I’m Writing Again. Here’s Why.
I used to write about this work. Then the work got big enough that I stopped.
Fourteen years across entertainment, professional sports, media, and nonprofits will do that. You spend so much time making things and running teams and sitting in meetings that the part where you step back and say what you’ve learned falls off the calendar. It’s the first thing to go, and it’s the last thing you notice is gone.
I noticed. So this is me getting back to it.
What This Is
A place where I write about sports marketing and brand from the inside: what it looks like to build a brand for a team, to lead a creative group, to sit across from partners and finance and fans and try to make all of them believe in the same thing.
Some of it will be practical, the stuff I wish someone had written down for me at year three. Some of it will be opinion, because fourteen years earns you a few. And some of it will be about the business side, the part creatives are told to stay away from and the part I think we should be running toward.
What This Isn’t
It’s not a highlight reel. I’m not going to write about the campaigns that worked and skip the ones that didn’t. The misses taught me more, and they’re more useful to you.
It’s also not a sports-only conversation, even though sports is where I live. Brand is brand. If you’re building one in tech, in music, in a nonprofit, you’ll recognize most of what’s here.
What’s Coming
I’m starting with a series on marketing, brand, and the business of sports. The first piece is about why creative is a line item, not a cost center, and why the people who can prove that are the ones who’ll be leading these organizations next. After that: giving back to culture instead of taking from it, experiential marketing, AI, and what ties all of it together.
A second series follows on the questions marketing leaders actually get asked: measurement, earned media, personalization, risk, and staying curious long enough to matter.
One article a week, starting September 15.
Why Now
I’ve been quiet for the last few months. Not absent, just quiet: observing, researching, writing in notebooks nobody sees. And the more I watched, the more I noticed how much is happening in sports, marketing, and brand that nobody’s really talking about out loud.
At the same time, the questions kept coming. People reaching out to ask how to think about a measurement problem, a partner conversation, a career move, a brand that’s lost its way. Enough of the same questions that it stopped making sense to answer them one at a time.
So this is me answering them in public. I have a real soft spot for this industry. It gave me a career and a point of view, and I’d like to give some of that perspective back to the people building the next version of it.
If you’ve been in those rooms too, I’d love to hear where you agree or disagree. That’s where the good writing usually comes from.
Catch you in the next article!
// A Nine28 publication.