Year 1 reflections working at the Adelaide Football Club: Welcome to the AFL and Esports

It's cliché to say time has flown, but there is no other way to describe my first year working for the Adelaide Football Club after a decade of working in health and service based NFP's. Sports organisations raise the curiosity of people (especially ones as broad as the AFC) and upon reflection, there are some things I learnt in my first year that I wanted to write down and look back on this time next year.

For some background, my role within AFC is Business Development Manager within the Commercial Team, responsible for creating new partnerships across all Football and Esports teams, managing our go to market proposals, with some game day and event hosting responsibility included for good measure!

Across each of the areas, there are a range of game day, digital, experiential marketing assets and community programs that a brand or company may use to reach fans across Australia and within South Australia. The package built for each brand is completely bespoke, designed to deliver measurable results and data, while often supporting communities and causes a brand or business is passionate about.

New Business is Hard Work but Awesome

Anyone who has been a BDM has heard a phrase similar to the following "oh your job must be so cool, do you mostly just take people out for drinks and watch the games?"... and then most BDM's probably smile as they reply. Undeniably, there are awesome moments and perks of working for at the AFC, including getting to interact with the players and staff, accessing the facilities, networking opportunities, hosting events, a behind the scenes look at Australia's biggest sport and so much knowledge that you always want more time to sit and take everything in.

The job is a roller coaster at times, full of early mornings, late nights, travel, becoming friends with people you once cold called, approaching prospects and never (ever!) hearing from them despite dozens of attempts, signing a partnership that makes you feel invincible and being knocked down hearing a brand is going with another option. Having not worked in sport prior to this role, I can honestly say it has taken me the better part of a year to develop a system, learn the AFL and AFC guidelines, structures and processes in order to make everything move efficiently, which is broad baseline knowledge in reality.

In a BDM role, the first 10 minute phone call may be the difference between further contact or not, so listening and building a relationship has been more valuable to me in year 1 than trying to sell a product straight away or provide stats and data. In a role that requires you to be always 'on' and energetic, there is a balance to making contact and providing a prospect the space they need to go through their internal processes to digest the opportunity, especially important as a potential partnership progresses!

Game Day Highs and Lows

Sport has extremely passionate fans, it is a key Australian past time and something those who work in the field get to witness first hand with the highs and lows that go with it, I love the variation of the role, hosting a room of 150+ guests one week and engaging with fans the next. As an AFL and NFL fan, there is no game I have watched more closely than Crows games since I started, when the team wins, the entire building is full of energy and when the last game is not the best, the start of the week can feel as though the energy has been taken from the building.

In saying this, the Men's Grand Final last year reminded me no one feels this more than the players and football staff. As fans and sports followers, we can't imagine the hours, effort and mental resilience needed to be a professional player in the era of social media and pressure to perform each week. It should remind everyone that people make mistakes at work/sport and I am grateful that mine don't end with hundreds of thousands of fans commenting on my performance or as the centrepiece of an article.

Two Major Things I Needed to Learn

From the outside, a BDM role looks logical (like most jobs), however there are two areas that I underestimated as part of my job before starting and constantly need to spend time updating and learning.

Marketing knowledge is crucial to creating a partnership opportunity, many of the people I meet with are CMO's or MM's with large targets of their own to reach and decades of experience, this brings it's own language and measurements of success. With the demands on their roles, a phone call or two and face to face meeting is generally all the time there is to ask the right questions, create a brief and work on designing a proposal that is going to stand out from the 50+ other options in their inbox. Learning marketing strategies, mixes and terminology is not something I associated with the job from the outside looking in, the time I spend on it now means my job is always evolving and challenging me to learn.

We live in a digital world and the beauty of this for many marketers is that campaigns and partnerships have a highly measurable component to analyse and assess. Sports data is a huge business in itself and being able to determine key information and stats can set a partnership apart, data is key in many aspects of the role and taking time to learn what is valuable to prospects is something to continually review. Often there is so much data that the biggest difficulty is verifying what is accurate, going straight to the source with questions is crucial as a good CMO or MM will quickly pick up a number that looks out of place.

Esports is Here, not Coming, and it's Rapidly Growing

As a kid, I grew up playing AFL, cricket and a handful of other sports, in my downtime I played video games, either with my brothers, friends or on my own instead of watching television or movies (unless sport was on). When AFC acquired Legacy Esports and esports became part of my role, I thought it would be a natural transition as a self considered gamer, however esports and my downtime hobby are very different and the opportunities are much larger globally and in Australia, than I imagined.

One of my first major projects was creating the assets for Legacy to take to market as part of the proposal and talking to brands about esports (shoutout to the esports professionals, players, volunteers and fans for the countless hours spent (still) talking with and teaching me). This gave me the chance to learn the major games, opportunities, rivalries and niches, while also talking to lots of people who were starting from square one, learning with and teaching them about the global and Australian sports scale and where it fits into their marketing mix and strategy. For the first time in 2017, video game hours overtook movies as a major global hobby, a rise destined to continue as the next generation takes over.

For those who have not ventured into esports yet, I urge you to have a look with open eyes and without preconceptions. The ecosystem of professional gaming is a worldwide behemoth that is continuing a rapid rise to ascension of the media market, particularly reaching the millennial demographic who are largely esports fans and well equipped with ad blockers, who largely stream from YouTube and Twitch, talk on Discord and WhatsApp and listen to music through Spotify and iTunes.