Abe Madkour opens up the 2018 NSF starting with a fireside chat with Dan & Clark Hunt. Join us as we take a look at what’s top of mind from these owners’ perspectives managing both an NFL and MLS team. You won’t want to miss the insights the Hunt Brothers have to share!

MODERATOR

Abe Madkour

Executive Director

Sports Business Journal/SBD

This session will highlight how the Anaheim Ducks use technology to set themselves apart in an extremely crowded marketplace.  We will dive into the processes they have put in place to solidify seven figure revenue increases in sponsorship and speak more specifically about why big brands like Toshiba felt partnering with the Ducks was the right solution for their business.  We will hear from Graham Siderius of the Ducks and Bill Melo, Chief Marketing Executive for Toshiba America Business Solutions/Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions.

Topics covered will include:

• Facing the challenge of time – brands + clients
• Setting yourself apart in a crowded market
• What brands are looking for in a partner
• Communicating the experience without being in venue
• Shortening the sales cycle + generating revenue

Women in the U.S. control or influence over 75% of all household spending and currently represent over 40% of the fan base for most professional and collegiate sports organizations.  Brands and advertisers are taking notice.  The days of a “pink it and shrink it” marketing approach have been replaced with new tactics, but is it enough for this savvy consumer group?  Experts will not only share compelling strategies for serving women in the sports marketplace and why advertisers should play close attention, but also discuss why making a concerted effort to hire more talented women in your own company will be invaluable.

Creating a positive service experience for your fans takes planning, collaboration and alignment with everyone in your venue, including contracted partners.  Come hear how Ruby’s 7 Star Service Playbook improved customer satisfaction ratings by 17%, increased renewals by 19%, and amplified playoff revenue from the previous season by 16% for one of her clients. Ruby’s 7 Star Service Methodology helped increase Season Ticket Members from 4,000 to 11,000 and moved another client from #78 to the #1 position in ESPN rankings of 122 professional sports franchises.  You can use the same techniques to elevate your service level and ticket sales as well.

Attendees will learn how to:

• Create a customer service mantra that will become the foundation of your customer service initiative
• Outline procedures for reviewing patron concerns and mystery shopping reports that promote transparent decision-making and improves accountability
• Solve interdepartmental and contracted partner challenges through collaboration and more efficient communication
• Offer practical, easy-to-implement solutions for incorporating customer engagement into your business plans to attract loyal, happy customers
• Increase transparency, communication and involvement to promote commitment and a sense of ownership with your company’s brand
• Develop, refine and test ideas to improve levels of service
• Promote greater receptivity to change by increasing employee involvement and improving the understanding of the rationale for changes

“And This Is Why People Are Leaving Sports…” This session will pinpoint culture drainers within teams.  5 areas will be discussed: Leadership (lack of training), Training (re-energizing or simply training), Diversity (race/gender/ideas), Pay, Work/Life Balance.  Focus will be on steps to change culture drainers and create a positive work environment with a more dedicated staff.

Leaders will be able to:

• Identify culture drainers
• Take away solid methods to build relationships
• Interview to build and grow a solid sales team vs looking for some experience
• Staff evaluations that cultivate change vs penalizing
• Continual training to foster growth
• Understanding and developing diversity
• Running sports sales as a business: pay and commissions to motivate vs struggle to pay rent

Social media best practices and algorithms change more frequently than we all would like. This session will help you better understand how to create a successful social media advertising campaign by introducing you to the basics – the 3 R’s of social media marketing: reach, relevancy and revenue. It doesn’t take a large budget to generate strong ROI, just a keen understanding of the key principles and a little bit of creativity. Sit in as we dig into the behind-the-curtain secrets of social media marketing.

In today’s competitive market for entertainment and hospitality spend, providing customer service and a guest experience that distinguishes your product in the crowded sports and entertainment market place is imperative. Learn how to, “Treat your Customers Like Norm”. Our Premium clients expect us to know their names and ensure that our staff is always glad they came. Learn how to deliver a service proposition that keeps your clients coming back season after season just like Norm.

An examination of Mobile Last Minute purchasers and their behavior.  Session will include examination of data and research collected by both Turnkey Intelligence and Gametime. Turnkey will share insights on the live event buyer and how the demographic make up of package buyers and general individual event ticket buyers differs from those that purchase via last minute mobile methods. In addition, Turnkey will share insights gathered from a deep dive into the attitudinal attributes of Gametime buyers, such as motivations for the purchase via last minute mobile. Gametime will provide in depth analysis on data findings from more than 700,000 mobile transactions on Gametime in 2017, answering questions, such as:  How do customers profiles differ by league, market and other genre’s? Do day of game purchasers have a different demographic profile than purchasers who buy earlier?  What are the buying patterns leading up to events?  What seat locations do last minute purchasers buy and what are different AOV’s.

Everyone loves a great deal. BOGO, 25% off, Black Friday – we love feeling like we are saving money. What if you could get that same feeling from your marketing campaign? Join USA Swimming for this round table discussion to learn some unique ways they have increased their marketing ROI with low cost add-ons to their base strategy. Come prepared to discuss some of your own low-cost marketing wins, as this session will take a collaborative approach to building a “Cheap Marketing Toolbox” for each attendee to take back to their organization.

Are you curious to know what Sponsors are saying? Or which sports do the best job and bring in the most sponsors? How do Sponsors really evaluate packages? The 2018 Corporate & Industry Survey is an in depth review of the opinions of team/event executives and leading corporate sponsors on sports marketing. The country’s top Corporate Advertisers and Sponsors have spoken! Come find out what both sides are saying as this session with Ron Seaver and Jim Kahler uncovers the insider’s information.

Fans today experience events from more than just their seats. Entertaining them and creating an exciting atmosphere in and outside of the seating bowl is increasingly important. Fans are arriving earlier and staying later than they ever have before. In this session, we’ll discuss how you can provide your fans with additional engagement during those key moments surrounding the main event to increase revenue and turn your venue into a complete entertainment destination.

SESSION LEADER

Will Ellerbruch

National Sales Manager

Daktronics

With the ever-changing sports business landscape, hot topics in the industry are continuously keeping senior level executives up at night. They must focus not only on what’s most important for their organizations, but for their team and themselves as well. Join George Killebrew as he leads a roundtable discussion on some of the biggest concerns & topics on manager’s minds daily. What happens at the roundtable, stays at the roundtable! (Senior Level Management Only Please).

What technologies are top stadiums, teams, and vendors using to engineer year-over-year F&B revenue growth? Food & Beverage experience ranks second to only live game action on your fans’ in-stadium experience meter. They want choices and speed of service to define the F&B experience. Our panel will fill you in on the strategies and technologies they are using to leverage data to make the dining experience more compelling for you venue’s visitors. Plus, hear how industry leaders are collecting more data and employing the data to increase F&B revenues …. every year! Our panel will discuss:

• What data you already have, but aren’t employing
• Data that is easy to collect, and how to do it
• Using data to drive fan engagement and behavior
• Becoming predictive with your F&B offers
• Engineering waste down to never-before-seen levels
• Speeding thru-put to speed queue times
• Using data to dynamically inform menu board content

In the age of diluted content, easy access to a variety of entertainment options, and other daily distractions how do promoters create the “FOMO” feeling to their potential customer base? While acknowledging this is far easier said than done the focus of this session will be on strategies, tactics and examples we have utilized across the Feld Entertainment portfolio. The goal of the session will be to create an open dialogue for idea generation and debate in this space.

In 2017 the esports industry brought in $1.5 billion in revenue and is poised to hit $2.3 billion by 2020. It’s no secret that pro sports is investing in esports and playing a huge role in the growth of the sector but there are many factors behind this trend. Opportunities to engage fans, cultivating new demographics, brand activations and media monetization strategies are just a few of the boundless opportunities presented by esports. This session will address why esports is a massive opportunity for pro sports and dive into specific examples of what’s happening today and what the future holds.

Brad Shelton will lead an all-star panel in a discussion about upcoming trends and hot topics during the “What’s Next” Super Panel. In a rapidly growing sports industry, new technologies and trends are constantly emerging allowing organizations to become more innovative with their campaigns and advertising. This Super Panel includes several organizations who continue to capitalize on these opportunities and are eager to share their insights on what we can expect to see in 2018 and the direction they see the sports industry heading.

Picture this: You’ve left the office, the day is over and as you try to fall asleep at night you lay there in bed… and you’re thinking… and thinking… and thinking. What keeps some of the best minds in the business up at night?

As a long-standing tradition, the NSF will begin the final day of the 2018 conference with the “What Keeps You Up at Night?” Super Panel. This gathering of top notch executives will tell you exactly what they’re losing sleep over.

Join us as this panel of top executives navigate through a discussion on the issues that consume their thoughts post-game and year-round. Guaranteed to leave you wanting more, JJ Gottsch takes you on a thought provoking ride as we begin our final day of the 2018 National Sports forum.

This session will take you behind the scenes with a roll up your sleeves open panel discussion with sponsors who oversee strategy, relationships and decisions on a day to day basis. Hosted by Jim Kahler, Executive Director of the AECOM Center for Sports Administration at Ohio University, the panel will feature candid insights from three sponsorship executives.

Gone are the days when we can simply offer tickets and parking to sit in “a box” on gameday.  Today’s fans, our clients, want unique experiential benefits that we have to be able to deliver and leverage as part of a year-round platform.

For some that means trips to away games on the team plane, or it could mean heading down to the field to take pre-game batting practice or a lap around the track at 165 mph with one of their favorite drivers.

Join us for this session as we focus on several of the new, novel, unique (…and effective…) ways that clubs and sports properties are keeping their high dollars ticket holders, sponsors and advertisers engaged and involved.

What can you do to make sure the investment you make in training pays off in improved results?  Bill Guertin is a sports sales performance expert, and in this session you’ll take away several simple things you can do before, during, and after training that will make your training investment “stickier”. Changing old sales habits is difficult, and there is a BIG difference between simply learning and actually incorporating the learning into daily activities.  Bill will reveal effective ways to help each of your staff members to “buy into” positive change, apply what they’ve learned, and help their careers to soar.

Everyone acknowledges the importance of data and analytics, but one area that’s overlooked is how use of this data can and should change how we manage staff. Simply put, it’s one thing to have the information, but it’s entirely another to know the best ways to make use of it. It can impact priorities, incentives, decision making, accountability, oversight, feedback, transparency, integrity and more. This panel discussion will focus less on data and more on the strategies, tactics and best practices on how to better integrate analytics into the role of management.

As the new kids on the block the Vegas Golden Knights take a 21^st century approach in capitalizing on generating revenue through social selling. This session will give you an inside look on how the Golden Knights use Facebook and other social media platforms to create brand awareness and engaging content through social selling. Through promoted and organic posts, we will analyze the strategy and data behind the Golden Knights objectives through social media selling.

First, it’s all about relationship-building. Second, in a competitive market, vying for the same corporate dollars can be a challenge. Understanding the market and competitive landscape while having the right offer and inventory are all important aspects to staying relevant and putting your team in a position to win locally. This fireside chat will cover various topics that pertain to the sales process for securing local sponsorship dollars that help fill the gap on everyone’s sponsorship P&L.

Hosted by BRC Imagination Arts, an experiential design and production agency, join Creative Director Matt Solari as he and other experts from sports marketing, organizations and top brands share their expertise on how the power of storytelling and transformational experiences generate traditional and non-traditional revenue. Learn how to build your very own storytelling roadmap for revenue generation on both game day and non-game day as well as increase brand loyalty and fan engagement all year round.

As fans increasingly spend their time online, sponsors are looking for opportunities to activate content-driven partnerships leveraged with fully integrated marketing platforms. Hear how the UFC and MetroPCS worked together to create an innovative campaign to amplify the sponsor’s message, bringing fans #CloserThanEver.

Sports are the coveted “DVR-proof” medium, which consumers still have to see, hear, or follow in real time.  We explore how networks, sponsors, and other stakeholders are leveraging sports entertainment content to deliver a more compelling experience and better reach their target audience.

In sales, we are all solutions providers and it is critical for us to find what the largest struggles are for our clients in order to provide them value.  As the sales climate is changing for ticket packages, we will discuss innovative ways to engage clients and create revenue streams for today’s buyer.

With escalating salary caps each season, how are teams meeting the demands of this growing expense? We can’t just continue to raise ticket prices ever year…. we need to get more creative on how we grow revenue streams. This includes growing revenues in Sponsorship, Radio, TV, Social/Digital, Merchandise, Special Experiences and Food/Beverage. Join Eric Stisser as he leads a roundtable discussion on the creative ways we are all having success increasing our revenue streams.

Content is King in today’s marketing, where consumers value brand authenticity and entertainment at ever-decreasing increments of time. But while content may be King, distribution is Queen…and she wears the pants.  Content is only as valuable as the consumer exposure and experience.  Marrying a strategic distribution plan with big idea content, from inception to implementation, is critical to success.  This session will explore some of the best Team and Property content and social media campaigns from the recent past.  We will break down the essential elements to creating campaigns worthy for a King and Queen.

From your own personal brand to building up a national or international campaign, “Parney” will share some concepts and experiences that will bring perspective on brands, brand building and living the brand.  Additionally, we will talk about ways the community can be impacted as the brand evolves.  Come to this expecting a live, interactive, energetic session and crazy pants are encouraged.

How successful are you at leveraging your entire organization against the common goal of revenue growth & brand engagement? Is your corporate sponsorship, season ticket holder, event sales and operations team aligned and working together? This session will take a look at building cross-functional strategies to optimize the utilization of your venue, fire up your revenue generation, extend your brand and deliver innovative experiences across the board. Join us for a candid discussion with a panel of leaders from the industry to talk about the opportunities to take your business further, break down the silos that may be in your way and surpass your goals for revenue and brand activation.

The corporate landscape in esports has taken the industry by storm in recent years, and the ecosystem continues to grow at an enormous rate. More and more we’re seeing sports organizations investing into esports, which provides a tremendous intersection between traditional sports and esports. One thing that remains consistent is corporate partnerships. In this session we’re going to explore WHY brands are investing in esports, and how they can be leveraging their existing sports portfolio to grow their brand in esports, and how teams with interests in esports can be approaching thier existing corporate clientele to expand their relationships.

Ticket sales are the life-blood of sports organizations. As ticketing evolves at hyper speed, it’s essential that sports organizations stay ahead of the marketplace. Technological advancements coupled with the creativity of contemporary ticketing companies are changing the way leagues, teams, venues and sports properties do business. Steve DeLay will lead this diverse panel in exploring the rapidly changing nature of ticket sales to stay profitable. Join us to learn tips and best practices for increasing sales and filling seats from these MVP’s of the industry.

To close out the 2018 NSF, we will be celebrating with a Budweiser Gala at the Star!