Recorded in frosty New York City during Super Bowl week, this week’s episode takes the NFL’s annual glitz and glamathon as its central theme.
Ed Horne, Executive Vice President of Endeavor Global Marketing, the cultural marketing agency that includes aspects of WME and IMG’s shared network, is a busy man this week, activating around the Super Bowl for major brand clients including Marriott, Visa and AB InBev.
Horne is not your average marketer – an ice hockey referee in the NHL and the Winter Olympics in his younger days, he got the sports marketing bug when he snuck his way into the hospitality tents at the Calgary Games in 1988 and realised that the companies he was cadging off were using sport as a genuine platform for business.
As an executive at the NFL, he negotiated the first ever halftime show sponsorship with Frito Lay, and then later, at the NHL, he was central to the negotiations that saw league players allowed to compete in the Olympics.
On the agenda:
- Marriott's Super Bowl stadium-hotel experience and the evolution of experiential activation;
- Is the Super Bowl at commercial saturation point?
- Politics in sports marketing campaigns, the Pepsi protest ad, and why tackling contentious issues might not be a bad idea.