The real Super Bowl winner? The company behind the Kelce brothers’ podcast

Nearly 13 minutes into a recent edition of the New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce, the show has already gone off the rails. The NFL-playing brothers and Super Bowl champions Travis and Jason Kelce, who host the show, are interviewing their mother, Donna Kelce, in a mega episode that also features their father, Ed. 

Travis and Jason are set to make NFL history on Sunday as the first brothers to ever face off in a Super Bowl. So it would only make sense to ask Mom who she’s rooting for between the two sons. She deftly flips the question around, asking who the brothers would save in the middle of the ocean, Mom or Dad.

No matter which brother comes away holding the Lombardi Trophy on Sunday, one big winner of the matchup is Wave Sports + Entertainment (WSE), the Santa Monica, California-based company behind the brothers’ successful sports podcast. Since New Heights launched in September, it has quickly amassed a large following. The show is Spotify’s most popular podcast in the sports category and third most popular overall. On Apple, the show is regularly among the top five most-popular podcasts, with roughly 500,000 downloads per episode. Its YouTube channel clocks more than 522,000 subscribers. 

The show has taken off, thanks to the authentic chemistry between the charismatic Kelce brothers, who bring their own verve to such topics as NFL analysis, alien conspiracies, and how Travis got his name from an ‘80s soap opera heartthrob. Plus, they just so happen to both play for the most dominant teams in football this year. Because of who they are, the Kelce brothers also landed interviews with Philadelphia Eagles star quarterback Jalen Hurts, which drew 1.3 million views on YouTube; and this year’s NFL MVP, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, whose interview drew more than 2.3 million views. 

Wave Sports + Entertainment, which was founded in 2017 and has positioned itself as a SportsCenter for Gen Z, has leaned heavily into creating social video and audio channels, devoted to nearly every athletic interest, to reach its target audience of Gen Z and millenials. When WSE decided to create original studio content, it chose to create video content instead of just developing an audio-only podcast that lives on platforms such as Spotify and Apple. 

Shorter highlight clips from podcasts like New Heights are often the entry point to connect with consumers, says WSE founder and CEO Brian Verne. The clips are placed on social media platforms, such as Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, and can often help a clip go viral. 

“We’re able to take the best moments from that show, and ultimately dominate the feed, which increases the discoverability of something like New Heights,” Verne tells Fast Company. 

In the past two weeks, as the brothers have prepared to face off in the Super Bowl, New Heights (which gets its name from Travis and Jason Kelce’s hometown of Cleveland Heights, Ohio) has accumulated over 66 million views on social platforms and added over 500,000 followers across Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube. according to data the brand shared with Fast Company.

A playbook for success

The idea for the Kelce brothers’ podcast has actually been kicking around for a few years. Aaron Eanes, executive producer of New Heights, president of A&A Management Group, and Travis’ longtime manager, remembers when the thought of a podcast between the brothers first came up.

Jason was visiting Kansas City to watch Travis play. During a dinner, the brothers bantered about different schemes to block premier defensive linemen. This could make a great podcast, they mused.

The group started to explore the possibility of looking for a production company, but the process was slow. “The first two years there was interest, but there wasn’t the fit that we thought made sense for the guys,” says Eanes.

By 2022, there appeared to be more serious interest in the podcast. After conversations with several companies, the brothers and Eanes picked Wave Sports + Entertainment because they felt it had the best ability to set them up for long-term success. 

WSE already had existing social platforms that gave the brothers an available audience ready to consume their show. New Heights is produced under WSE’s football sub-brand “Jukes,” which has 2.3 million followers on Instagram and 3.1 million followers on TikTok.

“We were able to supercharge this [launch] because we had an audience ready to go,” says Tunde St. Matthew-Daniel, senior vice president of original content at WSE. “That was really helpful. We have a really good show. We were very confident about quality, and we got an audience that was waiting to consume it.”

Of course, the Kelce brothers also had a following. Early on, the show relied on Travis and Jason to share clips and links on their personal social channels to gain traffic, but now the show doesn’t need to depend on their posts, though they both still engage and post clips.

Now, the company is looking to replicate the formula that made New Heights a hit. “With the success of New Heights, this idea of building these shows or these franchises around top athletes or digitally native personalities, that’s been very emblematic of what the future of this company looks like,” says Verne. “We want to build out a network and run this playbook back many times over.”