Know Your Cats | A longtime partner, jetBlue was looking to refresh some of their assets and wanted a repeatable series that had players tied to it. With the rules in the NHL about partners and player imagery, we brainstormed some different ideas. What came out of it was our Know Your Cats series that we delivered on for jetBlue for three seasons. It was easy to get the information from our players – one year we did a survey via our team app, another year I simply asked the guys the questions myself after practices – and our creative team made new templates every year to display different answers that the players gave. A win for the partner in getting player-focused content, a win for the social team in posting branded content that fans engaged with, and a win for the fans in getting to learn fun facts about the team's star players.
Mental Health Awareness Month | Every partner comes to the table with ideas, charitable causes, and a desire to engage with a club's fans in the most organic way. A big proponent for Solis Health Plans was mental health awareness and using our combined platforms for education and breaking of the stigma around mental health in our country. I suggested interviewing our team's Director of Sports Psychology, Dr. Derick Anderson, about his work with athletes and helping them through their own on or off-ice issues to make them not only better athletes, but better people. The two-part series shed some light on how athletes can and do struggle with mental health, how they overcome it, and how Dr. Anderson gives them tools to use. It was a new spin we hadn't previously taken for this kind of content and gave our fans a behind-the-scenes look at a part of the game not everyone is always aware of while also delivering on Solis' ask to help promote Mental Health Awareness Month.
The Road Ahead | Not necessarily a unique idea in the world of sports, but one that I wanted to change up after it was sold to a new partner. Previous iterations of this graphic had read and felt more like a basic schedule graphic and could get lost when scrolling. Working with our design team, we created the highway sign imagery above and pushed relatively far out of our creative look in order to do so and make a usually boring graphic look a bit more dynamic as people were scrolling. Rolling this out as an asset for Fubo also helped align with their goal of having Panthers fans tune in to games using their platform and gave them a consistent piece of content throughout the season. We rotated players on each graphic (posted for road trips that had three or more games) to promote players on a hot streak and used this to remind our fans to continue tuning in even when the team was on the road.
Finding out that your fun sports job is expected to be a revenue-driver as well can be jarring when first starting out, but learning how to unlock that side of the business to not only further a partner’s goals but showcase the value of social and content is a true game-changer.
Throughout my career, I have put an emphasis on learning the ins and outs of how corporate sponsorship teams operate, the many hats they have to wear internally and externally, and how to best meet partner needs while continuously advocating for the brand.