Blog: Colin Kaepernick

Disney tidies its streaming stats:  Disney is tidying up its streaming subscriber numbers in preparation for reporting the performance so far of Disney+.  In the shake-up, ESPN falls from 3.4 million to three million while Hulu goes from a 28.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, technology is completely altering the relationship between ‘creators’ and distributors – and it is doing so in a way which is empowering the independent agency of creators, while leaving those companies that focus upon the distribution of their work increasingly scrambling to justify the ROI between content provision and monetisation.

On 8 October, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted support for the Hong Kong protests. The NBA had an exclusive partnership with Tencent to stream this season to an estimated 500 million fans in China, a market for which the business is estimated to be worth $4 billion to the NBA.

Over the last few years, brands have been taking increasingly political stances. Whether Heineken’s ‘Open Your World’ 2017 ad, or Gillette’s ‘We Believe: The Best Men Can Be’ spot at the start of 2019, there has been a growing trend for brands boldly (and some say, haphazardly), entering the ‘political’ sphere.

Notoriously overwhelming, this week’s AWNY ramped activities up even further, expanding the number of stages from 8 to 12. A disorientating amount of content to navigate and a somewhat amusing metaphor for today’s digital consumer.

Nike’s choice to use Colin Kaepernick as one of the faces of its Just Do It slogan anniversary campaign is the latest – but as yet unmatched in scale – step in overt brand politics. The issue which Nike has just dived into, has to be one of the most profoundly personal and local – and at the same time, national-conscience defining – issues of US politics on the table today.