 Hi everyone, so glad you could join us for another episode of Most Powerful Woman in Sports for the world's greatest marketers, media pros, athletes and coaches share their remarkable journeys and how they achieve peak performance. Today we'll be speaking with NHL Chief Marketing Officer Heidi Browning. We'll talk to Heidi about leadership lessons learned from different stops along the way and the power of positivity, humor and humility. But first some background on Heidi. Heidi joined the NHL in 2016 as CMO after leading digital marketing strategies for companies such as Pandora, MySpace and AgencyUM. Based in San Francisco, Heidi is responsible for executing the NHL's growth marketing strategy and for deepening fan engagement across digital and traditional channels. Heidi, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. All the way from San Francisco. There you are. All right, hi. Hey, hey. So thanks for joining us. I wanted to dive right in and, you know, in preparing for this for our chat today, I went to your LinkedIn bio and it says you're dedicated and I love this to peace, love and ROI. Now, how did you come up with that? How is that, how do you apply that throughout your, you know, your career, your, I guess, as a leader? How did that come to be? Well, I mean, this is all about bringing both your heart and your head to business. And I firmly believe that it is possible to be both an effective leader who delivers results while also being kind and caring human being. And that's what I try to bring to my work life, my home life, etc. From the, you know, standpoint of the greatest lessons, I think that we've learned from the pandemic, the role empathy plays in both the workplace as well as at home has grown and we've seen it to become even more important in our world and I do think it's going to take, make a critical path in the future of work, this role of empathy and that's really again what all it is what it's all about combining that heart and head. And then from the ROI perspective, I've kind of been obsessed with our way all my life. Even when I was a little kid, we go to the mountain and we'd ski and try to get our cost per rundown each weekend. So, you know, that was a natural segue into working into digital media and now marketing so peace, love and ROI all the way baby. I love it. I love it. And where did, where did you grow up? I grew up in Montana, in a town called Great Falls, Montana, which was one of the bigger cities and it was a wonderful way to, you know, wonderful childhood. And I still have family there I don't get back as often as my parents would like me to but it's a lovely place. Yeah. And were you a big sports fan or an athlete or both back then. Let's say I was more of a mathlete than an athlete so I'd say I skewed more nerd than athlete but I did love to ski and have fun. And then, you know, as I went on to college, that's where I started to, you know, kind of join the bandwagon if you will have because we had professional teams and you could you know enjoy and all the fun and the fandom across multiple sports. And that's when you grow up in a state where you don't have a professional sports team to, you know, you kind of find strange alignments and reasons to like teams, you know, for example we love the 49ers because of Joe Montana, just because of the name Montana. That's really funny. So, when you got the job at the NHL and we'll talk about your some of your other roles that led to that job. What did you know about hockey, if anything. Well, I didn't know much about hockey I was like the most bandwagon fan meaning I would go to Stanley Cup parties because they're fun and social and fabulous, but I was not a dedicated hockey fan by any means. You know, when I was interviewing with the commissioner, he was so wonderful and, you know, made it really clear that I didn't have to be a hockey fan to work there he said you know we have a whole company filled with hockey fans and sometimes you can't see what you can't see. You know that's a really gracious way to bring me into the organization because it helped me, you know turn what I perceived as my weakness, not knowing the game into a strength and as we look to grow our fan base beyond the avid hockey fans and pull in and expand to casual fans. This became a definite you know opportunity for me to bring my perspective to the table. Like any other world you know when you're in an agency world which I spent many years on the agency side. When you win a piece of business, you all of a sudden get your PhD in that industry right you study the business products the people and you go from there and so what I was able to bring to the league was my years of experience and digital and social and mobile and data, and then learn the business of hockey, and now I love it and I'm a huge hockey fan. And we'll get into that I want to I want to just so I want to go back you worked at my space you worked at Pandora. Can you give me some examples of how those roles, you were able to apply the skills and tools for enriching the NHL brand. So those are two of my favorite experiences of my career and I always refer to my space is the business school of life. I mean it really was it was the most interesting and exciting and challenging role and it was absolutely a privilege to be part of that era. Because when you think about it, my space was the beginning of social media and that has changed marketing forever. So, you know, I joined back when it was the cultural zeitgeist we were breaking double click every day because of the rapid rapid exponential growth that the audience was having. And you think about it, it was a time in society where for the first time ever consumers had technology in their hands they had iPhones and flip video cameras if you remember those. And then so they could create, but they also had the opportunity to distribute content to audiences at scale via my space. So creators were now also distributors and that was game changing and I think the birth of our creator culture that we are living in today. The second thing that I think was transformational at that time and having a seat at the table was was extraordinary, which is the power and the relationship the social contract between consumers and brands. For the first time ever consumers had a voice they had a platform and they use their voice to tell brands what they thought about them right and the smart brands were leaning in and listening early and now listening is part of every marketers toolkit as an important touch point with your fans and your customers so creator culture and listening came right out of my space. I also had the opportunity to work at hand or I joined shortly before we went public and help scale that business into a billion dollar business and that was also an incredible experience because we're redefining the audio landscape. We were, you know, it was all about the power of personalization to deliver, you know, a sublime listening experience and discover new artists and all of that was driven by incredible amounts of data and mobile. Pandora was a mobile first company and that's where that scaled and grew and so all the clever tricks that we learned in the digital world and the web world didn't work in mobile so this was an extraordinary opportunity for us to learn how to grow and business and monetize in mobile while at the same time delivering this extraordinarily personalized experience. So, you know, to sum up the, these, you know, kind of trends that I bring with me to everything I do at the NHL and beyond it's the power of listening. It's the power of personalization and the power of people to create. Wow. So you really I mean you really are people shouldn't think that because they didn't start let's say at the bottom of the rung and make work their way up to some job and marketing at a sports league or a team that that's it there's no career. This is definitely a way to go bring bring your other school skills in and adapt. That's that's a really great way of looking at it. When you started was it did you find it hard. You started when did you, you, you started in 2016, 2016. Yeah, and that was a really important year because that was, we were celebrating our 100th year as a brand, and you know joint the ability and opportunity and the privilege to join the company at a time where we could celebrate 100 years of our legacy and then usher in the next 100 years and ensure that our brand is relevant for the next generation of fan is super exciting. So let's talk about the next generation of fans. So how are you, how are you who are you reaching out to as that generation, looking at diversity, diversifying the fan base and the players and maybe even the front office, bringing in more women like to give us sort of a lay of the land. Well, all of those are part of our key priorities at the league, the growth of our fan base, especially among younger and more diverse audiences is number one. And mirroring that it is our mission at the league to ensure that you know our front office looks like our fan base and looks like the rest of you know society and so making sure that we are a place that's welcoming and inclusive for all. I'm really proud to be at the NHL where we have so many women leaders across both US and Canada they're in the league office, their club owners their presidents and a growing number of women in hockey operations, as well as a broadcast. So we've got a lot of momentum going and it's continuing to build. One of my, my favorite, you know, moments or people I should say it's not a moment it's an ongoing relationship is the ability or the opportunity work with my partner and colleague and friend in the C suite, Kim Davis. We joined the league a year after I did and boy, having her come into the league and join the rest of us at the executive table has made an amazing impact on our business and she has you know years and years of experience, leading initiatives, but she's also helped us accelerate the work that we've been doing so we have hockey is for everyone is our North Star. It's our vision and our version of the highest version of our sport. We have a lot of work to do to truly make hockey is for everyone and we are committed to doing so for decades. We've been investing in youth programs all across North America, especially in underserved communities. We have learned to play programs we have stem programs, we have equipment sharing, we even have these really cool innovative technology pieces that were testing out in Canada, they're called NHL street nets and I think of it like a transformer. It's, we put it into, you know, like a, an urban area and it can transform it from a hockey net into a basketball hoop so it can be used for multi purposes. And that's like another just like innovative way we're trying to make our game accessible to everyone you don't have to step on the ice to become a you know to become a hockey fan there are many many paths to fandom. Yeah, when you think about it from a marketing perspective, you know, we're constantly listening to our fans, you know, talking to our fans and waiting maybe fans who are not fans quite yet might be multicultural fans or young fans and learning about what are the, you know, what are their perceptions and barriers, and what can we do to help make the game more welcoming to them. And we're implementing, you know, marketing and in arena policies to ensure that we live up to our highest form of hockey. And do you have something called power players still? Is that still active? Oh boy, you just asked me about my favorite topic we said. Yeah, let's do it. So the power players. So when I first joined the league, I did an interview. And, you know, I talked about how joining the league with 100 year anniversary and ushering the next generation of fan and being focused on these younger fans. There's a physical letter in the mail from this young lady named Sabrina Solomon. She was an 11 year old who was, you know, letting me know that she read the article. She had a bunch of ideas for us and in fact she was off for the summer because school was out and she could come work for free, which of course we couldn't hire her but we invited her and her mom and, you know, we assembled a little crew of, you know, different people across the league thinking she might want to you know, aspirationally have a job in the league and in some, you know, different categories. Well, she comes in, she brings a whole PowerPoint filled with ideas, and she presents them in the boardroom to everybody with, you know, great poise. And it was a real aha moment for us because we recognize like some of the ideas, all of the ideas she had were great. Some of the ideas we were already doing. And if she was not recognizing or seeing or knowing that we were doing these ideas, then we had a problem that meant that we weren't connecting with her and her generation. And so from there that birthed our NHL power players youth advisory board. It's comprised this year we're just we just announced our new board this year it's got 2713 to 17 year olds. They're across North America, about 60% of them are women and a third of them are multicultural. And we assemble them meet with them twice a month, and they advise us on everything we talk about sports, obviously hockey, but culture and media and music and content and intersectionality of all of this and each of them, you know, had to go through a pretty rigorous application process and inner free view process to get on our board and we want to make sure not only the we committed with ideas. This wasn't just a resume builder right that this was like something that they would actually want to participate on in, but they also get to learn about our business and have sort of a behind the scenes view of how the NHL works and we, we cherish all the insights that we learn from them. We've, you know, picked up a pattern over the course of the last three years of sort of the key themes that are important and resonate and which by the way, have also been validated in other research so we know it's not just this focus group of fans but it's, you know, it's bigger than that. And we use their insights to either validate the direction we're going or, you know, slightly change some of the work that we're doing or inspire new ideas together but they've been extraordinarily helpful to us and especially, you know, when you think about the importance of DEI and the importance of growth and making our sport available and inclusive to all this is a passion point for each and every one of them. And that's where they're here to help us think about what are the programs and the ways that we can communicate and connect with their peer group to bring them into the world of hockey. Fantastic. Are there any insights or surprises that you learn from the power players that you actually applied or stopped doing? Oh, all this. Yeah, all the day. There are really like four key pillars. The one is, which I call humans are greater than highlights, and that's all about, you know, this desire to know the whole athlete, right. The ones around the world are following athletes first, then club teams and then leagues, and they're following athletes of sports they don't even watch just because they're interesting humans. And so this is all about that power of personal. They want to have a one to one connection with the athletes that they admire so much they want to know how they became goats. They want to know what they do in their, you know, spare time with families like this has been an important pillar in our storytelling, both on our social medias and across all of our channels. The other key insight is around inclusivity which we've already talked about about how important it is and, you know, I am grateful that we have this group of power players that is, you know, happy to share with us their ideas, but also to let us know like where we need to, you know, be thinking of how we can change and evolve and as a brand and I applaud them for being very, you know, brave and straightforward with us on that. And then the third area is really around gamification of everything which I you know is not a surprise. There's eSports but it's generation every single thing you do right you know you just want to take it a poll. Okay, did I win did I lose how did I benchmark. That's really important. And then the last one is this idea around see me is how we call it, which is this idea of putting our fans at the center of our marketing so this goes all the way back to creator culture from my space. But it you know it's pulled through into this generation today and we, you know, have known have seen when we have fan centric content where it's featuring our fans and Jesus generated content or creator content. It's some of our highest performing content on our channel so it's an important part of our content pie. That's great. Now, what would be the hardest part of being the CMO the NHL and what would be the most rewarding. I think that the answer to this is the same. It's about being the voice of the fan is the CMO you are the voice of the fan right I feel great responsibility for our fan base. And especially with my team on the front lines of social media, we are the frontline for the voice of the fan as well as the voice of the league and we work really really hard to have healthy and vibrant community on social media and you know as well as I do there's also a dark side you know you've got people who hide behind keyboards and feel like they can say whatever and so we do our best to stand up to that kind of behavior we don't have it a lot but when we do we stand up to it but you know it's hard it's hard on the social media team who's managing it it's hard on the fans who didn't ask for that so that's the hardest part but the best part about it is that is the fans themselves right. Having these personal connections I love to go to games and sit in the stands with the fans and just talk with them about their experience. We, you know, listen to our power players. I meet fans all over the place on social media, and you know and have developed long lasting relationships with really amazing people, just because I'm open to learning about them and their fandom so fans are the best they're they're fuel in the life but of our business and we are here to serve them in every way possible. Okay, so I got one last question for you. We'll end it on what's the best piece of advice you give to women who want to enter or move up in the NHL or maybe any sport. I'd say this is our time right now, we've got incredible momentum and with more and more women in leadership positions across all aspects of the league, the clubs, the teams, then hockey ops. And so I'd say you know the hockey world is yours just go for it. Okay. All right, well, we're just out of time but we have just enough time for some takeaways. So I'm going to let you throw to your, your key takeaways and we'll go from there. Thanks that was quick Lisa. It was, I know. I you said it was going to be quick. So from the takeaway perspective, you know, this is really again about that heart in the head leading with passion, listening with empathy and learning with everyone we all have things to learn every single day. And not about just about the business. The second key takeaway is learning about yourself and you can learn a lot about yourself not just through the successes that you have but through the failures and ask yourself what did you learn from each of these moments because they always make you stronger. And then the last but not least is deliver business results. It's important, no matter who you are or where you are in business that you're thinking about the business first and driving the business. You can do it with heart and with passion, but always put the numbers on the board. Excellent. These are really great. Thank you so much for sharing them. Just say go Rangers actually I should say go senators from Ottawa. My father will kill me if I don't say senators. Anyway, thank you so much. I know I can't allow that except when they play each other. But thank you so much. I hope that we'll be speaking again very soon. Perhaps next time in real life. Thank you. Thank you. We'll, we'll talk soon. So next woman up will be Olympic gold medalist swimmer Katie Ledecky, and we'll see you back here on November 17 live at our annual brand week sports marketing summit live but virtual that is, and registration is free so come on come on down and register at at week.com. Thank you all and we'll see you soon.