Virtual Victors: Fast Pitch 2020

Thursday night, EMBRACE Action won.

The North Texas nonprofit earned the People’s Choice Award at the annual Fast Pitch competition. That’s not unusual. The Dallas Influencers in Sports and Entertainment organization has awarded the honor, this year sponsored by sponsorship data firm MVP, every year since 2015. What was strange this year was the winner couldn’t take the award home with them.

Normally a half dozen charities make presentations in front of judges and an audience of sports and entertainment industry types. The panel deliberates and doles out monetary grants in amounts they deem appropriate to the quality of the presentations. The crowd gives out more money to one of the six via the People’s Choice balloting.

But 2020 has frowned on gatherings. And passing awards between undersanitized hands. But it has driven home the need for kindness and generosity in one’s community. DISE decided it needed to still have a Fast Pitch.

Maintaining a sense of normalcy has proven challenging throughout the pandemic, and few professions have felt its impact more than those involved in planning live events. Many have canceled their gatherings altogether. Others have looked for ways to host them virtually, but one can’t possibly exactly duplicate the experience of a prestigious, rollicking, or meaningful program via electronic means.

To make the most of what you’ve got to work with, it helps to start by thinking about what you would have aimed to accomplish had you held the event live. And then to think about ways to still achieve those goals and, if possible, add enhancements unique to the virtual world.

For Fast Pitch, we identified this list:

•          Celebrate charities who do good things for the community

•          Celebrate a prominent sports figure who has made an impact

•          Actually do some good for the community through donations and awareness

•          Bring DFW industry professionals together for networking

•          Provide value for sponsors

•          Show what a vibrant sports & entertainment industry DFW has and position it as a leader among markets worldwide

•          Have fun (and cocktails)

OK, I might have added the cocktails part myself. But I didn’t get any pushback either.

The nonprofits normally get two things from Fast Pitch: funds through grants and notoriety via getting to tell their stories on stage. The organization luckily did have some funds available for grants. They decided to select three charities, with the DISE Philanthropy Committee choosing from among applications.

Without presentations on a stage, the notoriety portion seemed trickier. Here’s where we decided to utilize the advantages a virtual approach supplies. We realized we didn’t have to limit ourselves to just a one-day event. A rich mix of online content might allow us to achieve an even broader footprint for Fast Pitch spread over multiple days instead of just one bang-up evening.

We wanted a heavy dose of video to mimic the energy of a live stage. Specific communication resonates better than general, so rather than simply run overview videos for each grantee, we would ask the nonprofits to each supply us with three stories of ways they had helped a particular person, neighborhood, or cause. We’d create scripts and videos about the stories and run them on DISE social channels leading up to a virtual finale event. We’d still award a People’s Choice Award at the finale, but instead of just having one night of balloting, we’d allow individuals to vote once per day for 10 days. We wanted the community to have ample time to explore these organizations and for them to rally their supporters.

Who should we have tell these stories? Our distinguished collection of narrators featured sponsor representatives, including The Marketing Arm, the Dallas Mavericks, Tony Fay PR, and MVP, along with DISE board members and our finale emcee, Julie Dobbs from The Ticket and The Mom Game. We hoped this social media-centric approach would add a level of engagement across multiple days, with likes, shares, and comments from the narrators, their organizations, the beneficiaries, and all of their networks.

2020 influenced not only how we recognized the charities, but how we selected them. All summer, DISE programming had addressed the erupting racial tensions. So the Philanthropy Committee members looked for organizations whose missions included both service to children and social justice. They found three excellent ones:

• After8ToEducate

• EMBRACE Action

• Youth With Faces

Normally at the Fast Pitch event, we have a headlining music act of the caliber of U2 or Taylor Swift. We needed to duplicate their powerful impact, but I had, unfortunately, misplaced Taylor’s number.

OK, we haven’t convinced Taylor Swift to play a Fast Pitch yet (although Downtown Doug did a nice set one year). But we still needed attention-getting content to supplement the charity stories. We decided we’d have board members Hunter Harvin and Quashan Lockett do a retrospective on the social justice in sports webinar series DISE had held earlier in the year in conjunction with Black Sports Professionals – North Texas and the Women in Sports and Events DFW chapter. It would be poignant, but we also needed some content that could duplicate the exuberance everybody feels during the one time a year when the whole industry gets together. We needed to be, you know, fun. Even without cocktails. Or Taylor Swift.

Luckily DISE President Carla Rosenberg saw the vision. She let my colleague Dave French and I record video of her in front of a green screen and she gave a great performance while we threw her footballs and stabbed her with a hockey stick (the referee would have assessed me a five-minute spearing major penalty and a game misconduct in a real game).

The fast-paced result proved to be exactly what we needed as an opening video. If DISE members hadn’t picked up on the vision before, they could now. And they were energized. They could now see that Fast Pitch was still gonna be cool.

We put a couple more talented board members to work doing fun videos promoting the People’s Choice Award and the online auction (presented by Polsinelli), plus a promo from Julie. We also got all the charity stories videos shot and edited.

Meanwhile, we also wanted to find a prominent local athlete to honor with the Heart of Dallas Award, presented by Southwest Airlines. Past honorees have included Clayton Kershaw, Emmitt Smith, Jamie Benn, Troy Aikman, and Dirk Nowitzki, so we wanted to keep that run of quality going. Luckily the board saw an obvious choice in a Dallas Cowboys Pro Bowler who had both talked the talk and walked the walk on social justice and community service this year: DeMarcus Lawrence.

Thankfully Lawrence accepted the honor, designating the Ronald McDonald House to receive $10,000 on his behalf.

We tried to make the virtual happy hour finale fun, with Rosenberg and Board Chair Kern Egan even proposing drinking games involving the evening’s sponsors, Andrews Distributing and Red Bull (see how I worked cocktails back in there?). Via SPORTFIVE’s bespoke virtual events platform, we did much of the affair live, with a few pre-recorded bits. I’m not going to tell you which parts were pre-done - watch Julie’s DeMarcus Lawrence interview and see if you can guess which it was.

We wrapped it all up on time and, at the end, EMBRACE Action won the People’s Choice balloting. Just like a deserving nonprofit does every year. And we felt like we got all our boxes checked in terms of what we wanted to accomplish with the virtual version of the event. Thanks to social media interaction and the chat window at the finale, we even felt good about the networking angle. All the same, we’ll be happy to put 2020 behind us and do Fast Pitch in person next year. With cocktails.

Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

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Has A Smile Ever Mattered More?

 Has a smile ever mattered more?

The notion occurred to me after watching a video my friend Canaan Kelley put together for one of my favorite nonprofits, Nancy Lieberman Charities. In the piece, Nancy visited the office of one of the organization’s dedicated supporters, Couture Dentistry. Thus you see the connection that occurred to me: dentists & smiles.

In the video, like pretty much everywhere else in the world, we see a lot of people wearing masks. Masks make it harder to tell if someone is grinning at you. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t smile. In fact, conveying that touch of warmth in your expression seems more crucial than ever.

The world already had COVID-19 disrupting human relationships and, in the U.S., we had a contentious election looming. Then this summer social justice upheaval, made us question a lot of our assumptions about people and precipitated more tension. I’ve been fortunate enough to do some diversity, inclusion, and equity work with Sidney and Takisha Moncrief this year, and one thing he wrote about in his new book was how a smile can defuse hostility. I’d like to think I’m inclined to be friendly anyway, but I found myself thinking more than ever about smiling at strangers, especially ones who looked different than me. But unless I was properly socially distanced, the ever-present mask frustratingly muted its impact.

But a smile doesn’t have to just be about lifting your lips. There are other ways to show affection. You might just have to get a little more creative about it. 

Nancy has always believed in showing love to the companies who sponsor her charity. And in making this piece, she found a creative way to smile at one. She and Couture’s owner, Dr. Nelson Lo, come from different ethnicities and backgrounds, but she smiles at him big-time in the video - whether she’s showing her teeth off or not.

Nancy’s friend and TV colleague Erin Hartigan appeared with her at the Couture offices. If you’ve ever seen them together, on the air or off, Nancy and Erin share laughs regularly. Constantly, even. That comes through when they appear on camera together, including in this video. Thanks to COVID-19, most of us have had to do a lot more of our communication through cameras and monitors. We’re not all as professional at it as Erin and Nancy. But we can all aim to convey amiability in our interactions. 

Please, whether anyone can see you or not, keep smiling.

Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

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Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

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Agility Matters in TV and Football

 The agility of high-level American football players has always amazed me. 300-pound men change direction instantaneously as they pursue their missions of either protecting or demolishing a ballcarrier.

We saw a lot of agility among the guys in pads as we produced a television program about the College Gridiron Showcase this year. The event, in fact, revolves around former college football players trying to show pro scouts how nimble, strong, ferocious, and/or intelligent they are. They’re high-level performers – young men who excelled as amateurs hoping to show they’re truly elite. So our crew got to see some good football.

We also discovered we needed to be agile ourselves, and not just because videographer Suzanne Wilemon isn’t afraid to push the limits of how close one should get to a pileup involving guys up to a foot-and-a-half taller than her.

We first had to find a way to get the show shot. We didn’t have the financing or distribution in place by the time the event rolled around, and at the time we believed the football calendar to be an immovable object. The CGS had to happen in January in Fort Worth and we had to shoot it. So we called in some favors and pulled a few double shifts. We emerged with a lot of interviews, football footage, and a whole lot of great narratives involving young people trying to realize their dreams.

Our goal had been to create a series in which we would take deep dives into players’ stories using CGS as a common core element. We would conduct additional interviews, go to their hometowns, and generally let the audience engage with their whole life situations.

Then we had to pivot. As we worked on financing and distribution, the production world abruptly came to halt. NFL and CFL calendars normally propelled by pro days and live drafts came to an unprecedented halt.

The pandemic meant we wouldn’t be doing any more interviews or shoots.

So we took a look at what we had. And it turns out we had a lot. One thing we always liked about CGS from a production standpoint was that we could shoot efficiently, with a lot of players in one place. And we had some great stories we could still tell, including:

·     A one-time top recruit confronting the off-field issues that caused him to enroll at four colleges and put his pro football dreams in serious jeopardy.

·     A record-setting running back from a small school, homeless as a kid, who hopes to realize a lifelong dream on the NFL’s big stage.

·     An offensive lineman whose mental health issues forced him to leave the Big Ten school he loved and finish college at a lower-level school in Texas.

·     An offensive lineman who grew up in poverty and became one of the few players to announce he was gay while still competing.

·     A small-school running back who persevered through two torn ACLs.

So we decided to make a show from it. It wouldn’t be a series, but instead a one-hour capsule summary that revolved around the CGS chapter in these player’s lives. Mixed in with the football angles, we worked in how they prepared for life off the field. That part included powerful testimony from rape survivor and activist Brenda Tracy that made these 20-somethings really consider matters of character.

By the end, we thought we had something people would want to watch. Executives at a couple of networks agreed with us, but those deals fell apart when others in the organization didn’t share their vision. That led us to choose to distribute the show via broadcast syndication.

The broadcast syndication process involves placing a program individually on local stations throughout the country who agree to carry it. There are a number of groups who own many such stations and a couple of those, Nexstar and Scripps, agreed to offer it to their local decision-makers.

I was on a Zoom call with one of my business partners in late July and I checked my email when I got done. I’m not sure I had ever before received an email from Grand Junction, Colorado, but the one I read that day was from that city’s CBS affiliate. KREX wanted the show. We had our first broadcast outlet. No matter how many emails I get in the future from Grand Junction, that will always be the best one.

A number of other stations followed and we have gradually built up our coverage to a significant portion of the country. I think one of the things our team is most excited about is that the road wasn’t smooth, but we eventually found our way to where we wanted to be. One has to be agile.

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We also try to provide a package to our partner stations to allow them to be agile. We supply promotional spots of multiple lengths (you don’t know useful that is until you’ve found yourself hunched over a computer terminal trying to fill in the holes on the log of a typical broadcast day), social media content (including versions without voiceover so they can let their own sportscasters voice them for added localization), and materials to facilitate earned media. We want to give them the tools to drive viewers to their stations.

Thanks a bunch to our sponsors – we could not have pulled this off without them:

·     44 Management

·     KT Tape

·     One on One Kicking

·     Reveal Suits

·     Service King Collision

·     Space Center Houston

·     Visit Fort Worth

Ensuring Hockey Is For Everyone

This post originally appeared in the Blotch section of the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To consume it there: https://www.fwweekly.com/2020/02/21/sports-rush-making-hockey-a-sport-for-everyone/

In 1993, the Dallas Stars brought their sport to a whole new group of people when they moved to Texas from Minnesota. Much of the native population had little affinity for the game when the club arrived. Early marketing efforts emphasized similarities to American football.

The Stars gradually expanded their reach. They became the first Sun Belt team to win a Stanley Cup. Their initiatives to establish youth hockey programs have resulted in thousands of children playing the sport and even delivered locally-trained players to the National Hockey League. Sports fans previously unfamiliar with ice hockey developed affinity for the likes of Mike Modano, Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin, and Marty Turco. The Stars gave North Texans a comfort level with their game.

Before, during, and after Wednesday night’s game against another southern team, the Arizona Coyotes, the franchise looked toward making even more people comfortable in the sport. They held a Hockey is For Everyone night at their game against the St. Louis Blues in partnership with the You Can Play organization. You Can Play aims to, as they phrase it, “develop locker room cultures that replace ‘casual homophobia’ – the unintentional use of anti-gay slurs – with acceptance and respect for an athlete’s contribution to the team.” The organization works with a number of sports, but has roots in ice hockey thanks to former NHL GM Brian Burke and his son, current NHL Senior Director of Player Safety Patrick Burke. Their son/brother Brendan came out in an ESPN interview and advocated for a more inclusive hockey culture. After Brendan’s 2010 death, You Can Play was created to continue his legacy and move the issue forward.

The league has embraced the cause and almost all of its teams have participated in some form as well. The Stars held a pregame happy hour at Dibs on Victor. Their foundation’s staff, including Turco, the Dallas Stars Foundation’s president, attended and they also set up a silent auction. The video interviews in this post were conducted there and they offer some real insight into what the issue is all about. 

And there does seem to be plenty of misunderstanding of this initiative. Check out the comments on the Stars’ Instagram post about selling pride-taped sticks as a fundraiser. Many commenters take a strongly supportive tone. Others condemn the post.

Some objections consisted of juvenile jokes. Others were Biblically-based. Several called it out as a political play and wanted the team to stick to hockey. My conversations from Wednesday’s event lead me to think these hostile commentators miss the point. This whole thing IS about “sticking to hockey.”

You Can Play doesn’t have a PAC. They aren’t trying to get laws passed giving LGBTQ hockey players special privileges or restricting straight people’s freedom of speech. Their function is one of education. They want to help straight teammates and fans understand that certain jokes and terms can be detrimental to a teammate’s psyche. A stray comment can create a hostile atmosphere without the speaker even realizing it.
That’s especially true for young players. Coming out is hard enough without having to wonder if doing so will put you at odds with your teammates. Billy Scullion, one of this post’s interview subjects, spent years overcoming the repercussions of the challenges he experienced hiding his sexual orientation amidst what the perceived as hostile junior hockey dressing rooms. Scullion appeared with defenseman John Klingberg in a video that Stars created that discusses the initiative, and a number of other NHL players have expressed support for the principles behind Hockey Is For Everyone. You Can Play wants athletes to view teammates and opponents strictly on the basis of their performance. Their mantra is “if you can play, you can play,” meaning that if players have the requisite skill to compete on a team, they should be able to do so regardless of factors like race, creed, or sexual orientation. 

Scullion and You Can Play co-founder Brian Kitts explained how an environment where all players are comfortable helps them perform better and leads to a greater chance of realizing the shared goal of all teammates, gay or straight: to win the game. As I discussed with Fort Worth dentist Bill Ralstin in his interview, that can apply to business, too. An inclusive environment also improves employee productivity.
Any Stars fan or player wants the team to win. If an inclusive environment leads to a better quality of play, that seems like a good enough reason to get on board with it, even if one can’t summon up empathy for the particular people involved. What we’ve seen in the past, however, with issues of, for instance, race in sport, is that excellence in competition leads to greater overall acceptance eventually. The late Fort Worth baseball icon Bobby Bragan often talked of his objection to Jackie Robinson’s presence when the African American trailblazer first joined Bragan’s Brooklyn Dodger team. But soon enough, the Alabama-reared Bragan came to realize Robinson’s worth as a player and a person and it changed his whole outlook. You Can Play hopes to see that scenario duplicated, but without the initial hostility.

Hockey’s an uncomfortable sport. Bodychecks ram you into the boards from every angle as you glide along on tiny metal edges. You try to use a stick to convince a little blob of rubber to do what you want it to. And have you ever smelled a hockey dressing room? But the Stars and the NHL want to ensure discomfort in their sport remains confined to icing sore muscles or regretting you didn’t get a better shot on net in the second period, and not whether one can be oneself in front of one’s teammates.


Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

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Content Creators And AEs Running The Same Playbook

The Early Days of Football And Ad Sales

For the first four decades or so of American football, play selection had its limits. The introduction of the flying wedge in 1892, wherein a ballcarrier ran behind a massed wall of blockers, was the height of innovation. Then, in 1906, John Heisman finally convinced Walter Camp they needed to add the forward pass to the rules and everything changed.

Television ad sales and TV show production have behaved much the same way. For about the first four decades of the technology, the brute force proposition of four networks selling the only available video inventory dominated the game. Then, in the 1990s, the rapid growth of cable penetration and online options introduced the video equivalents of multiple sets, spread offenses, and jet sweeps. 

National TV reps used to come to work with a (relatively) simple job to do. They’d look at the last Nielsen book (or maybe a three-book average if they had an especially demanding buyer) and service a group of existing agency customers who wanted to match up their clients’ :30 second spots with the (relatively) simple demographic numbers in those perfect-bound manuals. Sometimes you’d add in a sales promotion or some opening and closing brought-to-you-bys. They competed in a (not relatively) small universe of networks, and while they did have to counter threats from outdoor, print, and radio advertising, TV had the hammer. They had the richest content (pictures PLUS sound!) and nobody could deliver audience numbers like they could.  

Content creators also had a (relatively)straightforward mandate. They needed to deliver 22-or 44-minute shows that could make the numbers Nielsen recorded large ones. Barring the occasional product placement or an actor on stage at the upfronts, that’s mostly how those who produced programming serviced sales reps.

Digital Spread Offenses 

Today, digital has gone all run-and-shoot on traditional ad models. Audience segmentation has become more fragmented, though that has also come with new, more targeted measurement tools. There are more networks, and they’re delivered on multiple devices. Advertisers even have their own channels, thanks to social media and websites. 

In addition, the consumer’s buyer journey has changed. A :30-second spot that used to drive people to a store where a clerk would complete (or foul up) the sale now pushes people to visit a website and/or a search engine to contemplate (and potentially execute) a purchase decision. 

So ad salespeople now face a world where their :30-second spots on linear television still have some value, but media buyers want to see more. They want more ways to speak to consumers than just one-off ads attached to content. Content creators have to help AEs deliver.

We still need to create compelling 22-minute shows, 2-hour films, or six-episode miniseries, because that’s still sellable. But we need to also think, “What else can we supply to help the network rep when she’s in that meeting with her client?” 

Content Creators As Team Players

Can we create some supplemental digital content to enable a deeper dive for the viewer and an opportunity for the advertiser to retarget the digital consumer that tuned in for the full piece? Can we make content available for an advertiser to use on their own channels? Can we offer directors and principals to participate in B-To-B functions? And what can we do to make sure viewers don’t want to skip what content we’re using to help the advertiser engage prospects? 

Producers can get sophisticated about truly helping network sales departments service their clients. How do clients’ prospects progress down a sales funnel? Much is made in the sales enablement world about having content to target (and retarget) consumers as they make their ways through their buyer journeys. If a network could supply buzz-worthy content (and video related to a network show should be a lot cooler than your standard testimonial vid or infographic), could such innovation cement a larger share of a media buy for your network partner? If so, then it might be worth some thought in planning a production. 

Football Analogies At Work

An advantage of having viewers who’ve signed up for, say, an SVOD account with you is that you’ll know more about them than the Mad Men boys knew about their mass-appeal audiences. And online services have the ability to serve content based on identifiable patterns - if they’ve got the right content to serve. It’s not too different from a middle linebacker who’s studied his opponent’s offensive tendencies out of certain formations and quickly processes that data to put himself in the right place to stuff the ballcarrier.

This can be fun for content creators. We got into this line of work because we love to tell stories, and here’s an opportunity to make even more of it, in innovative and efficient ways. The rise of subscription services who don’t show ads has helped drive cord-cutting. But ad-supported content isn’t going anywhere, because sellers of goods and services still have to communicate about what they do. Networks, including streaming ones like Tubi, Quibi, and Peacock, want to continue to be the ones to help them do it.

Ad-supported networks have to compete for eyeballs with ad-free services like Netflix. They also have to contend with Amazon Prime and Walmart’s Vudu, who have the ability to facilitate direct sales through their e-commerce platforms. Certainly content creators can make content for Amazon and Walmart, and they should be thinking about how to best drive sales there, too. But when we’re working for networks, we need to use every tool we can to help our partners succeed. That means getting in lockstep with the needs of their sales departments, kind of like quarterbacks do with receivers . . . or safeties do with cornerbacks . . . or holders do with kickers . . . or whatever football analogy works for you. 

Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

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https://www.linkedin.com/company/mintfarmfilms/

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