2024 Year-End Highlights from the All Access Interview Series Podcast

In this episode, we’re going to look back on 2024 to explore the most significant trends in the sports business industry.

In Year 4 of the podcast, we had the pleasure of hosting leaders from brands like Nationwide, Deloitte, BMO, and more, who all gave their takes on the trends and challenges that are shaping the sports business world today.

This episode only scratches the surface of what our guests had to offer. If you missed any episodes this year, be sure to go back and check them out!

2024 was the year of inclusivity, with brands taking a hard look at how their sponsorships help to achieve their purpose-driven goals. From the rise of women’s sports to the Caitlin Clark-Effect and sponsorship intentionality, our first four guests take a deep dive into the importance of inclusion.

Jason Andrea, Chief Revenue Officer, Las Vegas Aces: I think those extra eyeballs are fantastic for the game at a wonderful time.

For me, it’s fantastic to see the A’ja Wilsons, the Breanna Stewarts, the Jewel Loyds, Kelsey Plums, Chelsea Grays, Jackie Youngs being able to be seen by more people. The more exposure the better because you are truly seeing how great this game is and seeing it at its best. The league is 28 years in existence but now is the best basketball that’s been played.

When it comes to capitalizing on that from a revenue perspective, for us we have done a great job on the ticketing side of things. It fortified what we are doing on that side of the house. From a partnership standpoint, it just adds value to the conversations we are already having and the partners we already have.

Our partners who were on board with the Aces before this year are seeing the effects and the aftermath of all of the viewership numbers, and they are overjoyed from that perspective. That’s how we will be able to continue to grow partnerships—by having those partners talking about it and using them as an example with others we are having conversations with.
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Jim McCoy, Associate Vice President of Sports Marketing, Nationwide: The explosion in women’s sports has been remarkable, most recently with the Caitlin Clark effect the last couple of weeks. We are proud to have been ahead of that curve, having headed into the National Women’s Soccer League four or five years ago. It’s a relatively young league, but we have seen incredible growth, both from a team standpoint going from 10 to announcing their 15^th and 16^th teams, as well as their huge new media deal with Scripps ION, Amazon, Paramount and ESPN that will almost double the number of games out there.

Going into it, we knew the fan base was very avid, excited, and socially and digitally active. It allowed us to broaden our reach to a new audience. We’re really excited about what we have seen the first three years and about the next four.

We have built a community-impact platform with the NWSL that will come out in the next couple of months with a rebrand and some exciting elements connected to that. It’s an opportunity for us from a media standpoint to grow our presence and do more with the teams. We have 14 player ambassadors who we work with to tell their stories and that has been fantastic. We refresh that every year.

We have even built an internship program after the season to bring four to six women into Columbus to see what working at a Fortune 100 company looks like.

As a sponsor, we always want to do something more than just hang a banner, put the logo on signage, etc. We want to be integrated into a sport, help it grow and do what we can to enhance the experience for the fans.
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Tony Wells, Veteran Marketing Executive:  I subscribe to the thought that a rising tide lifts all boats. When you look at where the demographics are headed in the U.S. and you look at all the studies that have been done around how a more inclusive approach to business drives outcomes, I continue to be surprised that there is such concern and people who are against the idea.

That aside, the role of a marketer is to skate where the puck is going and ensure a brand stays relevant. When you don’t approach your sponsorship portfolio through a DEI lens, you risk losing a lot of your audience.

You need to look at it from a messaging standpoint, a creative standpoint, a media perspective and ensure that the communication around whatever property you have takes those into consideration.

I also believe that when you look internally to what is happening inside your company, you need to look at this from a supply chain perspective. In terms of talent, who is in front of the camera? Who is behind the camera? Is there a diverse set of folks at the table for the conversation about activating a property? When you don’t have that, you risk your communication being off target.

When you spend this type of money you want to ensure you get the full exposure, the full benefit and the ROI. I don’t know any property that doesn’t have an audience that is made up of people with different perspectives. What resonates with a Hispanic NFL fan is very different from an African-American fan. So you just have to think about that as you activate.
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Todd Fischer, Executive Vice President, Client Consulting, GMR Marketing: For us, it starts with the brand and understanding what it is, what it stands for, and its role and benefit in society. To do anything purposeful, it has to be authentic. We’ve both seen examples of a brand trying to draft off of something else purposeful going on. Consumers today are savvy and expecting to understand the ideals and the values of why those brands are associated and even why properties and causes are allowing those brands to partner with them if it’s coming from an inauthentic place.

The brand DNA and purpose translates into how you show up. In terms of activation, are you adding to the experience or are you becoming a distraction away from the experience? There are ways to do purpose work meaningfully and also be additive to the experience.

That is what I have seen change the most. Fans are receptive now to the idea that sport in particular—and partnerships in general—can add to the fabric of society while still being fun, while still being monetized. All of those things can be true, and the real magic happens when they start to overlap.

To use a real-world example, everybody wants to talk about women’s sports. GMR has been in the space, driving investment, having conversations with our clients for years. A lot of that was about not just showing up because it was a cause or the right thing to do but was the right place for those brands to impact their business.
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You can’t truly cover 2024 without highlighting the premier event of the year: the 2024 Paris Summer Games. Our next two guests highlighted the excitement drummed up amongst sponsors and attendees, and highlighted how a massive brand is activating their Olympic sponsorships.

Ken Hanscom, Chief Operating Officer, TicketManager: There is so much excitement because sponsors and others doing corporate entertaining missed out on Tokyo, which was meant to be a massive party and celebration. Same with Beijing during the pandemic.

As with other live events post-Covid, there is pent-up demand, and that is what we are seeing in Paris. More brands, even if they are not sponsors, are taking groups of people over there because it is an opportunity people have missed out on since 2018.

Beyond that, there are some very unique circumstances around Paris. We have an opening ceremony that is not going to be in a stadium. It will be going along the Seine River with more than 100 boats going by carrying athletes. For the first time ever, there will be a few hundred thousand people who can experience that—not just a stadium of 60,000 or 70,000 people.

There are also some really iconic venues that will offer first-ever experiences, which is one of my favorite things to do. You can see equestrian competition at the Palace of Versailles. You can watch fencing or taekwondo at the Grand Palais. And of course, beach volleyball in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. These are unique experiences in a great city like Paris. So, I think there’s lots of excitement. Some of the other things were seeing around the city is, there is a lot more sponsorship opportunities.
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Suzanne Kounkel, Global and US Chief Marketing Officer, Deloitte: We were privileged to work with the IOC and Paris Olympic Games organizers. They pulled off an amazing Olympic experience this summer. We have incredible stories about the work we are doing for the IOC as we think about them executing the games over the 10-year period of our commitment, which we call a “partnership with purpose.”

The longevity of that commitment is very important to us, but the storytelling around the IOC going out and looking for the partner that they wanted to work with to deliver on some of their most critical business issues gives us the ability to talk about the fact that with half the world watching they chose Deloitte to be the partner to deliver those things that are required to deliver the games in the future. That’s a very powerful client storytelling platform for us that we are very proud of.

But it also allowed us to talk about Team Deloitte and our support of athletes and our support of our talent to pursue multifaceted goals. So it allows us a very rich and dynamic platform as well.
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Our next three guests joined the show to discuss their unique activations and sponsorship deals in emerging spaces. They dove into the world of NIL, the ever-evolving Esports space, and a very unique NASCAR event.

Mark Youngworth, Chief Operating Officer, Zips Carwash: We are very proud of Car Wash Convos. It is our first jump into the NIL space. We looked at opportunities to connect with consumers in a meaningful and unique way. We didn’t feel it was right to just have a student athlete standing outside our car wash next to a shiny car giving the traditional advertising thumbs up. We wanted to have a bit more fun and be unexpected with the way we approached it.

We based the series off of James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke. We said, “What if we matched up student athletes in a car driving through our tunnel?” The most exciting part of a car wash is when you are in the tunnel. That’s when the magic happens—the sights, sounds, colors and scents. What I love about the series is you get an honest reaction from the student-athletes. Obviously, we have some fun questions prepared to understand who they are as people, their personalities, who they are as student athletes, etc., but you also get the real environment of being in a car wash, which adds some interest and excitement to it.

We have a student-athlete host from the university interview another student athlete from the same university, all dressed in their school swag at one of our local car washes.

Just in Season One of Carwash Convos, we had well over 50 million brand impressions, but at the end of the day it also helped us improve our traffic and our sales, as well as our overall brand recognition.
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Matt O’Brien, Senior Vice President/Chief Revenue Officer, Rock Entertainment Group: You mentioned the public ups and downs of esports, but through that esports viewership has continued to grow—nine percent in 2023.

The issue with esports has been it is something you played yourself, now how does that relate to you watching professionals play?

We are trying to integrate brand partners such as Lexus, Heineken, AT&T, Adidas and Crocs across the entire business. They have value coming back through multiple verticals, not just esports. That allows us flexibility.

Those partnerships can look really different from each other. We did an amazing Nadeshot hole-in-one challenge with AT&T. We put Matt, who is an avid golfer, on a par-three tee box and said we would shoot for a day until he hit a hole in one.

Some people might have questioned why a gaming and esports organization did that, but a lot of our followers, fans and community are not gamers sitting in their basement. They play golf, they are into fashion, etc.

We drew a huge audience online. Matt nailed a hole in one on his 79th shot. It’s all about the crossover. Same with the NBA. Somewhere between gaming and the NBA is this awesome community of connection. The guys on our NBA roster are playing against esports creators, etc.

Our biggest challenge is explaining the business and how we can extract value from it, because a lot of people who are great marketers love the audience, but don’t know how to get to it.
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Julie Giese, President, NASCAR Chicago Street Race: We wanted this to be a racing and entertainment experience. The race is our hallmark and the focus of the event weekend. We have a race on Saturday and a race on Sunday. Ultimately, you are going to a race experience, but given the location we are in and talking about what summer is all about in Chicago with the festival feel, we wanted to lean into that and incorporate some of those components. So you will have a very well-rounded entertainment experience when you are there with concerts as well as a lot of activations and displays. Our drivers will be participating in a number of different Q&As. We will have them on the main stage just prior to The Chainsmokers on Saturday night.

Our strategy is to provide something for everybody from an entertainment perspective and also how they consume the race. So we have a broad mix of product offerings from a general admission ticket allowing you to walk around the footprint and see the race from different vantage points to reserved seating, where you still have the ability to walk around but you have a dedicated seat you can watch the race from.

There is also a demand for hospitality and the all-inclusive experiences. We have a few different hospitality experiences with reserved seats and a club right behind. We also have our ultra-premium Skyline Club, which features suites as well as single-admission Founders Club hospitality where we will have our restaurant partners from RPM Italian and all of the Lettuce Entertain You venues serving food.

For us, again, it’s about making sure we have something for everybody, knowing we are in a unique market. NASCAR will be new to a lot of our attendees. Last year, 85 percent of our attendees were at their first NASCAR race.
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Finally, a key focus for sponsorship professionals in 2024 was effectively leveraging data and judging the impact of their deals. Our final four guests shared their insights on this topic, giving their takes on the early days of sponsorship data and analysis techniques.

Rob Prazmark, Founder & CEO, 21 Sports & Entertainment Marketing Group: Same with Jerry Jones. He would say the Cowboys were America’s Team, but when I asked him how he knew that, he would say, “I just feel it.” But he gave me the money to do research that proved that the Cowboys were, in fact, America’s Team. We never could have sold Cowboys sponsorships for the dollars we were asking unless we had those reams of data as proof.
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Matt Yonan, President, Tigris Marketing: From our perspective, measurement today is still very linear. By that I mean it is very much about measuring one piece—brand awareness or brand loyalty, etc. That’s great but how do all of those things come together?

If you have a company’s C-level execs in a room and you ask them to define sponsorship success, I guarantee you they will each give a different answer. How can you make each of them happy if you are only measuring one particular thing?

We measure as much as we can get our hands on and create a model for clients that combines all of things into a system where now—if I have six, seven or eight components that are impacting what success is for this partnership—I can tell you what is going wrong the deal. I can point to something, bring the data in and say this is what we have to change next year to be successful. Ninety percent of the industry will say they have a feeling of what might be wrong, but they are not exactly sure. That’s the difference-maker and why we are sticky with a lot of clients.
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Shelley Johnsen, Managing Director of Sponsorships, BMO: When we look at our two jobs to do—brand building and business building—across our key markets, I’m really proud of the fact that with our sponsorship properties alone we are reaching more than 50 percent of our consumer addressable audience.

With respect to our category, we by no means have the deepest pockets, but I believe in our ability to out-activate not just our competitive set, but other brands.

When we look at the business side, I mentioned we have 100-plus client experiences that we create in partnership with the lines of business, but we also foster relationships across the business with our partners to establish banking relationships that ultimately deliver millions in revenue back to BMO.
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Mike Falconer, Vice President of Strategy, Sportradar: What we observed very early on was when you activate against first-party data the baton was being dropped because two things were happening. One was that these collective sponsors were activating in silos, each doing their own thing. That created a chaotic environment. There was no supervision or control over what was happening.

That in itself is bad for the fan experience because there is no one looking out for them. The other thing that was happening, which was more of a worry for brands, is that they were pushing each other’s prices up. You would find that one sponsor was bidding against another sponsor to engage the same fan, which is counterproductive. The only “winner” there was the media owner.

With those two thoughts in our mind, we asked ourselves how we could create an environment where there is fairness, and where sponsors’ different status was considered and respected, and at the same time eliminate the internal competition that existed, all the while ensuring that the fan experience is curated.
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Thank you for watching this episode of the TicketManager All Access Interview Series, and a big thank you to all the industry leaders who joined us throughout 2024. We couldn’t be more excited for 2025 and all the engaging conversations to come. From everyone here at TicketManager, happy holidays and have a great new year!