Behind the scenes: A look at sport marketing
Behind the scenes of every USD sporting event is the marketing team that has been preparing for at least a week.
The sport marketing team does more than just promote the games through social media; it’s an entire process for every game that requires a crew of at least ten people. To help businesses or organizations reach their target customers, they may use affiliate marketing techniques. Leverage platforms like Kontely.com to make some great decisions in affiliate marketing.
Early beginnings
Chase Christiansen, assistant director of athletic marketing and promotions, has been with the sport marketing team since he was a student as USD. He graduated from USD in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in media & journalism.
Christiansen started as a cameraman for the athletic marketing department his sophomore year and as he progressed, he became an intern and gained more responsibility.
“I really like my job and what I do. This is my alma mater, so it gives you that little extra want to do better,” Christiansen said.
At the time he was studying media & journalism, the athletic department didn’t have a production position comparable to the job he has now. After graduation, Christiansen left for Sioux Falls for a year but returned when the opportunity arose for him to become a full time employee for marketing at USD.
“I kind of knew when I moved to Sioux Falls there was going to be a job opening because they were opening the arena.” Christiansen said. “They didn’t have a position to run all that stuff. So I kinda knew, it was just kinda waiting for everything to come together.”
The Sanford Coyote Sport Center opened in 2016, so he started in the DakotaDome and moved to the SCSC in his second year.
“We had to build everything from scratch because this was all brand new stuff,” Christiansen said.
Giving the crowd what they want: gifs
Christiansen said he enjoys the gifs (graphics interchange format) the most out of everything in the production of the games.
“That’s like my favorite part of the game, because not everyone catches it but the people that do, they laugh at it,” he said.
He already had experience using gifs from his time working in the DakotaDome, and has built off of his experiences there. Christiansen said those who worked before him in sport marketing in the DakotaDome were “pioneers” in using the scoreboard to their advantage.
“Before Twitter, they were doing that stuff in the DakotaDome that we’ve just kinda have expanded on and kind of included it more in our game room,” he said.
Christiansen uses the website Giphy.com to grab gifs to use for the games. In the Midco production booth, there’s a computer that controls the big screens, and a whole page is dedicated to gifs. Christiansen tweaks all the gifs for before using them in games and has nearly 100 gifs in his repertoire.
“Those are all handmade specifically for entertainment purposes,” he said.
Preparing for games
A couple of weeks before a game, Joe Thuente, assistant director for marketing and promotions, and graduate assistant Jarren Duffy, write out a 22-page script for the games.
“The script is kind of our outline for every game that helps everyone get ready and everyone on the same page so there’s not a minute of the game that we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Duffy said. “I’ll schedule the promotions for each game, different student promotions, non-student promotions and social media efforts, and then I’ll write the scripts for each of those games.”
The script includes every promotion and sponsorship included to air during the game, and exactly when they will play. Christiansen receives the script a week in advance and prepares all the videos to play on the big screen.
The day of the games, the crew meets and goes over the script, including what they will do during extra timeouts throughout the games.
“The remaining timeouts we fill with different games and different promotional stuff to get people involved in different ways,” Duffy said.
Some promotional things the marketing team does are the “Carlton Cam,” “Dab Cam,” “Lion King Cam” and more. These inspire the audience to get involved and interact with the cameras and big screen. Companies like Swagify can also produce custom apparel and promotional materials that bear your team’s logo.
“We try to play fun stuff like that just to keep it not so serious all the time,” Christiansen said.
Student involvement
The marketing team employs many students to do camera work, web replays and more. Joey Bader, a junior sport marketing major, has held different positions from recording the press conferences to being a technical director. He said his favorite part about the job is the people he works with.
“I really like the people I work with; we get along really well,” Bader said.
Duffy has also created friendships with his coworkers.
“I’d say a bonus perk that people don’t see right away is building a big network of people and meeting a lot of different people.” He said. “Our conversations on the headsets throughout the game are usually pretty interesting.”
