👋 Welcome back to Sponcon Sports, a weekly newsletter dedicated to sponsored content strategy in the sports industry!

The countdown to the Gondola Sports Summit has begun!

I'm thrilled to be a speaker at the event, but even before being asked to participate, I was eagerly anticipating attending.

The agenda confirms that this is the go-to event for content professionals in social media, digital marketing, video production, or creative strategy.

With 18 sessions packed with original content, there's a lot to look forward to. Here are a few sessions I'm particularly excited about:

• Winning Strategies for Media Day and Other Event-Based Bulk Production.

• Building an Effective Live Content Correspondent Program featuring reps from MLB, NFL, NBA, and the Big 12 Conference!

• Leadership Roundtable on Building and Developing High-Performing Social Teams.

We're just over a month away from the summit, so don't forget to use my code "sponconsports" to get $50 off your ticket.

Reply to this email if you're heading to Denver so we can connect IRL.

In Today’s Edition:

• Insights From The Atlanta Dream’s SVP of Growth 🪴 

• The Knicks’ Jesser-Inspired Sponcon Win 🤩 

• B/R’s Courtside Cam Gets A Sponsor 🎥 

🏊️ DEEP DIVE
How The Atlanta Dream Drive Organization-Wide Growth With Digital Content

Speaking of connecting with talented people, I recently had the pleasure of connecting with Dan Gadd from the Atlanta Dream.

Dan joined the Dream in 2022 as the organization’s first SVP of Growth, spearheading their comprehensive growth strategy encompassing Marketing, Digital, Ticketing, Sponsorships, and Business Intelligence.

Prior to his tenure in the WNBA, Dan helped lead the Atlanta Falcons as the Senior Director of Digital Strategy, overseeing a complete digital and content evolution that propelled the Falcons to the top spot in MVP Index’s Engagement Rankings among NFL teams.

His professional journey also includes notable stints at Taylor, a sports and entertainment agency, as well as with the Chicago Bears and Jacksonville Jaguars.

Dan brings a distinctive perspective to the sports industry, having driven success from the content domain, and is now positioned to leverage those insights to fuel organization-wide growth as a senior leader for the Dream.

Our conversation spanned various topics related to the pivotal role of digital content and marketing in advancing businesses within the sports industry, including:

• Creating captivating content that grabs the audience's attention in a crowded online space.

• Using content to strengthen brand connection, drive leads, and support sales efforts.

• Empowering the digital/content team as strategic leaders who shape direction.

• Advising partners on content strategies that match their brand and audience.

• Cultivating a collaborative, creative culture to encourage innovative ideas.

• Growing the fan base through memorable experiences and community outreach.

Note: Questions and answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

ALEX: What was the vision when you moved from the Atlanta Falcons to the Atlanta Dream?

DAN: At the time, the Dream had a new ownership group, and there was a chance to rebuild from the ground up.

We [the Atlanta Falcons] had built a really unbelievable collaborative creative culture specifically within the digital team. My boss with the Falcons, Morgan Shaw Parker, had been hired as the Atlanta Dream’s new President and Chief Operating Officer. We started talking about how you take something like that creative culture and make it go across an entire company.

How do you build a collaborative, creative culture where people can build on each other's ideas across an organization?

It's almost impossible no matter how you diagram it on an org chart to get in a room and be collaborative if everybody's walking in there with a different definition of success. And that was the starting point. Could we get every function trying to achieve the same things and with the same basic priorities?

One of the embodiments of this that I’m proud of is the synergy between our marketing and ticket sales groups. In the first six months, we hired a VP of Ticket Sales (Adam Boliek) and a Director of Marketing (Hannah Kronick Spencer). I sat in between a lot of those conversations and those two leaders formed a fantastic relationship and they built a trust that allowed both sides to play to their strengths.

That kind of collaboration was the vision.

How do you make sure that you know on the marketing and content side we're able to do these high-performance things that reach lots of people and help build and grow the brand and at the same time drive quality leads and help deliver the best possible phone calls for our sales team to drive ticket sales?

We've done both and we've been very good, especially in tentpole moments on the content side. And on the ticket sales side, we're reaching heights that are multiple times what the ticket sales revenue was prior to the pandemic so it's just been fun to watch that and we're trying to do that across the organization.

ALEX: What is content's role in growing the business across departments?

DAN: If you're going to be seen, you've got to be competing with all the other entertainers in that landscape. We have to compete as an entertainment business.

So, the mission of the content team is to go out and get in front of as many new people as we can try to build the brand and position us as something that people are interested in.

If you can have content go far and wide, there are a million ways you can drive revenue with the audiences that were interested in that content, whether they watched it, interacted with it, or visited our website.

The job of the content team is to go out and build content that gets in front of as many people as possible and then we build really good performance marketing pieces underneath the hood that allows us to retarget on paid social, that gets people into our database, that become quality leads, that we can email or text and we can do all these other things with.

The biggest thing is, that allows us to put our sales team on the phone with people who have already raised their hands and shown that they're interested as opposed to cold calling.

I think probably the most fundamental thing that I learned at Taylor and working with a lot of top-tier brands and seeing how businesses operate was the digital team is usually a sub-function of some other group.

They're not at the table as strategy leaders. They're normally being told what to promote, or trying to amplify something or push something. Basically, the digital people are not sitting the digital strategy.

If we all agree that digital is critical to business success, that setup needs to change. Let's have the digital people who are experts in the space set the digital strategy and quite honestly, that is going to drive the best results for our partners too.

We want to be the best brand counselors we can be to our partners.

That means putting them on content and digital products that we know our audience is going to be interested in and will earn their attention because the thing that doesn't get discussed enough in this space is the difference between the ceiling and the floor.

Things that don't get reacted to don't get seen. And we're not doing a good job with our partners if we're putting them on things that people aren't interested in. Those are some of the fundamental things that we're building around.

ALEX: How do you navigate conversations when clients push for bad content knowing paid social boosting can help them drive reach?

Dan: Let me start with my agency experience at Taylor.

I'd say my first six to nine months, I'm on all of these calls. And I was struggling, because it was kind of a new world to me, listening to how the creative agencies were advising the brands and how the content was created.

The process was usually still a product of 1950s TV advertising. It always started with ‘What is our brand message? What is our product differentiation?’ Then create ad. Then push to audience.

That works when you’re delivering advertising to a popular show that already has an audience. But it doesn’t work when you’re trying to compete in the competitive content landscape to earn an audience. Audience interests were usually only discussed in the most superficial manner.

So when this is what brands are used to, as an agency consultant you find yourself getting pulled in two directions. You're trying to sell in work to the brand, but you're trying to sell in what they want, not what you know is actually good content.

In my early days at the agency, I found myself putting ideas in front of clients that I thought they would buy, but I knew were terrible content ideas because they matched their brand campaign, or it matched their messaging, but there was no discussion around if anybody would be interested in this.

I felt like I was failing. Then I had a bit of an epiphany. I was like, if I'm going to go down, I'm gonna start to tell clients what I know to be true as opposed to what they want to hear.

That flipped everything for me. I got put in an email brainstorm for Tide, and our agency had yet to sell in a digital content activation with them. I wrote up an idea around the NFL Draft that I knew would be successful.

They selected it and it took off. Tide was the top brand activating at that draft. Within a year, they were our top digital client. And we did it by now putting them on things in the sports sponsorship space that we knew fans were going to love instead of things that were simply extensions of ad campaigns.

To me, that is being a good brand counselor.

How do we convince them that the high-performance content that this audience is passionate about is where you want your brand to be?

Most of these brands have a creative agency that can create whatever they want, and they have a media agency that can drive millions of impressions with that ad creative. That’s great if you want to push a message to a broad audience.

The one difference with digital content in a sports sponsorship is you know that the audience is all passionate about one thing. And reach is dependent on the reaction of that audience. Why wouldn't you try to tap into the thing that they're passionate about? You have a chance to do more than just drive a message. You can shape perception and favorability. And that ultimately drives purchase intent. And there is data to back that up.

Marketing is influence. There are not enough discussions around the insights and the things that are going influence this group of people and quite honestly, that's the most mandatory conversation there is in the content space.

If you’re in content, you’re in the competitive business of winning people’s time and attention. We're competing against Netflix, we're competing against Hulu, we're competing against ESPN and Bleacher Report and Mr. Beast and a million others that are really good at earning people’s time and attention. So the start of our process can’t be ‘What are we trying to promote?’ If we're not leading those conversations with questions about what is going to influence and earn people's attention, we're irrelevant. And the brands that we put on that stuff aren’t going to benefit.

ALEX: What is a good approach to pushing back on a client with solutions that work for both sides?

DAN: You can't just blindly put them on any content. It has to match the brand equity of that partner.

And it has to start with trust between myself and our SVP of Strategic Partnerships and Community Impact, Laila Brock, and our teams. We share a lot of information so everyone has the same strategic principles and beliefs, and the same basic motivation to deliver the best assets we can for our partners.

One of those is the fundamental belief that we’re not doing right by our partner if we’re putting them on content that no one pays attention to.

The content landscape is the place to illustrate the brand equity of that partner and try to match it with one of your content pillars or buckets that's going to work with that audience.

Or you need to have enough versatility in your digital product portfolio to meet their needs. Where people get into some trouble is they're not looking at the diversity of the products they have when there is a need for a product message. Too often, the first instinct is to put them on social content, which is dependent on audience reaction for reach. And we’re not benefiting our partners if we’re putting them on things that the platform algorithms are going to kill.

There's a lot of, I call it forced exposure areas where the audience reach and impressions are determined by other factors. Whether it's your billboards, it's LED signage, it's ad banners, it's pre-roll, it's things in the app, it's banners in email. 

There's a number of ways to get a product message out there, but if you're leading with a product message in the content landscape, you're usually fighting a losing battle against all of the other content creators who are just there to try to earn people's time and attention.

It just means looking at the entire portfolio of assets and determining which ones are going to deliver the brand equity or messaging that partner is looking for.

ALEX: How did the Falcons succeed with sponsored content while climbing MVP Index’s Engagement Rankings?

DAN: We had an incredibly talented team. And I’ll give Chris Jones a lot of credit. I think he was the first Digital Partnership person in sports. Or at least the first one I was aware of. There was no blueprint for what he was doing at the time. He had to work hard to try and bridge that gap and balance the needs and objectives of both sponsorship and holistic digital strategy. ‘Hey, we're going to drive sponsorship, and we don't want to put them on bad content.’

It really comes down to how well we communicate with the partners, and what is going to put them in the best possible light with our audiences.

How well can we help the sponsorship team build the case for needing to be on things that we're doing that are going to be high-quality content?

Every league has these numbers, and the NFL had it too at the time. The increased scores that partners were getting for things like favorability, loyalty and purchase intent when they were on a team partnership. It was because you're tapping into people's passion, there's something there that you can make them feel.

We needed to communicate that, beyond the things that are going to make people feel and love you and impact your brand perception with our audience.

If somebody wanted to drive app downloads, then we needed to find a different digital product for them, too. We weren't going to drive app downloads for a partner in Instagram posts.

So there was a lot of legwork that had to be done to try and be as good a brand counselor as possible on that stuff. That was always at the center of the conversations I had with Chris, Morgan Weeks, and then Ed Cahill. That digital partnership group with the Falcons was phenomenal.

ALEX: What are you focusing on with the Dream as you enter your third season with the team?

DAN: The most beneficial thing that we can do is grow the fan base.

We're doing a really good job on the season ticket side of things. But one of the numbers I'm looking at is how many people bought tickets for the first time. That's a huge indicator for us in terms of how we are growing this thing.

Eventually, we've got to scale that at a different pace. But scaling this across all the departments is important.

We’re working across all of our functions to bring the full weight of the organization to partnerships and be on the same page where the end goal is if we all have the same motivations and priorities, we should have an environment where the best idea wins.

Now when somebody throws an idea out, because everybody is trying to get to the same place, others are going to be more excited about building on that idea.

ALEX: With the popularity of women's sports and the WNBA shooting up, especially with more stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese entering the league, how do you capitalize on that moment so that it has staying power over time?

DAN: Our best creator of fans is our fan experience at the games.

We've put a massive investment over the last three years into the fan experience at games. Our approach to it is uncommon. We are not looking at entertainment acts as a revenue source.

We're looking at that as, how do we make sure that people come back?

I’m very confident in our fan experience. Hannah Kronick Spencer, who just went to US Soccer, and I used to talk a lot about how our brand strategy has to be to get people to the game because that is our best personification of the brand.

It’s generating nearly unanimous smiles and the best possible perception we can deliver.

We went harder at things like single-game ticket sales than probably a lot of marketing groups because we felt the most persuasive representation of our brand was getting people to the game.

It goes back to what I was saying earlier, if I could pick one number to excel at this year, it would be how many first-time buyers we have. Everything we do works better once they’ve been to a game.

ALEX: Why is it important to give digital and content teams a seat at the table in terms of senior leadership?

DAN: Marketing has changed as the landscape has gotten more fragmented. Reach and impressions are harder to earn. You can’t just say ‘We want to tell people X’ anymore. You have to be relevant.

Who works as hard as the digital strategy and content teams to understand what relevance looks like to the audiences they’re trying to reach?

But as much as everybody talks about the importance of digital, a lot of times the digital people aren't at the strategy meetings. They’re often just being told what to promote or what campaign to amplify. 

We can't just start with, hey, we want to post this. We have to start with different questions, create a different creative process, and quite honestly, a different mindset.

There’s a bigger opportunity for businesses than just telling the digital team what’s next on the calendar of things to be promoted.

‘Why will people care?’ is a very different question to start the process.  What are we doing that is going to earn people's time and attention? Those are bigger strategic questions and bigger opportunities. Those are questions that get at the heart of influencing people’s perceptions. And it’s generally where the minds of content creators gravitate towards.

Any creative process that doesn't start with research and insights is a bad process in the content space. But if you do start that way, there are a million things you can do with a great performance marketer to drive business with the people who show interest in that content.

But there's still not enough digital or content people in the business landscape who have the opportunity to set that kind of a strategic direction because they're usually finding out about the things that they have to promote as opposed to coming to the front and saying, how do we win people's time and attention and do it consistently? How do we make our brand relevant to them? How do we compete in the entertainment landscape?

💼 CASE STUDY
Sponsored Content of the Week

The New York Knicks introduced a clever content series in partnership with Starry last week.

• Episode 1: Allan Houston vs Chloe Pavlech

• Episode 2: Steve Novak vs Overtime Mikey

• Episode 3: Jamal Crawford vs Tristan Jass

In these videos, a Knicks legend competes against an influencer in a three-point shooting contest. Each successful shot moves a Starry can closer to their respective end of the table. The first person to move the can to their end wins.

The Knicks put their unique spin on these Jesser-style videos, making it a perfect fit for both the team and their partner.

• The series perfectly aligns with Starry’s league-wide initiative centered around three-pointers.

• The use of Starry branded basketballs cleverly recalls the brand’s sponsorship of the three-point contest at the NBA All-Star Game.

• Replacing a water bottle with a Starry can and utilizing a branded table showcases seamless product integration.

• The concept doesn’t rely on player access, making scheduling the shoot easier.

• Leveraging the collab tool with alumni and local influencers broadens the content's reach to relevant audiences.

The series has generated over 1.1M views and 44.8K engagements.

The Takeaway
For a while, I've believed that sports teams could learn from creators about engaging their audience beyond game days, and this series is a prime example. It delivers great value to their partner and entertains fans with engaging content.

What's truly impressive is how the Knicks tailored the concept to reflect their organization and its storied history.

🔍 SPONCONSPIRATION
Steal These Ideas

You love to see new, quality inventory drive revenue. Bleacher Report’s Coutside Cam is now sponsored by AT&T.

Red Bull Racing’s new series, Virtual Laps, features three-time world champion Max Verstappen and gives a detailed look around each race track via sim racing, with the help of Oracle's Dashboard.

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Player of the Game presented by Toyo Tires is one to replicate. Fans can vote for the winner and the creative design perfectly highlights players’ performances.

Chelsea FC and Three UK teamed up with Vinnie Jones and Samaritans to encourage fans to #TalkMoreThanFootball.

I really admire Mercedes F1’s Akkodis Race Debriefs. Not only do they source questions from fans, but they also don’t shy away from the tough questions after disappointing race results.

🚨 ICYMI
What To Watch For

Sponcon BTS: Remember the killer Liverpool FC x SC Johnson recycling video shared last week? Bill Masterson, SC Johnson’s Senior Director of Global Corporate Brand and Business Unit Communications, shared the story behind how it came to life.

IG Story Tips: Forgot to tag a partner in your story? No worries. Learn how to mention accounts after you post a story and six other story tips from Instagram.

Must Follow: You know that viral Boston Celtics video? Are you now thinking, which one? Exactly. You need to follow Celtics video producer Gage Duchon, who shares the best content coming from that team.

Web 3 Sponsorship: Polkadot will serve as the primary sponsor for the No. 24 Chevrolet driven by Conor Daly in the Indy 500. This partnership represents the first time a major athlete's sponsorship has been decided by a vote using blockchain technology [h/t Athelo Group]

Putting The Social In Social Media: NBC Sports explored how social media content helped Stewart-Haas Racing's team building.

AI-Powered In-Game Highlights: Genius Sports partnered with Brentford Football Club and Gtech to power augmented highlights to fans in-stadium and on social media [h/t Mark Locke].