on through that, but that, you know, I think that’s sort of really a bit of how we think about how we package and promote the Women’s World Cup.
Zee: Spot on, right, to what I was thinking as well, how we think about it or I think about it, which is you, think women’s cricket will, the goal for women’s cricket is like you said, right, not just women watch it, right, it’s men and women. And you look at some sport, like, and we’ll talk about this, you spend a lot of time in tennis, right? Lots of men watch women’s tennis, right? There are, that to me is like one of the best examples of the aspiration, right, which is, it should just be the love of the sport and it doesn’t matter who’s playing. And also, you know, think women’s football slash soccer, right? And especially in the U.S. where that team, the female team does so much better than the men’s team internationally. Like that’s one where you see sort of like just a broad support across men and women. And that’s really where we should eventually try to be going with cricket.
Finn: I would, I would agree with that. I’d pull out two sort of common themes to the examples you had there, women’s tennis and, the US women’s national team. They’ve also been chock full of personalities, like, and, and they’ve both, you the organizations have been really good at promoting that and women’s cricket is kind of, I mean, sorry, women’s tennis is ebbed and floated a bit on the back of those personalities. Like when they had Sharapova, the Williams sisters, Lindsay Davenport, like that’s probably sort of almost, you know, like that was a really high watermark for them in terms of interest in the game because they had some really big personalities and there was great rivalries and they didn’t necessarily like each other and that was great. And then, you know, the women’s, you know, soccer team in the US just seems blessed with big personalities. Like they just, like it’s like a production line. And again, like they… cut through, know, like people who may not be huge soccer fans are aware of that team as much because of the, you know, the, the commentary they might have on other things in life and stuff like that. And, and so, you know, what we often think about with women, like, you know, they, lot of the women who play in our tournaments, it’s unfortunate they’re not full -time cricketers.
But it means they have other interests in life. know, they’re not just sort of someone who’s played cricket since they were five and haven’t thought about anything else. And so that means they often have kind of a humanity and a broadness of interests that maybe the men don’t always have. You know, one of our most tangible and powerful moments was during the Women’s World Cup in New Zealand in 22, the Pakistan, let me get this right.
Yeah, the Pakistan captain had a very young baby with her and you know, she had her mom and her family there to support her. But there was this moment after they’d played India where all the Indian players were standing around meeting her baby. And, you know, you just, you’re literally never going to see that in a men’s event. And in that same way, and like, and it was such a moving moment, but it also spoke to like the kind of moments and the kind of emotions you get through women’s cricket, you’re never going to get through men’s cricket.
Zee: Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t agree more, right? The careers that I see, right? That women are like even the top cricketers. So for example, on our podcast, we had Tom Moffat, right? Head of the World Cricketers Association. And he was talking about one of their board members, Cecelia Joyce, right? Who’s from Ireland and she’s on the team and she’s a practicing attorney. So she helped with the forming of the Cricketers Association. I mean, it’s amazing, amazing stuff and juggling. you’re raising another point, which is.
Finn: Yeah.
Zee: Awesome because I was just about to ask you that because I feel very strongly about this. And it’s not just personalities in women. I’m wondering like, do we have enough personalities in the men’s sport? And that’s not even that they don’t have personalities. Do we encourage and facilitate the showcasing of those personalities, right?
Finn: Yeah, I mean, actually, look, I think, I think we need to be careful to sort of what we mean by personalities, because, you know, the, you know, not everyone’s going to be the sort of the Chris, not everyone can be Chris Gayle. But what we do want is everyone to be is their authentic selves. And I think we’ve seen, I reckon we’ve seen an interesting generational shift.
Zee: Yep.
Finn: I’ll talk to sort of something closer to home. Like the Australian team, we had that sort of great team under Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting, Shane Warne, where they were very, you we call in Australia, alpha male. you know, you’re on the field to play a very aggressive brand of cricket. You win by, you know, sort of bending people to your will.
And then you had generations come after them who I think found it quite hard because that wasn’t who they were, but they felt like that’s who they had to be as an Australian cricketer. And now you’re seeing this new generation under Pat Cummins leadership where people are much more comfortable being themselves. I think like that documentary series that Cricket Australia has done with Amazon has been really good for that because people like
Zee: Okay, yeah.
Finn: Marcus Stoinis at example, they’re not Chris Gayle characters, but they have a lot of personality in their own way. Like they’re very, you know, quirky is the, is the word that everyone uses for, you know, Zampa in particular. And, and so like they’re the love for them, you know, is quite high in Australia. Even though they’re not, they don’t fit what people would have thought the stereotypical Australian cricket of mold was. Same with Pat Cummins, you know, very political by Australian cricket.
Zee: Absolutely.
Finn: Captain standards. And so, and you look at how beloved the New Zealand cricket team was, the Kane Williams and for being the nicest guys in the world, you know, and that was kind of their brand. And its sort of, again, you know, it’s not necessarily what you think about when it’s personality, when people talk about big personality, but it was very much who they were. So what we do need to do, and when I say we, I mean, you know, administrators and people around the teams is work with those players to work out how to tell their stories and not all of them want to do it and you know not all them are going to do it in the same way but yeah the path to great fandom is always through the players and so how do you use these new platforms where you can do that stuff in a way that you can never capture in a 60 second interview at the end of the broadcast
Zee: Yeah, look, I will say that you hit the nail on the head, right? And you said it better than I did. And you even articulated what I was thinking better than I did, which is you just have to let, we have to let people get their personalities across, right? Like you said, if they want to, right? Some don’t, some don’t want to, but we’re not doing that, right? Or we’re not doing that as much as we can, as much as we should, because, we’ll talk to about other sort of contexts in a second, like,
I, know, we’re, Cricexec is a global media brand and we, we cover and we, we have an audience all over the world. I happen to be located in the U S right. So, it’s very, you know, how we grow cricket in the U S is a priority. I one thing I’m talking to USA cricket about, and a lot of the national team players about is the American cricket audience needs to connect with you personally as much as they can. That’s what’s going to help grow the sport as well, right? And tell your individual stories rather than just have you be on the pitch.
You know, in India, in Australia, in Pakistan, you have to be living under a rock to not know who the stars are. And something about there, see them in sort of the media and you’re always exposed to, but in other countries, it’s not. you really, but when you tell people’s stories, fans connect with them in a way that they just couldn’t before, and then they become fans of the sport. But I still think it’s upon us to focus on that, right? I’m actually going to start another channel that’s just for that in the US, again, to just help people connect with the players, because without that, there’s going to be an abstract nature to the sport that… is not as emotional, is not as resonant and it just won’t go as far.
Finn: Yeah, I completely agree. we, we get a limited amount of time with every player before each tournament where we create, get to create some content with them. And I’m exaggerating a bit, but we spend almost as much time planning for those sessions as we do with the rest of the stuff combined, partly because content creative a game takes care of itself to some degree. Yeah. Great moments. You know it in the moment, but working out.
Working with the media managers and the players to make sure whatever we’re planning with them is something they’re comfortable with. But we also know that great opportunity and that’s where it’s all about. You work with influencers and content creators and stuff like that as well because often they’re going to be at Create Content that would make no sense to the ICC. If we make a group of players imitate doing a dance or something, does that feel natural to us? But if you’re a creator who… does that stuff all the time then, you know, so that’s the sort of, but all of that takes a lot of planning, logistics and communication with the players. Cause last thing you want to do is just turn up and say, you know, hey, here’s a wacky thing for you to do. You know, come on dance monkey dance. So, yeah, the secret of, you know, the secret of all of all great content is planning. It’s boring. The secret, the secret.
Good content is really boring, it’s planning.
Zee: So, you we’ve been talking, Finn, about the content side of things, which, again, I could talk to forever, talk to this subject forever, I’m sure you can as well. I want to shift gears a bit to talk about, you know, broadcast and your role in that, and especially something interesting you were doing around the World Cup, which is, for the first time, I believe, there were some nations or some territories in developing associate nations where you… this time around said, you know what, we’re just going to broadcast off our website rather than having one of our big broadcasters, know, then sub license and whatever. Tell me about that initiative and how it went.
Finn: We launched ICC TV, which is our direct-to-consumer platform about three years ago. And its mission was quite simple, just to make sure that nowhere in the world was it hard for people to watch cricket. We didn’t want, we wanted to make sure that people had a really easy path to watching cricket. Because we know from research, like the number one thing that dilutes fandom is if it’s hard to watch the game. And yeah, you and I probably know about that about, you know, if you’re a Premier League fan in Australia or whatever. So that was the heart behind it, but we’re in the middle of an eight-year rights deal where we had one licensee that had global rights and, you know, and so that was, you know, they wanted to be able to commercialize them in the way they saw fit as they should.
When we went back to market for this right cycle, which started in 2024, we’re really clear that we didn’t want to have that one global licensee because we wanted, and there are a few reasons for that, but in terms of growing certain markets, we wanted to make sure that the, I guess the incentives were aligned right. Because if you’re asking a global licensee to commercialize content, they’re not going to spend a lot of time working on a market like Japan or Korea or France or something like that because the effort to reward just isn’t there for them. But for us it is because we get to take a nice long-term view of it. yeah, this tournament, the Men’s T20 was our first time that we had those rights.
And they’re in what we call dark markets in the industry. markets where we don’t have a broadcast licensee. And that was broadly Southeast Asia and Europe, mainland Europe, obviously not UK or Ireland. And we were really focused on not having a situation where we knew last time there were some territories where people literally couldn’t legally subscribe to cricket.
Just through a convoluted, a series of events that led that to this. So, we made it free in all those territories because we knew the audience there isn’t huge and we didn’t want to be a barrier between them watching cricket and choosing to do something else or going to a pirated site. But you had to sign up and you had to give us the details. And so, we’ve just been overwhelmed with the results.
Our target for the World Cup was to get 800,000 users across the world, you know, watching live streams and we’ve done multiples of that. You know, the story of that could be that my team and I are horrible at estimating, but we like to think it’s because the demand was so much greater than we expected.
And so, if you look at our top five territories for that, number one is Nepal, which shouldn’t shock anyone. No one, I’d argue that they’re the most fanatical fan base in world cricket. But after that is Japan, Korea, Germany, France. And they’re not territories that you associate with cricket fandom. And so, you know, we had, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in Japan alone, signing up to watch cricket.
And, and so that’s exciting, but then also we got to see what matches they’re watching. So you can make some pretty good assumptions around which teams are most important for them. And so to be able to then share that data with cricket Japan so that they can work out. You know, how do they best reach that audience and, you know, in bring them into their ecosystem of playing matches or, know, and all the other stuff that cricket Japan’s doing on the ground there, that’s so valuable.
And so if you’re taking a 10, 20 year view to growing the audience in the market for cricket in Japan, you know, I think that is much more valuable to the sport than sort of taking a relatively small sort of license fee upfront right now for that. That’s a long way of saying we’re, we’re, we’re over the moon with it, with the results that we’ve seen, from, ICC TV so far. And, know, it’s really, hardened the investment because you know, you know, none of this is free, right? You know, the ICC has had to invest in it and we’re, you know, we’re really pleased with the return we’re seeing on that investment.
Zee: Yeah, I will. I will echo what you’re saying about Nepal, right? Like my strong recommendation to every like franchise tournament is like everyone should sign Sandeep Lamichhane because like even here in the MLC, right, the fans turn up in droves. They are fanatical. That is we just, you know, we need like almost an Afghanistan like story with them where the teams, national team starts performing like very, very at a high level internationally, really successfully.
Not that they’re not, but you know what I mean, right? Get to that level, perform. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. If we have a few of those, mean, Nepal will just explode. I mean, it’s, it’s…
Finn: They should have beaten South Africa in St. Vincent.
Well, yeah, I I was like, I was talking to their administrators and I’m like, you should just like any, yeah, anyone in the world should get you guys out to, because wherever you go, you’ll turn out a crowd. You can kind of become like the Harlem Globetrotters just touring the world. commercials, right? But, yeah, like it’s the, the audience is there. Like the stories out of the U S were phenomenal. You know, guys from Australia sold their car to be able to get over to Dallas to watch it. You know, in St. Vincent in the Caribbean, there was quite a large supporting contingent. or not all, most of them were Nepalese people who lived in the US, but, you know, taking a week off to go down and support their team. Like they’re talking about a growth engine for cricket, like Nepal fans are legitimately that.
Zee: So, I don’t want to miss this because I want to ask you about it. know, the T20 World Cup happened, right? Because we’ve been talking about it, sort of like alluding to it. You came over, right? It was great seeing you in New York. It’s great seeing you New York and in the Caribbean, because we were both all over. Tell me about how big that was, right? From your perspective, because it was such a…
Finn: Yeah. Yep. And bye -bye to us.
Zee: Such a seismic moment, I think, for the sport in general. But how big was this tournament across all your channels and the areas you touched?
Finn: I mean, the numbers were phenomenal for us. Like it, definitely helped that India won. Like you’ve got to say that, like we saw whether 1 .3 billion video views on our chat and social channels, in the 24 hours after that, that match in the final in India one, you know, you know, to give you like a, point of comparison, you know, across the 50 something days of the Cricket World Cup in India last year, we had 16 billion video views. So, to get more than one billion video views in one 24-hour period is phenomenal. And, you know, so, you know, we were a bit, weren’t sure what the time zone would do because half the games were being played very early India time and most of our audience is in South Asia. So, we weren’t sure, but we saw really, really strong numbers right the way through. and so that’s great. You know, it’s a great proof point that you can take your tournament to a new territory, to a, to a time zone that’s not super friendly to India. But that said, we were playing games at 10 30 in the morning to cater for that audience. So we did try and mitigate it in that way, but you know, to be able to say you can do something as bold as that and not really infect engagement.
But the really exciting bit to us was to see what it did for that US audience. so, you know, the things we were tracking were, you know, how many, obviously there’s all the data collection. So, all the people in the US and Canada who signed up for the tickets, like people who signed up to buy tickets, there was hundreds of thousands of people who did that. At least that maybe got to a million, I can’t remember, but just across the US and Canada. And so to get all that data and get to help with that.
But then seeing people come to our website and app, you know, it was up and I’m going to get the numbers wrong here, but it’s like, was multiples of what we’ve ever seen before, like four or five times in terms of traffic from the U S to our website during an event. And 60 % of them when you were first time coming to our website and app., we really felt like we’re starting to sort of engage an audience that we hadn’t engaged with ICC tournaments much before.
We can probably go into this a little bit more if you want to, but one of the really exciting things was, you know, we did a whole lot of activations on roadblocks and yeah, Roblox is very much a kid’s platform. And we’d sort of started activating in there 12 months out, knowing that Roblox is really strong with young people in the US and so.
We did start of those activations. asked people, you know, what is cricket? You know, is it, is it a sport? Is it an insect? You know, is it a telecommunications company or whatever? And the number of people who knew that cricket was a sport had doubled by the end of the tournament on that platform. And we reached about 20 million people roughly on Roblox. And, you know,
You know, so like that, those kinds of data points just super exciting. So just more people in the US are aware of what cricket is and you have some sense of it. And then the other thing you want to do is show the market what the commercial opportunity is there. And that’s the other thing that’s really exciting to me because a lot of people will sort of say, you know, what does the tournament do for reaching outside the, the South Asian audience that’s already there? Well, you know, some of those numbers I talked about spoke to that, but also why would we ignore the South Asian audience that’s there? Like every other sport in the world would kill for this size and demographic profile of the South Asian audience in the US. Household income of Indian Americans is higher than any other ethnic group. So, like it’s not…
Like that is a really attractive group of people and they’re passionate about our sport. And so hopefully by, you know, like the effort of our events team to get that stadium built in the time they did, that was absolutely worth it because it showed if you put on the right content in this market, there is a really valuable audience there to be engaged with. you know, hopefully the market will take those signals and run with it.
Zee: I couldn’t agree more, right? With everything you’re saying. I’m a big fan. You’re saying something I’ve said to people as well, right? It’s sort of like, I hear, how do we get beyond the sort of the South Asian and the Caribbean audience in the US? And I said, I always said like, that’s nice, but why? You’ve got a market, you’ve got this is, and they’re growing and they’re passionate and they spend money and whatever. Hello, right? Like, what?
Finn: Look at the presidential election at moment. The main candidate for one party has got a Caribbean and Indian parentage and the wife of the vice president on the other side is Indian. Crickets going everywhere. I’m not sure.
Zee: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. But what do you, so while talking about the US, obviously something I know a lot about, where do we go from here in the US in your opinion, right? To keep growing the sport in general and the ICC’s role in that.
Finn: Yeah, I yeah, we, I’ll answer that in two parts. The number one challenge is facilities. We had to build a stadium and the time that we had, you know, know some people were like, well, you know, why couldn’t you leave it behind? You know, building a stadium, just getting approvals is like a multi -year process. And, you know, we’re not blessed with those kinds of timelines. So, you know, the, but the long term, that’s the big challenge of the sport. You can’t just keep playing at sort of little like sort of community facilities if you’re going to be a serious sport and that, in the US in particular, that needs to be solved by the private market. So, I think hopefully the sort of confluence of events will come together with the right sort of funding, the right people running it, the right environment to do that.
The US does have some benefits in terms of when the summer is, so it’s not competing with all the Southern Hemisphere countries. It is a wealthy sports-oriented economy, so there’s a lot of natural sorts of knowledge and benefits and stuff there.
As the ICC, we can’t… It’s not our remit to go and run year-round events or runs of year-to-year activities in the country. We’ve still got, I guess, our number one thing is to raise money and pass that back to the members so they can spend it in the best way possible to grow cricket in their territory.
But then it’s to do big events like this. So, we’ve given the US market the World Cup that was this year and then one of the exciting things for us about getting into the Olympics was knowing that in back -to -back years you had LA and then Brisbane got into LA. Hopefully Brisbane will follow suit. But then you’ve got that sort of nice little four-year runway from one event, from the World Cup into cricket being in Los Angeles and in 28. And so, you know, what, you know, that’s sort of, guess, where we hope is by sort of doing these big strategic activities that make people go, wow, there’s a great commercial opportunity there. I’m going to invest in that. And so, you know, that, kind of stuff is not what you’re going to see overnight.
And, know, the measure of the success of the strategic activities will probably only be, be able to be measured in five to 10 years’ time. and so, you know, that’s, we hope that sort of the legacy of this game is of this event is that people realise that this sort of funny little sport they’ve heard of has enormous commercial opportunity in the US.
Zee: Yeah. Amen to that. let me, let me sort of touch on something you’ve been alluding to and I’ve been sort of alluding to. There’s a lot of events, right? you know, there are a lot of international events, right? At the, at the men’s, just talking men’s senior level, right? There’s, there’s a T20 World Cup. There’s the ODI World Cup every four years, the T20 every two years. Now we’re bringing back the Champions Trophy.
And then there’s a lot of franchise tournaments, a lot. Everywhere I turn, there’s, you there’s more, even in the US I find tournaments that I hadn’t realized where they are. Right. And then there’s new T10s and whatever. There’s a lot of cricket and that’s not even talking about bilateral tours and the like. There’s a lot of cricket, a lot of cricket going on, lot of events from your perspective, right. From your kind of informed perspective, because you see this in the numbers, right. Is, is there no such thing as too much like more is always better?
Or are you seeing that there’s in some markets there’s a saturation, right? Between franchise cricket and international cricket that… maybe it is too much, right? Or maybe we need to sort of make these events more special.
Finn: Yeah, it’s such a hard one to answer that, isn’t it? Because you do need to be led by the market. And if there’s money being offered for the content, then, you kind of, again, lot of sports would bite your hand off for that sort of opportunity. so, you know, should you turn that down? The, I think the other one is, I think probably a way to answer it is like,
One thing that fans overwhelmingly tell us is that they want events with context and that where that sort of, you know, the winning clearly matters to the players and that they understand what the players are competing for. And so, you know, I think if you look at the sum of the really, the real success stories, you know, you know, around, world cricket.
In the last few years, I would say the World Test Championship has been really successful. I remember last cycle, there was like a Sri Lanka, no, I can’t, I’m going to make up. Let’s say, I think it was New Zealand Bangladesh Test Series that normally would be really of only importance to Bangladesh and New Zealand fans. But if there was a certain result out of that, that would affect who was going to play in the World Test Championship finals. So, something the whole eyes of the cricket world were on this Bangladesh-Ireland series, And, you know, like, that’s what we hoped when we started that, was that suddenly games had context and meaning beyond just, of course you want to win every match you’re playing. Similarly, I think, you know, some of the T20 leagues have been really good at sort of having this defined kind of purpose, you know, like to see the crowds that the South African T20 league, they’re clearly, they are providing something to their fans there that was missing. Yeah. And so, their fans aren’t saying that that league is too much content. It’s, you know, it’s clearly fulfilling a need for them. And, you know, I think it’s really brought an energy to the sport in that country, which is fantastic to see. And also, I would say their results in the T20 World Cup are not disconnected for having a very competitive, strong T20 league.
So, I think where, yeah, where, things can sometimes be suboptimal is if, know, those things aren’t hit, you know, like in any kind of competition, whether it’s the international domestic or whatever. And that, you know, that goes for, all sports, you know, like there’s those preseason tours by English premier league teams. And I’ve been to enough of those and where people turn up to a stadium and you watch some guys kind of stroll around the grass and kick the dew off it and you’re like this – I got to say that I saw a star player – but that wasn’t, that’s not why I watch sport.
So, so I think I’d say a lot of sports are wrestling with it. I don’t think it’s a uniquely cricket problem. We have multiple formats, but that’s, that’s our strength and our weakness, you know, in, and I’d say it’s more of a strength than a weakness because it enables you to engage a bunch of different fans.
And I think, you know, from an ICC perspective, you know, this, this cycle where we have an event every year, all the measures, they’re telling us that there’s like a hunger for it. Like we’re not seeing any kind of dilution. You know, it’s sort of like, it’s kind of got a little bit on digital. it’s sort of, we keep it waiting for the plateau and it doesn’t seem to come.
So yes, the fans aren’t telling us that but and so I think the market will sort it out. And definitely the thing I’d say that won’t sort it out is us trying to guess the way forward. And to, you know, try and regulate the right outcomes because I don’t think there’s a lot of history of that working out too well. The yeah, the
Again, I think the benefit of having more ICC tournaments than not is like it keeps that primacy of international competition. You saw that Indian team was stacked with superstars who earn a lot of money, who play in front of packed crowds for the IPL and get very well rewarded for that. But what it meant for them to win an ICC tournament, you know, like…
There’s still nothing else like that in world cricket and you know, that’s what fans want to say. That’s why fans, you know will Yeah, tune in Yeah time and time again because that’s an emotion that no other entertainment delivers
Zee: Yeah, super well put. Finn, definitely, there’s one area I wanted to ask you about quickly, is the role of, you’ve talked about sponsors, right, in a lot, and we think about sponsors a lot, right? They are central to our sport. They’re the ones, you people talk about investment in the sport. I always start with the advertisers and the sponsors, right? They’re the ones who are investing in the sport and enabling. Can you give me a couple of examples of how in your area digital activations have helped enhance the value of the return for some of the ICC’s biggest sponsors, right? Be it DP or whoever? The role that your organization has played or specific things you’ve done with specific sponsors that have really sort of supercharged what they’re looking for.
Finn: Yeah, every sponsor has a different strategy. I think one thing that I’m pretty proud of the way we approach it is we try and work with each sponsor to understand what they’re looking at, how they’re going to measure success of this sponsorship and, you know, and deliver outcomes for them that, you know, and hit that nail on the head, you know, that we’re not just…
Yeah, definitely a while ago, most organizations would just kind of come back with a media value and some impression numbers and that’s the measure of the partnership. I’ll probably answer it about a few things that I like, a couple of the activations that I’ve been really excited about.
Back to Roblox, Emirates came on board there and the really fun thing with that was you got, we had like one of the games we integrated with on Roblox was a thing called Strongman where part of the game is you have to drag things. And so, the fans had to like drag Emirates branded luggage or the fans, the players had to drag Emirates branded luggage across the part of the game. And then that’s the power of integrating with the game, right? Rather than sort of another form of media. Like the users are literally interacting with your brand.
And the numbers were phenomenal in that, way exceeded what we’d hoped. But it’s such a sort of tangible sort of thing. And again, like to be able to sort of say, look, here’s this platform that’s emerged that we think is really great for that. And to able to work on that with them, it was a very collaborative process to sort of work out what that was going to look like. When we sort of got the final report on that, was something I was really excited about. The other ones that I…
You probably want to call out one is our, what started off as an NFT partner, Fan Craze. They launched during the sort of when NFTs and Web3 and everything was really booming, that market has changed and to be able to really work with them to create new products that I think have actually landed as really quite cool sort of fan engagement products.
You know, I’m really sort of proud like, you know, as an organization, we don’t sort of say to them, you know, you’ve got your timing wrong, bad luck. You know, we, lean in with them and try and work out, you know, how can they use the rights they’ve got to still create a great experience and a great business. And so, you know, we’re about to, they’ve got a sort of new launch coming in the next month or so that I think is really cool and a really sort of progressive way of looking at that space.
That, then another one in that sort of same space is Nia, which is like a blockchain company and they wanted to able to show how you could use blockchain at scale. And so we, we’d had the ICC family for a while, which is like that sort of when you signed on to watch a live stream or something like that, you sign up to that audit of me. And with them, we turned it into a loyalty program. And so if you did things like start a fantasy league or start a fantasy team, get a certain number of runs and then you move up the loyalty tiers and then you’d get access to exclusive experiences and exclusive content and stuff like that.
And again, to have a sponsorship that creates something really tangible and cool for cricket fans that I think, you know, genuinely like not many other things like it out there. Like, you know, they’re the kind of partnerships that are really fun to work on.
But then, know, also DP World, you know, we’ve to work with them to tell the story about how they helped us get a pitch that had been created in Miami. You know, because what is DP World? They’re logistics. And what did we need to do? Shift a pitch from Miami to New York. Unfortunately, a pitch got a little bit of publicity about for some other reasons we weren’t that happy with, but…
But that story is a really cool story. And it’s amazing to have a logistics partner who helps you do that. And that’s a video that’s maybe not going to get the kind of views of India winning, but we’re really proud to be able to tell that story. And again, it’s about an integrated partnership. It’s not just putting a logo on something that we would have done otherwise.
Zee: Great. So, you know, before we wrap, Finn, I want to talk to you a little bit about your own career, right? And, you know, there are obviously a few areas of your background that I think are super relevant and must really help you do what you’re doing right now, right? One is, and let’s see if you can talk a little bit about it. One is the obvious one, right? You were the head of digital for Cricket Australia for many years. But I’ve always found in the cricket world, even now, when I look across the various national bodies and who does the, I think, the best or one of the best jobs in the digital space, is Cricket Australia and what they do. So what was it that you were doing there? What makes Cricket Australia so successful at that and so best in class? And what are you bringing from that into your role in the ICC?
Finn: The secret to Cricket Australia is two things. It’s executive support and it’s the talent of the team working on it. I was blessed when I started there that, similar to here, as a CEO who created a digital department and really believed in it. And all I really had to do was kind of help the organization understand how the digital strategy was supporting the rest of the organization and then how we measure it.
And so I was blessed with support of him and my bosses that I had there. So, James Sullivan was the CEO when I started, and then I reported to a guy called Ben Amafio, who was general manager of commercial and digital and communications, something like that. And then later on, I reported to Anthony Everard.
Zee: And who was that, by the way?
Finn: and yeah, the common thing for all of them was just the amount of air cover they kind of gave me and my team to just try stuff. And we did a lot of trying stuff. some of it really worked. some of it didn’t. but we got to, you know, we got to that cover for, you know, and some of the stuff was quite challenging for a governing body to do. Like we, you know, covered player performance.
So, to talk about the player who’s not in form and should they be in the team. Quite challenging for an organization that employs that person to talk about that. But, you know, we really felt it was important that if we were, can you build a credible media brand, which is essentially what we’re doing, if we didn’t talk about that stuff. We would never call for someone to be sacked, obviously to talk, not sacked, dropped from the team though. The same if the player got – yeah, had off field indiscretions. We wouldn’t comment on it, but we’d report on it.
The, and so, you know, that sort of support and then, you know, like I just was like, it’s the most amazing team. You know, proud that quite a few of the guys that I employed more than 10 years ago are still there, you know, and still the core of that team. And I think that speaks to the organization and the support they give them, but also that we hired people for whom telling stories about cricket is what is their dream job, what they love doing.
And so, yeah, I think those things have come together to really, you know, yeah, I mean, yeah, I’m super proud of everything they go, guys still do. yeah, I think they’re yeah, they’re a phenomenal team. Yeah.
And so, you know, I think, yeah, they’re definitely sort of this said, you know, I’ve got some things wrong along the way. So hopefully I think I was more effective when I came here. could probably do things in a shorter timeframe because I’d had bit of experience doing that before.
Zee: Okay. And then you did spend in between there and here, right? You spent a year at tennis Australia. So that was, you your, your stint outside of cricket, you left cricket, you came back, but what did you learn from that? You know, that, you know, brief time it was, it was probably strange because it covered some of the beginning of COVID. but what, what did you, what did you learn from that experience? It’s helping your cricket.
Finn: Yep. Yeah. One thing I learned is it really sucks to leave somewhere when COVID is on because you don’t get to say goodbye to anyone. It’s such an innovative entrepreneurial organization and like it starts with Craig Tiley, the CEO there and comes down and like their encouragement for you to be bold and take risks and try and think of new ways of doing things. It was really, really exciting. And I worked for a called Richard Heaselgrave there and the team that he formed was just such a dynamic, sort of energetic team and the sort of creative things they would do, whether that was about on -site experiences or whether that was about activations with brands or, you know, the encouragement they gave us on digital was just, you know, was just a thrilling sort of place to be part of. And then when the event comes, like you’ve never been to this train open, everyone’s got to go. Like it is one of the world’s great events. There’s phenomenal tennis played there and the crowds love tennis, but there is also like a concert with 20 ,000 people every single night. There is the world’s best restaurants there. You know, when I was working there, think Nobu had you know, a pop -up restaurant there, but, know, that’s just one of 50 restaurants they’ve got there. Like it is just, and it’s in Melbourne in summer. Like it’s, it’s a phenomenal event. I’ve never worked so hard as I did through that sort of three weeks, I guess, of it. And part of it was we started off with bushfires that interrupt, you know, there was smoke in the air. And so, we had to suspend some qualifying games and stuff like that. But then we had some big sponsors out of China and at the last minute they said we can’t come because there’s a disease.
Bit of an overreaction? Passed for a few months and wasn’t it was quite a sensible reaction. So yeah so we got in touch with COVID but I was very fortunate I left before the following two years where they were really hit hard by COVID because Australia was so locked down and they had issues with Novak Djokovic and all that.
But yeah, that’s what I took away from working there. I would have happily stayed there for many more years if it hadn’t been cricket calling me back.
Zee: So, you know, the last question before, well, actually the last question about your career before I ask you one more is, you know, in the evolution of the digital world, right, the internet world, a lot of traditional journalism has taken a big hit and it’s been challenging for them. And I almost feel like…
You know, a lot of journalists have been struggling career wise as revenues have shifted and funds have, you know, sponsors have shifted money away from traditional journalism to sort of social platforms. But your origins, right, your DNA, you grew up as a journalist. And I personally think that the skills that a journalist have are super relevant and super valuable in even the digital and the social media world more than ever, right? I mean, it’s hard to find people who can do that well, right? I hone in on stories and tell them well and engage people. So, what was your original career as a journalist like and how does that inform what you do?
Finn: I feel like, you know, that the old adage do what you love and you ever work a day in your life. Like that pretty much is a, you know, my first job was working on a basketball magazine, 1-on-1 for the Australian listeners out there, which was iconic for us, us basketball fans in Australia in the nineties. And it was working on a magazine, you know, like I was a sub editor, taking other people’s copy and, editing it to fit in the space on the page. And then, you know, then I sort of stayed in magazines for a while until, you know, you could just see that the secular trends were going against print. And so I made the move into the online space, as they called it back then. But what’s the first thing you learn as a journalist? It’s like, is this a story? Like, you know, that’s just that’s just industry thing for saying, is this interesting?
What is interesting about this? And so you have to articulate that in a sentence, essentially, because, you know, you learn the inverted pyramid, but you put at the top of a story, the most interesting thing. So you learn very quickly to get to the heart of that.
And then the second one is who you’re writing this for, because you write it very differently. If you’re writing, I worked for a tabloid newspaper for quite a while. And the way you would write for that is very differently than I also worked in long form magazines and you would write that in a very different way, this is different audience and serving a different purpose.
And that’s all that digital is – It’s about what is interesting about this and who are we creating it for? And so, yeah, the heart of what makes a good journalist is the same as someone who, because digital is essentially about creating content and then using that content to promote other things to people.
So that’s super useful. so, and so like, mean, I’m still biased towards hiring people who worked in media because I think those things are really valuable. And then the other thing is like, if you work in media, you’re used to working some horrible hours and some long hours under high stress and that’s working in sport. And so those things make people really valuable.
And I sort of think, you mentioned earlier, that, you know, the industry is contracted and it’s hard for journalists. The thing I do say to journalism students is I think more people are getting employed to create content than ever before. It’s just, they’re not housed in a couple of big buildings in your major city. And so, but you think every sports team now has probably three or four people creating content. And so, you know, it’s you’re probably not going to get paid to write Hunter S. Thompson style pieces, but if you want to tell stories about sport for a living, there’s so many opportunities out there.
Zee: So, on that note, before we wrap, always like to ask our guests this, who, and I’ll ask this in a couple of different ways, who are a couple of, or a few people you admire in, let’s just say the cricket world, and let’s start with your area, in the digital area, right? Anywhere in the world, right? Who, individuals, organizations and or individuals who you think are really admirable or doing great work. And for each one, just a little bit of why, why you think they’re doing so great.
Finn: Yeah, so like it’s, I guess there’s sort of a few couple of areas. Like I think in terms of their impact on the growth of cricket, Star TV, like it sounds ridiculous, like the biggest TV broadcaster in cricket, answer, but their innovation, you know, and, I’ve been lucky enough to own, to know Sanjog Gupta, who’s, you know, the CEO there for many years now, but there as an organization, what they’ve done in terms of producing feeds in so many different languages and different cultures and different, know, like just, like, I think that, I don’t think there’s a broadcaster in the world like them, the way they think about broadcasting cricket. You know, the broadcasters think it’s a novelty if they do things in two languages and they do it in so many different ways. And then the technology advances like the vertical video stream we’ve worked with them like they just continue to kick goals and I think really sort of just push the sport forward and we’re really fortunate as a sport to have them invested.
You know, Sky in England also does a phenomenal job.
In terms of sort of other sports, the, you know, I would say 15 years ago the boring answer was the NBA and then I think if I’m honest they probably lost their way a little bit for a while, but recently, and I’m really, really blessed to, you know, call Krishna, CTO, a really good friend there. The way that they, the NBA has embedded technology through that business and they have, you know, now, you know, they’ve, they’ve created, you know, the best app probably in world sport. They you know, the way they use social media is so strong. They’ve got like an ecosystem of startups that they invest in. They’re just, they continually push it forward and they always have a really good story around how they use technology to make their proposition better.
I think like another one to sort of call out is, again, it sort of seems ridiculous. Like the NFL biggest… you know, that make more money than any other sports organization in world, but they’re, they’ve become really interesting and innovative in sport. Yeah. Over the last couple of years, I think it’s really, you know, way they embrace new platforms and gaming and stuff like that.
And then probably sort of, you know, one last one that, you know, I think deserves some recognition is, you know, if we look at somewhere like the European tour, not the biggest sport, you know, in the biggest sports in the world, the leadership of a guy like Michael Cole there, they are always innovating in the technology space and they sort of always seem to be sort of pushing things forward. And I think that’s harder sometimes as a challenger brand than it is when you’re sort of the big dog. you know, whenever they do something.
Yeah, I always sit up and take notice.
Zee: So, absolute last question. Who are some individuals you admire who are executives in the cricket world, right? They could be mentors of yours, they could be colleagues, but people who you think are sort of really doing great things for the sport and you can’t help but think, wow, that’s a great person who’s really helping us.
Finn: Yeah. Well, I mentioned Sanjog earlier. I do want to shout out all of the senior management at ICC. It’s the most collaborative place I’ve ever worked in. it’s, you know, I love the discussion. Most organizations get territorial at some spot. so, but here, the discussion, whether it’s with Anurag, the chief commercial officer or Sunil Head of Media Rights or Claire from commercial and marketing or Nick the sponsorship team. You know, the discussion is always about what to do. What’s the right thing to do for the sport? What’s the right thing to do with the fans? It’s not sort of, you know, who’s going to get which department’s going to get the biggest win out of this. And so, the attitude those people bring to work every day, I think is phenomenal. And the sport is better for that.
Zee: Finn, it has been so fantastic having you on the show. I really appreciate the time you’ve given. I threatened to take eight hours. I’ve taken more than one. So, I appreciate the time you’ve taken and the insights you’ve shared and look forward to continuing the conversation and hopefully having you again in the future.
Finn: Thanks, it’s been a pleasure. And yeah, I think probably my two favorite podcasts are Hardcore History and The Quiet and both of them usually clock in around the four-hour mark. So, I think we’ve done all right. This is a short, sharp one, but look, I really enjoyed the conversation. Hope people get something out of it.
Zee: Sounds good. Cheers, Finn.
Name of Author: Zee Zaidi
