Sometimes it’s the simplest of ideas that work the best. One recent example, launched formally this spring, is Sox Lunch.
Founder Kevin Phelan felt that there was no place for fans to get simple unfettered news in an email form, easily digestible, for his hometown Red Sox, and launched the platform to do so.
A former Boston Herald staffer who moved on to the high-tech world in sales and marketing during the dot-com boom, and then went back to school to learn to code, Phelan has worked as a digital strategist for leading global brands such as Guinness, Red Bull and EA Sports. In 2011-12, he was part of the founding team at BostInno, leading monetization and business development efforts.
In spring of 2013, Phelan created Sox Lunch as a communiqué to his friends and family but grew the platform steadily as social media grew in stature. In the 2015 baseball season, with industry trends in news delivery backing his concept, Phelan began to scale the mobile-friendly news platform for Red Sox fans to the point of creating a viable business model.
We caught up with him as spring training blooms to talk about his new venture, one which he sees expanding to a city near you soon.
What exactly is Sox Lunch? A platform? An app?
Sox Lunch is an outbound news platform for Boston fans to follow the Red Sox to the 2016 World Series championship. It’s been purpose-built to be consumed on a mobile device, digestible in less than 60 seconds, and supply fans with everything they need to know each day of the season. What began as an email to friends and family back in July 2013 has expanded to a personal mission to create a single-purpose first-class fan experience. The concept was to build something simple and “snackable” by dropping this interesting, hand-curated Sox summary right on everyone’s digital doorstep.
There are so many places people can go for information, why this?
That’s the issue – too much noise and most of it comes with a heavy workload on the fan to “go” and battle a tsunami of pop-ups and ads just to find simple game-related information. We chose email because it’s “mission control” for most people and one of the few places in this digital world where you are human. Think about why every social media site from MySpace to Snapchat requires you to prove you are not a “bot” through an email verification process. It’s how you “prove you’re human” and that’s why we’re thrilled to introduce such an intimate experience and one-to-one relationship with our community of Red Sox fans.
Who exactly is the audience?
Sox Lunch is for Red Sox fans. We’re hyperlocal with over 90% of our subscribers in the Boston area and the remaining 10% spread around the globe. The audience ranges from MBTA worker/riders to office workers who want to stay plugged into the water cooler conversations about the hometown team. We’re like daily Cliffs Notes for the casual fan.
Should we assume the deliverable platform is mobile? Where else would people engage, and how?
Yes, we’re design and delivered for mobile. We’re a multi-platform operation with a highly engaged Twitter account where we “live tweet” every game. Sox Lunch is sent at noon each day because our research data showed there is a content consumption spike happening around the lunch hour. From there, we packaged a mobile-friendly design that allows fans to quickly get their Sox news and eat lunch too.
Where do you pull your customer data from?
Our consumer data, research and analytics were the first step in the strategic foundation of Sox Lunch. We’ve studied online data trends with everything from when the content is sent (peak consumption times) to predictive analytics around the topics that Red Sox fans care about. For example, NESN ended their relationship with broadcast announcer and fan favorite Don Orsillo last season. Sox Lunch was tracking the sentiment of the fan base and developed a custom “Save Don” campaign with signs that gained national attention on ESPN, SportsIllustrated.com, the Boston Herald, and the Boston Globe. We used data to help us connect with the fans.
How are you going to monetize this?
To date, we’ve been laser-focused on building a great product and a hyper-engaged community. The next step is to continue to scale and find business partners looking to connect with Red Sox fans. Monetization will happen through partnerships and native advertising in the daily email. We’re also having discussions with some amazing companies in the baseball industry, and we believe we can help them as much as they might help us, so stay tuned on that.
What is the traffic goal for season one?
Goals are important for a business like ours, and we have our sights firmly set on one million subscribers by the time the team wins the 2016 World Series. So, Sox fans – sign up at http://www.soxlunch.com
Is it just text? Do you have any plans for video?
The herd is chasing video, and we feel strongly that smartphones and data plans are not video ready. By this we mean that video is taxing on the phone, your wallet and the user experience, so we’re running in the opposite direction. That said, we can provide links for major milestones to appropriate video sources. Our plans call for giving it all away in the email and making it super-easy for fans to consume.
MLB is so tight on any kind of use of its data, how do you get around MLB licensing issues?
Sox Lunch is not baseball data or MLB video driven. People will look elsewhere, and they’ll need time and ten clicks for all the advanced analytics and stats. We’re utilizing the opportunities from an ever-evolving media world, and we’ve created a great mechanism to reach fans and provide the very basic information they want to receive on mobile devices. That said, our goal is to do this the right way and to make a great, local news delivery model that will be attractive to each club as it tries to reach new fans and keep existing fans engaged. Right from the start, we’re open to cooperation with everyone, and we anticipate working with local club sponsors, licensees, and even their media partners or the national media partners, whether it’s TBS promoting its national game of the week or MLB At Bat selling its great league-wide online subscription to the new fans we’ll be reaching.
Are there plans to launch this elsewhere, and if so, when?
We’re tracking several clubs for the ideal market fit and should launch in a few additional markets this season.
