Phones Up As Jordan Appears

Joeri Billast 0:00

Tuesday I was sitting in the MEO Arena in Lisbon and around me hundreds of phones suddenly went into the air. And then Michael Jordan walked onto the stage My name is Joeri Billast, and I'm the host of Web3 CMO Stories. Today, I want to share a few of my key takeaways from the opening session at SBC Summit. Jordan was joined by Jason Robins, co-founder and CEO of DraftKings, and Carsten Koerl, founder and CEO of Sportradar. The official topic was leadership in sports business, but some of the most interesting lessons had very little to do with sports They were about, authenticity, focus, personal brands, how to make decisions when nobody knows what will happen next, and where AI actually creates innovation rather than simply cutting costs. So this episode is not going to be a summary of an hour-long panel. Instead, I want to share the ideas I took away from that conversation and what I think that they mean for marketers, founders, and business leaders.

Authenticity Before Visibility

Joeri Billast 1:28

And I want to start with Michael Jordan, because one thing he said was especially relevant to me Takeaway one Authenticity before visibility. Jordan was asked how he chooses the businesses and opportunities he gets involved with, and his answer was essentially this: there needs to be an authentic connection between the opportunity and who he is. the consumer needs to understand why that connection exists, because if there is a disconnect, people see it. I found that interesting because we are entering an era where visibility has never been easier to manufacture. AI can create the content, platforms can distribute it, influencers can amplify it. Paid media can put it in front of millions of people, but none of those things can make a relationship credible when the underlying connection doesn't make sense. Jordan used NASCAR as an example. His involvement with racing wasn't something that somebody invented in a marketing meeting. he grew up around racing in North Carolina and there was history there. There was personal relevance, and he saw an opportunity to help NASCAR reach audiences it hadn't traditionally reached, and that distinction matters. Because marketers sometimes start with the question: How can we make this partnership work? And maybe the better question comes earlier: Why should this partnership exist in the first place? If you need a complicated story to explain why two brands or people belong together, the audience will probably feel that too. And AI makes this even more important because AI is making visibility abundant. It is making polished content abundant. It is making campaigns cheaper and faster to produce, which means credibility becomes more scarce, not less. You can scale visibility, but credibility has still to be earned Takeaway two: know what you can control.

Control What You Can Influence

Joeri Billast 4:02

There was another moment where Jordan was asked how he would deal with playing basketball today. modern athletes have statistics following every movement. Fans are talking about them continuously. There is social media, fantasy sports, betting markets, personal brands, commercial deals. And Jordan's answer was remarkably simple. When he played, his objective was to win the game. He wasn't thinking about betting markets. He wasn't thinking about whether somebody expected him to score 30 or 40 points. He focused on his opponent, his own performance, and what he could influence on the basketball court. And I think there is a business lesson in that. We have more data than any previous generation of marketers, more dashboards, more attribution models, more social metrics, more AI-generated analysis, more predictions, more signals. That sounds like progress, but information can also create noise. The question becomes: which part of this can I actually influence? As a marketer, you don't control the algorithm. You don't control whether somebody becomes a customer today. You don't control what your competitors launch next week. But you can control the quality of your thinking, the clarity of your positioning, the customer experience, the conversations you are having, the work you are putting into the market. Jordan's world has become dramatically more complicated since he played, but his underlying principle is still surprisingly simple. Know the game you're actually playing and focus on the part you can influence Takeaway three When the personal brand starts competing with the team Jordan also made an observation about today's athletes that I think applies far beyond sports.

When Personal Brands Compete

Joeri Billast 6:24

He talked about how modern players don't only think about the team anymore. They are also building their own brands. They have logos, commercial partnerships, social channels, their own audiences, their own business opportunities. And Jordan's concern was that this can sometimes take attention away from the team objective. That's a very interesting tension. Because I strongly believe executives should build visibility, founders should build personal brands, experts should share what they know. In an AI-driven world, trusted individuals may actually become more important to companies. But there is a difference between a personal brand that strengthens the business and a personal brand that starts competing with the business. The same applies internally. If the CEO, CMO, or founder becomes a powerful voice, that can create enormous value, but only when the individual reputation and the company strategy reinforce each other. Jordan made me think of this because he himself is probably one of the strongest personal brands in sports history. Yet his description of basketball was still fundamentally team first. That tension is worth thinking about, especially as more executives become creators Takeaway four: Don't predict one future.

Strategy Through Options Not Predictions

Joeri Billast 8:10

Build options En this is actually what Jason Robbins Jason Robins made what I thought was one of the smartest strategic points of the entire conversation. They were discussing prediction markets and how DraftKings approaches emerging opportunities. And Robins basically said, "Nobody really knows what the final outcome will be. And instead of pretending they know, DraftKings tries to position itself so the company can succeed under several business outcomes." He used NFTs as an earlier example. at the height of the NFT market, nobody knew whether this was going to become an, permanent category or a temporary wave. DraftKings participated, they learned, they created exposure to the opportunity, but they didn't structure the future of the company around one prediction. And he described prediction markets in a similar way. There are regulatory questions, legal questions, market questions. Nobody controls all of those variables. So instead of optimizing the company for one forecast, they try to maximize what he called their option value. I think that idea is incredibly relevant right now. Think about AI. Which model will dominate? Will people primarily use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Agents? Some platform that doesn't even exist yet? Nobody knows. So perhaps the wrong strategy is let's predict the winner and build everything around it. A stronger strategy might be: How do we position ourselves so that several possible futures still work for us? Build capabilities that transfer. Build first party knowledge. Own our customer relationships. Create systems that can work with multiple models. Learn faster than competitors. In uncertain markets, adaptability can be a better competitive advantage than prediction. When things are easy, almost everybody can perform. The moments that differentiate companies are the difficult ones, when the environment is uncertain and you have to decide without having all the answers. That is strategy. Takeaway five.

AI Innovation Versus AI Efficiency

Joeri Billast 11:08

AI innovation is not the same as AI efficiency Carsten Koerl brought the conversation directly into AI. He described what Sportradar is doing with AI in product development. For example, using multiple AI agents working in parallel. One AI agent can focus on compliance, another on mathematical models, another on security and testing. Others can work on product creation. The result is that products that previously required hundreds of development hours can potentially be created dramatically faster and personalized m-much more deeply. But then Koerl made the distinction that caught my attention. Using AI for cost savings and efficiency may be necessary. But that is not where the real innovation happens. The innovation happens in the product. That is a big distinction Because a lot of corporate AI strategy today still sounds like this: How can we write emails faster? How can we generate content faster? How can we automate customer support? How can we reduce headcount? those things can create efficiencies, but your competitors can probably implement many of the same efficiencies. And the more interesting question is: What can we now create that wasn't economically or technically possible before? Can we create a completely different customer experience? Can we personalize a product at an individual level? Can we build services that update in real time? Can several AI agents work together to solve problems that previously required entire teams? That's where AI starts moving from productivity, from, That's where AI starts moving from productivity tool to innovation engine. and I think that's a much more interesting conversation for CMOs and business leader. So don't only ask what can AI make cheaper, but ask what can AI make possible? Takeaway

Data Helps But Uncertainty Remains

Joeri Billast 13:43

six: data doesn't remove uncertainty. There was another interesting tension throughout the panel. Sportradar works with extraordinary amounts of data. Curl talked about systems capturing player movements many times per second and using AI models to predict what would happen next. Betting markets are becoming increasingly real time. Fan experiences are becoming increasingly personalized. In theory, we know more and more, but sports remains unpredictable, and that is precisely why people watch it. At one point, the conversation came back to athletes reacting in real time. You can have all analytics in the world. You can calculate probabilities. You can analyze historical performance. But then somebody has to take the shot. Somebody has to react to the defense. Somebody has to make a decision in the moment. And I think that's another AI parallel here. Data can make us better informed. AI can help us see patterns. Models help us create understand of probabilities. But none of that eliminates judgment, and none of it eliminates uncertainty. The best leaders won't necessarily be the people with the most innovation. They may be the people who can combine information with judgment and still act when certainty isn't available Coming to the end of this podcast episode, what I found fascinating about this conversation is that the sports industry is becoming incredibly sophisticated.

Human Fundamentals Beat New Tools

Joeri Billast 15:45

AI, real-time data, prediction markets, personalization, media, betting, personal brands, all of the systems are converging, and yet Michael Jordan kept bringing the conversation back to remarkably human ideas. Be authentic. Know what you can control. Stay focused. Compete. Don't lose sight of the team. Maybe that's the bigger lesson. Technology keeps changing the environment, but it does not necessarily change the fundamentals of performance. AI can increase our capabilities. Data can improve our decisions. Platforms can scale our visibility, but none of them replace authenticity, judgment, or focus. And perhaps that's precisely why those things become more valuable as technology gets better. I recorded this episode after attending the opening day of SBC Summit here in Lisbon as media. I'll continue following some of the conversations around AI technology and the changing boards and the changing sports business ecosystem. But from day one, this was the idea, yeah, kept coming back to. The tools keep getting more sophisticated, but the fundamentals remain surprisingly human My name is Joeri Billast. You've been listening to Web3 CMO Stories.

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Joeri Billast 17:17

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