#BoltsPets | A content series I developed during the height of COVID. Without having games to play, we were tasked with finding ways to continue engaging our fanbase. I reached out to many of our players in Tampa and had them or their spouses send us photos of their family pets, complete with names, breeds, ages, and fun facts, for us to then share on the Lightning social pages. During its short run, it became something our fans looked forward to as well as a way to connect them to our players while our season was on hold due to pandemic. A fun bonus was that as it gained traction online, players started reaching out to us in order to be featured if I hadn't already contacted them!
Getting to create billboard art | The Lightning owned the rights to a highly visible billboard in the South Howard neighborhood of Tampa. As a marketing department, we were continually tasked with coming up with the idea or art every time we needed to switch out the creative. During a brainstorm ahead of the 2018 Stanley Cup Playoffs, I pitched the idea of going simple: Instead of creating something from scratch when our playoff look wasn't ready yet, why not just mimic the NHL standings page and place an "x" in front of our name, signifying that we were officially playoff bound? Short, simple, and to the point. It got buy-in and soon it was brought to life in the biggest way possible.
2019 NHL Global Series | The Lightning were invited to the 2019 Global Series, held in Stockholm, Sweden, alongside the Buffalo Sabres. I was lucky enough to travel overseas with the team and spent the week covering the event on the ground. In a moment of total serendipity, the musician behind the team's win song that year, Yung Gravy, happened to be touring nearby. Having already established a relationship with him earlier in the season, I arranged for him and his manager to come to our open practice and skills competition that day, bringing him to the locker room afterwards to meet some of the players. Before he left, Lightning forward Mathieu Joseph recorded a video with Yung Gravy live from Stockholm for us to use on our social channels.
Social room on Media Day | For the first time in my hockey career, I directed/produced a social media room at the Panthers' 2023 media day ahead of the 2023-24 NHL season. I was decently nervous going in as I historically have spent media days doing photo and video coverage of all the goings on, but it ended up being one of the most rewarding and fun days ever. As a team, we came up with a handful of ideas that we then turned into their own mini series: Would You Rather, Fishing for Compliments, Never Have I Ever, and Guess the Emoji. Tons of learnings for next time but I'm incredibly proud of how everything turned out and was so excited to bring fun, fresh, and new content to Cats fans while showing off our players' personalities and friendships with each other. It was a massive team effort between our social team, video team, and motion graphics designers, and allowed everyone to really have fun on a project and then see the engagement from fans reward their hard work.
Milestone Polaroid project | Ahead of the 2023-24 NHL season, we wanted to re-envision how we celebrated player milestones outside of the traditional videos, graphics, and articles. As the main traveling party member of the social media team, I spent the season documenting each "puck pic" (a player posing with the game puck that has his milestone written on it) not only on our DSLR camera, but also snapping a picture with our mini Polaroid. Once the player was satisfied with the photo, I had each of them write their name (no signatures! We wanted to see their actual handwriting) along with the date of said milestone. I worked with one of our designers to create a collage of all of them throughout the season which we then posted on our social channels as a recap. Once finished, each player got to take their Polaroid back to either store as a keepsake, five to a family member, or include with their puck as it got framed and memorialized.
Turning moments into BTS content | In this era of social media, anything can be content and everything can turn into storytelling. Our media scrums balloon during the playoffs to include many more reporters than usual. At only 5'3" I would have to get creative with finding photo lanes to grab pictures of our players doing media avails. In this example, Panthers forward Steven Lorentz (standing at 6'4") passed me in the locker room and saw how I was struggling to capture a photo over everyone's heads. He asked if I needed help and when I said yes, he grabbed the camera from me and easily lifted it over everyone's heads. I showed him how to frame it, where to push the button to take the photo, and he ended up being absolutely clutch!
Content creation and strategy is something I’ve worked on in my career, trying to find the moments and ideas (both big and small) that will resonate with audiences and meet them where they are.
Some examples above showcase my ability to create produced content series, cover tentpole events, leverage my relationships, and understand in the moment how a small interaction can spawn into a behind the scenes showcase for the fans.