SECRETS OF SUCCESS
We speak to Showtime boss Stephen Espinoza about boxing broadcasting
STEPHEN ESPINOZA’S boxing roots run deep. He was introduced to the sport by his grandfather Raul while growing up in El Paso, Texas. The younger Espinoza became hooked by age eight, shedding tears when Muhammad Ali lost to Leon Spinks in 1978 and later describing it as “one of the greatest tragedies of a young kid’s life.”
Boxing wasn’t the only thing Raul passed down. He had migrated from Mexico to the US in his teens, battling through several deportations before becoming an Army welder. Raul instilled a strong work ethic in the first Us-born Espinoza’s, a generation that produced two lawyers, a registered nurse, an Army Lieutenant Colonel and a medical professional.
Second-generation Stephen earned a BA in Communications from Stanford University and then a law degree from UCLA School of Law. While practising law, he negotiated on behalf of Tom Cruise, Tyler Perry, Eminem and Snoop Dogg.
But he never strayed from his first love, representing Mike Tyson and serving as lead counsel for Golden Boy Promotions. But Espinoza’s work at Showtime is his crowning achievement. The network’s boxing ratings rose by nearly 15 per cent in his first year. Then, in a move analogous to Michael Jordan leaving the Bulls for the Knicks, in 2013, the network outbid HBO for Floyd Mayweather’s services.
The Showtime-mayweather relationship produced the three most lucrative fights in boxing history, and their roster of boxers also grew exponentially. Outside of Mayweather, nearly all their big fights were kept off pay-per-view - in contrast to rival network HBO.
Espinoza also presented statistics disproving the well-trod “boxing is on the decline” myth. Actually, boxing viewership is on the rise, outpacing other combat sports by connecting with a younger, more diverse audience (more on this later). Showtime, headed by Espinoza, is at the fore of it all.
When you first joined Showtime, you said you wanted to identify talent-rich weight divisions where viewers could connect with the fighters. Is that still part of your strategy today?
I think we’ve executed that strategy effectively. And I point primarily to four divisions: 126, 147, 154 and heavyweight. In those divisions, we could see significant progress toward unification, if not complete unification, in this calendar year. Looking at the heavyweights, you’ve got Deontay Wilder with one belt and Anthony Joshua with the other three. That’s relatively easy to unify. We’ve got a potential Jarrett Hurdjermell Charlo unification at 154. And we’ve got everyone at 147 primed to do the same once Keith Thurman is back in action. So, we targeted those four divisions and it’s borne a lot of fruit for us.
Joshua-wilder is the fight everyone wants to see. There have been rumours that Joshua may move to HBO. What can you disclose publicly about that situation?
We’ve made our interest known. We’ve got a track record with them going back six fights. We were supporting “AJ” here in the US market before anyone else was interested in doing so, so we’re proud of the traction we’ve helped him get in the US, and we’re proud of the traction that a fight with Wilder has gotten because Wilder is also a boxer that we’ve heavily invested in. I think they see the value that Showtime brings to the equation, with our expertise and track record in PPV. ➤
PUTTING FIGHTS ON PPV DOES NOT DELIVER VALUE TO OUR SUBSCRIBERS’
And, as important, they recognise everything we’ve invested to get the Joshua-wilder fight to the point that it is. I think that carries a lot of weight and I’m confident that we’re going to be in business with both guys for a long time.
The amount of boxing on Showtime has significantly increased over the years. What compelled senior management to increase the boxing budget?
Showtime, like all other media companies, is a business. We may be boxing fans, but things don’t get done unless they make sense from a business or financial standpoint. What we’ve demonstrated over the past few years is that there is a very healthy and thriving audience that wants high-level, highquality boxing.
We see it in our TV ratings, we see it in our customer sign-ups, we see it in social media traffic. We see it when we quantify the marketing and PR value of being associated with mega events like Mayweather-mcgregor and Mayweatherpacquiao. So, regardless of the measure, boxing draws eyeballs, it drives business. It gets attention from the network and, most importantly, it brings in new subscribers.
Unless that isn’t true, then we don’t have the freedom to do everything that we’re doing. We sort of laugh when we hear things about the demos of the boxing audience or the trajectory that the audience is on. It’s a young, diverse, multigenerational and multi-ethnic audience that’s driving significant business for us.
During the Boxing Upfront presentation, you demonstrated how boxing’s popularity remains strong in the U.S. Where does the perception that the sport is dying come from?
One, it’s a tradition with boxing. You can go back to the early 1900’s and see similar headlines about boxing being on its last leg. Back in the 1950’s and 60’s, the three biggest sports in the US were baseball, horse racing and boxing. Times change. Horse racing and baseball don’t have the massive audiences they had back then either.
The second aspect of it is, when the UFC first launched, their initial marketing campaign was built on, “Boxing is dying, UFC is the next biggest thing.” For all its positives, boxing isn’t very organised, and doesn’t really have anyone speaking on its behalf from a PR and marketing standpoint. So, the sport didn’t really respond effectively, and that marketing slogan began to be accepted as reality.
Now, we’ve seen UFC facing challenges with ratings and TV buys, so it’s all cyclical. Overall, there is a very, very healthy audience for boxing. But old habits die hard. Some of it is laziness. It’s an easy narrative to perpetuate. It takes a bit of work to do the research and find out that, wait a minute, this old conventional wisdom isn’t active anymore.
The median age of the American boxing viewer, 49, is relatively young compared to other sports [similar to the NBA and significantly lower than UFC, where the median age has risen by 15 years]. This has held true over the years. How did that happen?
I think there are a couple critical things that keep the sport young. One, boxing is a top-three sport in the African-american and Hispanic household. And those are demographics which are relatively young. That keeps the average age low.
Second, there’s a big element of community, heritage and tradition within boxing fandom. A lot of boxing fans get
JOSHUA, WILDER, THURMAN, SPENCE, GARCIA AND THE CHARLOS COULD BE SUPERSTARS’
their fandom from their parents and grandparents. Boxing is something handed down within communities. We saw that with Oscar De La Hoya. The women who followed him during the Olympics, became mothers and had children who became fans during the latter part of his career.
Fans love to compare ratings between Showtime, HBO and ESPN boxing. Is there some sort of internal metric used to determine whether a fight card was a success?
It’s a variety of things. One, is the amount of general buzz that an event gets. A big event that is associated with Showtime contributes to the demand for, and the awareness of, the brand. The PR impact, the amount of discussions, social media, traditional media all are factors. We’re also much better equipped to track new subscribers, at least on digital platforms. It used to be that you’d have to call the cable company, make an appointment and they’d turn it on. You never really knew exactly why someone signed up through a traditional provider.
We now know what kind of new subscribers we’re drawing daily on our digital platforms, down to the specific number. And we can see how many new subscribers we get for a big fight card, like a Wilder-ortiz. The ability to draw new subscribers for a fight is a valuable metric for us in assessing how fights perform.
You often say that Showtime is the market leader for boxing. How do you measure that?
When we try to look at ourselves critically and objectively, we ask ourselves, are we on the cutting edge in every aspect of the sport? Finding the best talent, having the best production, making the highest quality matchups and the most meaningful, exciting fights and marketing and distributing them to the biggest amount of people? Looking at the quality of our fights, using objective standards, we have more title fights, more competitively-matched fights, a greater number of platforms used and so forth.
The Wilder-ortiz fight wasn’t just the highest-rated Showtime fight in a while, it was the highestrated fight for either premier network in the last two years. And that’s true even though we have a significantly smaller subscriber base than our competitors. When we’re able to win against outlets with larger audiences, that says a lot about the loyalty the boxing audience has for the Showtime platform.
You’ve shied away from Pay Per View in recent years. Was that by design or does boxing simply not have as many stars as it had yesteryear?
It was a conscious decision and by design. We certainly could’ve put Wilder-ortiz on as a PPV and it probably would’ve outperformed a lot of the recent PPV’S over the last few years. And sometimes that’ll be necessary. Sometimes, because of budget restrictions, timing, or a variety of other reasons, you’re forced to go to PPV. But, for the most part, our business is delivering high quality programming to Showtime subscribers.
Putting fights on PPV doesn’t deliver any value to our subscribers. We’re keeping our eye on the ball and avoiding the easy dollar. It would be easy to throw a bunch of fights on PPV and let them eat what they kill. But being committed to the sport means we’re trying to keep as many fights off PPV as possible. It’s better for our sport, and better for our network.
Who do you believe has the best chance to carry the torch that Mayweather left behind?
It requires a little bit of luck. So quite honestly, I can’t tell you which guy. I don’t think anyone thought Floyd would become as big as he did. He was certainly popular, but no one thought he’d become the world’s highest paid athlete, arguably ever. But I can tell you that from a group of guys like Wilder, Joshua, Thurman, Errol Spence Jnr, Mikey Garcia, the Charlos and younger guys like Gervonta Davis, David Benavidez and so forth, at least a couple of them will break out as true superstars. But it requires a little bit of luck, inside and outside of the ring. A couple may emerge from the pack. We’re going to do the work to try to make them all superstars.