 Welcome to the sports playbook where we discuss solutions to issues that impact sports. I'm your host, Angela Hazelett. Today's guest is Jacob Nicely, the Director of Marketing for Vanderbilt Athletics. Today we are going to discuss college athletics marketing preparation before promotion. Let's get to it. Welcome Jacob. Thank you for joining us today on the sports playbook. Of course, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. You bet. You have quite the history of being involved in athletics marketing at a number of collegiate institutions, which includes James Madison University, University of Georgia, Clemson, University of Maryland, and now at Vanderbilt University. So talk to me. What are some of the key differences in athletics marketing between these universities? Yeah, there's a fair amount of differences. I'd say generally it's about the same from place to place, but just depending on the conferences and kind of the institutional setup of it, a major difference between my current role now and previous institutions is that this is my first time working at a private university as opposed to a state university. So there's quite a bit of differences and policies and different hoops and things to go through working at a private university than a public one. But for the most part, we're primarily focused on serving our student-athletes, our alumni, and our fans, and all those institutions that have had die-hard fans and just makes my job a little more fun trying to pack our stadiums and support our student-athletes. What about the sports that were popular at the different programs? Are there certain sports that are more preferred by the community and the student body? Oh, for sure. I'd say each place I've been to, I've had unique sports. At Georgia, one of my sports was equestrian, which is an emerging sport for NCAA. Vanderbilt, I have bowling, but regionally I've been a very big difference. Maryland, I had mince lacrosse, which lacrosse is a huge deal in the northeast, and especially in that Maryland region. It was a huge fan favorite and student favorite. And it's a sport that, even though I only grew up about four hours away from there in Virginia, we didn't have growing up. So it was kind of a little bit of a learning curve for me on that one. But yeah, it was kind of interesting of each school has a different passion. Vanderbilt, our fans are really die hard, but I'd say our baseball program is probably the most well-known nationally, profile-wise. Like I said, Maryland, really known for their basketball program historically. Clemson's football program has been a powerhouse recently. So each school kind of has their own little different powerhouse sports, but been thankful to work with some national championship caliber teams everywhere I've been. So that's been awesome. That is amazing. And how did the different sports change your approach to athletics marketing? Oh, I think just each target demographic is so different with each sport that you work with and kind of the fan base of it. Like, for instance, being in Maryland, you know, really heavy pro sports markets working there. So the way that you're targeting fans and trying to get new fans in is completely different than being at Clemson and being in a college town environment, where it's really just Clemson in South Carolina if you grow up in a state of who you're a fan of. So just kind of what's that fan base and alumni base kind of like looks like and kind of how you go after them as well as new fans. It's just a little bit different based on kind of like the market share of each one. It's just very unique and Nashville is kind of a little bit of a hybrid of both. We're low on power five school here in Nashville being in Vanderbilt, but we also are competing with pro sports teams. So if we have the predators and the Titans in Nashville, I see here in town too. So it's a little more unique than what I was at Maryland, but still kind of the same situation, but definitely changes from college towns to big cities to pro sports towns. Very different. Yeah. Well, you brought up a really good point that there's a lot of competition for entertainment options, both in sports and in nationals really known for music as well. And how do you compete in that space? Oh, yeah. 100% really it's just trying to make sure that our product is as good as our competition. And thankfully here, we're not really competing with as many power five schools, but we do have a couple local division one schools here in Belmont and Lipscomb now we're competing with, but in short, it's the pro teams and concerts and everything else going on in Nashville. We just try and make our in venue experience match that expectation of what our fans expect to go out and see in the community of just trying to put on a production level that matches the entertainment value, which has been a learning curve, but getting better at it for sure and trying to bring that wow factor. And does your budget match those of who you're competing against in the community? For pro teams, I probably say not quite the same ballpark. I kind of wish I had the pyro budgets of the Titans and Nashville SC and the predators, but we're definitely getting creative and trying to find new ways to kind of bring that same value just within a reasonable price budget in a reasonable price. Yes, absolutely. And talk to me post COVID how have you how has competing for this entertainment changed or has it stayed the same? It's changed a lot. And kind of during that time period transition from Maryland to Vanderbilt, but this past season for us was the first season that we haven't had COVID attendance protocols in place for men's basketball. We had vaccination cards for proof of vaccination last season. So this year is kind of the first one. So really like in that change from pre-COVID to now, I think a lot of people reevaluated where they're spending their time and their entertainment dollars on. And we saw a decrease in our season tickets from our last season pre-COVID to our 21-22 season of our first season with fans back prior to that. So it has been a challenge, but really just trying to focus on is the product we're putting in the arena worth getting up off of your couch to go experience and is it at a price point that makes sense. So it has been a challenge, but that's why I'm in this job. I like that part of things. So it's been fun to figure out when we've been increasing our attendance numbers in the right direction. So things are going well. So tell me about some of the marketing strategies that you're using like in regards to promotions and entertainment at halftime, things like that. Talk to me about some of those strategies and how do you make that happen? Yeah, 100%. So we have just started going out one of just making sure our price points and our ticketing offers are where they should be and trying to make sure that we're spending our marketing dollars wisely through digital ads, through search, advertising through our email marketing efforts, traditional advertising, and just trying to get around the community of like, hey, come out to our games. It's affordable. It's fun. It's a good time. And even with that of just the in venue experience, we this past season for men's basketball started adding in halftime singer songwriter concert series because we're a Nashville, right? And that's what you come to Nashville for and trying to just do those unique things that you might not get at other venues and adding in smoke off the goals and fun giveaway items like cowboy hats and just trying to get our student population out because they kind of really enhance our game atmosphere. And if they're there and they're loud and they're rowdy, it's really going to bleed to our other fans and kind of get them excited and pumped up and create a really good environment that's helpful for me to sell to new fans that are thinking about coming out to games. And what percentage of attendees are students versus people from the community? It really depends on the game for a lot of our bigger attendance attended games. I'd say it's usually about 15 to 20 percent of our attendance are our students. Our last regular season home game of the year. We had a little over 10,000 people for our Mississippi State game and we had about 2200 students, which is about 17 percent of our entire student population was at the game, which is a really good number for us. And like I said, when they come out, it's a it's a rowdy environment. They're probably very passionate about cheering for their home team. 100 percent. So do you bring some of these students or fans onto the court or the field for promotional activities? Yes, all the time, whether sponsored or we're just looking to fill some entertainment portions of our game production. We'll definitely get the crowd and the fans involved and students. Well, talk to me a little bit about what are your strategies for protecting those people and protecting the university if there's a slip and fall. I think if someone gets hurt, how do you kind of prevent that from happening? Yeah, absolutely. So we work with a couple different areas on that. So we have waivers, that we work with our campus legal team on to provide to make sure that everyone knows what they're participating in, kind of knows what to expect in up front. So we make all of our participants for on court promotions look over those waivers, review them and then sign them. And then as well, like we work with our facilities seem to like make sure that the courts are cleaned and that we are kind of operating what makes sense. Like our court, for instance, is raised. We have a very unique court here at Vanderbilt. And if you could potentially if you go too far off the one side or the other could fall off. So we make sure that we're staying away from team huddles when we're doing these promotions and make sure we're staying away from the edges of the court and also making sure that they're safe and fun for the participant, making sure that we're not putting somebody into a situation that could be super risky or something that they don't want to do. Does this mean you just choose to work with adults when you're doing these promotions? A lot of times we'll work with adults. Now we will do kids promotions on some things like we'll do like a little kids dunk or that little basketball and they'll do a dunk on a goal. But for the most part, anything that involves a lot of dribbling or shooting or running, we'll try and stick to 18 and up and kind of our NCA guidance and compliance kind of dictate some of that. We usually don't get to work with what this considered prospective student athletes for these promotions. So a lot of times high schoolers are out of the question for a lot of these promotions on that side of things. So really it's just either going with kids or going with adults and a lot of times obviously with kids, you just work with the parents on getting their permission and reviewing the waivers prior to the kid participating in the promotion. But usually we'll stick to adults for the most part. That's interesting. So do you have to, are you guessing whether or not they kind of fit that high school profile or do you ask? Yes. So usually sometimes we'll try and we'll ask. We'll get a little bit of leeway on if it's reasonable for us to expect that they're not like most of the time we're just randomly picking fans out of the crowd. They're to participate. So most of the time like we know where the students sit in our student section. So we're pretty safe going there. But occasionally if we feel like it's a question or not, we will ask to clarify, hey, are you, what grade are you? Or what high school are you attend? There are things like that just to try and be on the safe side. Yeah, absolutely. Don't ever run into the eligibility issues. So talk to me about music. Music is a big part of for the promotional experience and making a game lively. So what kind of licenses do you have to play music in the different facilities? Yeah, so our campus legal team and university, thankfully, handles most of that side of things. But the big players in this industry, ASCAP and BMI, which both have offices here in Nashville, are the main licensors for when it comes to music and songwriting stuff. So we work with them and then also work with a DJ at our men's basketball games, who is also covered underneath those licenses, and goes through the right process of getting music to play in venue to make sure that we're covered from those areas. Because as you said, music is a huge piece of the game experience fans want to come in here, well-known music and common things. It's hard to get people excited off of songs they haven't really ever heard before. And especially when it comes to the tour team and their warm-ups and they have specific artists and songs that they want to hear and listen to. So making sure that we're able to kind of play those things in venue for them is important. So if you're having a live performance where an entertainer is coming in and they're performing music, and you have also TV recording, filming the game, and maybe capturing some of the footage of the performers, how does that work with getting permission to broadcast, or how do you resolve those issues regarding copyright? Yeah, so really that's when we have those type of things is it's really just getting for clearance from the label for the recording artists. Sometimes we're lucky enough to have artists that are independent and work on their own that don't have quite as many hurdles when dealing with music. But sometimes we have artists that obviously are assigned to record labels. So a lot of times it's just reaching out to them directly and our radio broadcast and play-by-play guy Andrew has done a really good job of kind of working with campus to kind of get rights to or at least a kind of form put together to be able to use some artist's music on our football broadcasts and men's basketball broadcasts. So we at least have a little bit of a template that when we go to these artists and reach out to them we can kind of say, hey there's a chance that your music could be used in X, Y, and Z or put on this whatever channel do you get permission to clear it and just kind of working with them to make sure that our bases are covered legally if we do want to use it in that manner. Yeah, lots of permission and advance and clear communication and contra and written language and contracts, things like that. A little overwhelming effort. Yeah, no, I imagine I'm managing all that and making sure everybody signed off before you actually let the show go on is probably pretty critical. Vanderbilt has had some different trademarks for athletics and the university. Can you talk to me about how you're sort of working on rebranding and working on using more consistent trademarks across the board? Yeah, absolutely. So last March we debuted, I should say March of 2022, I keep forgetting it's May now. We launched a new rebrand for a university and our athletic department, kind of uniting both of those logos. So we had been using our Star V logo for quite some time at this point, but just to kind of nail home our radical collaboration that we've been doing with campus and just being one entity. We switched over our logos to the new V that we have. So with that process has been kind of updating all of our logos and throughout our venues and promotional products and giveaway items and website and everywhere you can think of bookstore, etc. So with that, we just work really closely with Danielle Mellon who is overseas or a licensing for Vanderbilt. And she comes from the athletic space, which is really awesome for us to have that background for her and being able to work with us on it of making sure that all of our vendors are up and aware of all of our new logos when we're ordering items and making sure going through the right approval process with her and through CLC to make sure that we're covering all of our bases when ordering merchandise to make sure that if there's royalties or not royalties involved or making sure certain vendors are only allowed to use certain marks, whether some are only allowed to use apparel, some are only allowed to use print, some are just different license types throughout that they work with her on and then we end up working with a lot of those different vendors on when we get bids for different items and promotions. So it's just been something that we've been slowly working towards getting rid of all of our StarV stuff and moving towards the new logo. So you'll have to ignore the StarV that's still on my shirt, but like he's walking by me due to supply chain issues from COVID, but we're getting there. And it's not just the Vanderbilt trademarks, sometimes you have sponsors or partners that you may be using their marks as well. I am sure there's a lot of contracts that really spell out how and when you can use those marks. Is that correct? Yep, 100%. And a lot of times, especially when we're working with sponsors and outside entities, it'll go through a pretty lengthy or I should say in-depth, hopefully it's not lengthy, sometimes it is lengthy approval process on them when we're doing things like co-branded items or specific giveaway items or even simply a lot of times just using their logo in venue of they each have preference within their ring guidelines of what color background certain logos should be on or what outline the text should be for certain things or it needs to be displayed vertically when used in this format or horizontally in this format or all those different things. And it can get a little more complicated when it goes to co-branded stuff, but we always usually find a way to get it done for the most part. And at this point, once you're in it for a little while, figure out what the brand guidelines are and get a feel for what the sponsor's going to be okay with. And a lot of times it's just going through a lot of proofs and making sure everyone's on the same page and everything looks correct from their branding standpoint and their trademarks when handing things out or using them on social or etc. And you have to take pictures and document how that's used and 100% so a lot of times. Yes, 100% excuse me. We'll show proof of them being used. A lot of times we'll save some extra items for the sponsors if it's a t-shirt or a bobble head or whatever. So that they'll physically have the item afterwards in addition to the pictures of their sponsored content or sponsored assets being run or handed out or whatever channel we're executing it on. And advertising is something that you're also part of or have a contribute to helping with the marketing efforts. What kind of advertising do you do when it comes to college athletics? Yeah, so we'll do honestly, there's nothing off limits when it comes to advertising and what we'll do for the most part. I'd say obviously within what we would consider standard for university and what's allowed within the NCAA or with our states. So we won't do anything crazy in that sense. Like we're not advertising on betting apps or anything like that. But outside of that we're always trying to get creative and we're on every social platform pretty much that you could think of. We still do traditional advertising like radio and billboards, search advertising. I'm even trying to think of some of the crazy stuff. We just did a campaign where we just launched, we sent out I think 30,000 postcards as part of our next door neighbor campaign of people that are new to Nashville and trying to get them to adopt us as their new hometown team as they're moving here. So new old, we're kind of all over the place on what works even if it's just sticking a table out at different farmers markets or events that hand out flyers. Anything we can do to drive attention to us and get people out to support us as athletes. Yeah, that's really amazing. And you pivoted away from using Ticketmaster for your ticketing platforms, right? Can you tell us a little bit about the reason for the change? Yeah, so Ticketmaster is obviously widely used within sports and right now or I should say recently it's been in a little bit of not hot water but in the public spotlights. For some of their decisions, we kind of made ours prior to that of they just weren't quite meeting our needs and kind of what we were looking to do. And we switched over to Pacquiao and who is a leader kind of in the collegiate athletics ticketing space and kind of solely focuses on that side of things. So it really just comes down to what are our goals and what is our ticket provider providing and is the back end what we need is the front end facing the customer. What they need is providing a good experience for them and that's not saying that Ticketmaster doesn't have some of those things. But for us Pacquiao was just the right decision for us and the services that can provide us and the system and the way it just communicates with all of our platforms via email, social back end, etc. for us. So it's still we're still working out I'd say through some kinks and trying out new features as we get more experience where I guess coming up on July 1 will be about a year into the new agreement with Pacquiao and but yeah just kind of at the end of the day it comes down to is are they meeting our needs and if we feel like another party can help us improve our efforts we're going to move that direction. Yeah that makes sense. So you got to find out that what's going to suit your needs the best. NIL, name, image and likeness has been a big deal. How has this shifted how you pursue promotions? Yeah I 100% of it has changed a lot of things. One it changes kind of in venue the way we do things. We're even on social media we're promoting a lot more of our student athletes and the sense of tagging their profiles or doing collaborations with them on Instagram or including their social media handles on their headshot when they're up to bat at baseball or announcing the starting lineup at men's basketball but it also kind of yeah changes the way that we we market things. Obviously in the past kind of NCA guidelines so to kind of specify the way we kind of interact with student athletes and their images with sponsor logos where now they are allowed to do that opportunity kind of on their own. So we just try and be conscious of that balance of not taking away a potential NIL opportunity from them but also still being able to promote their events and their likeness and try and be a good partner in supporting our student athletes however we can and getting them though of the recognition they deserve and try to tote that line between the two. The balancing act now you have to consider other factors and your decisions and Vanderbilt is enrollment is just shy of 14,000 students who are enrolled at your university with different backgrounds and inclusion is something that a lot of universities are trying to embrace and be more mindful of. So how does collegiate athletic marketing working towards being more inclusive? Oh yeah 100% I mean it's what we live in a world obviously where DEI is an important piece of it as it should be and for us is trying to reach out to new folks that might not have considered being a fan or coming to our sporting events and so our coaches have been good partners and we have our headman's basketball coach Jerry Stackhouse was a member of a divine nine fraternity and something that's big for him is scheduling non-conference games with HBCUs so it's been fun for for me to work on divine nine nights and national panellinic nights with some of our black fraternities and sororities on campus and just trying different efforts through things and we came off of a big 50-year title nine campaign last season throughout our women's sports programs here so for me it's just a new hopefully more exciting way to get people involved with us on our sporting events and just being a part of our community and our university which really embraces DEI and for us I think that's just something that we want to continue to build upon going forward. Yeah so the HBCUs the historically black colleges and universities and then of course Title IX has to do with more gender equity in athletics so those are two great things that kind of highlight your efforts towards inclusion. Well Jacob I thank you so much for your time today and thanks for talking to us about the college athletics marketing and the preparation before promotion so thank you for your time. Yeah absolutely thanks for having me. You're welcome and thank you to our viewers for joining us today we will see you next time on the sports playbook. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo