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Top USSA marketer Jaquet leaving before Winter Games

U.S. Ski & Snowboarding’s top marketer is leaving his job a year before the Pyeongchang Games, suggesting big changes are coming to the nation’s largest winter sports governing body’s commercial strategy.

In a surprising development Jan. 4, USSA CEO Tiger Shaw said CMO Mike Jaquet will step down this spring after nearly five years. USSA is launching a search for Jaquet’s replacement immediately, and hopes to name a successor in time for its June partner summit.

Both sides characterized it as a mutual decision come to after several discussions about the future of the position. Shaw said Jaquet had done a “great job.” When asked whether there were performance problems, he said: “No, I wouldn’t put it that way. Because it’s formal, it’s an HR issue, I can’t go into any kind of detail there.”

In separate interviews, Shaw and Jaquet indicated there was a growing divide over what the six-member marketing staff should be doing during the next Winter Olympic cycle after the 2018 Games.

“I’m staying until a time when this sales season is definitely done, and everyone’s on board and comfortable.”

MIKE JAQUET
USSA CMO

Shaw wants the organization to focus more on marketing individual athletes, and to create much more digital and social media. That will help popularize the sport, generate more income for elite athletes and create more stars for corporate USSA partners to use in campaigns, he said.

He hopes to collaborate with, and learn from, household names like Lindsey Vonn, he said. She’s made millions in endorsements, but skiers and snowboarders just a few rungs down struggle to break out.

“The point is, how do we utilize today’s power of social channels to help those kids develop their own brand, and their own personalities, which also supports the entire sport and the national teams?” Shaw said. “You see it work effectively in other sports, but I think we’re a little behind the eight ball.”

There are nearly 200 national team members, Shaw said, and 60 of them pay their own way for worldwide travel to compete. Shaw also said he wants USSA to streamline its brand and bring more skiing and snowboarding activity in the U.S. under its influence.

Jaquet, on the other hand, is a media and sales specialist. He came to the role from CBS Sports, and made perhaps his biggest mark at USSA in 2014 when he repackaged and sold a five-year media rights package to NBC Sports, greatly expanding the sports’ linear and streaming visibility.

Jaquet said he’d been considering his future since last summer.

“I think there was a lot of realization on both sides that maybe there were some other things I wanted to do, and some changes Tiger wants to make, and both are agreeing that it’s going to be better for someone else to take over,” Jaquet said.

An official USSA statement praised Jaquet for growing sponsorship revenue by 60 percent over the quadrennial cycle before his arrival. He also recently secured Toyota as naming-rights sponsor to the U.S. Grand Prix.

“I was brought in very specifically to do two things: one, grow the corporate sponsorship program and grow revenue, and, when the time came, which was about a year and a half into my tenure, to essentially fix the media deal and bring us out of that,” Jaquet said. “And I’ve accomplished both those things.”

Several industry experts said the timing of the announcement was unusual, coming three years into the four-year Olympic cycle ending in South Korea in February 2018. With 13 months to go, now is when most NGB marketers shift from sales to helping partners plan activations heading into the Games.

“If I walked out the door tomorrow, I’d be leaving them out to dry, and that’s exactly what I’m not doing and not what I want to do,” Jaquet said. “I’m staying until a time when this sales season is definitely done, and everyone’s on board and comfortable.”

Shaw said the split had been in the works for some time, and sought to assure partners that it’s being handled strategically. “Yesterday’s announcement seems sudden, but there is a grand plan,” he said last week.

Jaquet said he’ll pursue opportunities in media. “You know how intrigued I am by where the media world is going in the next two years, with skinny bundles and direct-to-consumer,” he said. “There’s a tremendous opportunity out there for programmers and content makers, and I certainly see myself on that side of the business.”

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