It's not a bad test of any creative output I once talked to the producer of The Benny Hill Show about the difference between a good TV programme and a bad one. And his answer is a pretty good barometer of any creative output, from films and Netflix box sets through to 30-second ad spots or branded social content. The simple rule is this: Do you think the producer watches? Put another way, do the people who made the show like the show? Or, are they making it for other people to watch? Even when viewed through the lens of 1970s television, the content of The Benny Hill Show was indefensible, all dodgy innuendo, cultural stereotypes and lazy sexism. It was massively popular, both in the UK and around the world, even given the obvious caveat that there was no internet, only three TV channels and you had to get up off the sofa and walk across the room to change channels. But the producer of The Benny Hill Show loved The Benny Hill Show. He laughed when Benny slapped the little old bald bloke on the head for the 1,000th time and fell about when Bob Todd did his deadpan bloodhound schtick straight to camera. This has got little to do with quality or taste, but is about authenticity, or at least a version of it.

Boost your personal brand by appearing to think really hard about things Like many of you, I sometimes have thoughts. This can be thrilling but in the viciously competitive sports knowledge economy, thoughts will only get you so far: being known as an industry opinion-former is where the money is. The time-rich, ideas-poor demographic Today’s democratised internet allows all of us to reach an audience. This will be largely made up of lazy account managers and prisoners: people with time on their hands and who are weak-minded enough to have their views shaped by what they read on LinkedIn. A White Paper Science has proved that more people write Thought Leadership White Papers than have read them. Nonetheless, the very existence of a white paper does much of the heavy lifting when seeking to create gravitas: pages and pages full of words, like a New Yorker feature. An Ideas Manifesto For the more fashionable, a manifesto takes the Thought Leadership White Paper and adds some communist chic, only without the grinding poverty and loss of hope. Think Che Guevara, when he had a hipster beard and was properly hot. See also: any agency with ‘Republic’ in its title. Tone of voice Innocent Smoothies meets Martin Luther King. ‘Like a TED talk’  There comes a time when typing is not enough and you’ll feel the impulse to take your thoughts on the road. Conferences are an essential component of the plan and, luckily, there’s a loophole to be exploited by the aspiring opinion-former.The properly smart people tend to want a fee to appear. They see this as a reward for reading books and arriving at their ideas after a period of serious study. But payment undermines the conference business model, which relies on the ambition of lightweight chancers. By doing it for free, the sports business everyman can get on stage and go ‘full Gladwell’. Mention Shoreditch in conversation Shoreditch is UK sport business shorthand for ‘the future’, a mythical place inhabited by ‘tech-savvy Millennials’. For a US audience, try Brooklyn or Portland. Storytelling Like all the best episodes of Midsomer Murders, there’s a simple three-part structure to any sport business opinion blog post. The first paragraph establishes that ‘sport is big business’. This can be applied to all verticals. This is followed by what proper writers call ‘the difficult middle bit’, in which your argument is built by quoting other people saying things, and graphs.Then we come to the end. The final can be summarised by the phrase: ‘But the future is uncertain’. This is the perfect get out of jail free card for when your 6,000-word missive on what Liberty can do to grow Formula One turns out to be patronising and naive hogwash. Zig then zag In the market for ideas, it’s far more important to be different than correct. Nobody got famous just by being right: the great thought leaders type things that make the rest of us shudder with surprise and envy. It’s not enough to say that the Premier League bubble is about to burst – far better to suggest the next round of media rights will be a contest between Twitter and CBeebies. Be a sexy outlaw Steve Jobs used to wear a T-shirt with ‘Be an Outlaw’ on the front. Outlaws are sexy renegades who ride in to Dodge and terrorise the townspeople.When launching a new sports agency, give interviews with the trade press saying that you’re about to rip up the sports marketing rulebook. Don’t smile in the photo. Own a word The godfather of positive thinking, Tony Robbins, once tried to trade mark the word ‘ICAN’. Be like Tony and create your own term that becomes your calling card.There are still many words that remain unclaimed: Engagementism. OTTershite. DataSuckage. SPORTULTURAL. Narratelling.The only limit is your imagination. Leave them wanting more Do you have an exit plan? Great stories after all, have great endings. David Foster Wallace only really started selling books once he’d topped himself. Invest in your own career by doing that, too.

Is AI the answer to sponsorship's big questions? I heard the word ‘machine’ used as a verb the other day. The scene was yet another panel discussion about the value of sport at yet another marketing conference. This is not an exact reproduction of the conversation, but it captures the gist: “They can’t sell the Six Nations title. What’s it worth, do you think?” “Dunno, but I’m sure we could machine it.” I love ‘machine it’. It’s such a revealing phrase, one that says much more about the speaker than it does the subject matter. Think of all that intellectual energy devoted to doggedly pursuing a single measurement framework for sports sponsorship, only for the robots to get there first, with a contraption that sounds like the bastard love child of Lesa Ukman and IBM Watson. Since sport started pulling in the serious brand cash, sponsors and rights holders have danced around the age-old question of value. Finding the definitive answer has been the holy grail since Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer shook hands. As in every business sphere, some of this work has been automated: sponsors and rights holders are using machines of varying quality and complexity, from simple Excel dashboards to data-devouring supercomputers. But the real power of ‘machine it’ lies in the promise of something more. It is about our fundamental quest for simple answers to complex questions. ‘Machine it’ allows us to glide across questions of cause and effect by devolving the donkey work of marketing attribution to an elegant equation, providing a beguilingly simple number that even a chief exec can understand. Think of all that intellectual energy devoted to doggedly pursuing a single measurement framework for sports sponsorship, only for the robots to get there first, with a contraption that sounds like the bastard love child of Lesa Ukman and IBM Watson.