When Josh Pate decided to sign a contract extension with CBS Sports this past August, he could discern the value of being an independent creator affiliated with a large media conglomerate. Since joining the company after building his hit college football show through smaller outlets, Pate has focused on evolving the program while continuing to have ownership over his intellectual property.
Understanding the shifting paradigms within the content space, he views it as incontrovertible that consumers are relating more to individuals and their products, subsequently discovering these creators and exhibiting loyalty no matter the platform. At the same time, Pate has adopted a similar view towards advertising, forging personal relationships with business partners rather than engaging in transactional interaction that can render itself supercilious or condescending.
Pate, who records his show out of Nashville, has the ability to travel to different schools around the country to watch college football games on Saturday. After watching the action, he returns to the studio to discuss it on Sunday. Moreover, the show also has methods of distribution to expand its reach, which has contributed to consistent growth within key performance indicators, such as views on YouTube and podcast downloads.
“I was always very aware that getting the show up to a certain altitude is one thing,” Pate explained. “Getting it in front of people is another thing, and the folks at CBS can finish your sentence when you start to express that concern, and then the next sentence will be, ‘Don’t worry about that. We specialize in that. You do a good job – we’ll make sure it’s in front of folks,’ and they’ve delivered on that.”
In the end, remaining with CBS Sports makes sense for Pate as the size and scope of his show proliferates. Commensurate with the signing, he renamed the program to Josh Pate’s College Football Show after it had been known as Late Kick since its launch. The rationale for this alteration to an eponymous format had to do with the ‘Pate State’ sub-brand that had derived within the show, along with insights gleaned through search-engine optimization. Maintaining a keen awareness and avidity towards dissemination on digital platforms, Pate recognizes the value of having a multiplatform distribution model.
The decision to embark on this venture came with Pate taking a leap of faith early in his career. Landing a job in a fabric warehouse in Columbus, Ga. after leaving college, he began to listen to sports talk radio and eventually landed a hosting job with the local ESPN Radio affiliate. Two years later, he was hosting a college football show on WLTZ-TV and later became a news anchor where he became comfortable speaking without a teleprompter. These early ventures in the media business helped shape the way in which he goes about preparing for an episode of his program.
“I call our approach sort of a jazz-based approach instead of a symphonic approach,” Pate said. “Our rundowns are minimal, the way we map out our show is minimal. There’s immense prep that goes into it, but it’s all content-based prep; it’s not formulaic prep.”
Pate was offered a lucrative contract to remain on linear television, but he declined the offer and started his own YouTube channel instead, recognizing the fundamental nature of owning intellectual property. From the beginning, he ensured that his college football program reflected the audience, and he was granted use of the television studios for three nights a week to build his show. As the production continued to scale upwards, he received a call from 247 Sports and started working for the company with freedom to cultivate his brand, which has continued with CBS Sports.
“I knew I was sort of the first in the space that was being given the opportunity that I was given,” Pate said, “and I knew whether I sink or swim here is going to dictate whether dozens more people like me get an opportunity because I knew the other networks were watching, and I knew CBS was sort of treating this as a trial balloon, a test pilot.”
Ahead of a typical episode of the show, Pate is consistently preparing and following teams from around the country. In fact, he surmises that he should be able to host an hour-long show on college football at a moment’s notice no matter the circumstances since he should always remain cognizant of the landscape. Once the program begins, he is focused on fulfilling four pillars within the conversations – a hook angle, money angle, push angle and wrap angle – to satisfy the multifarious interests of the audience. Rigorous examination of the program commences upon its completion through the utilization of a rubric in order to safeguard against a diminution in salient discussion, especially amid an ecosystem replete with choice.
“If we mispunch an element, I don’t care,” Pate said. “If something’s misspelled, I don’t like it, but I don’t care nearly as much about that or a technical glitch as I do about wasting someone’s time. That’s the biggest thing you can commit in this business.”
Finding the common motifs interweaving throughout his topics came after doing inventory on the sports media space and recognizing value in logic-based reasoning. Cogently reaching a conclusion with minimal wavering while also educating, entertaining and enlightening the audience is a combination Pate identified to be a winning formula. It has held true thus far, with Pate attaining nearly twice as many subscribers on YouTube as the next largest individual college football show or podcast.
“Exposure is one thing, but you better be good enough because you may only get one shot with a prospective audience member, and you better be delivering,” Pate said. “So the visibility is great and the magnitude of the brand is wonderful, but the pressure is really a privilege.”
Throughout the college football season, Pate’s show airs on CBS Sports HQ, the free ad-supported streaming television channel launched by the company in 2018. The average age of viewers on the network is 38 years old, and the outlet has also had record-breaking viewership this year. Nearly half of Pate’s viewers on YouTube are under the age of 34, and he saw an uptick in those within the age 18-34 demographic this year as well. Resonating with this group has been pivotal amid his growth strategy, and it has been matched with enthusiasm and effusiveness in the field.
“When I go to college campuses, that’s undeniable,” Pate said. “When I walk the sidelines at games and the interaction and reception that we get, specifically from a student section, is such validation that we’re doing it the way we want to do it, we’re reaching the people that we want to reach.”
Yet the metric Pate is looking at the most is audience retention and retention rate as the aggregate attention span continues to dwindle. In reviewing the data, he emphasizes that consumers ages 18-34 listen to one of their live shows at an average of more than 23 minutes per episode, something that he feels “defies all convention logic.” Successfully persuading viewers to invest time in the product is effectuated through a blend of storytelling and personality, allowing for the growth of the show. Pate is even able to communicate his passion for atmospheric science and hosts the program on the road in the spring while chasing down storms and tornadoes.
“A lot of our audience, while they previously may not have cared less about weather, they are really dialed in when I’ll go out and I’ll do that stuff in the middle of Oklahoma or Kansas or Iowa or Nebraska in the spring, and there’s a ton of interaction from the college football crowd when it comes to storm chasing, and to the point where I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’ve thought about content creation that kind of blends the two or merges the two in another lane down the road because I actually think there’s a market there.”
Through his partnership with CBS Sports, Pate is able to contribute on other programming with the outlet, including the College Football Pregame show. As the company gets set to present the Big Ten Conference championship game this Saturday, he recently completed a sit-down interview with Penn State Nittany Lions head coach James Franklin that will air on Saturday’s pregame show, which starts at 7 p.m. EST on CBS and Paramount+. Continuing to blend his passions for sports media and atmospheric science, Pate hopes that his program can continue achieving precipitous growth and provide adept coverage of college football around the country.
“I want it to be the most recognized brand in college football, and I want the show to essentially be viewed as the authority voice in college football,” Pate said. “I want everyone to have been exposed to it, and at that point, if you like it, great. If you don’t, it’s not great, but I accept it, but I just want to make sure we do our job on our end to provide the opportunity for everyone to be exposed to it, and you want to create a show that everyone gravitates towards.”
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