Join Mike Lewis, professor at Emory University, on the Fanalytics podcast as he continues counting down the top 10 fandom events and people of 2024, exploring their marketing implications. This episode highlights key moments and lessons learned from events numbered five through one. Topics include Kamala Harris's political endorsements, the Paris Olympics' opening ceremony, World Series viewership trends, Caitlin Clark's impact on women's basketball, and the record-breaking Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight. Tune in for an in-depth analysis of how fandom shapes marketing strategies across various sectors.
00:00 Introduction to Fanalytics Podcast
00:19 Recap of Previous Episode
00:27 Top Fandom Events and People of 2024: Numbers 5 to 1
02:31 Political Endorsements and Fandom
05:21 Paris Olympics Controversy
08:18 World Series Viewership Analysis
12:47 Caitlin Clark's Impact on Women's Basketball
19:43 Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson: The Biggest Fandom Event
24:33 Key Lessons from 2024 Fandom Events
30:41 Looking Ahead to 2025 Predictions
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Fanalytics podcast. This is Mike Lewis professor at Emory University Essentially your professor of fandom continuing with our countdown of the top 10 Fandom events and people of 2024 and the marketing implications. So looking at fandom and what are the marketing lessons? Okay, so as a quick recap Recap from where we've been thus far.
Previous episode had a numbers 10 through six. Today, we're going to do numbers five through one. So at number 10, we had Joe Rogan and this cultural realignment to essentially put some celebrity star power aligned with Donald Trump, not necessarily the Republicans, but with Donald Trump and number nine.
We had the Wolverine and Deadpool movie. So the Marvel Cinematic Universe is largely cratering, but Wolverine and Deadpool has been very strong, was very strong at the box office in 2024. At number eight, it was a very sports specific story. A look at the Steelers quarterback room versus the Dallas Cowboys quarterback room.
Cowboys have spent big money on a sort of essentially top 10 to 15 quarterback. Dak Prescott and the team has really faded where the Steelers got two value, two cost controlled quarterbacks. Lesson there about, something about, the lesson there is that is about investing in creating, investing. The lesson there is about investing effectively to create fandom.
Number seven, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, two biggest, well, the biggest pop star in the world. One of the biggest stars in the NFL and how they have combined to, you know, generate record ratings for the, for the NFL Superbowl. Number six, the Costco guys. Double chunk chocolate cookie. Boom or Doom. So the return of catchphrase marketing, though this time it's not advertising on mainstream TV, on the networks, it is via social media.
Now before we get into it, you know, numbers five through number one, I do think the list really begins to, and I'll hit this more at the end, but thus far the list is really revealing, you know, if there's some common theme, it is about the power and the limits. Of fandom for marketing purposes. And when I say marketing purposes, obviously I'm not just talking about, you know, the stuff we buy in the grocery store.
I'm talking everything from politics to sports, essentially everything that we assume is part of popular culture. Okay, proceeding with our countdown, number five to number one, the most impactful fandom event of 2024. At number five, I've got the Harris campaign's political endorsements. Okay, so the story is that, you know, 10 million to Beyoncé. 5 million to Megan Thee Stallion, 3 million to Lizzo, 1 million to Oprah, and a fairly crushing electoral defeat, at least in terms of the American political system in 2024.
Now again, one caveat here, it's not clear that these were paid endorsements. I think the Harris campaign would say they paid for performances from celebrities that supported Harris. Now this one as I look at this and this failure to move the electorate in Harris's favor, it almost seems at odds with the the event I had at number 10 of Joe Rogan's embrace of Donald Trump.
I think there's something fundamentally different about these two things, and there's really an instructive story. With Rogan, it was a matter of a cultural realignment. The Intellectual dark web, as they like to call themselves, the intellectual dark web embracing Trump, the culture, the counterculture, a masculine counterculture embracing Donald Trump is really important because it's a cultural alignment, right?
So a cultural realignment, that can matter a great deal, um, as Trump becomes part of a Fandom community accepted by the fandom community and the Harris campaign the endorsements. It's something different going on These popular cultural figures their fan bases were already aligned with Harris So in this case, it's not anything sort of significant happening in the culture.
It's just They're essentially saying who Lizzo supports for president or who Beyonce supports for president. And this type of stuff ends up being relatively meaningless. So again, there's a, there's a, there's a key distinction here that you can, you know, the way fandom can affect politics is if the community embraces, a larger community embraces a candidate.
If it's an endorsement, then what you're really seeing isn't just an effort to take fandom and music or fandom and, you know, I guess Lizzo, Beyonce and Megan Thee Stallion are all music and then suddenly say, well, that fandom should be transferable to politics. Unless there's a reason for it, you know, long form conversation, intellectual consistency, it's just not going to work.
And so the Harris campaign made a grievous marketing mistake by not respecting the nature of fandom. By thinking, hey, if people love Beyonce and Beyonce likes Harris as her candidate, then they'll come along and vote for her. A disastrous mistake and really a fundamental misreading of what fandom is and how transferable it can be.
Ed number four. We have the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony, and specifically their Last Supper inspired Drag Queen performance. Right, so a piece of performance art was part of the Olympics Opening Ceremony, and this one's interesting in a couple of respects. First, the backlash was enormous, instantaneous.
Um, you know, essentially NBC went out of their way to make sure no one could put this imagery on social media. So you know how big of a disaster it was. Uh, number two. It was instantly forgotten. I mean, by the time the Olympics had finished, there was no boycott. There was almost little memory of it. So I think this is an really an important fandom event in a couple of respects.
First, it shows how resilient fandom is. That you can have a brand crisis at the beginning of a games and essentially it has no impact throughout the three weeks of the games. Now,
the second key issue with this is that you have to realize that this was a completely unforced error on the part of the Olympics. So, like I said, at least through the three weeks of the games, there seems to be little impact on viewership and enthusiasm for the games, but I do think there's a longer term question of, does this degrade the Olympic brand's long term?
Right? Is this, and you see this in a lot of sports where it's mistake after mistake after mistake, the fans accept it, the fans move on, but then you see a slow erosion of viewership and brand equity. And for the Olympics, is this, this type of thing, right? You, you start to insert. politics and ideology into the games.
And I make that distinction intentionally because the key thing about this event, the drag queen last supper, was that it's a totally unforced error, right? What is the upside of bringing this type of ideology into the Olympics? You can make some labored case that it's about inclusion, but I think the reality is it's essentially the people marketing the games.
creating the opening ceremony. They have an artistic bent and it was something they wanted to do. It was something they wanted to put out, put out there. Is it actually something that has benefits in appealing to the fans? And so there's a, there's a deeper story here that ideological capture of a lot of the cultural industries advertising the arts is increasingly leading to marketing mistakes, um, um, uh, is increasingly leading to marketing mistakes where the content is at odds with what the fans actually want.
Number three on the list is the World Series, the 2024 World Series viewership. Now, the World Series viewership this year was largely celebrated. The World Series averaged 15. 8 million viewers. So, this is the high point post COVID plus a couple of years. So, just in terms of trends, baseball, look, the World Series viewership had been broadly declining.
The, uh, the 2023 series had some of the lowest Viewership on record. So this was very much viewed as a bright spot. Now my view of this number, 15. 8 million, is a little bit more complicated. When I look at this year's World Series, in some ways this series had everything going for it. It had the two biggest markets in America, New York and Los Angeles.
It had the two biggest stars, Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. It had the two premium premier brands in Major League Baseball, in the Yankees and in the Dodgers. And so, with all that going for it, the fact that it hit a number of less than 16 million, and just as a point of reference, you know, the average NFL, typical NFL, regular season game, draws more than that, 20 plus million, pretty regularly, so, World Series with, The Yankees and the Dodgers about on par if the Colts are playing the Jaguars, right?
So there's through that lens, and even if you go back in time, you go back in time and you look at World Series viewership in the late 70s, the early 80s, and World Series viewership is less than half of what it, of what it previously was, even though the population has grown enormously. So baseball viewership ticking up.
We see some celebration, we start to look at the fundamentals, the brands at play, the markets at play, and long term trends don't look that, look that great. Now, it's not all bad for baseball, because when you look at local demand, so things like local attendance, this is where baseball really shines. The Dodgers drew, I think, about three and a half million folks through their turnstile, the Yankees more than three million.
So, no other sport. Because we're playing so many games in baseball, no other sport is going to come close to that. But it does reveal that baseball has, look, baseball used to be the national pastime. I don't think we can call it that anymore. Football absolutely dominates American sports culture, but baseball has developed incredible strength in a lot of local markets.
When you look at markets like New York, the Yankees, Los Angeles, the Dodgers, Chicago, the Cubs, um, here in Atlanta, the Braves. I think fandom for those teams is completely on par with the local NFL. Cubs vs Bears fandom in Chicago strikes me to be about on par. Dodgers vs, uh, Dodgers probably have greater fandom than the Rams or the Chargers.
Yankees, what Probably have greater fandom than the New York Giants. So baseball has lost its place as the national pastime, but it has done a phenomenal job at the local level. Uh, I also suspect that baseball absolutely dominates when you're talking about like the number of kids that go through the turnstiles compared to other sports.
So I'm not sure that there's a marketing lesson here. Um, I mean there's some small lessons along the way. The power of brand, the power of markets, the power of stars gets you to a better viewership number. Of than anything we've seen over the last five to seven years. But it's a difference in strategy where baseball seems to have pursued this, this, this path towards moving towards extreme local strength, but perhaps moving away from being part of the national conversation.
or creating the spectacle on the scale of the Super Bowl. Now, I don't know that this was an intentional thing. Um, you know, maybe there's just not enough coordination of the league, the building of stars, the building of narratives from Major League Baseball's office, but it's an interesting comparison between the two major American sports, where the Super Bowl is essentially hugely national.
It's all about spectacle, but baseball has shifted to being an incredible powerhouse at the local level.
Baseball, the national pastime at number three on the list. At number two, it almost feels like going the opposite direction. I've got Caitlin Clark at number two on the list for 2024. Now, I've been following the Caitlin Clark story for years at this point. I'm, look, I'm on record as predicting at the start of last year's basketball season, last year's, that the women's national championship game would outdraw the men's game if Clark was in it.
And that prediction seemed audacious at the time, but that prediction actually came true. Now Clark has been, in a lot of respects, the most successful, Clark recently Won the Sports Person of the Year Time Magazine. In a lot of respects. Clark is the absolute cultural story of 2024. But I think the Clark story, you know, it's almost to really evaluate Clark.
We can't just look at it as a. From a sports angle we've gotta look at it from a cultural or from a media angle. So Clark's, Clark's impact has been enormous. Like I said, um, the woman's game last year drew 18. 7 million viewers. Versus 14.8 million for the men's game. That's unprecedented. That doesn't, for, for those of us that have, you know, a fair number of years under our belt, that, that doesn't make any sense given the sports culture that we grew up in. Now, after that amazing success, she was the number one pick for the , Indiana Fever.
And she essentially dominated the WNBA, at least in terms of fandom, just about every game that was televised. She, she was in most of them, um, when she played viewership, far exceeded when she didn't play on tv. Um, I think the highest rated, uh, playoff games were when she was still in it. I think her initial early round playoff games, outdrew, the WNBA championships, uh, now along the way.
What a mess, right? They didn't pick her for the Olympic team. You had some hard fouls delivered. You had, I think it's Cheryl Swoops talking endless kind of crap about Caitlin Clark. So, women's basketball did the opposite of embracing this gift that they had been given. Now, look, I can, I can sympathize with women's basketball, right?
I mean, so you think about the nature of this league. It's been going on 25, 27 years, and it's a league that, despite massive subsidies from the NBA, again, complicated story, right? Massive subsidies, but it's been playing in the shadows, right? The, the attendance at WNBA games peaked, I think, in the first or second year of the league, and has steadily ticked downward.
Now, Caitlin Clark shows up, and there's a sense, like, this Feeling of resentment that the people that built the league are not collecting the benefits, right? They're not the stars, they're not the ones on the cover of the magazine, but it's this new person, this girl from, from Iowa, and it's been an absolutely, from a marketing perspective, it's been absolutely brutal to watch.
The WNBA has essentially been given this, gifted this brand asset, and they've done everything in their power to Look, they've leveraged it. The league has leveraged it, putting her on TV a lot.
Cheryl Swoopes, Angel Reese, etc, etc. Has been so aggressive that it's really tainted the entire situation. You go on social media and there's not a lot of joy associated with the WNBA. There's a lot of. Again, the key word seems to be resentment, this fact that essentially the view is that the people that built the league are not the ones that are enjoying the league's success at the moment.
So, it's been a, like I said, the marketing lesson here is think through. What your fans want now. And again, their complexity in this one is there's almost two kinds of WNBA fans. There's this core group of fans that's very small. That's been with the league that follows the league year in, year out. Now it's a strange fandom, right?
I like, I've never seen anyone really that concerned with competition. It's more all the league is associated with a lot of social movement with fans. advocating for marginalized populations, which is a strange place for a position for a sports league. And then you've got the new fans that have come in.
They want to see Caitlin hit the logo threes and make the sharp passes.
Now, these fan bases seem to be in absolute conflict. So there is a, there's a complexity here in that the WNBA is almost in this Impossible position of trying to market both to their core fan bases, fan base that resents Kaitlyn Clark, while also welcoming in this, this new fandom. Now I've got this at number two on the list because like I said, an absolutely fascinating story because the other thing.
The other thing that goes on in all this, and part of the reason why I have some sympathy for the, for the women's basketball establishment is that Clark is, you know, a lot of people will say, I've got to push back saying, Clark, Clark is the absolute driver of the WNBA success. I think that's a really naïve, Clark is the recipient of a lot of media attention, and it's Clark's game plus the media attention, the media stardom, that is actually driving the interest in the WNBA.
So the resentment from the established folks is they want more of the media spread to their existing players, but the reality is that's just not how it's gonna work. Clark became a star because she had a unique game, and to be honest, she was also doing a fair amount of trash talking her junior year at Iowa.
And she was really kind of fun to watch. She was like an instant ESPN star. So the big question for the league going forward is what is really the future of all this? Is Caitlin Clark's stardom actually sustainable? Is it going to translate to significant interest for the WNBA? And I think those are answers that are, if you're an honest broker of all this stuff, and you're looking at fandom in terms of the, The core structure of fandom, I think the jury is absolutely out as to whether or not the Caitlin Clark phenomena is actually sustainable.
Number one on the list of cultural events and people for 2024. I almost feel bad doing this one. Because this was an event that has been so widely derided, so widely criticized, that there's so much negativity, almost accusations of fraud surrounding it, that it's tough to put it number one on the list.
But all that said, the Jake Paul, Mike Tyson fight is the most impactful fandom event of 2024. The event itself was hugely disappointing, but here's a key number in all this, right? And like I said, disappointing, some people think it was scripted, some people think it was fake, some people think it was exploited, that someone Tyson's age should not have been in the ring, but here's the key number.
Oh, and you can even go back. Technically, it was a nightmare to watch, right? The buffering felt like we were back in 1997. So the Netflix technical execution was terrible. But here's the thing. Key number. The event generated 38 million concurrent streams in the United States. Now, I don't know exactly how to translate that to viewership, but let's just multiply it by two.
Almost 80 million people watched that fight live on Netflix. The only television event that gets to a number exceeding that is the Super Bowl. So, in some ways, you know, you can almost say the spectacle of the Super Bowl, all the major advertisers, um, essentially a national holiday. This is the day we set records in terms of food consumptions.
People watch the game for the ads. It's got everything going for it. Not that different of a number, third more. Number two. is a boxing match between a YouTuber, um, and a boxer from the 80s and the 1990s, right? So this is pure spectacle in terms of what Netflix put out there.
Pure spectacle. Right? Maybe not even a legitimate match and maybe 80 million people watching it. The internationally, it was also huge. I think there's some number that it was number one in for Netflix in something like 78 or 80 countries. So this is This was the biggest event of the second half of the year, and it's not even clear that it's a real event.
So it's tough, right? Because we gotta look at this from a boxing fandom perspective. It's an absolute disaster for boxing. Right? It's not a real boxer facing a guy that's been retired for a couple of decades. And this is by far the biggest fight. So devastating for boxing. 'cause it, it says something that the boxing world is not real.
There's no legitimate ladder to work up to be the biggest, the biggest star, and make the most money because what is sellable is essentially taking two big brands, Mike Tyson and Jake Paul, putting them together. And this is what a dri uh, you know, the, the novelty and spectacle is what attracts the fans rather than the actual sport.
Another thing, another aspect of this absolutely critical is the amount of viewership that track to Netflix. So I think we have to look at the channels in which we are, our content, we receive our content, the stuff that we are fans of. We had network TV, then we had cable TV. Now we've moved very much to internet, internet based channels, things like streaming platforms.
Well, the streaming platforms have done great in terms of stealing share from cable, but they've got a problem, right? They've got a problem in that you can watch whenever you want. So there's nothing that absolutely draws. There's eyes there all at the same time, what's the key to that? Live sports, so you got Amazon Prime with their NFL contract, I think you got Disney doing some MLS stuff and you've got, you know, Netflix, I think Netflix has A couple of NFL games on Christmas Day, and also things like the Tyson Paul fight.
So it's very much a harbinger for where content is going to go to internet based platforms, because that's where the audiences are going to be. And so, you know, sports and the streaming platforms absolutely need each other. Now I'll sort of, a little bit of a wink in terms of foreshadowing where this is going to go.
Here's a question. What is a streaming platform? Right? What's the difference between, and maybe not right now, but in five years, what's the difference between Amazon Prime, TikTok, Facebook, Netflix? You know, we're starting to see this kind of convergence, and live sports is going to be a big determinant of who the winners are in that, because that's going to be the one thing that continually draws sort of mass audiences.
That's our top 10 for 2024. I, you know, just as a little bit of wrap up, I think there are some key lessons across the, across the top 10. Uh, just to restate the top 10, at number 10, we had Joe Rogan's, uh, cultural unification. At number 10, we had Joe Rogan and Donald Trump finding some common ground.
Number 9, we had Wolverine and Deadpool as the infrequent bright spot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At number 8, we had the Steelers and the Cowboys, different approaches to, uh, paying quarterbacks. Number 7, we had megastar Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Uh, bringing Taylor's fans to the NFL. How long will they stick around?
At number six, we had the Costco guys this new age kind of catchphrase marketing. And at this week's episode, number five we had the failure. The failure of celebrity endorsements to move the needle for Kamala Harris. We had the last summer drag queen performance art at the Olympics. Number three, the World Series viewership number.
Number two, Caitlin Clark. And number one, Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. So if I'm going to put this all together and put some, put some structure around what we've learned from fandom in 2024.
The big thing that comes to my mind is number one, the power and limits of fandom and the importance of respecting fandom. So you can see this in a lot of our top 10 list. Rogan has some real power to help shift the culture. Towards a guy like Donald Trump. Taylor Swift can bring a lot of our fans to the NFL and get a record setting.
NFL number, the, you know, relying on the established, the established stars of Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds is big. Part of the reason why Deadpool and Wolverine was the bright spot for the Marvel cinematic universe, right? So relying on the established, the established fandom. Now, on the other side of it, we do see some, some.
Elements of the, the limits, right? The Kamala endorsements don't move the needle because they don't really respect what's happening with fandom. The idea that if someone's a fan of Beyonce, well then she'll vote the way Beyonce tells her. That is a flawed and an almost insulting way of looking at what fandom is. Fandoms are communities, and so there's very little to say, Hey.
Just because I like the music, I should vote the same way as her, uh, Caitlin Clark. Another issue where we see some really, some, some deep fandom complexities where the established fan core fandom of the WNBA wants to support their players that have been in the league for years, and they almost resent both this new player, Caitlin Clark, and the new fans that come with her, uh, Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, pure marketing spectacle becomes the biggest boxing match in years, right?
So you're taking the, The Jake Paul fans, the nostalgic Mike Tyson fans, and you are getting a mega event. Okay, um, second theme that connects a lot of these top 10, the role of investment and the quantification in creating fandom. Now, I just had one, uh, you know, part of what makes Jake Paul powerful is that you can quantify his fandom on social media.
Uh, we have the Costco guys at number six. Again, social media is making it, think about how hard it used to be to quantify fandom. I mean, you can look at movie sales or record sales, but for a lot of it, where there's, there's teams of celebrities getting involved, it's hard to actually disentangle what's, you know, who's driving what.
But social media is getting involved. Giving us real insight into how powerful different influencer brands are, uh, the quarterback rooms, uh, of the Steelers and the Cowboys. Very much, you know, again, that's almost more of a football analytics topic, but given the football analytics is what creates wins, gets us very much to the relationship between how you invest and what you get.
So whether you invest in Mike Tyson and Jake Paul for your boxing match, or you invest in Justin Fields and Russell Wilson versus Dak Prescott, you know, in some ways, this is probably very much going to be the future of fandom is people being more More, more concerned with how they're actually putting their dollars to building products and content that fans like.
The last thing, social media and new media are critical. Now, this has been a trend that's been happening for years, but 2024, this top 10 list, you see a lot of this. Joe Rogan having a major impact on the political process. The Costco guys becoming the. Essentially the new source, the Costco guys on TikTok and YouTube becoming the new source of societal catchphrases, right?
We're not 1980s, the Wendy's grandma lady talking, where's the beef? Or the Budweiser ad saying, what's up? Now this kind of viral content, viral catchphrases is going to happen on social media. And then the last one, right? And again, this was number one on the list. The merging of media models. So again, maybe it wasn't even a real boxing match, but that Tyson Paul match, when you think about what this means, where sports coming to a streaming platform, where, and again, going back to Costco guys, where the catchphrases are now happening on social media, we are in this transition point where traditional media, the role of it, Creating this unifying social content is rapidly moving to the internet, to social media, to internet based platforms, Spotify in the case of Joe Rogan, uh, Netflix, TikTok, this is where the future seems to be.
Okay, that's our 2024. Next episode Looking forward to this one is going to look at, I'm going to give you my, you got, I'm going to give you guys my top five predictions for 2025. So going to go out there on a limb, take a look at where the data is pointing me and what I think is going to happen. What are the big trends?
So things to look for in the fandom space for 2025. Uh, as always, my online home is www. fandomanalytics. com. Thank you.