 Hi, everyone. So glad you could join us for another episode of Most Powerful Woman in Sports, where the world's greatest marketers, media pros, athletes, and coaches share the remarkable career journeys to achieving peak performance. We'd also like to hear from you to join the conversation in the chat and questions in the Q&A box. I'm thrilled today to introduce global brand and PR strategist, Marvet Brito, president, CEO of the Brito Agency, whose diversified portfolio is at the nexus of sports, entertainment, fashion, politics, and business. We'll talk about Marvet's career, how she became an uber connector of sports stars, and what it takes to succeed today in the cutthroat world of PR and brand strategy. But first, some background on Marvet. Called on by those in the know, Marvet is the ultimate brand architect. Marvet founded the Brito Agency in 1993, and from there has built a thriving global business-shaping brands. And having worked alongside the likes of everyone from Magic Johnson, Yankee's great Gary Shuffle, NBA All-Star, and entertainment producer Tyson Chandler to critically acclaimed director Lee Daniels and music legend Mariah Carey. Marvet is hardly behind the scenes though. She is a force in her own right with over 100,000 Twitter followers, I'm jealous, and is often tapped as a brand strategy and crisis communications expert on NMSNBC, The Today Show, CNN, New York Times, and yes, she has appeared several times on Ad Weeks events. Marvet, welcome back to the show. Hello. Hey, Marvet. Great to have you here. So good to see you. Thank you for having me, Lisa. Always good to chat with you. Same, same. Thank you for joining us. So we're going to start from the beginning. I want to start with how you, because I've never asked you this before. So it'll be interesting to me who I've known you for a few years now. How did you actually get your start in PR and brand strategy and then specifically in sports? You know, Lisa, I wish we had enough time to really talk about my journey because it was a long one. And really a non-traditional one, because back when I started in 1991, Black women, particularly in women in PR and branding, was an anomaly. And so I was a former waitress, actually a former flight attendant that ended up moving to New York City. I was a waitress before I started my business, and I went to what I love to call Barnes & Noble University. I literally believed that I had the innate ability to build equity and to build brands. And I essentially went to Barnes & Nobles and sat on the floor and read books I could not afford to buy and really just educated myself on all things, branding, bios, stories, because I knew I had the ability to serve and the ability to serve other people to fullness. For me, it's about taking people from fracturedness to fullness through brand equity and building their brand profiles. So that's my short version, and maybe one day I'll be able to share the longer version with you and the ad-week community because it is quite an inspiring college dropout to CEO journey. Wow, I would love to hear it, but I am curious. We could spend just a moment if you could tell me how you actually got to PR and brand strategy. What was it sitting in Barnes & Noble that got you there or was it somebody who inspired you? Why PR? You know, I think that if you have, I think we all are born with gifts. We all have an innate purpose within us, and we just have to really find the environments that will nurture our gifts. And for me, I was always seeing people fully realized. I would walk into businesses and give recommendations to what I felt a business owner should do. I would talk to my friends about the things that I felt they needed to do. I went to school and studied political science. I went to Tuskegee, and after two years, I felt like I wanted to just fly towards my greater purpose. And I wasn't really sure what that was called until I moved to New York City. Again, I was a flight attendant. Eastern went out of business literally in the air. I was stuck in New York. And as I lived in the city, I just began to understand that PR was a practice that was able to help me shape perceptions. I was really, really big on shaping perception and helping to understand how I could change the way people felt, the way people interacted with each other. And I realized that PR was the most potent tool to do that. When you think about how people act, how they consume, how they respond to their environment, how they respond to each other, it's awesome level of PR or shaping of perception, shaping of the way that they think. And I knew that I wanted to work on the positive side of doing that. Okay. So what is a day in the like of Marfette, Fredo, like, tell me, I mean, what do you do? What do you do? I mean, I know a little bit, you help us out with a lot of our speakers and give us strategies. But how do you work with sports stars? Let's start there. How do you work with your clients? Well, what I do for every brand and every client that I work with is that I do a couple things. First of all, build equity and bring value. That's the number one thing that we should all do. No matter where we live, where we work, what we do in our day to day lives, it's always measured in how valuable we are and how much value we bring to another individual or to an enterprise, a corporation upon which we work. And so that's what I started doing in 1991. I started to work and bring value to people within my ecosystem. And that work, which we'll get to later, which I call servitude, spread very quickly amongst my ecosystem of friends. I was always willing to work, always willing to support, always willing to partner. And from that, my gifts and talents were beginning to be nurtured. And one of the things I'll talk about later, because a lot of people always ask, well, how do I find people who will help nurture my gifts? And how do I find people who will actually hire me to do what I know I'm capable of doing? It starts with servitude, Lisa. It starts with believing in yourself and just doing it. I believe that people, when you're passionate about something, you'll do it without even being compensated for it. That's how that it fuels you, right? It becomes the thing that makes you tick. And that's what I was doing. I started with a young actress, Michelle Thomas, who was my official first client. Gary Sheffield was my official first paying client, but Michelle Thomas was the first person who let me practice my talents on her, if you will. And I did such a great job for her. She was on a show called Family Matters. And I got more press for her and she was a guest star than the main actors on the show got. And so quickly, people started to ask, Michelle, how did you get on this magazine? How did you get on Regis and Kathy Lee? How did you get all of this press that is so keenly talking about who you are as an actress and your distinct handprint that you bring to the craft? And she started to just share with people that more of that Brito was the one who was helping me, that I was helping to shape the storytelling around her talents in a way that no one had done before, really because she wasn't considered the star of the show. So no one was really thinking about her. So from there, I got a call from Gary Sheffield, whose uncle, Doc Gooden, I was friends with. And from Gary Sheffield, then that's where the Brito agency's journey began. And I started with, I was, I guess, blessed enough to say that I started with someone who was a wildly celebrated baseball star at the time. And he allowed me to learn. He allowed me to learn and develop my skills. But that was how I started in sports. Gary was our first sports brand. Go Yankees. So how does it work now? I mean, how has PR evolved since, I mean, I'm not even going to ask since the 90s, obviously, it's dramatically changed. But even in the last few years, how have you seen your business shift in terms of working with, let's, we'll focus on the sports talent, working with them in terms of that seems like there's a lot of effort and focus towards brand marketing and getting them involved. Why is that? Why are they going this route? And how are you helping them? And how has it changed? Well, you know, I think, I don't, I think the only thing that changed really is the message vehicles, right? When I started in the early 90s, there was no, certainly no internet, no Google, no social media. So we really had to do the work. It was all about reading. It was all about writing. It was all about communicating, picking up the phone and really getting journalists and potential partners outside of the sports world interested in the brands and the products that you were working with. If you look at sports, sports is all about consumer engagement and fan engagement. And it's all about getting those fans to become ambassadors, both of the team that the brand and client plays for and for the client individually, the difference between what I do in the Brito agency does and what the teams do is that the team is keenly interested in the team. They're there to advance the Yankees, the Yankees or the Knicks per se. I am there to build equity in the player. We help players build legacy and to really position themselves for life off the field and off the court, right? Because one day their career will sadly come to an end. And so while you are playing in front of the world that adores you, that is the time for you to plant the seeds so that you can eat from those trees that you planted when your career is over. So that is what we started doing very early on, is cross pollinating the guys and first of all, starting with helping them create a very distinct handprint. And what does that mean? Yes, there might be several hundred players on a football squad, several players on a basketball team, but it's your job to bring your authentic, distinct handprint to the job every day. And it's my job as a brander to amplify that handprint so that I can communicate your value proposition to an audience, to fans and to potential partners. Because if you are Odell and you have blonde hair, or if you are someone who has a particular way that you celebrate in the end zone, if you have a certain way like Gary Sheffield has, where he swung his bat with a particular style, all of those things are things that we amplify. And then you introduce those nuances to potential partners and you bridge brand alliances. So teams are around really to make sure that the stands are filled with people who are there for the Yankees, right? Our job is to make sure that people specifically are there for the individual player because the player can't do a whole lot with the Yankees brand when he's no longer on the Yankee field, right? And so we want to help the players build legacy, build category leadership while they're in the game so that they can have lifelong legacies and really build enterprise when their careers are over. Okay, so I'm going to continue asking you questions, but I'm also going to ask the audience, please be sure to drop your questions into the Q&A box for Morvette. I'll ask them as we go along. So my next question tied to that is tied to what we were just discussing is how do you think the Black Lives Matter movement has altered the course of Black talent or people of color in general, even representation? How have you seen that change and where do we need still to go? I think with any industry, particularly sports, women have been historically excluded. I really became a staunch advocate for making sure that we created space in sports for women because I feel like any industry should at least mirror the composition of the fan base. I see so many women in the stands, so many women who come and support sports, but there were very few women behind the scenes. We get the glares and the stares and we get pointed in the direction of the wives lounge and I would always have to say, no, no, I'm actually the one helping to negotiate the contract. I'm the one who's actually working on a sponsorship deal and there's nothing wrong with being a wife, but the assumption is always made that a woman's role is very segmented into how she is perceived in that space. And so for me it's been about activism and I've even helped to empower the wives and work with the wives. I have a very special wife, Mia Wright, who runs the NBA Players Wives Association, who has done a fantastic job of using that organization to help reshift the way people think about women, both wives and women in general in the sports world. But for me, it's really about understanding that the Black Lives Matter movement just I think shined a brighter light on the fact that there were these gaps and voids and disparities and I just don't want there to be an assignment of titles, if you will. I want there to be real collective mission-aligned allyship rather than tokenism. Have you found it easier to do your job in this regard in promoting your clients? Has it been easier? Have you seen a change? Well for me, Lisa, fortunately for me, I have been around for almost three decades and so I think that there's a good knowledge of who the Brito agency is, who I have been. I have worked with iconic players from LaTrell's Freewell to Stefan Marbury to, you know, I mean just a long list. I mean we have been incredibly blessed to work with really category-leading talent. So for me, I have not really found any difference in the way that there have been more opportunities for me or not. But what I will say is that I am seeing more women in front of the camera whether it's in locker rooms, whether it's on the field. I do think that I don't know if it's necessarily the Black Lives Matter movement because again I think that all of the spaces of sports need to do a better deliberate job outside of any movement of making sure that there is diversity, diversity that is fair, that is equitable and that is authentic to the space that women occupy in collective humanity and in business and enterprise on a day-to-day basis. So I think that they're trying to do a better job but ultimately there's still of course a lot more work to be done. There needs to be, you know, coaches across the league that are women, coaches across, you know, all the industries that are women. It shouldn't be a special circumstance when you see a woman and it shouldn't be a first. There's still too many firsts that we need to really eradicate in sports. Right. So tell me what's the hardest part of being a CEO and the most rewarding? I think the hardest part is balancing the business side and the activism, you know, all the work that goes into making sure that there are others who follow behind me, right, and that these spaces that I occupy that I am not the only one because I think that I take no pleasure in being the first. I take no pleasure in being the only. For me, I take pleasure in opening up the door, sticking my foot in it and making sure that I, you know, turn around and usher more women who look like me through the door. And so that balance of doing that activism while also managing and overseeing business on a day-to-day basis can be challenging but at the same time the reward for me is greater because as I see the composition and the landscape of sports changing, I get to edify others in this space and I get to know that the work is not in vain. Right. So we have some chatter on the channel and so I'm wondering if you could share some advice with, we have a few students in college who are athletes, college players, and they're interested in PR and brand marketing. What's the best advice you could give them to make that first step into your world? You know, I think the interesting thing is I'm surprised at how many students I meet who have an interest in PR, have an interest in sports, have an interest in branding, and have not really read and done the work, right? And I mean real life stories. I mean really dig deep into how did the needle on this particular brand move? If you're trying to be in sports and you don't know who some of the icons are, and I'm talking about behind the scene icons, so if you don't know who David Falk is, you know, the man who has been an architect and agent to Michael Jordan throughout his whole career and helped create brand Jordan, then that's someone you need to study. So I do believe that it's very important people want to master fields that they have yet to study, seriously study, right? And I don't mean textbook study. I mean actually go out and understand how a certain thing came to be. And I think in that study you'll understand not only people's successes, but the mistakes that people made, right? And you understand careers and the pitfalls of those careers. You know, study the Williams sisters and understand what their father had to do, you know, to chart a very specific niche for them in the world of tennis. So to me, I think the greatest thing you can do, because I think that's what I did, Lisa, that is immeasurable and invaluable. I learned so much by reading real-time stories and understanding, being very curious and asking questions. I had no entitlement. There was nothing owed to me. I knew I needed to do the work. And I knew that if the door ever opened, that I would be knowledgeable, equipped, and ready, and fully aware of the industry that I would one day hope to master. Yeah. Okay. I'm now starting to of course get a bunch of questions thrown here. So I'm going to ask one question and then we may have to go to takeaways. We're running out of time. This is from Lexi Sydney. How have you seen the branding business change as athletes have more of a direct line to fans through their social channels, as opposed to additional media outlets? So it's really much more of a direct connection. It is a direct connection. But let me tell you the difference between proactive and reactive. A lot of athletes or just people in general don't believe that they need strategy, that they need to move with strategy. You have to be proactive, but proactive and working in a strategic way, not just being responsive. And I find that a lot of athletes believe that visibility, you know, they're confusing visibility with credibility, right? So just because they're visible and just because they have an audience doesn't mean they're building equity. And equity really is about what you say no to, not just what you say yes to. So opportunity and the volume of opportunity doesn't mean you will ever become a potent brand. You have to understand what are your values? What is your value proposition? What is your distinct contribution to sports? And then you will know the opportunities that come to you, whether or not those are going to amplify who you are, further magnify who you are, or distract you from who you are. So I don't think that just because an athlete has direct access to an audience, they still need a strategist. They still need a team of operatives who are going to help them navigate the terrain. Because sometimes you can have so much coming at you that you believe it's all driving you further towards your goal, but it's not. It's just everyone wanting access to you and everyone wanting you to do what they think is best for you to do, but you have to have guardrails that protect your brand and keep you on track towards your brand goals. Wow. Okay, I'm taking major notes when this is over. This is like a masterclass in PR and branding. We're going to go to your takeaways now and then at some point soon we're going to have to continue this conversation somehow with all with this audience and I want my own personal class. First, let's go to the takeaways. Well, the first takeaway is rejection is God's protection. I meet so many amazing strategists and visionaries who really want to tackle the world of sports and they just don't know how to keep going. They feel like if one player says no to them, if I want to be a sports agent and if 10 players say no, rejection is God's protection. Keep moving, keep focused, keep mastering your craft. Eventually, you will find that person who will understand the work that you did. They will understand the work that you did and they will seek you out. For me, I have always believed that you should never have to pursue what you can attract. If you keep your head down, do the work, work on yourself, make yourself valuable. The individuals whose lives you will impact will find you. They will be introduced to you and your talents will help birth their deepest aspirations. The second, your deepest purpose is found on the other side of servitude. Be of service. You won't always get paid, find an opportunity, find someone that you can work with. Be of service. Today, I think that there are so many relationships that are transactional. You give to someone and you expect something in return. Just give your gifts, support other people's vision, and in doing that, people will discover you, your talents, and your capabilities. I believe that everyone's gift is found on the other side of them being of service and them being and walking in their servitude. The third is you are your greatest asset. Make yourself valuable. This whole world, whether you're in partnership, if you work a job, if you're in school, everything is about how valuable you are and how you can make yourself an asset. I believe that everyone should do all they can do to educate themselves, expand their ecosystem, their resource space, their relationship base, do whatever you can so that when you get the opportunity, you will be so filled with those who will support you and help you. You will be so valuable that the player or the organization that you choose to work for won't be able to deny how you can help them achieve their next level of greatness. This is just amazing. I get to say that we will actually hear from you again next week. If you all register for Brand Week, you could go to adweek.com to register and Marvet is going to be holding a workshop for us. Awesome. I want to thank you so much. This has been, as always, a pleasure. I know it went really, really fast, but thank you and I hope we'll have you back. We'll definitely see you next week at Brand Week. Definitely. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. See you soon. Thank you all for joining us today. Our next woman up is WWE Chief Brand Officer Stephanie McMahon. I'm looking forward to speaking to Steph about her family legacy and the role of women in professional wrestling world. See you all back here on September 29th.