Peyton Manning’s screen play

A new leaf indeed. After authoring an NFL Hall of Fame football career, the former quarterback, jingle-singer and Cherry Hills Village resident Peyton Manning has rolled his way into the media mainstream as pitchman for frosty beer brands, insurance companies and the occasional Colorado healthcare provider. But it’s the role Manning is carving out in a shifting media ecosystem that’s the interesting story.

The vehicle is Omaha Productions. The (mostly) sports-themed content company, housed in the Denver Tech Center and majority-owned by Manning, is all over the modern-day sports media ecosystem. With a recent capital injection from entertainment industry veteran Peter Chernin — he ran much of the Fox media empire during its heyday — the company is churning out a prodigious storm of video and audio content.

Omaha Productions is just four years old, but Manning isn’t exactly new on the media scene. The “sheriff” is a brand unto himself, a signature figure within a global athlete endorsement market that generates close to $1 billion annually, per Forbes. Various published estimates maintain that Manning averages around $25 million a year in endorsement money.

What that means is that Manning, in football lingo, is “piling on.” The QB Broncos fans adoringly named “PFM” during the glory years (the “F” represents, let’s say, the word “freaking” or derivatives) had already earned close to $400 million between his NFL paychecks and endorsement deals by the time he retired from the game in 2016 (again, from Forbes). But what Manning and Omaha Productions is doing transcends the boundaries of traditional athlete endorsement gigs and/or the seemingly contagious itch among retired sports heroes to open steakhouses. Rather than merely appearing in commercials and TV shows on behalf of third-parties, Manning is making and distributing his own stuff.

Exactly where that stuff shows up is the telling element. Some of what Omaha Productions does falls into a traditional media category: live television. The so-called “Manningcast” companion to ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” (the actual title is “Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli”) is a legit pop culture hit that’s unscripted, extemporaneous and in the moment: a classic example of the longstanding live TV formula.

But Manning’s also doing what he so famously did on the football field: changing the play. Besides customary formats, Omaha Productions is deep into new avenues of distribution for new types of content.

The reasons are obvious. As of mid-2024, the number of U.S. households connected to a traditional pay TV service — think Comcast’s Xfinity video packages, or DirecTV — has dwindled to 55 million. That’s now less than half of the nation’s total number of homes, compared with a peak of nearly 99 million in 2016. The disruption is so dramatic that households without a traditional pay TV package now outnumber those with a legacy television service. ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” (and the companion Manningcast) remains must-watch TV for sports fans, but it’s must-watch TV within a dwindling universe of potential viewers.

The consequence is that a sports media game once keenly focused on the world of linear, pre-scheduled channels is now being played across multiple fields, with anytime, on-demand access to individual titles getting more and more of the reps.

Manning is on it. Most of what Omaha Productions does plays outside the hash marks of linear entertainment. Shows from Omaha Productions like the 2024 Netflix series “Receiver” or the WNBA docuseries “Full Court Press” (ESPN+) pop up on choose-your-own-adventure streaming menus where they can be summoned to the screen anytime. Who needs live, anyway?

Then there’s the vast maw of digital podcasting. Manning has his hand in the game via an assortment of specialized sports podcasts like “SVPOD” with sports TV personality Scott Van Pelt and “This Is College Football” with Kevin Clark.

Add it all up and you get a sprawling menu of content, tucked into just about every available delivery vehicle there is. Which begs the question: In a sea of digital content, where anybody with a Shure SM7B and an internet connection can produce a podcast, who wins?

Here, as the Hollywood impresario Peter Chernin surely intuits, star quality comes into play. Manning is able to stand out by exploiting a quality only a few luminaries possess: a big name. PFM  is easily one of the most-recognized personalities in sports, the product not just of on-field heroics over an 18-season NFL career, but a likeable, self-deprecating sense of humor sponsors find irresistible. By blending the star power factor with a rising slate of content, Omaha Productions enjoys a business model advantage that lesser souls — you know, people lacking a folksy on-screen demeanor and 539 career passing touchdowns to their name — cannot easily replicate.

Behind the scenes, a trusted coach calls the plays. Manning’s public persona is guided by Alan Zucker, a former IMG talent agent who heads marketing activities for Excel Sports Management, the well-known sports marketing agency whose clients include Denver Nuggets stars Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic. For Zucker and Excel Sports, the business playbook revolves around a singular concept, with Excel representing “world-class athletes and arbiters of pop culture.” Peyton Manning, NFL Hall of Famer, star of Nationwide Insurance commercials and Monday night football simulcasts alike, certainly checks off both boxes.