After a triumphant Super Bowl, during which GMR Marketing served 14 clients in San Francisco with more than 400 employees, Jan Katzoff, the agency’s head of global sports and entertainment consulting, is moving on.
Katzoff’s last day with the firm will be March 1. Adam Lippard will succeed Katzoff as head of sports and entertainment consulting at GMR.
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KATZOFF
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“It was a tough decision, but my career started in San Francisco, and bringing it full circle seemed perfect,” Katzoff said.
Katzoff in 1988 helped found SportsMark, which was later purchased by GMR, and has managed events in more than 50 countries, including 13 Olympic Games and six World Cups. Now, he’s venturing into entertainment as a producer of the documentary film “Charged: The Eduardo Garcia Story,” currently being shot in Montana.
“I just felt that after all these years, it was time to do a creative recharge,” Katzoff said.
Asked for reflections on the industry over his career, Katzoff said the biggest changes were the impact of technology along with the scale that sports had achieved.
“Technology has had the biggest impact. I don’t know how we did events before cellphones,” he said. “And, of course, the economics of what the sporting industry has become. … We knew it was huge and had a lot of growth potential, but nobody could see it transforming into what it’s turned into today.”
Knowing it was his last big event, Katzoff said he tried to slow Super Bowl Week down, even as it sped by.
“I’ve been so lucky,” he said. “The first thing I did at the Olympics was helping to coordinate the original Dream Team [in 1992]. Finishing on a high note with Super Bowl 50 just seemed right.”
