Saving the Franchise

There was a big signing around here a couple of weeks ago.  Like 6 foot 11 big.  Dwight Howard decided to stay with the Orlando Magic and, in talking about it afterwards, seemed genuinely humble, contrite and sincere in talking about his love for the City Beautiful.  While a spat with his coach has since become public, and Howard is taking the heat for that, he nevertheless postponed the opportunity to take more money more quickly to stay in a situation and a city which has made him happy.  Superman, perhaps.  Unique, no question.

But outside of Central Florida, there is an even larger story.  Like 6 foot 6, 283 pounds large.  Mario Williams, the best defensive free agent to hit the NFL's open market in perhaps two decades, signed with the Buffalo Bills.  

I don't know Mario Williams.  I've never heard him utter a soundbite that I can remember.  I've never seen him appear in a video game commerical, or on a kids' tv show, or seen him take over a karaoke machine, or create a scavenger hunt for tickets to an event he is hosting, or a smile a smile as wide as the Mississippi like I have with Howard.

But I do know Buffalo.  I lived there for nine years.  My wife is from there.  Both my kids were born there.  I covered sports in Buffalo in the post-Super Bowl era when I saw Jim Kelly and Bruce Smith in their twilight, just before the darkness of the last twelve seasons without the playoffs.  I know how much identity that city gets from its football team -- how regal they felt when they went to four straight Super Bowls -- and how deeply they feel the sting of the embarrassment of being not just bad, but irrelevant on the NFL scene.  The city takes on a sad, stoop-shouldered that reflects one of the gloomy, deep-gray days of Western New York's mid-autumn.

To get a sense of what their relevance means, note in the article below by the excellent football writer Mark Gaughan, how Gaughan calls the signing, "a milestone in the 52-year history of the Bills."  

http://www.buffalonews.com/sports/bills-nfl/article763200.ece

Or this one, from news reporter Gene Warner on Williams' impact on the franchise and the city:

http://www.buffalonews.com/city/article776137.ece

Without Howard, the Magic would rebuild.  It would be painful and it would take some time, but they would get other good players and they would revive.  And the city would never need validation from its favorite team the way Buffalo does.  Orlando without a good basketball team is still a fast-growing city with theme parks and entertainment and sunshine.  Buffalo without the Bills is Slovakia without the view.  

So give the Bills credit here. They gambled their entire franchise on one expensive hand, and finally, for once, they came up aces.

Effective Social Media Communication in the Sports World

            A couple of months ago I was talking to a "Major Player" at a "Major Hollywood Entertainment Company" who is involved in sports only because his company has a tangential relationship with some sports properties.  In trying to carve out his space, he was seeking my expertise by asking where there are opportunities to create new revenue streams in sports.  I told him that I felt the broadest opportunities are in engagement and social media.

            “Really?” he asked.  “Don’t you think most people are there already?”

            And I had to tell him no, because while virtually all sports businesses and sports stars understand that the marketplace of consumers has moved from the newspaper and the television to the laptop and the smart phone, very few sports businesses really understand what they are trying to accomplish in that space.  The model has fundamentally shifted:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/youtube-the-future-of-entertainment-is-on-the-web/2012/01/12/gIQADpdBuP_story.html.  

            Unlike business in general, the landscape in sports business has the additional challenge of competition as a core element.   That is, not only does a sports business compete for a dollar, but when that business is inefficient with its dollars, it directly affects its ability to win on the field of play.  So when new business models begin to infiltrate the industry, the risk for established businesses to change is very high.  Fortunately, so is the reward.  Nonetheless, it is scary for these businesses to try to take that risk into new creative spaces, because the cost of being wrong affects the organization in so many ways.

            When it comes to social media enterprises like Facebook and Pinterest and Groupon among others, many smart companies and teams have done a terrific job of accumulating followers while they begin to figure out this landscape.   Their first move has been to position their fans for the next big revolution even as those companies and teams try to figure out what that revolution is attempting to accomplish.  The Orlando Magic, for example, have done a masterful job of plowing into the social media space well out of proportion for the size of their media market and their lack of a national fan base http://www.adamsherk.com/social-media/most-popular-nba-teams-twitter-facebook/.  The Magic got out in front of the game and have stayed there.

            But other teams have done an equally good job of understanding what it means to be in that space and been very bold in creating some new ideas that complete that vision.  The New Jersey Devils:

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2012/01/09/Franchises/Devils.aspx 

and the Pittsburgh Penguins:

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2011/10/24/Franchises/Penguins.aspx 

seem to understand that it isn’t enough just to be in social media or web spaces, but that the conversation has to be a two-way conversation.  These businesses, and others, understand it isn’t just that the business speaks to the consumer in a new location, but that the structure of the conversation itself has changed.  If the business is in position to have a conversation where there is give and take, where it listens as well as speaks to the consumer, the business is more likely to make a sale.

About Me

About Me

I'm Josh Mora, aka JAMarketer.  My background and my current position offer me a very unique perspective on the Sports Business and Sports Marketing Industry.  For the first 17 years of my professional career, I was an award-winning Sports Anchor, Reporter, Host and Journalist in some of the biggest and best sports markets in the country.  I was the main anchor and managing editor for the first successful regional sports network, which launched the boom of RSN's from the mid-90's.  As sports journalism adapted to technology, I was one of the first to embrace blogging, personal branding and multi-platform distribution as necessary ingredients in successful sports media coverage.

In 2009, I discovered that technology had so revolutionized the communications industry, especially in regards to journalism, that the best of my skills and passions lent themselves more towards sports business than towards sports media.  By a stroke of extremely good fortune, I had the opportunity to meet with the COO of Full Sail University at a time when Full Sail was beginning to explore the possibility of creating a degree program based in sports. In the years that have followed, we have created the very first program in the country that holistically combines the teaching of content creation, traditional and advanced media, and sports business and marketing principles and threads it throughout the educational program.  We have additionally created several unique partnerships with such companies as ESPN, the Orlando Magic, ESPN Wide World of Sports, as well as many others, that allow our students unique opportunities to contribute to these organizations as a part of their course of study, and to apply their learnings immediately to real-world situations.

I'm a fan of sports -- I love the NHL playoffs, Opening Day in the Major Leagues, the Masters, the Triple Crown, and NFL Sundays.  I love watching great athletes perform at the top of their game, and I love watching great plays that define crucial moments.  But mostly, I love those moments that put highlights in your hair.  I love the drama that builds up when some sports entity emphasizes the possible, like these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKkcoL2kjG0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2w3HTcxwAo&feature=related

These are the moments when sports brands -- be they teams, sports, athletes, companies -- connect with fans, often for a lifetime of highs and lows, joys and sorrows, shared moments with parents and friends and children.

I think that's worth dedicating a life to.

Foundations

When I sat down to create the new Sports Marketing and Media Bachelor's degree at Full Sail University, I drafted a team to figure out what the industry was saying about itself.  That is, what could people working in the industry tell us about the problems and needs in the industry, particularly from a labor force that we were about to help create and invent.

What we heard back, with near unanimity, was that sports-based industries were having difficulty connecting their dynamic Gen-X sales and sponsorship people, with the communications technology used by the Millennials.  It's not that the guys in their 40's couldn't use a Macbook or Twitter, but that they didn't really know how to converse with the people in the medium in them.  There are few people speaking to this generational break better than Don Tapscott, who writes about it in his book "Grown Up Digital.

From this, and from my own experiences having been in the business, we also discovered that many sports businesses are so consumed by their own day-to-day operations, that they lose sight of what it really means to connect, and the importance of connecting in a world in which it is difficult to be heard above the cacophony of businesses (particularly in sports), who attempt to compete for your attention.  To that end, Sally Hogshead is very much at the forefront of modern thought.  Her message is mostly about personal branding, which has some resonance in sports in a very defined niche, but it can be expanded to reach into general thoughts about standing out in a crowded world.

And of course, for current thought, nothing stands out like Sports Business Journal, as an in-industry chronicle of the different ways in which sports businesses and individuals are working and thinking about different problems within the industry.

These are just a couple of the resources that provide, in different measures, some of the core ingredients that make up the recipe of our degree program.  It is a living and breathing degree program and thus it moves fluidly.

My interest goes beyond just that which we create for our students.  My interests are also about the business decisions and partnerships which support our degree, and the really interesting partnerships and activations I get to observe in researching the degree.  I also love getting to put these kinds of deals together and to build something really interesting, new and creative, and as I develop this blog I think it will be as much about exploring the depths of great partnerships as it will be about the problems we pose for our students.

Thanks for taking a peek behind our curtain...we'll reveal more as time goes on!