Sunday Forum: The secret to game-day presentation

Good Sunday morning. A few things to start your week.

• Previewing this week’s CAA World Congress of Sports
• Stories and photos of the week
• This Week’s Forum: Music, mascots and moments matter on game day

SBJ is looking forward to seeing so many of you this week at the CAA World Congress of Sports. As I wrote this, we were nearing record attendance, so L.A. Live and JW Marriott will be filled with activity. If you haven’t yet, download the SBJ Events app, as it has the agenda and full attendee list.

A couple of highlights around the agenda:

— SBJ Champions panel discussion led by Proskauer’s Joe Leccese, with Steve Greenberg, Andy Lansing, Chris Plonsky and Arn Tellem is going to be filled with great storytelling.

— Outside of AI, the topic of the future I’m asked about a lot is the creator economy and how teams, leagues, brands and everyone in sports will navigate that. That’s why we focused on making that a theme of this year’s event, with two panels on Wednesday:

The Creators – Part I Creators in Sports: How Leagues and Teams are Working with Today’s Biggest Digital Stars

Featuring:

• Tim Ellis, EVP and CMO, NFL
• Dhar Mann, founder, Dhar Mann Studios
• Guest moderator: Brent Weinstein, senior leadership team, CAA

The Creators – Part II Brand Ambassadors: Why Leading Brands are Turning to Creators to Reach Sports Fans

Featuring:

• Leah Macko VP, brand marketing, Powerade
• Jesse “Jesser” Riedel, founder, Bucketsquad
• Guest moderator: Brent Weinstein, senior leadership team, CAA

These two sessions will really inform and shape future strategies and approaches. You’ll want to be in the room for these.

Remember, there is still time to register for CAA World Congress of Sports.

→ On a call this week, a top executive expressed how bullish they are on the NBA’s domestic expansion effort, and especially confident that Seattle will be a tremendously successful NBA market. They are far more bullish on Seattle than Las Vegas. Seattle really is an underrated sports market, but I did ask how many teams can Seattle support. Count them up: Mariners, Sounders, Seahawks, Kraken, Storm, Reign, Torrent, University of Washington and Seattle University, and other minor league teams. It is the 13th largest TV market in the U.S. Their argument was focused on the city’s love of the NBA and that the history of the Sonics, combined with a strong corporate hub, will make Seattle among the strongest NBA markets. Your thoughts?

→ The sponsorship strategy of Bank of America has been interesting to watch, as it’s going very deep in one sport: soccer. A company with such resources could be expected to go more horizontal across sports, and yes, they do have a number of other deals in other high-profile properties, but the brand obviously senses soccer is the right fit to target its customer base, and wants to lean into the sport at this critical moment. This week, BofA was named the retail bank of the NWSL’s Gotham FC, but this joins other bigger investments, including a FIFA deal for the World Cup, a deal with U.S. Soccer, the Portland Timbers, and also signing David Beckham as a brand ambassador under a five-year deal, which was a major investment. Bottom line: It’s a good example of a major brand going very vertical and deep in trying to own one sport, from participation to the pros.

→ Biggest feedback I got all week from the Morning Buzzcast was that the new NFL-backed professional flag football league is looking for a top operating executive. TMRW Sports retained Elevate Talent to launch a search for a president of flag football, reporting to TMRW Sports founder and CEO Mike McCarley while working closely with the NFL. Interest in this role was expected: a league launch, tied to what most believe is a tremendous growth opportunity and with the resources of the NFL.

→ A reader emailed me, “I thought your selection of Michael Jordan as an Executive of the Year nominee was curious, until I watched his CBS interview. Now I get it.” That was one of a few notes I received on Jordan’s interview with Gayle King on “CBS Sunday Morning,” where he showed his usual command of a subject but also his desire to change a system he felt needed to be changed. It was an interview a long time in the making, as sources said King has pursued this for years, and so they made it happen around NASCAR’s Phoenix race and showed off the race-day experience to her. CBS has multiple edits of the interview, and Jordan come across very well: polished, prepared, interested, collaborative and curious, not bitter or outside the tent. He sounded and acted like a leader. It was also the ideal non-NASCAR audience to get people interested in the sport or to check out 23XI Racing.

→ There continues to be a lot of angst from World Cup Host Cities about their operating agreement with FIFA. One could argue they knew what they were signing up for, but here’s another example from the Boston Globe of the challenge. The top executive of Boston’s organization committee acknowledged the pressures of finding corporate sponsors during a busy summer schedule that includes America’s 250th birthday. That city may also downsize its plans for its fan fest at Boston City Hall Plaza.

“Fundraising has been a challenge,” said Mike Loynd, chief executive of Boston Soccer 26, the local organizing committee. “The overall [Massachusetts 250] event cycle has put a lot of demands on fund-raising in the corporate environment. … There’s a lot of asks in the market right now.” He added the committee’s budget may wind up dipping below $100 million, down from the $170 million initially projected in 2023. The games are expected to draw two million visitors to the Boston area.

→ A fun story from longtime baseball executive Charles Steinberg, who I write about below in a piece on game presentation. Reggie Jackson played one season for the Baltimore Orioles: 1976. One time, the team posted on the scoreboard statistics of Jackson’s exceptional hitting success against a certain pitcher, Mike Caldwell, whom he was facing from the Milwaukee Brewers. Steinberg shared with me, “Reggie walked into the office the next day and told us and our legendary PR director, Bob Brown, ‘Hey, you can’t put up that note you put up last night. If that pitcher takes a look at that stat on the board, that next pitch is going to be in my ear.” Steinberg’s point, of course, is that it made the Orioles and other teams be cognizant of paying attention to player reaction to messaging, and that all types of communication have to keep in mind the response from players and managers.

While on the subject of baseball and the Orioles, I was a PR intern at the team in the strike-shortened 1994 season and was hired by Steinberg. I pinched myself every time I drove the one hour drive up I-95 from Washington, D.C., to Camden Yards to work a game, and knew how fortunate I was to be working in such a tremendous ballpark. My friend Mark Hyman shared with me the latest project from students at the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism and the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. More than two dozen worked on “Creating Camden Yards: An Oral History,” which gathered the stories of nearly 60 participants and is presented in five acts. It’s worth your time. Let me know your favorite/notable memory of Camden Yards.

→ More reader feedback on the best sports documentaries:

“As We Rise: 25 Years of the WNBA” (2021): An NBA TV documentary that looks back at the foundation built by David Stern, Val Ackerman, and others, launching in June 1997.

Obviously, “The Last Dance,” and I really enjoyed “America’s Team.”

The two documentaries I’ve got everyone on my sports team watching are “Earnhardt” on Amazon Prime and “Brawn GP” on Disney Hulu. With new regulations in F1, the Brawn doc is particularly relevant in highlighting how regulations can impact performance as well as the importance of the business side and financials of a motorsports organization. The things that team did to get by were truly innovative and still haven’t been fully adopted yet.

There are so many to choose from … here are my favorite sports docs in no particular order:

“Battered Bastards of Baseball” (Netflix)

“Andre the Giant” (HBO)

“The Identity Theft of Mitch Mustain” (Amazon Prime)

“The Russian Five” (Amazon Prime)

“This Was the XFL” (ESPN 30 for 30)

“First Pitch” (ESPN 30 For 30 short)

“Miracle: The Boys of ’80” (Netflix)

“Qualified” (Janet Guthrie) (ESPN 30 for 30)

“June 17^th, 1994” (ESPN 30 for 30)

I’m still taking recommendations, so send them along.

→ Photos of the Week below include WISE’s event in New York City and more.

→ If you missed Morning Buzzcast, check out this week’s episodes here.

→ Remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Check out our Early Access stories from this week’s magazine, coming out tomorrow, this week’s Forum, and our Faces and Places photo gallery.

Baseball always delivers big-event productions, from Opening Day to All-Star Games to historical events and playoffs. The setting of the sport lends itself to such pageantry. I always think about this around Opening Day, and this year, there were grand productions at Dodger Stadium around their World Series title; at Oracle Park, as the San Francisco Giants opened the season on Netflix; the Toronto Blue Jays had a big and ambitious opener around the team’s 50^th season; the Tampa Bay Rays celebrated the reopening of Tropicana Field in style; and the Boston Red Sox honored their 1986 team that came one strike away from winning the World Series. All big productions, challenging and complex efforts, and, in these specific cases, focused on the team and baseball.

Event presentation and game-day entertainment are among the most important aspects of a fan’s sports experience, and teams are better than ever at this. It’s something I’ve long followed, and as I read Don Costante’s new book, “Beyond The Scoreboard: The Ultimate Guide to Sports Event Presentation,” you understand just how much there is to this puzzle.

First, the overall philosophy starts from above — and the vision of ownership plays a major role in the approach. Costante’s point is that while you and I will see a final product, what ultimately determines success happens through leadership decisions, structural alignment and the ability of the event director to deliver. A chapter that intrigued me was when he recalled a change in ownership philosophy at the baseball team he worked for. It shifted from a broad-based, “fan-centric” effort that looked across pop culture to more “sport-centric,” where all content was based on baseball. So, that meant eliminating various programming, live entertainment and reducing the number of contests to only those that were sponsored.

He also writes that some wanted a “team-centric” approach, with the attention focused on players; each player appearance would have to be structured and submitted weeks in advance. But that offered up curveballs: Which players are used? Do others get overlooked and feel slighted? Will team operations intervene and offer their suggestions, thoughts or pushback? Both of these approaches clearly narrowed his options, and the programming became far less diverse and tailored to only a segment of the audience. He felt that didn’t cast a wide enough net to attract the casual fan.

As I thought more about this, I remembered one of the first people who hired me in sports while he worked at the Baltimore Orioles. Charles Steinberg is well-known as being among the best in class when it comes to scripting powerful game-day productions; he did so for years at Fenway Park with the Red Sox, and continues today with the Worcester WooSox. Steinberg shared his philosophy on event presentation that he has followed since he joined the Orioles at the age of 17: “Who is the market? Who is the market you desire, and who is the market who is actually in the ballpark? That’s what you consistently have to be asking yourself,” he told me. He agreed that ownership’s direction sets the tone, and laughed when recalling, “A new owner told me, ‘You can play any song you like. Just make a list and show it to my wife for approval.’ Well, how limiting was that?”

I went to a game recently with friends who have a young boy, and as I don’t have children, it was a fun opportunity to see the game through his eyes. For him, this regular-season game was all about the atmosphere, entertainment, storytelling and pace. To Costante’s points about broad-based entertainment, the young boy loved the mascot, the giveaways and scripted acts, but he was also fully engaged in music, lighting and wanting to be on the jumbotron. Costante’s takeaway is that when these elements are aligned, the event becomes a fully emotional experience — not some disconnected in-game moments — which strengthens fan loyalty and connection to the organization. That was easy to see on this game night, as it’s about live and electronic entertainment delivering one seamless, emotional, inspiring performance.

Steinberg, who helped make “Sweet Caroline” and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” team anthems, stressed that music is critical. “You can avert your eyes from the field, the scoreboard and even the video board, but you can’t avoid the music,” Steinberg told me. “Music sets the tone. There are times for ‘Field of Dreams,’ ‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’ and ‘Hells Bells.’ I put myself into the shoes of the 10-year-old fan, to get the wonder of how that child feels; that helps you know which Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter song would be best to play.”

There are clearly different approaches: In his book, Costante said he adhered to a “fan-centric” approach, which he believes was more open and accessible, drives interest and attendance, and incorporates everyone’s needs and wishes. Steinberg’s philosophy was simply, “Listen to the children. They will always tell you what matters.”

Let me know what approaches work in your market.

Abraham Madkour can be reached at amadkour@sportsbusinessjournal.com.