At its upfront presentation Wednesday, The Walt Disney Co. said the popular online sports program The Pat McAfee Show is coming to ESPN.
The show will air live weekdays on ESPN, the ESPN App, ESPN Plus and on YouTube through ESPN’s YouTube channel starting in the fall. He will also continue in his role as an analyst on ESPN's College GameDay.
McAfee, a former NFL punter, is walking away from a $120 million deal with FanDuel to join ESPN, according to The New York Post.
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“Pat is a proven talent. He and his team have built The Pat McAfee Show into one of the most engaging programs in sports and all of media,” ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said. “It’s a destination for athlete interviews and breaking news, and the centerpiece of a growing community of sports fans. We’re honored to bring Pat and the show to ESPN through a multifaceted, multiplatform approach.”
McAfee said staying on YouTube was important and that he agreed to make the deal after meeting with Disney execs including Disney CEO Bob Iger, Pitaro and Burke Magnus, ESPN’s head of content.
“A lot of people are wondering why would you ever want to do that when you run a couple of hundred-million-dollar valued company with full independence and the ability to kind of do whatever I want, whenever I want with my crew,” McAfee said at the Disney upfront.
The answer was because Pitaro was “one of the only people that I talked to that truly understood what the future of sports media is going to look like,” McAfee said.
McAfee said that digital media is able to reach millions of people, which ESPN in linear is still, at this point, attracting more people than ever.
“The future obviously says that linear television’s going to be dead,” McAfee said. “ESPN the channel won’t be able to exist. But when is that?”
It could take decades before ESPN disappears and McAfee said he didn’t want to miss the boat while ESPN is still a powerhouse.
He said the Disney and ESPN execs embraced the vision of embracing both the present and future of ESPN and that means simulcasting on YouTube.
“My show has been a YouTube show. We've been able to influence, we've been able to build our community, we've been able to generate a group of humans that will ride with us wherever we go,” McAfee said. “Jimmy, Burke, Bob understood that 98% of all male GenZers use YouTube on a daily basis, so being live there and on ESPN, we should be able to reach the entire world hopefully, if I don't f–k it up . Which I might have just did by saying the F-word in this room.”
McAfee was one of the numerous personalities appearing at Disney’s upfront, which didn’t have actors in attendance because of the strike by the Writers Guild of America, which picketed the event.
Providing a level of showbiz buzz were sports personalities including Serena Williams, Damar Hamlin, Joe Buck, Troy Aikman and Peyton Manning, newsmen including David Muir and George Stephanopoulos, reality show hosts Jesse Palmer and Ryan Searest and two of the Kardashians, Kim and Khloe.
Ad Sales president Rita Ferro wanted Disney’s advertising technology to also be a star of the show.
Ferro acknowledged that media companies and their ad clients were facing “difficult challenges,” adding that “as the past years have taught us, you must be prepared to meet every moment, no matter how tough. And Disney is prepared to meet every moment.”
She said that Disney’s success is based on both its content and “a sophisticated tech and data stack that enables best-in-class personalized experiences and advertising that compliments it.”
Disney has built and owns its new tech stack, as well as an audience graphic that’s built for streaming with 250 million identifiers representing 112 million households.
“This enables targeting with precision,” Ferro said.
Disney is working to automate the ad-buying process. “Over one-third of our advertising transactions today happen programmatically and close to half of these are using real-time ad decisioning,” she said.
That gives buyers more control. “That’s why we know every single upfront deal this year will have programmatic at its core,” Ferro said.
Disney Plus, which launched its ad-supported tier in December, rolled out additional ad-targeting capabilities last week.
“It will have more coming your way,” Ferro said. “Our goal is ultimately to have Disney Plus have the same leading capabilities as Hulu.”
