Meredith Starkey
Age: 38
Company: T-Mobile
Title: Director, sponsorships, entertainment and events
Where born: Wilmington, N.C.
Education: Clemson University (B.S., marketing)
Favorite way to unwind: A glass of wine and “Downton Abbey.”
Groups supported: My local church and Clemson University.
Most thrilling/adventurous thing I’ve ever done: Either kayaking with whales in Hawaii or riding in an Indy car with Michael Andretti.
Person in the industry I’d most like to meet: Kevin Plank. Under Armour really punches way above their weight; they’re a challenger, like us.
If I could change jobs with anyone for a day, it would be: Seattle Seahawks GM John Schneider. (And I would have run the ball at the goal line in the Super Bowl.)
2015 will be a good year if: The Seattle Mariners make it to the postseason, and the Seattle Seahawks are back in the hunt for the Super Bowl.
My fellow Forty Under 40 class members would be surprised to know that I: Was captain of the Clemson Rally Cats dance team in college.
ACKERMAN AND GRUBER
eredith Starkey grew up around sports. Her mother played basketball in college and coached high school hoops. Then, at college, Starkey got a taste of the business side of sports, supporting sponsors’ efforts at Clemson. Her passion for entertainment and sports marketing was kindled. It ignited when she started working at the intersection of sports and technology marketing while at Genesco Sports Enterprises, followed by a stint at Motorola and now with T-Mobile, since 2009.
During these more recent years, T-Mobile has adroitly positioned itself as “the un-carrier,” a foil
{podcast}
SBJ Podcast:
Forty Under 40 editor Mark Mensheha and Executive Editor Abraham Madkour discuss this year's class, some of the more interesting stories in it and how the selection process works.
against the infinitely larger market share and marketing budgets of Verizon and AT&T.
“What’s enjoyable is that we’re not just turning around a business, we’re impacting an entire industry by connecting differently with consumers,” Starkey said. “When you have a clear business proposition and brand strategy, it makes my job — using sponsorship and event marketing to drive home our message — much easier and a lot more fun.”
Competing with industry behemoths also means it’s more difficult to be heard above all the marketing noise. T-Mobile counters that by concentrating on one large property and going deep. Recently, that has been MLB. During the 2014 World Series, T-Mobile encouraged fans to send in video selfies of themselves singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and mashed up all that user-generated content into a World Series ad — during the seventh-inning stretch, of course. Next up for T-Mobile is a move into electronic dance music.
“I knew we’d done something right when [Los Angeles Dodgers executive vice president and CMO] Lon Rosen called me to say that Meredith was really a tough negotiator,” said Genesco CEO John Tatum, who has worked with Starkey as an employee and a client. “Meredith’s been on all sides of the table: property, brand and agency, so her perspective is really broad.”
— Terry Lefton
