Sunday Forum: “Owners don’t like to be surprised”

Good morning. A couple of things to start your week, and takeaways from NACDA in Las Vegas and SBJ’s Brand Innovation Summit in Chicago. Thanks for the continued support…

• So you want to be a GM? Two former leaders share insights
• How to build an effective content and social team
• Takeaways from NACDA and BIS
• This Week’s Forum: The A’s have a vision to build something special in Las Vegas

First, a call to arms: Can we please, please stop using “authentic”? It’s such an overused cliché. Let’s collectively find another term or word — heck, give me “real,” “original” or “genuine” — but we have to move on from “authentic.” Who is with me on this?

→ With the new-ish general manager role on college campuses, NACDA aligned with the NFL for a number of sessions around the day-to-day responsibility of the job. I sat in on a couple of panels and found a conversation with former Tennessee Titans GM Ran Carthon and longtime NFL executive Scott Pioli very insightful. They are both excellent speakers who aren’t afraid to be open and pointed. A few comments that stood out:

• Carthon detailed how a GM faces three to four problems daily that they may not be expecting or experienced to handle. Because of that relentless roller coaster, he stressed to prospective GMs to carefully organize their days. He arrived at his office at 4:30 every morning and worked until 8:30 a.m. with his door closed, just to get what he needed done, and then opened his door to focus on all the incoming requests on his time, which included those three to four problems that he’d never dealt with or wasn’t expecting. He refreshingly admitted that he overextended himself during his two-year tenure as GM, and gave anecdotes of frequent calls after midnight dealing with player issues.

• Both spoke about the importance of managing up — in their case, to NFL owners. Carthon said he worked for various owners during his nearly 20 years in front office roles: owners he never saw, owners he only heard from on Mondays after a game and owners he talked with every day — alluding that in Tennessee, he talked to owners three times a day, sometimes for hours at a time. His suggestion to anyone managing up: Ask the boss how they want to be communicated with; what’s their favorite manner of conversing? Another suggestion: Be able to talk to owners about things they want to talk about, and focus on things you have in common with the people you’re managing up to. He also stressed that he’s bilingual: “I can speak upstairs and downstairs.”

• Pioli added: “I love the presence of an owner. I knew how much I didn’t know and owners know so much about various businesses and industries, and they have so many experiences that I knew I could benefit from. So, my advice is be around them, even if they make you uncomfortable at times, but lean into that experience.”

• When offering other tips about managing up to ownership, Pioli said, “No one likes surprises, and no one hates surprises more than billionaires. None of them like surprises. They want to know everything.” In a later conversation I had with A’s President Marc Badain, he echoed that. “Owners don’t like to be surprised,” he said, when asked for his experience in managing up. “The biggest problems happen when people are worried about the consequence of dropping bad news. ... It’s sort of like the lie begets the lie begets the lie. The three different owners I worked with all have very different personalities — Al [Davis], Mark [Davis] and John [Fisher]. All of them have different reactions to hearing the bad news, but none of them like to be surprised.”

• Pioli also called on young people to brace for the grind of team operations and remarked about his days in New England. “Let’s be honest, it was not always a pleasant place to work,” he said. “You need emotional endurance.” A final piece of advice: “Don’t allow sycophants. The worst danger is having sycophants around you. ‘You’re right, you’re great.’ No, you need people to tell you the honest truth.”

→ Going through the notebook from sessions at NACDA and Brand Innovation Summit:

• Athletic department officials said they could double their video content people and still not be able to get all the work done. That’s the amount of interest and opportunity.

• In a session on content creation, athletic department staffers stressed the importance of having a strategist on your staff who can direct your social/content/activation strategy — a staffer who can incorporate all departments, who understands your athletes and their likes/interests, and who can create a content roadmap. It doesn’t matter which department the strategist sits in, but that they’re someone who constantly thinks about what works from a content perspective, what is available to sell, what is sellable, and what you can execute on; a staffer who sits in content meetings and in sales meetings. It’s also the hardest position to fill, and most fill it from within with a staffer who understands the various departments and the athletes.

• All schools are focused on sponsored content/vignettes and are driving real revenue around it, but panelists stressed that sponsored content shouldn’t have such a negative connotation. Too frequently, sponsored content is poorly presented and misguided, and therefore doesn’t make sense to fans or viewers. They agreed there is no reason the content should be poor or underperform, and most of the time, it’s because the appropriate people who can make it compelling and top quality aren’t in the room. Their point: Get as many critical people who touch content, the athletes and the clients into the room to think through all the best options.

• I was struck by the consistent theme that length of video content doesn’t matter. Some schools are doing content that runs 18 to 25 minutes and has six figures in views. The consensus was don’t worry about the length of video; if consumers really want to watch it, they will. That aligns with what Dude Perfect CEO Andrew Yaffe noted at BIS, saying sports teams assume young fans have only short attention spans. He pointed to a recent four-hour Dude Perfect video that drew a primarily young audience with an average watch time of more than an hour.

• It’s not news, but it bears repeating. The level of engagement colleges, pro teams and brands get around content from their women’s sports teams and female athletes significantly outperforms men’s sports. The college executives all agreed that it’s not even close, and this aligns with what a team president who oversees an NBA and WNBA team told me, as they stressed their WNBA social posts and content gets 10x more engagement than their NBA posts, and they are continuously blown away by it. PepsiCo’s vice president of sports and entertainment, Carolyn Braff, sees the same thing on the brand side. “Female athletes tend to bring their full selves to the partnership in a way that male athletes don’t always,” she said. “They want to be shown as multidimensional. They want to show off who they are as a full person, on and off the field of play. And that tends to appeal to a broad array of consumers, not just women.”

• Women’s sports were a consistent theme during BIS, and Braff shared Pepsi’s current point of view on its partners and the space. “We are with the W, and I would love to continue to do more with the W,” she said. “The PWHL is telling a really phenomenal story right now, so that’s a place that we will continue to lean into. Athletes Unlimited Softball League kicked off their season and that’s probably one of my favorite partners that we’ve been able to invest with because of the differentiation that they have in terms of how they’re building the model — so athlete-led, really listening to the athletes and changing based on what the athletes need.”

• Attention women’s sports properties: Your sales team will want to clip and use Braff’s data insights on women’s sports, as it will help in your pitches. “Fans of women’s sports — and those fans can be women and men — they want to support the brands that support women’s sports,” she said. “The data shows they’re buying more things from the sponsors that sponsor women’s sports because they recognize the investment that those brands are making. So that’s a big difference. You don’t see that behavior change as much in men’s sports, but fans of women’s sports, across the gender spectrum, they are supporting the brands that support women’s sports.”

→ Many know I enjoy tennis, so I did a fair share of watching Warner Bros. Discovery’s coverage of the French Open and, overall, give it good marks. While I found their studio show uncomfortably awkward at times, give me more Andre Agassi. He is really, really good: He offered a strong point of view and isn’t afraid to be critical, with his comments about Jannik Sinner’s collapse particularly noteworthy. In another segment, when pressed about “superstitions” during his playing days, he expertly shifted it to his focus on “routines” — something the viewer could relate to. Smart, smooth and insightful, Agassi checked all the boxes for me. I thought Venus Williams was very good with both storytelling and on-court strategy, and her delivery was clear and concise. Jim Courier is also very comfortable, and someone I found myself paying attention to.

QUOTES THAT STOOD OUT

• “Quaker is the official sponsor of the ‘Player Escort Program,’ which is a name that needs to be changed.” —PepsiCo’s Carolyn Braff, offering the best “Wow, that’s so true” point of the week about a program in which children walk with players onto the pitch.

• “I cringe when my colleagues ask for tickets to women’s volleyball and women’s hockey, because they are harder tickets to get than for men’s sports. … The revenue we’re driving from women’s volleyball has been amazing.” —Scott Silvestri, vice president and general manager, Badger Sports Properties at the University of Wisconsin

• “Soccer is definitely one of those sports that we see as a growing sport. It’s the most multicultural sport in the U.S., the quickest playing for youth in the U.S. and the most gender-parity sport in the U.S. So, it talks to the values of what Bank of America stands for and what we’re about.” —Brad Ross, Bank of America’s managing director of global marketing partnerships

→ Check out the latest episode of SBJ Inside the Industry. I am joined by my colleague Joe Lemire and we discuss how sports technology enhances the live sports experience. Segments include a look at OneCourt, which just won Sports Tech of the Year at SBA: Tech (18:52), and sports execs featured include Amy Brooks, president of global business development, NBA; Raul Fernandez, CEO, DXC Technology; Jez Lubenetski, EVP of global strategy and consulting, The Team; Dan Reed, former COO, Meta Reality Labs; Tina Thornton, EVP of creative studio and marketing, ESPN; Luke Tingle, senior project manager, Daktronics; and Dave Wolf, principal, KPMG.

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

→ Remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Check out our photos of the week from the Brand Innovation Summit, and this week’s Forum, which looks at the A’s move to Las Vegas — yes, they have their work cut out for them, but their new ballpark could be something special.

Over the past few years, a question I have asked a panel or sources was, “Does the A’s ballpark in Las Vegas ever get built?” The question emanated from doubts the project would ever come out of the ground — for various reasons — and even well-connected baseball reporters speculated it wouldn’t happen. Well, I’m here to say it will be built and could be one of the most stunning and talked-about new venues in sports.

I toured the job site and the A’s preview center last week in Las Vegas and came away very impressed by the vision of team owner John Fisher, President Marc Badain and everyone associated with taking such a different approach. It won’t be easy; they have their work cut out for them on the business side, and they have a lot of inventory to sell in an incredibly competitive marketplace.

But here is what stood out about MLB’s newest ballpark since Globe Life Field opened in 2020. First, the location at South Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue, right on the Strip, calls for something unique, and the A’s are building a dramatic addition to the Vegas skyline that will have a distinct personality. It’s designed by Bjarke Ingels Group and HNTB and being built by a joint venture of Mortenson and McCarthy. The first thing you notice is the intimacy, with a capacity of 33,000, and 30,000 seats. Some of that is a reflection of the land — building on just 9 acres — and some of it is the design, as they wanted fans close to the action.

The team estimates that 60% of fans will access the building through a center field entrance that offers a full, magnificent view of the ballpark and its friendly layout. The entire venue gives off an open, airy, well-lit vibe, with an incredible arched roof, and yes, it will be climate controlled to counter the Vegas heat. The building will have about 20% premium seating, so roughly 6,000 seats are tied to a suite, suite product or club, higher than the industry norm of roughly 15%. Each club has a defined offering with premium finishes, fitting for Vegas’ high-rolling consumer, and every team will see the novel Dugout Suites — the closest thing to floor seats in basketball and a product that others will replicate because of the access and premium setting. The A’s sacrificed seating, but there are numerous areas on different levels where fans can roam, from terrace bars to social, community spaces. The team is even contemplating a space where visiting fans can convene.

To help tell the story of the ballpark, the A’s worked with Advent to develop the A’s Ballpark Experience Center, about 15 minutes from the Strip. The killer app is The Cube, a curtained-off room of LED screens — think of a VR experience without the goggles. It puts a potential ticket buyer in every imaginable experience: on the roads and highways accessing the ballpark; flight times from nearby cities; the journey from parking garages, entrances, into the clubs and eventually their seat, offering full views of the ballpark. It was a stunning sensation, and teams will copy The Cube because it is an incredibly effective sales tool, benefiting sellers and buyers.

Las Vegas didn’t know the A’s brand or history, so the team needed to spend on the preview center to tell its story. The storylines around leaving the Bay Area weren’t positive, so the organization needed to do something special, and this preview center showcases the team and its unique ballpark.

With construction on time and on budget for a February 2028 opening, Badain is focused on monetizing the ballpark and building out a commercial staff. Remember, the team doesn’t have a deep database of prospects or fan information in Las Vegas. Badain’s work in building Allegiant Stadium for the Raiders will come in handy, as he can help drive relationships and hopefully ticket and suite sales.

Fisher now lives in the market and that’s a positive, because he and his leadership team will have to be active and make sure the community understands the ownership’s vision, what they want to bring to the region and what the baseball experience is going to be about.

All of this sounds easy, but it’s not, and there is a lot to sell commercially. They are starting from scratch and trying to remove the scars of their exit from Oakland. But I do have the answer to my question: Yes, the A’s ballpark will be built in Las Vegas, the team will play there starting in 2028 and the fan experience will be unlike any other in sports. In an age when we stress innovation and originality, the A’s are offering both at a ballpark that will have long-term implications and influence on future facilities.

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