Welcome to the Marketing MadMen. It's a special hybrid edition with Legacy of Luxury, and I'm here with Shelby Wright from Georgia Bulldog Sports Marketing. Today we're covering two things that line up with each other: the evolution of sports as a luxury good and the experience fans now expect, and how that ties into the sponsorship world. Shelby, give me your background.

I'm a proud graduate of the University of Georgia with a degree in public relations from the Grady College and a minor in Renaissance history. I spent time in special events and event management, then came back to sports about ten or fifteen years ago, working internally with Learfield across roughly eighty school portfolios. The last nine years I've been at the University of Georgia selling corporate partnerships.

PR is one of the most misunderstood parts of marketing. People think it's free advertising or damage control. How much has that background helped you in what you do now?

It was the foundation of where I am now. It teaches you to communicate clearly, to understand the behavior behind how people want to be communicated to, and that it's part of the business and marketing mix, not a standalone. It should be part of the C-suite conversation.

Good marketing takes three months to turn around and ten months to deteriorate. Ten years of brand equity buys you about six months of goodwill before the seventh month catches up with you. All right, let's get into what we came here to talk about. Sports used to be Wrigley Field bleachers and blue concrete seats at Shea Stadium. What do fans expect out of a game-day experience now?

It's morphed from the shirtless-guys-drinking-beer era into a full-on experience, and that experience varies depending on whether you're a fan with kids or entertaining clients. It's all about authenticity, convenience and expectation. On the authenticity side that could be the tailgate or the gear you wear. And now with NIL, boosters are being asked to fund a specific quarterback, not just donate to the program. On convenience, it's a lot like an airline: do you want economy, premium seating, drinks delivered to your seat, more legroom? All of that has a price, and it's about loyalty, because a bad first-class experience means someone never flies first class with you again.

Talk about the evolution you've seen specifically at Athens over the last decade or so.

It's all about experience. The Bulldog Tailgate Club is turnkey now, your tent, tables and chairs are already there when you show up. We've added premium seating and fan enhancements over the last eleven years, seat backs instead of aluminum bleachers, premium and corporate tailgating options, all in response to direct feedback. None of that is us pushing something on fans; we're catching up to demand that already exists.

The margins people assume exist in college athletics don't actually exist. Ohio State was fifty million dollars in the red the year after it won a national championship. Talk about how expensive this actually is.

They don't exist. Well, they think tickets are free. They're not free. There's a fixed cost to tickets. The most expensive and least predictable line is tuition, because you don't know year to year whether your student-athletes are in-state, out-of-state or international. Coach Dooley understood that early and helped establish scholarship endowments to cover it, because you can finance bricks and mortar, but you can't finance tuition. The other misconception is parking. It's a college campus 355 days a year, not a pro stadium built around a parking lot, and the university's main goal is still education. Athletics is the front porch, but we still operate within campus.

The football budget is a sliver of the university's research budget, but it's what gets all the press. As sports has built out this luxury experience, sponsorship has evolved right alongside it. Talk about how sponsorships looked ten or twelve years ago versus now.

I think 10 or 12 years ago, it was much more spots and dots. It was radio spots, it was print ads, it was signage. Now people want full-blown conceptual storytelling and experiences, and those are my favorite partnerships to work on. I value every partnership at every size, but sometimes you have to walk before you run. Get a blueprint of success and then build on it.

Talk about how the fan experience has changed: being on the field, athlete scholarship presentations, check presentation ceremonies. None of that existed twenty years ago, and now it's every day.

I always start with what does success look like to you as a brand, because that's my favorite part of the fact-finding, understanding what success looks like for each brand, because every brand is different. And you have to agree on how you're going to measure it, because if you don't come to an agreeable term on the metric, it's a worthless pie-in-the-sky thing. The partnership is the start, not the end. There's often an additional five or ten thousand dollars to activate a weekend really well, co-branded merchandise, and that's where marketers sometimes haven't thought it all the way through.

People think this is the sexy, fun part of marketing, but a lot of it is tedium, redesigning stadium signage to a 9,300-DPI spec on the wrong computer, and then someone tells you a color is too white.

It's tedious, labor-intensive work that people forget is required, because the last thing you want to do is pay all this money and have a terrible-looking thing that doesn't match. As we continue to evolve, I think you're going to see augmented reality come in, and the data is going to get more granular, targeting people with offers on their credit cards while they're in the stadium. I also think you'll get to a point where the valuations have peaked and people get more practical, which pulls it back a little more toward spots and dots.

There's only so much time in a broadcast window to do all of this anyway, and everyone's trying to speed the game itself up because the TV audience loses attention even quicker.

Right, and we've also seen a rise in unique, behind-the-velvet-rope experiences that aren't necessarily tied to game day at all. People just want authenticity. This younger generation craves real connection.

Let's give advice to a brand getting into sponsorship for the first time, at any level, minor league baseball, a D3 school, all the way up. What core principles hold across every one of these deals?

They need to understand what success looks like to them and understand their target demographic: where they shop, what they like, what's authentic to them. Figure those things out before you get excited about a festival, a concert or a sports property. Then pressure-test the opportunities, and pay attention to who is actually digging in, doing research on your brand, because information is currency, and the more information either side has, the better the likelihood of a successful partnership.

The worst partners show up with one asset at one price and tell you that's what you should do. The best ones ask a couple more questions, or come with options.

Correct, and you also can't be hyper-focused on assets. Someone will say they want the video board, but if brand awareness isn't actually what they said mattered, and it's really about unique experiences for their clients, the video board isn't going to give them that. Part of my job is to pressure-test whether the asset they're asking for actually serves the goal they told me they had.

How do you evaluate whether a sponsorship actually worked?

We set the KPI, and that's important, but when you look back you have to have a mix of magic and science. The data says one thing, but sometimes something touched a person, and that's intrinsically valuable even if you can't measure it in the moment. I really like the word partnership better than sponsorship, because it's communication the whole way along, not just asking if someone's happy at renewal time. Business climates change on a dime, tariffs, COVID, gold at forty-five hundred dollars an ounce, up a hundred percent in two years. If the person you're working with isn't flexible, that's a red flag, because what worked two years ago might not work now.

Second half of this, off the radio clock now. This is a dude-heavy industry. Talk about being a woman in college sports sponsorship, and what advantages that background brought you sitting across the table from these partners.

I grew up in the pest control industry, which is not exactly known for its female diversity, so I was pretty well prepared to work in a male-dominated field. I did have to work harder than some of my counterparts to prove I was capable. But I do think women are inherently better listeners, and better at asking questions that get to the answer they actually want, because they'll stay with a line of questioning longer. I think women make better leaders for that reason, because they process the information instead of just formulating their next response while you're still talking. We also carry less ego into the sale. I don't bring up that I played sports growing up, because that piece doesn't come into play, and you don't have to have played sports to be competitive. I was a figure skater.

More and more of the partners I sit across from now are women, and they don't want to go play golf or go out for a big steak dinner. They're trying to get it done and spend time with their kids. It's a different game than it was.

It is. And I've seen younger women in this business who are really good at getting the meeting and much worse at closing the deal, because they still feel like they have to prove themselves through the relationship instead of just asking directly for what they want.

You're at the pinnacle of college sports sponsorship now. What advice would you give someone, man or woman, trying to follow a similar path?

Get a business-facing degree if you want to work on the business side of sports, or a sport management degree if you want recreation and operations. Sports is an industry just like diamonds and jewelry are. You need to be well-read and curious about what's going on in the world, because you can't look at your market in a silo, and if you don't naturally have that, you have to learn techniques to become interested. And you need to start early and get behind the curtain, whether that's working at a radio station or helping out on event weekends as a student, so you don't carry a rose-colored view of what sports actually is.

Every bit of rapport in a sales meeting comes down to finding something in common, and the easiest way to have something in common with a lot of people is to have had a wide diversity of experiences yourself.

I genuinely love connecting people, whether or not it benefits me directly, because I think it comes back in spades. Part of it is always taking the coffee, always taking the meeting, even when it's exhausting to always have to be on.

Let's close on authenticity, since we've said the word about fifty times today. People crave it, but they also know when it's fake. My own definition is simple: if you can walk into a store and spend five hundred dollars, you understand what luxury is, because most people don't have ten dollars in savings. You don't need a Birkin bag to understand luxury.

Luxury can be a piece of jewelry that carries your grandmother's diamonds, handmade into something you can't just go pick up off a shelf somewhere else. To somebody else, luxury might be something entirely different, and that's okay, because luxury is also an experience. If you felt important and valued at the three-hundred-dollar experience, you'll come back when you have three thousand or thirty thousand to spend, because you were treated well. That's hard to fake, and it's what we try to be.

Tell people where to find you and why they should consider a partnership with the Bulldogs.

You can reach me at shelby.wright@georgiadogs.com. Consider a partnership with the University of Georgia if you're interested in high-household-income fans. We've graduated more women than men for the last eight years, so if you're looking for a female head-of-household demographic, we've got a great one, and we have a tremendous range of experiences and price points that would fit pretty much any business, as long as what you bring to the table matches what you're asking for.