This transcript has been lightly edited by AI
Sean: So how do you manage a team in multiple locations, multiple countries with the motto of, “Hey, we've got to get it out fast and be fit to be first.” And we still want to hit our brand marks, those kinds of things that we've set up. How do you manage that team?
David: We have a couple of mottos, really. The first one is that we want to be on the shoulder or we want the fan to feel like they're on the shoulder of the team. The other thing is really about using our unfair advantage. That means it's really our access to the team that sets us apart from media organisations. It's about capturing those moments where if anyone comes into any of our social channels or onto our website, they feel like they're almost getting a story of what's going on each day of being with the All Blacks. Whether it's on game day or any day during the week. We certainly get great feedback from our fans if we're doing a good job at that.
Sean: So from a team collaboration point of view, how do you coordinate it?
David: It's a lot easier now than what it was. What we tend to do now is use WhatsApp. Instead of our people on the ground having to capture and edit it, we have an editing team back in the office. Those people who are capturing it can just WhatsApp that content straight back to the office and they're the ones there that can just put it straight up onto our social media channels. That makes things a lot quicker and a lot more coordinated. We also use Edit Mate, which allows us to get a whole bunch of content or user generated content to come in, and for us to edit it here. The bonus of that is unlike WhatsApp, with Editmate, you don't lose any of the quality, so you still get a HD quality video that you can pretty much use on any platform that you want.
Sean: So it's about coordination to effectively set those roles of you're someone that's capturing the content. We just want you to capture it.
David: Yes. In between, say 8am and 10pm New Zealand time, they would do that. Outside of those hours, they would know that they need to do that themselves.
Sean: Part of that piece is your focus of having access to the team. One of the things that has grown since the advent of social media is the rise of players as brands themselves, especially in the digital space. We've seen the rise of player driven media and players being media channels in their own right. How do you manage that as a problem and opportunity on how you manage and make the players part of the digital story?
David: It's really something that's coming to the fore now. It hasn't been around for very long. The approach that we are going to take is about working a lot closer with our athletes. While they have got big followings, none of them match what we've got. I think where we can have a relationship where we can work together and it benefits us and the athlete, that's a really good healthy relationship to have. I'm a big fan of helping athletes set themselves up for life after being in all black. So what we tend to try and do is work on the ideas around, right, outside of being a rugby player, what are your passions? We try and work on those and let's tell a story about it. One of the players might be a hunter or a fisherman in his spare time. Let's do some episodes or episodic content around those. After they're in all black, they're setting themselves up to be picked up by a fishing show on TV or something like that. We've done it with a couple of our guys who have come, gone on to be presenters on Sky TV, purely because of what they've done on allblacks.com.
