Digital disruption: theScore’s John Levy on staying ahead of the game

Ask John Levy to predict what idea will captivate the communications world in 10 years – what platform, channel or app – and the online media tycoon sputters at the mere suggestion.

“I challenge anybody to do that,” Levy says. “Come on, 10 years? We’re dealing with stuff that showed up six months ago that we’re watching today.”

Levy lives in the technological moment – and his unabashed celebration of short-term thinking has served him well. He parlayed his family’s cable TV business in Hamilton into a sports network called theScore, adapting a little trailer that delivered data at the bottom of the TV screen – back when television sports and news tickers were a new thing. The cable business was sold, the TV network divested, and the trailer has morphed into a family of mobile sports apps – among the most popular applications for iPhone and Android users.

Mobile apps developed by Levy’s theScore now reach an average of 4.4 million users a month, with 65 per cent of the business in the United States, 20 per cent in Canada, and the rest from around the world. The average number of user sessions per month has scaled beyond 330 million, having risen more than a third over the past year.

At the DeGroote School of Business, the evolving digital sphere is an important area of strategic focus. Through his business, Levy has been a committed partner in the launch of DeGroote’s new Executive MBA in Digital Transformation.

On Monday, he’s being honoured with an honorary doctorate during DeGroote’s spring convocation ceremony – a tribute that reflects his leadership in the McMaster and Hamilton communities and the media industry worldwide.

If Levy story seems like a triumph of live-in-the-moment thinking, there are some long-term themes. He and his team are sports and data junkies, which reflects the obsession of their customers. theScore’s programmers were often audience members first – they live and breathe sports numbers – and this has been theScore’s distinct persona in its specialty TV mode and in its current app stage. In his view, sports remain the sweetest spot in media. “People are always going to love sports and they all think they are experts. All we have to do is pay attention to them.”

Who would have expected this life story for a lawyer’s son from Hamilton? Levy used to ride around with his cable-pioneer father after ice storms to spot fallen TV aerials so they could guide customer reps on where to aim their cable sales efforts. Trained as a lawyer himself – between selling and installing cable packages – John never practiced law but went straight to the family business and helped build it to the point it was a valuable asset to sell to an industry consolidator.

In essence, he is still that kid in his dad’s car – the scrappy upstart, as one newspaper called him, taking on the big guys. At one time, the big guys were Rogers and Shaw, and now it is ESPN, the Goliath of North American TV and online sports content. His current company, theScore, Inc., is essentially a start-up and yet to make a profit, but Levy is confident it will turn a corner within four to six quarters.

Spend some time with Levy and expect a cascade of ideas, expressed in rapid fire, often with life lessons imparted in bursts of three, such as “work, work, work.” What gets him excited is the stuff that turns on people half his age – including son Benjie, the president and chief operating officer, who is in his late 30s.

In fact, in his relentless quest for ideas, Levy is willing to consider almost everything. Even online sports betting would get his attention, if it gets to be properly regulated and legitimized as a real business.

So if he is so good in delivering sports data, what about branching out into other data-heavy applications, such as business? This is where Levy suddenly turns conservative. Yes, his technology is good at presenting information on mobile devices. And yet, “I think we are so well positioned inside sports, and the opportunity is so big, you really want to make sure you keep your focus on your expertise.” In other words, stick to your knitting, which may be the oldest prescription in business. But within that timeless adage, and that big ball of yarn, there are endless ways to make your stitches.

In that avalanche of ideas, there might be one that delivers a business model in 10 years – or something could come out of the blue. He just has to be ready – just as his dad Cecil was in the 1950s, when nascent cable TV taught the Levys about customer service and programming. That presaged theScore network and the ticker, which was a kind of Internet before the Internet.

The pattern was always “struggle, struggle, struggle,” Levy says, and it meant spending a lot of money at the beginning. If you built something profitable, someone will want to buy it, although, he adds, that should not be the goal. “Don’t just polish something to sell it,” he says, but “build it up.”

In the TV era, the Levy family realized its audiences were younger and gravitating to mobile technology, such as flip phones with varied functions. “We had data and we knew how to program it,” and the result was a pioneering app for a flip phone.

“Nothing happens independently of the other – it is all a progression. The core elements are to keep your eyes open and watch what people are doing,” he says. “That’s the failure of big companies, in making a lot of money and thinking it is never going to change. Well, it does.” Larger players were turned upside down by technology, but “we were never afraid of it.”

So Levy is a technology guy, right? Not so much. He’s got younger people working on that. At 63, “I don’t pretend to keep up with all stuff.” Instead, “I can bring the 60,000-foot perspective. I can smell that it is working.”

That means there are some sleepless nights. “There is always something out there that worries you in terms of moving fast enough.” You might feel confident about the special nature of your business, “but you never want to put the blinders on and say you are that unique.”

In fact, if you don’t worry about stuff – about recruiting the next group of developers or seeing eSports become a big global idea – it is a bad sign. “The minute you think you are on a rocking chair, that is when someone like me comes along and knocks you off it. I am going after the guy who says he has no sleepless nights.”

Competitiveness is at the core of Levy’s being. He commutes from his Hamilton home to Toronto – where theScore is based – but don’t call him a Torontonian. He is still the Hamilton hometown boy rankled by “Toronto snobbery.” It is “a bit of this underdog edge that drives me.” And now Levy’s underdog chutzpah is being directed at a sports-media behemoth. “I am not going to be happy unless we are right up there close to ESPN in this mobile space. In our space, we want to take those guys down.”

Levy remains on the forefront of digital transformation in his industry. As DeGroote’s graduating class of 2016 crosses the stage and heads off to pursue their careers, they would do well to embrace his lessons on succeeding in a rapidly evolving business landscape.

Innovations in the digital space John is watching:

The power of Facebook Messenger

This Facebook offering is approaching a billion users worldwide. Messaging platforms of its kind are being heralded as the basic applications that will dominate how people – particularly young people – will interact online. Levy wants to be there and theScore has been developing chat bots (essentially, software robots) to work off Messenger and its competitors. “That is a huge opportunity for us to extend our brand and do the same as we did in the app world.”

Competitive video gaming

Levy bursts with enthusiasm describing the potential in this space, known generically as eSports. It is not just about playing games on an online platform – it is also about watching people playing games. He is almost incredulous in explaining that this new kind of spectator sport is already bigger than the NBA playoffs or the baseball post-season. And his company is building a strong base in the area.

Programmatic advertising

It only makes sense that a company obsessed with sports data is cutting-edge in deploying its own internal business data. theScore has a team of analytics pros who crunch numbers on customers and their usage. That feeds into the real-time pricing of the company’s inventory sold on the advertising exchanges sweeping the U.S. media world. In Canada, ads are still sold the old way with salespeople, but in the U.S. the exchanges are taking hold and they are a field day for analytics.