Wednesday, July 11, 2012

PowerShares Series countdown & Panel Night


Today was a big day for my office at InsideOut Sports & Entertainment – there are exactly 7 days until we release the dates for our PowerShares Series champions tennis tour.  Part of my job is to help run our social media sites, so I posted a countdown to our official press release, and it got a lot of positive feedback on Facebook.  Hopefully we can keep the momentum going for the rest of the week!

Tonight at Leverage we had the opportunity to talk to a panel of three professionals, and learn their stories before having a Q&A session.  The first person to speak was Doug Smoyer, VP of business development for the Giants.  I would say the two most intriguing things he told us were that 1) having an in-house agency is actually the best option (because media agencies don’t view impressions of American Idol and Giants games the same way), and 2) at the end of the day it doesn’t matter if your team is 14-2 or 2-14, the brand is what’s constant, and ultimately you want people to want equity in the name regardless of season score.

The next to speak was Dana Fabrikant (now Weinbach), VP of corporate partnerships  for the NewJersey Devils and the Prudential Center.  The one thing she said that really struck me (and gave me hope) was that sports business is not like finance, where there is an incoming class, or “new crop” of students every year.  Jobs open and close very quickly, so I definitely hope this helps us MSBA students out as we venture on into the workforce.

The third person on our team panel was Chris Insolera, Manager of corporate sales and sponsorships for the Yankees.   I felt like I could relate to Chris the most because he started off in ticket sales, and worked his way up to corporate ticket sales, and then into sponsorship managing.  While I had never thought that working at the athletic ticketing office in college my senior year would actually help me in regards to getting into sportsbiz, I realized that it may have been the best decision I ever made! After listening to these 3 wonderful speakers, I realized that I would really love to try working at a large venue somewhere for a big team.  Perhaps with the help of MSBA, it could work out :)

After our team panel had ended, we all sat around the Leverage conference table and watched the ESPYS.  While most of the time I was busy eating Subway sandwiches, I think the only thing I ended up caring about anyway was this:

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