Big-name sports figures often look to build their brands. With that comes a new wave of athlete-developed digital content, including Unscriptd—a video content platform funded by tennis greats Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf and former Nike executives.
Unscriptd links fans directly to athletes via short videos. “I think there’s an insatiable marketplace out there,” said Agassi said, as reported by ABC News. “We’re not trying to get fans to go somewhere. We’re coming to them where they are with direct athlete-to-fan engagement.”
Athletes shoot and self-publish videos of up to two minutes that are posted to their feeds on sites such as Facebook and Twitter and collected at Unscriptd’s website.
“This is the next generation of what we call an athlete-media company,” CEO Brent Scrimshaw told the AP. “And we’re really obsessed with powering the personal video direct from the world’s best athletes to the consumer. From an athlete’s point of view, it enables them to really take control of their own personal story and build their brand at the same time.”
Unscriptd is already working with more than 30 athletes, including soccer stars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, Olympians Mo Farah and Justin Gatlin, and India test cricket captain Virat Kohli.
Unscriptd isn’t the only athlete-generated content site. Derek Jeter cofounded Players Tribune, a site that has athletes writing first-person stories, in 2014 with the investment help of Kobe Bryant and others. And last year, LeBron James worked with from Warner Bros. and Turner Sports the develop his UnInterrupted athlete video platform.
