As always, POST CREDITS airs on Bloomberg TV Tuesdays at 6pm ET & 10pm ET, and full episodes go live on our YouTube channel at 6pm ET on Wednesdays: youtube.com/@postcreditstv.

This week's guest was Shana Stephenson, Chief Brand Officer of the New York Liberty, the brand architect behind the most valuable women's sports franchise in America.

Shana Stephenson has spent nearly twenty years in sports — three of them at ESPN, then a blog she started because nobody was telling the stories she wanted told, then a marketing job with the Liberty in 2019 that turned into running the whole brand.

This year the Liberty announced a new head coach. In the past, a press conference like that went straight to the team's YouTube channel, where the audience already was. This year Stephenson put it on Liberty Live, the team's own subscription platform, and took public criticism for it. They eventually posted it to YouTube anyway.

She explains why in about twenty seconds, and the reasoning is the most useful thing in the episode for anyone building an owned audience. It has nothing to do with the coach and everything to do with what she thinks a fan has to be taught. I'd rather you hear her say it.

If you're a CMO: the platform your partner controls and the platform your partner rents are two different assets. Find out which one you're buying.

I spent a chunk of this conversation trying to understand what the Liberty were really paying for when they built a content staff that travels with the players.

The shape of it is clear enough. Photographers and video people embedded with the team, on the road, producing an all-access series in-house. Stephenson believes they were among the first teams in the league to do it. What I did not expect was her reason, which she gives plainly: they couldn't rely on the league's resources to photograph their players the way the team wanted them to show up.

Sit with that. A franchise decided the league's picture of its own athletes was not good enough, and paid to replace it. She calls it a huge financial investment and does not soften it — the people, the time to find the people, the strategy underneath them.

The structural point is one every rights holder should think about. When a team owns its cameras, it stops receiving an image and starts producing an asset. That asset can be sold, licensed, and built on. The team next door, waiting on league handouts, can only sell space around a game.

Ellie the Elephant now sits inside partner activations the way a character sits inside a franchise.

Here is the example Stephenson gave that should bother anyone still running a rate card. Essie came to the Liberty wanting Ellie to launch a new gel product. Ellie had never worn nails. The team could have said no — that was never part of her identity — and instead said yes, then shot a full campaign with Ellie and a slate of influencers around the launch.

A mascot that can say yes to an idea nobody planned for is a different kind of inventory than a logo on a stanchion. Stephenson is direct about the filter: brands that share the team's values, and brands not afraid to be innovative. Everybody else wants signage.

What she does not explain on the record until late in the episode is where Ellie came from, and why an elephant, in Brooklyn, made sense to a team named for a statue. The origin story involves the Brooklyn Bridge and a stunt from the 1800s, and it is the single best two minutes of the episode. There's also a specific moment when she realized Ellie had escaped the arena entirely — a tweet, then a magazine that has never covered a mascot. Go listen.

The number I keep coming back to: this past season the Liberty signed more than 25 brands who had never partnered with the team before, and roughly 20 who had never partnered with the WNBA at all.

The second number is the one that matters. Renewing a category is maintenance. Bringing a brand into women's sports for the first time expands the market, and the Liberty are doing it at a rate that should embarrass franchises with three times the history.

Stephenson traces the instinct to a job she had before sports, at a company focused on mothers, where the data all said women controlled household spending and the brands still would not invest. She carried the same question into the W and could not get an answer: these athletes are mothers, entrepreneurs, former dancers, deep into fashion and beauty, and for years the beauty category was nowhere near them. That gap is closing now, and she can name the partners closing it.

If you're a CMO: count how many of your partnerships are new to the category rather than new to you. One of those numbers is growth. The other is a trade.

The WNBA's national rights are locked up through 2036. Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video carry more than 125 regular-season and playoff games a season starting this year. USA Network, under Versant, added at least 50 more a year on the same eleven-year horizon. CBS came in on top of that. By any measure the league has never been more distributed.

Now look at what Stephenson built underneath it. Liberty local games sit on Fox 5, which puts them in roughly 8 million homes — a real upgrade from regional sports network math. On top of that she runs Liberty Live, a direct-to-consumer subscription platform the team owns outright, plus a YouTube channel, plus a content team producing material that lives on all of it.

This is the two clocks thesis playing out inside one franchise. The national deals are the appointment clock: the games an audience makes time for, on somebody else's schedule, with somebody else's logo in the corner. Liberty Live, YouTube, the tunnel fits, the all-access series, and the players' own feeds are the ambient clock: the stuff fans pass time with, every day, between games.

The league sold eleven years of the appointment clock. It cannot sell the ambient clock, because it does not own it. The teams do, and only the teams that paid to build a content operation actually have anything to sell there.

That reframes what a sponsorship of the Liberty is. A national WNBA buy gets you the game. A Liberty partnership gets you a character who can launch your product, a content staff who can produce the work, a roster whose personal platforms carry it, and an owned distribution channel to put it on. Stephenson describes a 360 deal with Away Luggage that runs through both the team and Sabrina Ionescu, and she's explicit that partners who also sign a player are showing a deeper layer of investment.

Every league in America is about to run this experiment. The rights money goes to the center. The daily attention lives at the edges. The franchises that spent the last five years building their own production capacity are about to find out they own the more valuable half.

Watch the full episode now on YouTube: youtube.com/@postcreditstv. Subscribe so you don't miss who’s next.

Post Credits airs Tuesdays at 6pm ET on Bloomberg Originals — streaming on YouTube TV, Prime Video Channels, Samsung TV Plus, LG Channels, and Tubi — and again at 10pm ET on Bloomberg Television.

Until next time, Ian Schafer, Ensemble, and the POST CREDITS team.

— Ian

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