Atlanta Dream Exec Dan Gadd on Driving Fan Engagement and Growth, Serving the Audience First, Rallying around the Same Goals, and More

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 269 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted
with Dan Gadd, Senior Vice President, Growth for the Atlanta Dream WNBA
Club. He discusses insights and experiences from his career with the
Jacksonville Jaguars, Chicago Bears, Taylor Strategy, Atlanta Falcons, and now
the Atlanta Dream.
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the full
interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast platforms and at
www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 269: Dan Gadd

Dan’s Career Path
“I've mentioned this story before, but it does kind of live with me a lot — I was not
really looking to get into the digital content space. There's all these moments that kind
of stick out in your life, and one of them for me was freshman orientation in college,
we had a dean at our school that spoke to us, and one of the things she said was,
‘We're not going to teach you how to do a job, but we're going to teach you how to
think, so when a bigger opportunity comes along, you know how to take advantage of
it.’ I don't know why that stuck with me, I don't know why I remember it so well, but
that has probably been one of the most defining things of of my path. Every stop along
the way, and I've had a bunch of them, I've just been blessed to be around some really
smart people and learned a ton from them, and I've picked up different things over the
years. I'm getting older now, so I've been around for quite a while, but I feel like I've
got things that I've learned at every stop of the way that has made me more versatile
and let me see, quite honestly, the whole system and the whole operation a lot better.”

“My first job out of college was as an intern with the Jacksonville Jaguars. I got
hired by a guy named Jeff Imperial and the broadcast department down there.
They had won a bunch of Emmys and Jeff was literally a teacher for telling stories
through videography, so I could not have landed in a better spot and learned from
from somebody right out of college the way that I learned from him. My career
goal was really to be more in front of the camera and be like a sports anchor or
something on the news. And I got fascinated with the stories that they were
telling, so that turned into I just worked my tail off there and they had a position
open up as basically like a web video person. This is like 2000, early days of the
internet. But I basically started producing web content for the team and the cool
thing about that gig was it was such a small team. This was back before there were
league platforms or agencies doing websites, so they were doing their website in-
house. There was only three people working on this website and a writer. The
person that was the webmaster was a guy named Steve Hall.

“One of the good things about joining that web team was it was it was a small
group. And we had to do everything in. Our webmaster was a guy named Steve
Hall who could do anything on a computer. He had a photographic memory,
could memorize anything, could program basically anything. He knew
everything from graphic design, non-linear editing — anything that was on a
computer, he could do it. I was hired to basically produce video for the team to
get posted on the website, but I started learning things like web design and
graphic design, and he got me introduced into analytics and I started doing
HTML and CSS and all these other things. And all of a sudden, I stayed there
for about five years, but I was much more than just a videographer and editor
by the time I was done because I had to do a little bit of everything that he was
doing because I was essentially his backup. So I ended up going for a position
that I could have never dreamed of going for when I landed in Jacksonville, and
that was to be a website manager for the Chicago Bears.

“I got hired there and, you know, again, I didn't know anything about the
web, I knew that I could browse Google and, you know, get on to
websites, but I couldn't put a site together. I couldn't run one. I'd never
even thought about it. I had no idea how they were coded and put
together and designed, and now all of a sudden I'm running one for a
major NFL team. It was unbelievable. And, you know, the same thing
kind of happened there. Like, I went in there and think I'm going to be
doing website and email and that's going to be my role and I'm going to
make those as good as possible, and ‘Oh, here comes social media,’ and
that just absolutely exploded. I was always into the content side of things,
so I was very much into the editorial side. We had a writer, so I was
overseeing that with Chicago, and we were trying to drive as much traffic
with our content as possible.

We spun up a video position, hired a guy named Chris Wenk, who is
one of the all time greatest video storytellers. He was my first hire in
Chicago and was just amazing. So we had that team and here comes
social media, and all of a sudden, you know, now all of these things
that had worked in terms of web content for that avid fan base that
was coming to the website every day we thought we're going to be
geniuses and put that stuff on social and we're going to drive all this
traffic back to the website, increase the numbers, and we're going to
look like geniuses. Well, funny thing, the stuff that worked on our site
did not work on Facebook or Twitter at all.

“We had to take a step back and go, wait a minute, what's going on here?
There's a different audience out here. This is not the avid group, this is just
people who have basically followed the account because they're a fan of the
team, but they're not paying attention to us on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
They may be tuning in on Sundays, but that's about it. And all of a sudden, a
group of us kind of went, hey, there's a bigger opportunity here because these
people don't come to our events, they're not on our email lists, they're not
coming to our website — we don't really have contact with these people and if
we can get them thinking about the team more we have a chance to actually
strengthen the fan base here. So we went hard at work at basically building out
content buckets and just testing a bunch of stuff. And this was probably my first
big foray into trying to develop a content strategy from scratch. Because up to
that point, I'd kind of learned the ropes of what was working on websites.

“This was starting from scratch and really just testing a bunch of stuff.
And we just got better and better at it. We had a very small web team,
but at that time, Facebook had a number that we consider to be the
most important one — it was ‘people talking about this,’ I think was
the name of it. And we just went hard at it; like, I think my last year
there, we had a losing record, but we dominated the league in that
statistic just by really focusing on, hey, how do we get these people to
have some kind of commenting or reactions to this content?

“So that was kind of the start of really the next transition in my career
and really teed me up to go to Taylor, which I think was probably the mos
transformative stop along the way. So I landed at Taylor and, I'll be
honest, the first 6 to 9 months there it felt like I had just landed on Mars.
I did not know what was happening. Taylor was a traditional comms
agency that was spinning up a digital group, and so I got hired to basically
come in and be a digital consultant. And they only worked with tier one
brands, so it was unbelievable. We basically at that time only had 15
clients at a time, but they had to be category-leading brands. So we were
working with like Allstate, Capital One, Tide, Jordan Brand, Mercedes, on
and on and on, so it was a fascinating place to be. But the guy that was
leading it at the time was a guy named Jackson Jeyanayagam, and he's
the best team builder I've ever been around.

“It was a fascinating place to be because agencies can be a very cutthroat
business. The stereotype is a lot of people looking out for themselves. And
Jackson put together an absolutely brilliant team of people, but he had it
working as a group that understood if Mike Dolan wins on this account,
that's good for the whole group, if Matt Arnhols wins on this account,
that's good for the whole group, if Amanda Lordy wins on this account,
that's good for the whole group. So what happened was we ended up with
a group of really diverse backgrounds and skill sets and views of the
digital world who you could not get us off the phone with each other. We
had a main office in New York and I was in the satellite office in
Charlotte, and there was no distance. I mean, I was on the phone with
them all day long, and we were running our ideas by each other
constantly. So the collaboration was just phenomenal.

“The learning moment there was I'm coming from having done content for ten plus
years and I'm coming into these brands and who are at this time — this is still the early
days of social media. This is like 2012, 2013, and brands are still trying to figure out the
space, and I couldn't figure out why everybody was so bad at it at the time. I had to
really start listening to what all the agencies were telling the brands and, to be frank,
the creative agencies were driving most of the conversations about what was going on
social, and then we'd come in and try and provide suggestions to change the strategy,
but all the creative agencies, and I still think there's a lot of this in the industry, they
were using processes built for TV advertising that go back to the 50s, and they were
using them as content processes. So it was like, what is our brand messaging? What is
our brand equity? What is our product differentiation? And that was the start of the
creative process. Then they basically were producing ads and then they would post
them on Facebook and Twitter, and then all the brands were saying, ‘Oh, organic reach
is dead.’ No, the content's not content, it's advertising. So I had to really start to hone
how I was going to communicate this and build out kind of communication languages.

“At the time, it was a lot of like comms clients or marketing clients that
had not been in the digital content space yet, so how we were going to
communicate and translate this was a big challenge. This was a big
moment for me — like I said, the first 6 or 9 months I got in this rut of,
you know, we have to make money by selling these ideas in, but the idea
is that the clients wanted were the things that matched their campaigns,
essentially, but now they're trying to put it on social and it's not working.
So I'm in this position of I've got to sell them what they want, but I know
it's not good. I know it's not good content. I was really struggling with
that because I'm like, I know that I'm putting things in front of these
clients that are just not good content, but it matches their color scheme
and it matches their brand equity or it matches their tagline.

“We had a break between Christmas and New Year for a week, and there was a night
where I was up — we had a little bonus room upstairs and I just I went up there, I did a
lot of thinking about where I was because I had just moved my family, including a one
and a half year old daughter from Chicago to to Charlotte, and I kind of felt like I was
failing and I felt like I don't know where this is going. I don't feel good about the things
that I'm putting in front of people, I don't feel like I'm driving any really good creative
content here. And it kind of hit me. I was like, well, if I'm going to go down, I'm going to
go down telling clients what I think they need to hear instead of what they want to hear.
So I came back from that break and, I don't know if this was coincidence or what, but
there was a brainstorm on a brand that I wasn't on yet, Tide, who was just getting into
the NFL sponsorship space that year. And I threw out an idea around the Draft and I
wrote it out exactly the way I would have done it if I was in the NFL. I mean, this is
what you need to do. They bought it and we signed basically the top 40 prospects going
into that NFL Draft and the deal was the contract went into effect if they were the first
pick for a team. So we got their first post and that thing went absolutely haywire.

“It was a the start of the Our Colors campaign in the NFL. And we
dominated the other brands in that Draft and that kind of turned
everything around for me. Like, okay, I'm now going to go in and I'm
going to put the best things I can [in front of clients], I'm going to sell the
things that are going to work in this space. I'm not going to keep putting
things in front of clients that I don't believe in. But I had to build out a
communication model on how are you going to now tell people that are
built on these other processes that you have to flip all this? So I started
building out models like the creative process has to start with research
and insights. You can't jump right into brainstorming and it can't start
with questions like ‘what is our brand equity’ and ‘what is our brand
message?’ It has to start with ‘what are people interested in?' Otherwise
it's not going to work in this space.

“So that's where I think I really sharpened my ability to build
strategies. We had some unbelievable strategists with that group.
Amanda Lordy was phenomenal. Jackson, the leader of that group,
was just brilliant and hugely creative. He's a rock star now. Everybody
should look him up, he's amazing. I still talk to this day with Mike
Dolan and Matt Arnhols and a whole bunch of that crew because they
were so good and I learned so much from that group and I just had a
much different assessment of the landscape coming out of there.

“So, you know, one of our clients, happened to be AMBSE (Arthur M. Blank
Sports and Entertainment) who was at that time, launching the new stadium,
which became Mercedes-Benz Stadium. We were helping them with some
comms and digital work around that and, while we were helping, they decided
they were going to go through a digital transformation, and they were really
bullish on being different in the space. We had a little sports group, Sam Baier
was a big part of that. So a group of us with Bo Wolfe went out to Atlanta a
couple times to just kind of help them bridge the gap on the digital
transformation, and I remember walking out of there with Sam one day and I
said, You know, just the way they were talking about the path they were going
to clear for digital, I was like, somebody's going to have a chance to come in
here and build one hell of a content strategy, because they want this to be great.
So I threw my hat in the ring, and Morgan Shaw-Parker made the worst
decision of her life and hired me.

“So I jumped in there and those next couple of years with Atlanta
were, I think, just the culmination of everything. It was almost magic.
The talent that group had, you know, Austin Hittle is still there, but
we brought Chris Wenk back from the Bears — he had been out in the
NBA for a while, and brought him in, and we hired Kyle Benzion, who
just became a lot sometimes like an extension of me in a lot of ways
where I knew he could go into a meeting and make sure that
everybody was on strategy and that allowed me to play some other
roles. We had just had an amazing group.

Chris Jones, who just did a phenomenal job of trying to help
everybody understand what was going to work in the space and help
organizational communication with that. We had Nikko Tan, just as
as creative as all get out. And we brought in Matt Tabeek, digital
managing editor who's now at Front Office Sports. Like, where that
team has landed — you got Chris Jones, who's leading content with
Publix, you got Erik Hansen, who's over broadcast and marketing
with the Charlotte MLS team. Austin Hittle is an absolute rock star in
the video world, now he's in the Wall Street Journal and all over the
place and on and on and on. Kyle has a phenomenal gig with Hilton. I
could go on all day about that team. It was magic there for for several
years, and it was a lot of fun.

“That team, I think, is, for me, one of the benchmarks. I talk about the Taylor
team and the collaboration they had, but that group and the creative synergy
and the trust that that group started to have with each other, it was very easy
for me to to basically just get the group in the room and tee up, you know, what
we were going for and what the goals were and what outcomes we were looking
for and just let them start collaborating. It was not people fighting for their own
ideas because that group was on the same page about what we were trying to
achieve. When they heard a good idea, people build onto each other's ideas, and
that was just magic. So that was just a phenomenal experience, and they've still
got a great crew there. They've brought in Scott Kegley now, and they've got
Ryan Mucatel, who I worked with at Taylor is the SVP over all of that, and it's
still a just unbelievably talented group. They've got a big studio now and are
doing great things, so it's been fun to watch what has happened there…

“We had a lot of fun there. But, you know, Morgan took the job as team
president with with the Atlanta Dream and a couple months later, she and
I just started talking and, honestly, the conversation was, Hey, you know,
the level of collaboration that we had between social and video and
editorial and UI/UX on that bigger digital team — what if we could take
that and rebuild an organization and have everybody on the same page and
trying to establish that same synergy across the whole organization where
everybody has the exact same goals, the exact same motivations, and the
exact same priorities, so we can build on each other's ideas? We can build
an entire organization where ideas thrive because everybody's on the same
page. And then same thing — when a good idea comes out, people build on
it because they know it's getting us closer to the goals. So that's what we've
tried to do. We're still working at it hard every single day.

“But I'm super proud of just the fact that — there's a whole bunch of stuff on
TikTok like sales versus marketing, [but] if you watch our sales and marketing
teams work together, it's just magic. They trust each other. They lean on each
other, they collaborate. I mean, they share space and there is constant chatter
between the ticket sales reps and our digital marketer, for instance, and they're
sharing insights with each other. And the ticket team trusts that the marketing
team is going to drive all the leads that they need and the marketing team is doing
an absolutely unbelievable job of of driving leads and driving sales as well. They
take a lot of pride in that. So it's just a lot of fun to watch those things. And same
thing on the sponsorship side, we hired Laila Brock as our SVP of of Corporate
Partnerships and Community Impact, and it's just amazing to be able to go down
and we can have any conversation that we need to, in terms of like, Hey, can we try
this instead or Hey, let's do this, or What do you think about this? She's doing a big
event right now for Microsoft and Xbox and it's amazing to watch that team work
and build that stuff out and get everybody in the organization involved in it.”

Reflecting on his career path
“If I hadn't been to all those stops and seen the way that some of those people
carried out their jobs and learned — I mean, go to the Falcons and ticket sales
was a huge deal there, too. So we had to go from just creating great content
and trying to grow the fan base and do all these great digital executions to
how can we drive as much revenue as possible? And so, you know, the couple
of us just kind of rolled up our sleeves and said, well, we know we can crush
these cost per view metrics with paid social, let's see how good we can get on
the lead gen side and drive people through a funnel essentially and help the
ticket team out. And you know, the last two years that we did that 2019 and
2021, because of the pandemic, we had a 15 to 1 return on ad spend in 2019
and a 17 to 1 return on ad spend in 2021 just by by constant tweaking.

It was such a collaborative thing because I would be watching the paid
dashboards, but we had Austin Klubenspies, who was our UI/UX guy, who's
now a VP at an agency and I think he's 18 years old and he's a VP. I'm lying,
he's older than that, but he's a rock star. But I was in collaboration with him
and Greg Urbano basically looking at our UI/UX, and I talked to Greg about,
you know, Hey, what is Google saying in terms of what's happening on our site
when they get to these pages? And then I would be talking to Eric about, Hey,
we need to either tweak this on this page, or I need another graphic, this one
popped and we got 30 leads in two hours, I need another graphic that hits on
the same nerve. Then we'd get reports back from Warren Parr the ticket sales
director, about, Hey, how this batch of leads is doing this or this batch of leads
is doing that, okay, we need to get a little more information on the page because
they don't know what they're getting into. So the back and forth on that stuff
was just unbelievable.

“Then Karl Pierburg and Susie Alvarez came into the picture and built
out a whole data engine around it and it was just magic. So to be able
to work and see all those things — you know, I don't even consider
myself in digital anymore, in content as much. There's a system to
this where we're looking very much at how much reach and
entertainment can we provide and attention can we have people
spend with our content? We want our content team to push the best
content they can, but then we're using paid ads to come behind and
retarget and do all the intentional ticket sales or retail sales pieces.

But we've got it basically as a four part engine. We've got to have the
best content possible that goes out and just earns people's attention.
Then we got to get the retargeting. We got to find the hand-raisers
who watch these videos for ten seconds, who interacted with
something, who came to our website, and then create all these and get
as many of those people as possible — if the content's doing its work,
we should have huge retargeting audiences, which we generally do,
and then we push as hard as we can on the paid social side to use
those retargeting audiences and drive them through the ticket sales
funnel. And our ticket team is in love with it. And then we look at like,
what are the conversion rates on the sales calls? And we keep
tweaking products until we get it right.”

On actually building an organization that understands how all the individuals and
dots fit together to drive outcomes
“I think the biggest thing is you can't have a team if you don't have a common
purpose. One of the things we've talked about, between ticket sales and marketing, is
we are absolutely driving ticket sales, but the bigger brand goal is to drive demand,
and that's something both ticket sales and marketing can do. So one of the things that
we're trying to do, for instance, is we're trying to tear down — you just mentioned it
— if the marketing team is only looking at this set of metrics and the sales team is
only looking at this set of metrics, including conversion rates, then at some point —
one of the things that I've seen over the years is you start to get finger pointing. ‘Well,
they didn't do enough of this’ and ‘they didn't do enough of this.’ So we're trying to
tear down all of those siloed metrics and start looking at the whole process from the
time an ad goes out to the reaction of the people to whether or not it got people to the
site, what happened when they got to the site, to the conversion rate of the reps.

“We actually have a project going with Microsoft. It's taking way
longer than we thought it would. But Microsoft's been a phenomenal
partner. We're basically bringing all of our Ticketmaster data and all
of our social and all of our marketing data into into CRM essentially,
and now we’re able to look at the whole process across from the time
an ad goes out, or any marketing effort goes out, to what happened all
the way through the process. And now our ticket team is looking at
the same set of metrics that our marketing team is…That's the goal is
to tear down those silos, have the same goals, have a common
purpose and get people in a room excited.

“I think one of the key things when I got to the Falcons was we did a
couple things to make sure that everybody had the same goals. So we
did a thing called Finding the Why, where it was an approach to
content, and we made sure every content creator went through
finding the why. And it had four key factors. I can share that with you
afterwards, but everybody had to have those same things. The
number one factor was be a people expert, not a platform or
technology expert. Every one of our content producers and that's we
still talk about this everywhere I go, this will be part of it — to create
consistently good content, you have to understand what moves
people. That is the magic of of being consistently good in the content
space.

So we make all of our content producers responsible for what is
happening. And we're looking at metrics not to be data geeks, we're
looking at it to understand what's happening with people when they
view our content. But they're all responsible for trying to build things
that earn people's time and attention. So those kinds of things to
ground the team and have common purpose and a common set of we
want to have as many creative differences and creative ideas, but we
want them all going in the same place. We want them going to the
same goals of how are we moving people? We're not producing
content because we like it, we're producing it because we want these
people. So we have to understand these people to like it and we have
to understand what moves them.”

On understanding different fan segments and how that affects content, marketingm,
and programming strategy
“It depends on a lot of things, right where your team is in the journey of being a
content-creating team and an engine, how many people you have at the time. But the
big thing is how many big wins are there out there? How many of these efforts are
worth the time and energy that your team is going to put into them have a big enough
reward coming back? If you're doing it right and you're generating revenue off of this
stuff you can continue to grow a team. At the Falcons we had a pretty big team. We
had, I think, a more built out UI/UX team than most of the other teams because we
knew that the fan experience on a site and whether or not they converted was going
to be very important, and we also had a big push behind an app. So that for us was a
big deal, where some teams, Hey, there's an NFL platform, we don't need that. The
pages are basically built, we just drop the content on — and that worked for them.
But as we started to build up this app that became very important.

“Same thing on the editorial side. We did not at that time feel like we
had a massive avid fan base the way, you know, a Steelers or the
Eagles or some of those did. We needed to develop that more and we
felt like we had the the path to do that, so we hired Matt Tabeek and
an editorial team to [realize that vision]. And if I remember correctly,
we jumped from number 25 in the league in article views per year to
number nine, just by having a really good editorial strategy. And that
was probably the hardest effort we had. So I think when you sit down
and just look at, like, Hey, where where are the opportunities if we
can build the revenue strategy? You can do a number of them.

“But for us, with the Dream right now, we want to grow it, absolutely. But
we know that our best fan converting engine is our games. So we want to
produce that high end content that gets as many people as possible and
then we want to have the performance marketing engine built to get them
to games. And that's where we had a Hannah Kronick Spencer, who just
went to US Soccer, came in and did a phenomenal job of building that
performance marketing engine. And then we, hired Adam Bullock from a
VP of Ticket Sales standpoint who has just done an unbelievable job of
teaching the habits and the day-to-day work ethic of that team and all the
minutia. He’s just an unbelievable teacher. So those are our core
components right now. But do we want to eventually expand it? Yeah,
down the road at some point. But we know that we got to get more people
to games and we got to get the revenue engine going first.”

“Last year we sold out 12 of our 20 games and led the league in sell
outs, so we know that we are starting to build and we're going to do
even better this year. So we know that right now we're building the
right parts of the engine, but there is definitely some grey areas that
we can grow in future years.”

On balancing revenue goals alongside longer term fan development objectives an
allocating resources and efforts
“I'll put it this way. The short term ones were easy. We knew that we had an awareness
issue, and we had to get some of the content and digital marketing things in place. But a
great example of this is they did not have a CRM when Morgan took over this position. So
that was literally the first thing I did when I got here was I had to get us up and running on
a CRM. And luckily we have a phenomenal partner in Microsoft, who got us on to
Dynamics. So we've got that established, but now we've got to grow the database and,
ultimately, to your point, there's all kinds of things that we could do. And one of the things
that we absolutely want to get into is segmenting out that audience on the database and
starting to do more personalized marketing and get more relevant things in front of more
relevant audiences and know exactly who we have in our database. But to be frank, where
the numbers were when we came in, we just needed to get people in the database. So right
now our effort is to grow the size of the database so that we have more people to reach out
to and more fans in the system.

“But at some point we need to really segment this thing out. And
that's why we're doing this other project with Microsoft is to get our
Ticketmaster data in so we can see things like not only have they
bought tickets, and have they been to the games and how many games
they've been to over the years and start to identify all those behavioral
things as well as our marketing data, so social media numbers and all
that stuff…Also who's buying retail, who isn't. And we can start to
segment this stuff out a little bit. That has to be a future year thing
because we've got too many other foundational things we've got to
build right now."

On evaluating the ROI of organic social media
“For us, it's very important that there are quality leads that are going into
our database, that we're getting quality traffic. So we've done some
sweepstakes that generated unbelievable numbers in returns, but when we
tried to do any kind of outreach to that group, it has not worked at all
because they just wanted to win a great prize. Then we started to see, well,
hey, you know, we probably we just knew there was there was not a lot of
great leads in those batches. So I think one of the things that we're having
the most success with is [to] generate as much attention and interest as we
can with the social content and find those hand-raisers but then come
behind it — and one of the best things that we've done is started to build
out these really great game experiences. So it's not just single game tickets.

We’re now building experiences around them. The one that we've had the
most success with right now is is a product we created called Daughter
Date Night. It has been a great seller for us, now this is year two. And
when we create those retargeting audiences and find all those hand-
raisers and put this in front of them, it's magic in terms of the sales. And
it's been something that we can really leverage, especially in games where
we would otherwise have a hard time selling, you know? Now all of a
sudden we've got an experience…who doesn't want to bring their kid to a
game and let them watch the the top pro sports team for women in
Georgia? We put a t-shirt in there and they get a chance to take a picture
on the court after the game and all of a sudden it's who doesn't want to
sign up for that? I bought one for me and my daughters. It's a lot of fun.

“It's always what is the value prop that is not going to just bring people
in to the database, but is actually going to get us people that a come to
that game? Then the next year, Adam Bullock and his team are calling
those buyers and trying to see if they can buy a five game package or a
ten or whatever. We talk a lot about what is the value that we're
putting in front of people to make them take behaviors that we want,
and I think experiences is one of them. But also really attractive five
game and ten game partial plans; we have a lot of discussion about
that. Our theme games, our halftimes, our giveaways — all of those
things we're trying to really build out. We have a matrix for every game
and it's like, okay, what is everything that's going into this game? And
how do we make sure that every game is a very sellable game?”

On connecting organic content with built-out game experiences
“That's the conversation that, you know the segmenting piece is how do you
identify those audiences? In year one, we stopped using a media agency and
hired a digital media professional, Lindsey Hill on our team, who is absolutely
fantastic. And we have a lot of conversations with her about like, okay, what
do we know about what's in our database, for instance, and how do we how
do we start to find event goers in this thing? Right now we're promoting this
Microsoft Xbox event for April 5th and that was one of the discussions we had
was, like, how do we put a promotion for this event in front of the people that
we know like to come out to similar things, whether it's camps and clinics,
whether that's game attendees, whatever — anything else that we've done and
try to get the most relevant content in front of the most relevant audiences.

That's the magic that we're still trying to build a little bit. We are, just
because of where we started, we had to get some of the engine built
first. And we do the same thing on the paid social, right? That's why
Facebook ads have been so good for so long, right? There's so many
interests or ways to segment in there and find relevant audiences.
And honestly, you know, I'm sometimes pushing the pedal towards
like, Let's get a little bit broader and let the algorithm in there figure
out who's actually buying these things. But there's a ton of
segmenting we can do on the paid social side too.”

“I think what you just said is really telling that TikTok is probably, I think, in
terms of social platforms…I look at us as content across the board, like we have
to be content producers. But TikTok probably changed the game more than
anything since social media started, because it's the shift from who's following
you to what topics are people interested in? I don't know the last time I had a
video in my TikTok feed from somebody that I follow, it's all the topics. You
just get down these rabbit holes. There's an opportunity there because you can
jump into whatever conversation you want, and if you bring the best content to
that conversation, you can blow up overnight. It's such a fascinating way to look
at, you know, the research and insights part of the creative process, it's a
different model. And I actually kind of love it. I love the fact that we can we can
look at anything and if we think, Hey, our potential fans are over here, okay, we
can get in front of them much quicker than trying to develop that audience over
years. You can just jump right in.”

About TikTok and reaching broader audiences that may not even
know the Dream are a basketball team
“I think you can almost call everybody that's a fan right now is almost
in the category of early adopter. They have the reasons that they are
fans and they are our biggest advocates and they are awesome, and
the stories that they tell are fantastic. The growth side of this thing is
very open for us. But it's the people who — what we're looking at, we
did a big market research piece when I first got here and the whole
thing was aimed at who are our potential fans? Who are the people
that are that are willing to basically either change allegiances or adopt
an allegiance to our team? Who is willing to come in?

And we looked at questions like, would you be willing to come to an Atlanta Dream
game? And then really kind of dug into who those people were and what their
interests were and what their background was and what other behaviors they're
taking. So, long story short, we're kind of looking at this inside-out strategy of the
next group out from our current fans is, okay, who are the other basketball fans in
Atlanta? And then I think the next ring out from there, and we have some really
good data on this, is anybody involved in the youth athletics space. So everything
that we're doing from an organization, even in the community is ratcheted up
towards like, Hey, gotta we've got to have a value to these audiences and we got to
build out a value prop across the board.
“But to your point, yeah, now it's how do we get in front of those people with
content as well? And that's where TikTok can start to let us, if we're doing it right,
we can look at what are the conversations that those communities are into, and we
can start a tailored content [plan] and get in front of them pretty quick.”

On growing the national and global fan base alongside focusing on potential ticket buyers
“It's entertainment and I think we saw one of the biggest turnarounds in a sports team
history last year, and I think there's a ton of learning there, is what happened at Colorado
when Deion Sanders went there. They became an entertainment brand and they became
must watch-TV. They sold out their spring game, their gear sales went up something like
90x over one year. It's insane. And look at what happened to the other teams that got
caught up in it too, because, like right there, he's trading barbs with the head coach at
Colorado State during their weekly pressers and getting into fights and arguing over which
of their mothers raised them better. All of a sudden press conferences are becoming must-
watch entertainment. And then you've got the Oregon coach basically just going off in his
pregame speech about needing to beat them and talking at halftime about continuing to
run the score up. It became must watch TV, even though I don't even think they ended up
with a winning record. Not everybody can have a Deion Sanders, but the takeaway of the
importance of viewing ourselves as an entertainment brand and to drive interest.

“You don't have to do it the same way that Deion Sanders did it, but
the general takeaway is we've got to be interesting. We've got to be
entertaining. If you're going to reach a broader audience of people —
and I'm going to use I'm gonna use Atlanta for a second; this has got
to be the most competitive sports market anywhere. I mean, what
other market has a college football team that gets NFL type TV
ratings, a Major League Baseball team that probably has the most
casual fans of any of the teams in the market and the most overall
kind of backing, and they just won a World Series not long ago, an
NFL team, an NBA team that that sells out most of their games, one of
the top 2 or 3 most popular MLS teams and a WNBA team?

So the competition for people's time, attention, dollars and interest is
ridiculous. There's no other market like that. So I just don't think boring is an
option. And I think, you know, you look at the growth of women's sports, it is
fantastic. But the personalities — now, there's a lot of conversation about we
know more of the players now on the women's side than on the men's college
space. And part of that, I mean, Caitlin Clark, is there's an entertainment factor
there. She gets the crowd going, she's talking to the crowd. You go back to the
biggest moment of last year's national championship game, which was a
massive TV draw, the biggest moment is that viral moment between Angel
Reese and Caitlin Clark, with the the pointing to the ring finger. Here’s the
blueprint. It's right there in front of us. We've got to do it now. We don't have to
do it and be snarky all the time. We don't have to do it in a mean spirited way,
but we do have to be entertaining. To broaden an audience, we've got to bring
entertainment value.”

On capitalizing on opportunities where entertaining content drives broad audience
and how that does/does not directly impact the bottom line significantly
“It has to be reasonable, right? We can't bite off more than we can chew. So we do
think we have to win Atlanta first. Now, the exception to that is there's a really strong
contingent, as you can imagine, of South Carolina players in the WNBA, including 1
or 2 on our team. So when we play an A'ja Wilson or we play Indiana who has Aliyah
Boston we know that Hey a couple hours away in Columbia, South Carolina they have
a massive following, so we can do some marketing there and win those fans over.
Matter of fact, Dawn Staley is one of our season ticket members. It's awesome. We
get a lot of ticket buyers from from Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee.
We're not like going out and doing activations there, we can't do that kind of stuff
right now, but if Rhyne Howard has something in Tennessee or Kentucky, we'll send
a videographer or a photographer and get content of those things she's done, like
street signings and stuff like that. So yeah, but it has to be within reason.

“We feel like we've got to start by winning Atlanta and we work very hard
at that. But that also goes right into our game experience, which I just
think is honestly — I don't know if I want to say this on this podcast, but
I think it's the most fun game experience in Atlanta. I'll put it that way. I
think it is. And the Falcons do a fantastic job, every team here does, and
the Hawks are phenomenal. But our games are a lot of fun. Like, our
fans, no matter what the score is when the DJ cuts the music, they're still
singing. It's just amazing. It is so much fun. I've never been to games and
just had so much fun whether or not the team was winning. And trust me
when when it's a tight game and we're winning, they are as loud as it
gets. But even in games where we may not be winning, the crowd is still
having a great time, and it's just a great atmosphere.”

On conveying the game experience to fan and prospective ticket buyers
“We do it any way that we can. We obviously try to put a lot of clips out.
But one of the things we do is try to amplify also when our fans do
because our fans do a great job of talking about it on Twitter especially,
but on all the platforms. Just amplifying and kind of making sure that
third party validation is getting a little more air cover and getting more
eyeballs on it. We've done billboards where we've used the social
comments of fans in the arena and put them on billboards to illustrate,
like, don't take it from us, [the game experience/atmosphere] is
unbelievable. Like I said, it is just so much fun. So we know that that's
also driving talk value for us, and that it's driving great word of mouth
marketing for us.”

On the accessibility and engagement of athletes in the WNBA and other
women’s sports
“We don't really have to have a ton of conversation. Our basketball side is great,
and we work hand in hand with them. And you're absolutely right. The players
do a great job of making themselves accessible. We'll put in requests but they're
fantastic about it. I've seen a couple just magic moments since since I've been
doing this. As I mentioned, we do this Daughter Date Night thing and after the
game the parents and the kids get to come down and take pictures on our court.
And it's a really cool thing. Well, this family came all decked out in Michigan
gear for one of the games. Well, Naz Hillmon, who is the all time leading
rebounder at Michigan sees them, runs over and takes a picture with the family
at midcourt, and then talks to the kid afterwards. It's like magic.

“We also do another experience called My First Dream game. The first
50 buyers get to come down into the lower stands and sit with the
player after the game and basically meet a player and there's just stuff
like that that is just fantastic. It really is. And a lot of the players will
linger around and meet with people and talk to them after the game.
It's really cool.”

“The greatest thing to watch is the look on the kids faces when they
meet the players. It's why you do it, right? I mean, it's just magic. So I
mean, we've talked a ton about digital, but my biggest driver is fan
growth in any way shape or form. So I technically oversee our
marketing, our ticket sales and our fan experience. We have a great
community team as well. I work very closely with corporate
partnerships as well. Everything for me is through the lens of what is
creating new fans and that's the partnerships that we do, that's the
types of community activations or partnerships, it's the content pieces.
Our best fan driver is getting them to that first game, so it becomes our
number one metric. So the number I look at closest now is not a digital
metric, it's how many buyers did we have? Especially first time buyers

So I'm constantly obsessing. But it's the same exact process to start
with the research and the insights, what's going to move people. And
it's how many fans can we make; we have these things called fan
experiences, before or after games, it’s things like going down on the
court to take pictures, we have a fan tunnel where they can basically
give the players five as they're coming out onto the court. mentioned
the meet and greet, so we have a whole bunch of those things. And it's
really just trying to create that look to what your point of creating that
magic that makes somebody a fan and trying to get thousands of
people walking out of there for 20 games, all with a giant smile on
their face.

“My first year every game I would kind of position myself in an area
where I could just watch everybody walk out of the arena, and I was
just gauging whether or not they all had smiles on their faces. And
most of the time they did. It was funny, because [Team President]
Morgan and I would in those early days call each other after every
game. And Morgan would be like, Oh, man, you know, the parking lot
was jammed or this thing didn't go right. And I'm like, Morgan,
everybody I saw walked out of the arena with a smile. We just won the
night. Whatever the score was, we just won because everybody I saw
walked out with a smile on their face and they didn't notice — the
things that we can get better at next time, they didn't even notice it.”

“The very first presentation that Morgan and I did when we were
trying to basically overhaul the digital strategy with the Falcons — we
had a slide, and I mentioned it before the creative process, and it's a
five step process. Number one is research. Number two is pull
insights from the data. Number three is brainstorming. And then it's
production and distribution. I labeled it as a creative process and I
was trying to roll it out to everybody — this is going to be our creative
process. And I didn't intend for this to happen, but I kept coming
back to that slide and I still do. It's in every one of my presentations to
any group because for me now it's a great creative process, but it's
way more than that.

It is an actual mindset shift that I think, go back to the way I was
saying, like a lot of the creative agencies operated, right? Their
process was always what is our brand messaging? What is our
product differentiation? Dot dot, me me me. Okay, now produce
something. And I'm like, we got to flip this. Everything we do is about
insights and influence. We have got to understand people and
influence them and and motivate them or get them to move, to take
the next step in the fan journey. And so with that creative process I
have in every deck that I do because I'm always trying to keep coming
back to that.

“Everything starts with what moves people emotionally and how do
we produce it. And it's more than just a digital creative process; that
is, I think, the way that marketing works now. There's so many things
now [competing for attention], there's such a fragmented landscape.
You can't get reach easily anymore, right? Like when you and I were
doing Facebook back in like 2010, 2011, we didn't even hear about the
algorithm. We posted and assumed everybody saw it. Now we have
posts that don't even reach 800 people. Reach has become far harder
to attain and much more expensive than it used to be. So the only way
to break through that is to do things that move people and get them to
talk about it with others. That is the marketing landscape. Not just in
content, not just in digital.

“There's so many things now competing for people's attention. And
we're seeing that at the youth level, the number of things that they're
interested in now compared to 30 years ago is like it was everybody you
were either an NFL or a Major League Baseball or an NBA fan. Almost
every kid in my school back then; that's not the case anymore. There's
so many other things for people to be interested in now. Interests have
splintered as the entertainment and media landscape has splintered, so
you're now in a competition for people's attention, and you've got to do
things that earn their attention better than everybody else. And that's
not just in digital and content, that's marketing across the board. That's
in fan experience, to be frank, as I just mentioned, with Atlanta, we
have to be the best. There are so many options

So I go back to that slide all the time. And it's everything we do
should be starting with with research and insights and asking better
questions. Instead of, you know, what is our message, we need to start
with why will they care? Why are people going to be interested? Start
there. That's a much better question to ask if you want to build
something that's going to move people. To me those are the
fundamental things that if you can get everybody bought in on those
things, all of a sudden you're going to have a group of people who are
going to be highly motivated to come into work every day and try to
do something better and build on each other's ideas if that's the
ground floor.”

The non sports organization that was the most memorable to work
with during Dan’s time at Taylor Strategy
“Easy one. Tide. Just phenomenal partnership there. I still talk to,
who was our client at the time, Anne Candido a lot. She now runs her
own agency, she's fantastic. It was just a great partnership, and we got
to do a lot of really awesome stuff while we were there.”

Dan’s number one tip for someone leading a team or being a manager of people
“I think if you're transitioning into being a leader, the biggest thing — and I talk about this
with our team a lot — is you've got to transition from being a high achiever yourself to
getting the most out of people. And that means creating the environment, creating the
culture; that means, quite honestly, building a team of people who trust each other enough
to share ideas and creating an environment where even the quiet voices are sharing ideas
and you're giving them the platform to bring in ideas because I think some of the absolute
best creatives are the quietest ones. So how you're managing that team and building the
environment where they feel comfortable sharing or you're creating mechanisms so that
they do share…again, the biggest thing is how effective and what kind of output can you get
from the team, and that's a big transition from being the individual. But it's also where,
quite honestly, you're going to get the most pride, to see the other people go on and excel at
other places — I cannot tell you how exciting it is to watch where a lot of the people I've
worked with have have landed over the years. It's just so cool to watch it happen. So that's
the transition.”

The most memorable player to work that Dan got to work with during
his NFL tenure. And also, the most memorable piece of content from
from his time in the NFL
“Most memorable player, I think just one of the best human beings,
and I didn't get to work with him a ton because we weren't doing a lot
with the players — and there's been a lot of good ones, I don't want to
feel like I'm leaving people out, but Fred Taylor with the Jaguars was
just a phenomenal human. My wife still has a Fred Taylor jersey. I
think any long time Jaguars fan has a real special place in their heart
for Fred Taylor, and there's a good reason for it.

“In terms of most memorable piece of content, Oh, man, you're making
me choose between my babies here. I'll tell you one that has a special place
in my heart. I just heard Kyle Benzion mentioned the Hayden Hurst piece
[in an interview], that was a great one in terms of impactful storytelling.
I'm going to go a slightly different direction, though. I think, you know,
when we when we came into AMBSE, when we came in with the Falcons
we were making a pretty big 180 turn on the content side, and I think just
naturally you're doing something that's very different, so there's going to
be skeptics on whether or not this works or not. And we were going into
the playoffs and we had a brainstorm and we came up with this kind of
creative exercise and came up with this equity called In Brotherhood and
wrote it and edited everything out, and we released it, and that thing just
went absolutely bonkers. It was the most amazing thing.

We released it before the divisional round against Seattle, if I
remember correctly, and I can remember the next several days
driving to work and all of the radio stations in Atlanta were ripping
the audio and just playing it over the radio, and I could not believe it.
And the guy that was the host of that, Derek Moore — all of a sudden
he's on TV and radio all over the place. He becomes like an overnight
sensation, and we did end up doing a whole bunch of videos with him.

“But the fact that that showed what it could be, When that thing blew up, it became
— and honestly, it was unbelievable what happened. In Brotherhood is on the NFC
Championship rings from that year, it was over the locker room in the Super Bowl,
it was on the billboards. And when we came into Houston, like that was not
planned as a playoff campaign, that was just a singular video that just exploded.
That just showed what the potential was of that team. We hadn't had one of those
yet that went like that. It's just natural that there's going to be a lot of people like,
Hey, they've hired all these new people and they're talking crazy and doing all this
new stuff, and they're operating differently than we've ever seen digital operate
here. And to have that thing take off the way that it did and just kind of like, it
validated the approach. So for that reason, and it was the first of many great things
that that team did. So I think it got a lot of buy in, even probably from some of the
people that were on that team at the time and didn't know what we could be. I
think that was an important part of that team gelling and becoming what it did.”

What was the experience like when the Falcons lost the Super Bowl after
being up 28-3 against New England?
“I'm going to tell you something that is going to be unexpected for you. So
that was my second Super Bowl loss; ten years before that, I'd gotten hired
mid-season by the Bears, and we lost to the Colts. In the Devin Hester
returned [the opening kickoff] and then it rained the whole game. And that
was a miserable experience. That whole franchise was just devastated. That
was hard. This is going to sound so stupid, and I might get eaten alive for
this, I have a much more favorable memory of 28 to 3, because at least for
three quarters I was sitting there going We're going to win a Super Bowl. I've
said this before and that the team that I was a part of ate me alive for it, so I
know I'm going to get a lot of comments about this, but I still stand by that.

“The feeling in that (28-3) game was very different than the the Bears-Colts Super
Bowl, which it just felt like that one was going sideways most of the game, and then
it kind of did at the end. I remember in Houston sitting there — and this is a funny
part — when that game ended I had four tabs open on my browser. One was the
win graphic that Shea Rhim had produced, our digital graphic designer, and I had
to close that one out. The next one was the parade route in Atlanta, I had to close
[that one]. The next tab was the Super Bowl champion merch sale page, and then
the last one was the article announcing that the Falcons had won their first ever
Super Bowl, and I had to rewrite the entire article because our writer was down on
the field to cover the celebration. I was furiously typing the entire fourth quarter
because the score kept changing, and our writer left and said, Hey, everything's in
there, you just need to probably change out the score and any final stats. And when
I say I typed furiously for the entire fourth quarter because I had to keep changing
almost every paragraph and I had to keep basically detailing how, at the time I was
writing, the Falcons staved off a comeback attempt, right?

And then I'm like going Oh, damn it. I mean, I may need to rewrite
the whole lead. I may need to rewrite the whole headline. I need to
start creatively thinking about how to position this. It felt like every
play in the fourth quarter I was having to rewrite and type something
else in there. And I'm like, This is not good. So that's my other
memory.

“And then I also remember I had a text chain with a bunch of mostly
college friends and they were joking, like in the third quarter, like, Don't
blow this Gadd. Then all of a sudden like, ding ding, it just started picking
up pace and by the end I just had to put my phone off to the side because
they were just going ham on me. It was obviously a brutal end to that
game, there's no doubt about it. That was a cool experience even [with]
the way that it ended [whereas] sitting in the Miami game, the Bears
versus Colts, we were literally under an overhang, we had an auxiliary
press box, so when the wind blew it was bringing water on back onto me
and our writer, and it was getting on our laptop. I can remembe trying to,
like, hover over the laptop because I thought it was going to fry with the
water coming on it. So if I had to pick one of those two Super Bowls to
relive, it would definitely be the Falcons-Patriots one.”

The most memorable game for positive reasons from Dan’s sports career
“I'll say the very first game with the Dream was a magical game. And I've
had a lot of really fun ones. But that game, because we threw an
organization together, like I said, there was eight people and we hired
Hannah Kronick Spencer, our Marketing Director like a month, six
weeks before that game. And there's an unbelievable backstory. I won't
get into the whole thing, but we basically went from only 500 tickets sold
to sold out in a couple of weeks, and there was a mad dash to make that
happen. To get it sold out the night before the game and walk into the
arena and have have successfully gotten that game sold out and then the
game was just unbelievable, and the fans — we didn't really know.

Most of us were new and and this was the first sellout that the
organization had had in a long time, so we really didn't know what to
expect. They hadn't really been in a full building in that arena, so we
really didn’t know what it was going to be like. And it was the most
fun. Like the crowd was just singing and dancing and and just having
a great time. And it came down to the final shot of the game, and the
LA Sparks missed a shot and Cheyenne Parker rebounded it and the
whole arena erupted.

“There were a lot of things that kind of went crazy that day in terms of
parking entrances and and gates and seats weren't numbered and not
on the court side — there were a lot of things that we needed to get
better at, but it was absolute magic in the arena. I'll never forget this
the DJ played Candy Rain, the old 90s song and stopped when play
resumed. And I'm not making this up, our crowd, the entire arena,
kept singing it for like another minute, and myself and Hannah were
standing up there and we just got goosebumps and looked at each
other like, Whoa. I had never seen anything that cool. And just the
way the game ended.

So to have thrown that team together the way that we did, I just got in
there in February, this game was in May, so, I mean, I had only been
there a couple months and for that game to get sold out, to have the
magic that we did in that arena that night and for it to end the way
that it did and all those special things, that game was one of the
coolest things I've ever walked out of. And it just like such a feel of of
accomplishment with a group of people. That was pretty awesome.”

Dan has a magic wand to yield in pursuit of the Dream’s off court goals. What
does he use it for?
“There's so many things I want. I just I'll say this. Let's go back to the Deion
Sanders example. Lightning in a bottle on the entertainment side. And that's
something we'll build towards. We have a chance to have a really good
personality on social. But you know, I think we've done such a great job of
scaling this thing up, but to have something that just goes electric and changes
the dynamic of the way everybody sees it in one fell swoop. If I had a magic
wand that would make fan growth a lot easier. But I also love the sweat equity
that we've put into building this thing brick by brick and doing an excellent job
of growing the fan base over the last two plus years and building the foundation
for us to keep scaling this thing. Like the amazing thing is we look at the ticket
sales projections, we're very confident.

We're one of the top teams in the league in ticket sales revenue
growth year over year. And we know that we can sustain this for years
to come, just based on [how] we can continue to scale up on the
marketing side and drive leads, and we know that we can continue to
build the call volume on the ticket sales team underneath Adam
Bullock. And we know that we have unbelievable conversion rates
right now. The team is killing it. Everybody working hand in hand.

“So yeah I'd love to have a Deion Sanders type, an entertainment
infusion that changes everything. But I'm not panicking about it.
We've got a good marketing team, we've got a good content team,
we've got a good ticket sales team, and we can continue to grow this
thing. And we've got excellent partners on the partnership side too… I
think one of the best things that's happened with the Dream is this
leadership team is so much fun to work with — and that's not a knock
on any other place, it's just this group is just fantastic at getting in a
room and talking through potential challenges or solves for them and
and coming out with an aligned POV on how to move forward as an
organization. I really have a ton of fun with that.”

The best meal to get in Atlanta and where
to get it
“Atlanta is fantastic with food. There are
so many things that you can get here. But
I will say a couple of my favorites. There's
a place called Kimball House that has
fantastic food, steaks or whatever you
want, but they also built the entire decor
for two drinks, their old fashioned and
the Sazerac. So if you want to have a meal
and a cocktail, that place is absolutely off
the charts. It's the best old fashioned I've
had in Atlanta.”

What's something significant Dan has had his mind changed about recently or
something or something new and novel that he learned recently?
“I'm going to change it up slightly. I'm going to go back to an old one, because
this is something that has stuck with me. And I mentioned earlier, like that the
dean at the college as a big moment and thinking a certain way. I'm going to
date myself here a little bit, but I got a really valuable lesson out of a failure.
When I was in Jacksonville, they used to have a thing called the NFL Business
Summit, and I had flown out that year, and I'd gotten enamored with a
presentation that happened at the NFL Business Summit. There was a group
presenting, and again, I'm going to date myself, but it was basically like
accessories for at the time, cell phones like ringtones and stuff like that.
Remember when those were big? And I got blown away by the projections they
had in there.

They're like, Oh, it's going to be a $9 billion industry. So I comeback
from the business summit and I'm hooked. So I go running around
our organization, I'm like, We got to do this. So we do, we sign up for
this thing and we're going to build now wallpapers and ringtones and
all that, and we're doing a trivia contest and all this stuff for cell
phones and back then I'm shooting and editing, so I'm producing TV
commercials, radio spots — I'm going all in to try and promote this
thing. I've got the hosts of our radio shows doing their snarky one-
liners. I mean, on and on and on — and this thing rolls out and I'm
like, We're going to blow this thing up.

“And the group from this company, they had done a deal, I believe, with
the Jets as well, and they're saying all these numbers that we're going to
hit. We go in, so our CMO, our IT director, our webmaster, and I and I
think maybe one other person are having a meeting one day, and the
organization has put up airfare, hotel and tickets to the Super Bowl — two
Super Bowl, all paid packages for this trivia contest. So we're going to give
away two of these things for the top two winners. So in this meeting, our
CMO turns to our webmaster and goes ‘How many people do we have
playing the the trivia contest?’ And he looks up and goes, ‘Uh, four.’ And
you could just hear the air go out of the room. And I'm like, I'm going to
get fired. And then our CMO goes, ‘You're telling me there's a 50% chance
you're winning the the the Super Bowl package if you're in the contest?’

“So we have another meeting and this time the vendor flies down and
we're in this radio studio, and they're touting all these revenue
projections and all these numbers that we're going to hit, and our
CMO goes ‘How are you guys coming up with these projections?
What's the math on this?’ And, and they go, Well, you know, when
we've worked with the Jets, so based on a million listeners per radio
show and this and that and our CMO goes, ‘Wait, hold on. We don't
have a million listeners on the radio shows.’ ‘Well, how many do you
have?’ And I'm already doing the math, because at this time I think
there's only 800,000 people in all of Jacksonville, and I’m like ‘Uh
oh.’ And I think he said 40,000. And again, I'm like, ‘Uh oh.’

“So long story short, one of the things that really kind of stuck with
me from that was that it's great to be innovative, but don't be ahead of
your audience. Like do the things that they're interested in and they're
going to move them again. It comes back to insights and influence,
right? Don't do things that your audience isn't ready for. You don't
want to be the educator, you don't want to be the first to die on the
sword on that. And that thing did not get better as the season went on
and it was like, Oh, man, we just got out over our skis here. So that
was something that I'm always thinking through. I want to make sure
that we're doing things that are right in line with what our fans are
interested in.”

The sports team or brand or general brand whose social digital
strategy Dan most admires right now and why
“I'm going to again tweak this slightly. I'll put it this way, I'm kind of
like TikTok, I'm not so much following people or accounts, I'm
looking at the great content that's out there. I scout, I try to be curious
and look at everything in terms of the numbers that it's doing, and try
to figure out why. And that can come from so many great sources, and
I always try and pull the insights out of what is moving the things that
are moving. But, I will say, I still think the blueprint, if you're a sports
brand, I don't know if anybody's ever done it better than what Red
Bull was doing in like 2012, 2013, 2014, and they still do a great job.

But the fact that they produce content. I'm a huge believer in the impact
of great content, and Red Bull made themselves a part of the action
sports culture because of their content. It's tough to beat that. They
made their logo a symbol of a culture. It was something people wanted
to wear on their jackets, on their shirts. That was just amazing to watch
happen.
“I remember there was a quote and I used to use this in decks all the
time. They said something to the effect of like, ‘We don't want to be the
ad, we want to be the show.’ And I'm like that right there is the
mentality, right? They just produced better content than anybody else in
that space, and they became part of the culture. That's the blueprint.”

The player on the Dream whose name we should all know heading into
the season for on court reasons and if different a player that we should
know for off court reasons
“I'll stay on court. Rhyne Howard is our [most talented] player, Rookie of
the Year in 2022, first overall pick that year. Great player, she set a league
playoff scoring record against Dallas this past season. But the one the one
eho I love to watch and I just think is such a difference maker on our
team as well who probably doesn't get quite as much attention as Rhyne
is Allisha Gray. She has just been so clutch and quite honestly, I think
she's a fantastic complement to Rhyne Howard. So I have a ton of fun
watching Allisha Gray play. She's kind of like a pro's pro. She's fantastic.”

Dan’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“I'm going to tell you another out of the box one here. He's not
necessarily super active on platforms. Just one of the wisest people I
know, and I reach out to him sparingly because I try not to wear him
out, but Jackson Jeyanayagam, who was the leader at Taylor. He's
just got an unbelievable demeanor to him and common sense and
wisdom. Anytime I'm in a tough spot or I just need to have somebody
look at something a little bit differently, he does a great job on
LinkedIn of posting this occasionally that wisdom. I just think the
world of him.

“He went on a really big things after Taylor. He was the head of digital
at Chipotle and in the startup space. Now he is basically the founder
of of a new drink under the Budweiser umbrella called Hey, Hei. And,
he took another guy from that Taylor crew named Matt Anger, who
was his chief digital officer, and it's just amazing to watch them
launch a brand together. There's so much that I take [from others] I
obviously had a ton of great leaders over the years, but there's just
something about the way that he built and instilled a trust and a sense
of confidence and quite honestly, a camaraderie amongst a bunch of
people who I just marvel at all the time with the group. We probably
would not have been friends, we're just such different people, and he
just created an environment that made us more than friends.

We were collaborators on everything. There's a lot that I take away
from that in the way that I approach teamwork. And that is quite
honestly — my biggest motivation in this space is is building great
teams of people, and I think all the time about the things that he did
to to instill common ground amongst everybody and get everybody to
have very different ideas, but towards the same goals and to create
that creative synergy where we loved talking to each other and
building on each other's ideas. I mean, we loved it. We were on the
phones with each other all the time. That was pretty magical.”

Where to find Dan and the Atlanta Dream on digital/social
“Follow the Dream channels across social platforms (@atlantadream). I
don't post a ton. And there's a funny story — I genuinely mean this. I
have a ton of creative energy and I love to come up with ideas, but I like
to do them for the groups I'm working for. Quite honestly, I get more
joy out of watching a team of people come up with an idea than than me
posting. You and I talked a little bit about that right before we jumped
on here. I kind of lost my energy for me posting, but I have a ton of
energy for great content, and I want to work with teams of people to to
put out content that impacts perception and the way people think, and
that happens through our channels with the Dream now.”

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
Thanks again to Dan for being so generous with his time to share his
knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.

Atlanta Dream Exec Dan Gadd on Driving Fan Engagement and Growth, Serving the Audience First, Rallying around the Same Goals, and More

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