Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of Purpose to ignite business and social impact. In today's Purpose 360, I'm having a discussion with a dear friend about an issue that I just love and that is sport and it's the power of sport to come together with Purpose, whether it is going to be a league, a venue, amateur athletes, professional athletes, competitions. I just love watching the Olympics, and this is first airing during the Olympic period.
Welcome to Purpose 360, and today I am delighted to have a friend and a colleague, Neill Duffy join me. He's Chief Executive and Co-founder of 17 Sport. And he, for his entire career, he's saying like, I love sport, but I want sport to have a greater impact. So we're going to talk about so many great points. He's going to talk about sports having its potential to be an ally for Purpose, and he talks so much about you need to do it before you talk about it, he's going to talk about the power of fans and athletes to push forward social issues. So this is such an exciting conversation. It's spot on about what's happening in the world. So welcome to the show, Neill.
Neill Duffy:
Thank you Carol, and it's an honor to be with you.
Carol Cone:
Oh, well it's always lovely to, whenever I have big questions about sport and athletes and tying in social issues, environmental issues, I'm always going to Neill and he's always so generous with his time. So why don't we just start with the background. So tell us a little bit about who Neill Duffy is and why you created 17 Sport at the backend of 2019.
Neill Duffy:
Really a story of two chapters, Carol. The first was in the very traditional sports marketing space. I started a business in South Africa that grew and was very successful, really on the back of a notion that we could help brands manage their investment in sport in a more professional way. Ended up selling that the business to what became Octagon. And I became president of Octagon Europe, Middle East, Africa based out of Brussels. So I moved from South Africa to Europe to do that, and that's where the first chapter ends and the next chapter started when I realized that that wasn't the right space for me to be in, to pursue my passion around what we now call Purpose. Back then, which is around 2005, that word wasn't used so much, but I've long been a believer in the power of Purpose as we call it today, to bring people together and to solve business problems.
And so not being able to do that at Octagon, I decided to go on my own again. And for the second chapter, I was on a mission to prove sports power or sports potential to be a powerful ally for Purpose. And so I needed a case study to prove that in the international markets I got to work on the America's Cup and on Super Bowl. And in both cases showed that it is possible to do good while you do well through sport. Not only do well sport's, really good at making money, but doesn't always play a role in doing good. And so those two case studies, those two proof points gave me, I guess the confidence to start my next agency, which was 17 Sport, which I started at the back end of 2019 just before COVID.
Carol Cone:
And why did you pick the name 17 Sport?
Neill Duffy:
Everyone asked that question. My father and I, Fabi and [inaudible 00:05:20] battled for a long time to come up with a name and eventually one day I said, "Well, why don't we just call it 17 Sport?" And Fabi said, "Why?" I said, "Well, there's 17 SDGs." And SDG 17 is around collaboration and partnerships, and that's really at the core of our business model at 17 Sport. We believe that collaboration is essential for success in today's world, especially in the world of Purpose. And so seeing as we were going to use 17 Sport as a vehicle to address social impact through sport, seemed like a perfect name.
Carol Cone:
It was a perfect name. I'd love your definition of Purpose, a lot of different ways to describe it.
Neill Duffy:
Yeah, I don't have a short definition for Purpose, Carol, but my longer version would be the Purpose is a strategic business driver that should be used by organizations to build greater relevance with their customers in a world where what you stand for counts for as much as what you make or do. That for me is what Purpose is all about. It's not CSR, it's not philanthropy, it's an organizing principle more than anything.
Carol Cone:
Excellent. Okay, so let's talk about today because we're in the middle of the Olympics as when this program begins to air. I love the Olympics. I can say truly that I have, unfortunately she's passed away, but I have a dear friend who won gold and silver in the three day, which is horse competitions in '84. And I was there when I saw Karen Stives win, which was very, very exciting to have that personal relationship with an Olympian. And I know people that are vying for the equestrian team that are jumping, actually a dear friend of mine knows the gold medal winner from Tokyo, a great young man. So we're all watching, we're glued to our television set. Some people are fortunate enough to have gone to France. So in your opinion, what's going on with the Olympics? What are the key issues this year in the Olympics? And also are you involved in any way?
Neill Duffy:
Well, that's a big question, what are the key issues? I'm living in Paris right now, so I'm actually experiencing the buildup to the games, which has also been really interesting. I've been to several Olympics, but it's the first time I've actually lived in an Olympic city leading up to the games. And it's quite interesting to see how disruptive it is. You often ignore that, right? So as a spectator, you arrive a day or two before the opening ceremony and you hang around for a couple of weeks and then you go home. But for the local residents it's quite disruptive. I mean roads are closed, there's a lot of construction happening. But one of the main reasons for that is that the IOC and the Paris 24 Organizing Committee decided to really shake things up and to do things differently in terms of how they go about staging the games.
In the past, the Olympics have come under a lot of criticism for building stadiums that become white elephants. And there's a huge amount of money spent on infrastructure that ends up not being useful. They decided to really spin that model on its head this time around and are using primarily existing infrastructure for the games. And there are only two venues that are being built, which is quite interesting. There's an aquatic center and the Athlete Village and the Athlete Village will actually be repurposed as a housing estate after the game.
Carol Cone:
So let's talk about the spirit of the Olympic Games and Purpose and I'd love you to just talk about perhaps what companies do you see that are really embracing that spirit and who do you like, what stands out maybe in previous Olympics and what's happening in Paris?
Neill Duffy:
Yeah, so much to talk about. What I'd like to do is just go step back and just talk about the IOC for a second. I think it's very relevant because the IOC I think is a great example of a organization that's trying to become a purpose led sports property. Their stated purpose is to build a better world through sports. So they say that's why they exist, and that's really important because the majority of sports properties will tell you that their purpose is to put on a sports event or if they're a team or a club to win a competition.
So the IOC released a thing called Agenda 2020 plus five, which is their strategic vision for the next five years, which is almost up and they're about to start developing the next five-year plan, but they talk about things like promoting sustainable Olympic Games, strengthening the role of sport as an important partner in achieving the SDGs, strengthening support for refugees and displaced populations continue to lead by example, etc, etc.
So the Purpose messaging is really ingrained in who they are as an organization and they really seem to be committed to using their platform as a force for good, which I'm very excited about because that's exactly what I think sport, the role that sports should be playing in society. Some responses are some of their partners and they have the IOC has, I think it's 12, 15 top partners, they call them their top tier Olympic partners. I would say probably a third to nearly or maybe a half of those partners are now activating around their partnership with the Olympic Games in a purposeful way. So that's something new.
My two favorite examples are Allianz. So the big life insurance company, coming out of COVID, they recognized that there was an increased instance of sedentary or that people were less active as a result of COVID, which is obviously not good if you're an insurance company, life insurance company. And so they've really lent into this and are using their Olympic partnership to try and encourage people to get active. They've got a great program called Move Now, which they're doing together with the IOC. And it's all about getting people active and partaking in physical activity. And I think it's a great example of how you can leverage the Olympic movement and all the excitement and glamour and intrigue around that to get people active. And the other is Procter and Gamble who've really stepped into the Purpose pieces you'd expect. They've got a program called Athlete for Good where they're actually providing a bunch of athletes that they sponsor with funds that they can use to support nonprofits that they care about.
They've got a program called, I don't know exactly what it's called, but it's about recycling material and they're making the Olympic podiums and the metals in Tokyo were made out of this recycled materials. They connected over 24 and a half tons of recycled material in Tokyo, and they're going to try and do something similar in France. And then they also support a program called Rising Phoenix, which was a Netflix documentary that's now grown up and become a fully pledged content platform, which is all around this notion of disability. Because the Olympics is not just the Olympics, it's also the Paralympics, the two go hand in hand today, which is also really good to see. And so P and G have put their muscle and weight behind rising Phoenix to elevated into, as I said, a full content platform, which is all focused on the whole disability topic and trying to normalize disability and give people with disabilities a share of voice and all the great things that are happening at the moment. So that two of many examples.
Carol Cone:
And I love what P and G has done in the past about moms, and that they celebrate the mother who has to just jump through hoops to get the child to skating practice or to track practice or to riding or whatever at five o'clock in the morning and the whole family becomes recalibrated around the child or the young athlete.
Neill Duffy:
Carol, just to build on that because I think there's another really important point here, is as if you look at the evolution of advertising and communication over the decades, even as recently as five years ago, I think brands were still, personally, I think brands were still guilty of defaulting to telling stories as opposed to doing stories. And what we're starting to see now is that they're both telling those stories, but they're also underpinning them with support for programmatic initiatives that are actually addressing the problem on the ground and making real life changes not only in people's perceptions, but in terms of the experiences that people have on the ground around whatever topic is being addressed. And that's really important. So this transition from storytelling to story doing is a real thing and I think is becoming a necessary component of any purposely of sports activation.
Carol Cone:
I think sport has only recently, maybe the last five to 10 years, understood going from telling to doing. In your great experience, was there an event like a COVID or a Key Olympics or a World Cup that all of a sudden something happened that made that shift, accelerated that shift or just put a finer focus on that?
Neill Duffy:
100%. We launched 17 Sport at the back end of 2019, which was, I think it was four months before COVID. And you can imagine how excited we were when COVID happened and sport got shut down. I'll never forget that day that Commissioner Adam Stern made that announcement that the NBA was shutting down because of COVID. And the main reason was that sport was no longer considered an essential service. And I think that was a wake-up call for the sports industry because people sat back, well, not everybody, but the more enlightened members amongst the leadership community in sports sat back and said, "Holy crap, what does that mean for us? If we're not an essential service, what's our reason for existing?"
And so COVID ironically ended up being, for us at 17 Sport, the best thing that could have ever happened in our little bubble because it really shone a light on sports role in society and the fact that that needed to evolve and change in order for sport to remain relevant and in order for sport to become an essential service. And so I think that was the major thing that happened that really shifted perceptions. And as I said, some people have really jumped on board and embraced that, but it's still very much the 80/20 rule. I'd say 20% of sport gets it, 80% of sport is still operating the old-fashioned way, which is all about money and entertainment and glitz and glamour and paying lip service to doing good.
Carol Cone:
So let's talk about which sports, which type of sport. And there's so many pieces. There's the athlete, there's the stadiums, there's the leagues, which ones are at the cutting edge of getting the fact that they must do and get involved in a holistic way in social and environmental issues versus others. So who's leading the way? And let's talk about types of sport and then we can talk about separate it from athletes.
Neill Duffy:
What has happened is that the majority of sport has done a good job of catching up from an operational perspective. So you'll find that most of them now, and in fact it's become table stakes, I would say, to make sure that you're addressing your operations as a sporting organization. So they've all got energy programs and energy efficiency programs and waste programs and all that kind of stuff. So doing a good job of that. What fewer have embraced is the power or the potential that they have to be used as platforms to solve some of the biggest problems in the world. And that for me is where the magic lies. Okay, so it's great that the Super Bowl is carbon-neutral, but at the end of the day, that's not going to have any impact on climate change.
But the ones that are recognizing, we've already spoken about the IOC, we are seeing UEFA, so the European football governing body that Euros are on right now as we speak, and UEFA I think are recognizing that they have that potential role. They recently launched a new strategic vision, which is very much worded around similar type of sentiments to the IOCs, and I know that UEFA are moving in this direction. And then you have some smaller properties like the Ocean Race used to be the Volvo Ocean Race, it's now called the Ocean race. Their stated purpose is to address climate health. That's why they exist. They don't exist to put on a sailing event, they exist to address ocean health.
Carol Cone:
And you're a leading firm to do that. You worked on Super Bowl and can you talk about that because you were hands on in terms of, and maybe that was one of the earlier Super Bowls, it was beginning to transition to being more environmentally focused. Talk a little bit about your experience with that.
Neill Duffy:
Yeah, it seems like a lifetime ago. And it's funny, Carol, it's funny how quickly things date because often when I use that Super Bowl example, people say, yeah, well that was in 2016, that's long ago. But I still think it's very relevant today and I think it's a great case study. Just very quickly, the insight there was that a third of the population in the Bay Area live in poverty, can you believe it? Headquarters for the biggest tech companies in the world and yet over two million people live in poverty. And within that group of over two million people, there is a large chunk of that are under the age of 18, so over 50%, and many of them have no hope of a bright future of any kind. So what we decided to do is the organizing committee, not the NFL, but the local organizing committee for Super Bowl 50 was to use the event as a platform to close the opportunity gap for young people to create opportunity and chances of hope for a better future.
And that became the central organizing idea for everything that we did at Super Bowl 50. It informed our commercial program, it informed the way we delivered the event, it informed the way we communicated around the event and it informed the way we delivered the event because you can't be doing that kind of stuff if you're not paying attention to the basics around how you're going about delivering the event. Anyway, to cut a long story short, that was a huge success and it really captured the imagination of the local corporate community. We ended up with over 35 corporate partners sponsoring that initiative, raised almost $60 million from the local corporate community to support that event and that initiative. And included within that, we made a commitment of every dollar that we raised through sponsorship, 25% would go to support nonprofits in the Bay Area working with young people. And so we were at the end of the day able to support over 150 nonprofits and it was all non-restricted funding. So it was all focused on building the capacity of those organizations to better serve the young people.
Carol Cone:
That was smart.
Neill Duffy:
And I think that's another really important point, right? Because often philanthropic dollars are restricted and it's counterintuitive or counterproductive at the end of the day. And we delivered the most, what ended up being the most shared, the most commercially successful, the most giving, the most engaging, the most sustainable Super Bowl ever. And I believe that was because we decided to lead with a purpose. We put purpose first. It wasn't an afterthought. It led every decision that we took and allowed us to behave and operate differently, to innovate in terms of how we deliver that event.
Carol Cone:
How did you have such an enlightened, now this is eight years ago, 2016, and you had to plan prior to that. How did you have such an enlightened planning group? Was it because it wasn't the NFL, but it was the local planning committee?
Neill Duffy:
I think that had a lot to do with it. The way that it's structured is the NFL basically grants a license to a local city to host the event, and then a local group gets put together to make that happen. And most of the time those local groups were funded by public money, tourism, taxes, that type of stuff. But because it was San Francisco and because it was California, there was no public money. So we had to fund the event 100% with private sector funding. So there was a gentleman by the name of Daniel Nury, I don't know if you know Daniel, but Daniel was appointed as chair of the organizing committee. And Daniel was also chair of a thing called Tipping Point, which is one of the leading social impact companies in the Bay Area. And Daniel basically gave us permission to think differently and to do what we needed to do, but there was also a commercial imperative because we would not have been able to raise the money we needed to raise to host the event if we hadn't done something different.
And so it created an environment where they were open to my line of thinking and others like me were thinking in this way. Heath Bruce, the CEO, embraced this and asked me to come and join him to help him figure out how to get this done. And we almost created an internal agency within the super 15 host where we set the strategy and we empowered the operators within the business to operate in a purposeful way. And that was a key insight. This is not something that you could do as one person on the hill with a stick.
Carol Cone:
Right.
Neill Duffy:
It has to be something that everybody in the organization has to embrace and believe in order for it to reach its full potential.
Carol Cone:
Yes, as we always talk about the cross-functional team and bringing their resources to bear against a consolidated vision. So now this is great, Neill, I love the conversation. Let's turn to what 17 Sport does. And I know you've got some favorite, favorite initiatives, but one that I really like that I hope you will talk about is the Breaking Barriers project with Adidas. So can you talk a little bit about it because there's lovely elements to it. It's not just a one pillar and it looks like it's being built to last, a little bit about what is it and then what impact is it having?
Neill Duffy:
I love talking about this project. It's probably my very favorite project of my whole career. And really because it is all encompassing and it's also a great example of the power of 17 Sport because we do everything across the project. So the story is that we were approached by Adidas, their European head of Purpose lady called Clementine Painter, who said she had a business crash on Fabi and I when she heard us talk at the Sustainable Brands Conference in Paris, she was just right time at the right place. She was looking for a partner to help her solve a problem. Adidas's stated purpose is to improve people's lives through sport, focusing on people and planet. They felt that they'd done a good job on the planet side. I think they have, and I think Adidas is a great example of what's possible when you try and address your planetary impacts through your supply chain and that type of stuff. But the one area where they felt back then, and this was back in 2019, so they were our first client at 17 Sport, was on the people side.
And so the insight that we ended up leading into was that girls drop out of sport at a younger age than boys and the reason for that and as a consequence, don't get to enjoy the benefits that participating in sports afford. And the further insight around that was that the reason that they do that is that girls face numerous barriers that prevent them from continuing their journey in sport. And so to cut a long story short, we decided with Adidas's blessing and excitement to build the program around that, what ended up becoming the Breaking Barriers in Sport program for girls and women in Europe. And it started off with a commitment, and this is really important, and it's Adidas's words it's not mine. We want this to be a commitment, not a campaign. This is something that we want to do for the long term, not for the short term.
And through that commitment we would directly improve the lives of 50,000 girls by empowering 15 nonprofit organizations to better serve girls and inspiring them with 100 local champions in the community who could become role models that girls could look up to as a way of keeping and staying in sport and in the process, build the backbone, build the technology, build the infrastructure required in order to help the grassroots sector of society keep girls active in sport. And we're in year five of the program now and we've already achieved all of our objectives. We actually achieved them at the end of year four.
We thought it would be mainly external focus, but it's become a really important platform internally with an Adidas Europe to drive their agenda equity conversation. It's the most oversubscribed volunteer program within Adidas. We have a mentorship program, a volunteer program, and everybody wants to be involved. We've also started to lead into the various different assets that Adidas partners with. When I say assets, teams and leagues and athletes, we've just created a thing called Team Period, which is all around raising awareness and solutions for menstruation in sport.
And our Team Period, which is made up of a bunch of Adidas sponsored athletes led by Jasmine Sawyer, the British track and field athlete, is now on the road delivering this program programming to football clubs like Arsenal. And so what we're starting to see now that this project is being integrated across the whole of Adidas ecosystem and being a real driver of real change, and we're looking forward to the next five years and what's possible.
Carol Cone:
Again, I think what's really important for our listeners is that you've taken a holistic approach to deconstructing the challenges and showing you have trainings and role models. So share about the academy.
Neill Duffy:
It's a two-year online program where basically we build the capacity of those nonprofits to better serve girls or of the champions, which are young girls in the community to be able to better represent girls in sport. And it's been so successful. So we've had five cohorts of girls, of nonprofits and champions going through this program. It's been so successful that we actually decided to take that content and to build an open source online program that's now available to everybody.
Carol Cone:
That's so smart. I mean, again, you're leading with the issue. You're creating scale, you're looking at long-term, you're open sourcing it, so you're being very generous. But in doing that, that you're creating such loyalty and ambassadors and such and it's a very unique, so congratulations and I hope that you're going to sign up for another five years in that.
I'm curious about athletes and where are athletes in their knowledge? And a lot of athletes are young and they've got all the pressures are going maybe from amateur to going to professional. And how are you seeing in their mind that they need to support a cause, that they need to, whether it's social or environmental, what's happening with athletes?
Neill Duffy:
Yeah, I think five years ago, maybe 10 years ago, athletes that understood their power and their role in building a better world were few and far between. It was the exception rather than the rule, today it's become the norm. I think that there are two major driving forces in the world right now when it comes to Purpose in sport. The first is that fans expect organizations to stand for something more than profits and want them to take action. And that's forcing brands and sponsors to change and it's forcing properties as a consequence to change. The other major driving force is athletes.
As athletes become more and more vocal and have more and more power in the dynamic and in the mix and recognize the potential that they have to make a difference and want to make a difference, their voice is becoming so much more important.
Carol Cone:
And I'm just curious about who comes to mind. Rapid fire, one athlete, doesn't matter, are very socially conscious or environmentally conscious, just names.
Neill Duffy:
There's so many. Megan Rapinoe, woman, gender equity, she's been a major driving force. LeBron James and the wonderful stuff that he does. Serena Williams and again, gender equity. Siya Kolisi, my favorite, I don't know if you even know who Siya is, but he's captain of the South African Rugby World Cup team. I could go on and on, the list is endless. And most recently, and the one that I'm most excited about is Mbappe, the French football player who has been criticized for not having a position, despite the fact that he's a young person, has been criticized for taking a plane to a soccer tournament that he could have got on a train for and made jokes about it. But in the last, I think he's grown up because in the last 18 months he's just come out of his shell and he just took a stand on the French elections, I don't know if you know, but they're just called snap elections in France. And he basically said, "I don't want to play for a country that's managed by somebody that doesn't share my values."
Carol Cone:
Great line. Great line. So I'm curious, who is guiding these young athletes? I mean is it their financial managers, their parents, their teams? It's probably very bifurcated and very fragmented.
Neill Duffy:
It's very fragmented. And I think if I'm going to be super critical, I'd say that that's an area of huge weakness in the system right now because the people that are managing most of these athletes, I don't believe are always well-equipped to be able to do that. So I think a lot of the time it's coming from a personal place within these athletes and I guess that's good, because they're not doing it because someone's told them to do it, they're doing it because they're caring about it. One example, Carol, that I got to tell you about because he is a client of ours, but he's just the most amazing young man I've ever met. His name is Ezra Frech and he's a team USA Olympic Paralympian and how holds the world record in high jump in his category. He's 18 years old and since the age of 10, Ezra has been on a mission to normalize disability using his discipline and the Paralympic is a platform to do that.
And he's just a superstar. And he said himself, sometimes when I listen to him, I think Ezra, do you really want to be saying that because you're setting yourself up here. But he says things like he wants to become the Michael Phelps of the disability movement. And as a consequence of that, really reshaped the way that people think about disability in the world and start treating people with disabilities as normal people. And so that's what's starting to happen. I mean, this kid's 18, he's going to change the world. And I think that's the power of athletes that has such huge potential and that gives me hope for a future that does have some hope in it.
Carol Cone:
Great. Quick lightning round. What issue do you feel or issues are the most neglected in sport? Whether it's a league, whether it's an athlete or such, or what do you wish was supported that hasn't been supported yet?
Neill Duffy:
I think the biggest issue sport needs to address is itself because sport is not living up to its superpower. It's not living up to its full potential to drive and build a sustainable future. It needs to get its own act together. If it did that, I'd be delighted.
Carol Cone:
Okay. What advice do you have for an athlete becoming an elite athlete and they're thinking about, "Oh my God, I want to get involved in some social issue, but I don't know where to start."
Neill Duffy:
The starting point for anybody is trying to identify what issue really resonates with you at a personal level. It's that internal discovery because for this stuff to work, it has to be real and authentic. It can't be made up. You can build all those strategies and collaborations and partnerships and ideas and activations around that to bring it to life.
Carol Cone:
Super. What's next for 17 Sport?
Neill Duffy:
We are really excited about what's next for us. We decided that we are going to spread our wings and start building a presence in the US market. When we started the business, we designed, decided to focus on just Europe, but we're now ready to come back to the US market. And so we have our first client there. It's an organization called Ocean Conservancy who are doing amazing work around ocean health and climate change. And we are building a really exciting sports activation program for them that I think is going to be pretty transformational. And then of course LA 28's happening, so we've got a whole lot of things happening that are building towards that as well. So that's what excites us.
Carol Cone:
So that's a lot. I always like to give the last point to my guest. We certainly could go another show and we can probably do that in the future, but how would you like to just end this conversation?
Neill Duffy:
Thank you for the inspiration, Carol that you provided and if I think back all those years when I first started this journey, I remember reading your stuff and being inspired by what was possible. I think for me there were two aha moments. The first was being inspired by what you wrote and what the work that you were doing. The second was living through the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa where Nelson Mandela used sports as a vehicle-
Carol Cone:
Yes, beautiful. Yeah, beautiful.
Neill Duffy:
... to heal a divided nation. So thank you.
Carol Cone:
This has been a marvelous conversation and we look forward to continuing it because sport has always been a part of my life. Neill, it's been wonderful.
Neill Duffy:
Thank you, Carol.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people and I'd love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristen Kenny at Carol Cone on Purpose. Pete Wright and Andy Nelson our crack production team at True Story FM and you, our listener, please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic Purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
This transcript was exported on Jul 01, 2024 - view latest version here.
p360_177 17 Sport RAW (Completed 07/01/24)
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