The Future of Fandom
In today’s digital world, engaging fans isn’t optional—it’s everything.
Future of Fandom is the podcast for sports leagues, broadcasters, and digital platforms who know that the old playbook for audience engagement no longer works. Hosted by the team at LiveLike—the leading enterprise engagement and loyalty platform—this series explores how the most forward-thinking organisations are using gamification, loyalty programs, and community-driven experiences to deepen fan relationships and drive real business results.
Every other week, we speak with senior decision-makers from global sports teams, media companies, and consumer brands about what it takes to turn casual spectators into loyal superfans. We dive into how enterprise organisations are rethinking digital infrastructure, leveraging first-party data, and adopting modular, API-first engagement tools to future-proof their fan strategies.
Whether you're a Head of Product, Digital, Revenue or Strategy, Future of Fandom gives you the insight and inspiration you need to move beyond passive content and into interactive, monetisable, and measurable fan experiences.
This isn’t about chasing trends—it’s about building the infrastructure of tomorrow’s fandom, today.
Subscribe now and stay ahead of the game.
The Future of Fandom
Fan Engagement Beyond Borders: Why Demographics Are the Wrong Starting Point
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Most media companies are still building for an audience that no longer exists. Demographic boxes - Hispanic or American, soccer or football, Spanish or English - were built for a world where culture moved slowly. The fans those boxes were meant to describe left them behind years ago.
Olek Loewenstein, Global President of Sports at TelevisaUnivision, has spent his career serving audiences that live between worlds. His read on global fandom isn't theoretical - it's operational. And his argument cuts through a lot of the noise around global expansion: distribution creates reach, but reach is not fandom. Fandom is identity. It's ritual. It's the fans crossing the San Diego-Tijuana border every week not because the stream is unavailable, but because being there means something.
In this episode of Future of Fandom, Alex Hay, VP of Business Development and Strategy at LiveLike, sits down with Olek to unpack what the bicultural fan actually means for media companies, rights holders, and anyone trying to build lasting audience relationships in a world without borders.
What you'll learn in this episode
- Why the demographic frameworks most media companies still operate within were built for a world that no longer exists - and what replacing them actually looks like in practice
- The difference between global reach and global fandom - and why selling rights into a market and building genuine fan attachment there are two entirely different commercial propositions
- How the fan loyalty shift from league to team to player is forcing broadcasters and rights holders to rethink storytelling, content rights, and athlete relationships
- Why accessibility - distribution, language, and education - are the three layers leagues need to fulfill to build fandom in new markets, and where AI is changing the equation
- What "secondhand fandom" means for platform and audience development strategy - and whether fandom is increasingly discovered rather than inherited
- How TelevisaUnivision thinks about serving audiences that exist at the intersection of multiple cultures, languages, and sports simultaneously
What’s next?
If Olek's argument reframed how you think about the audiences you're building for, share it with someone working on the same problem.
And be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss what’s next.
Useful resources
- Connect with Alex Hay: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhayaus/
- Connect with Olek Loewenstein: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olek-loewenstein-708326/
- Visit https://www.livelike.com/
- Visit https://www.envisionsportgp.com/