Catching Up With Hilton Hotels' SVP Jeff Diskin
When Hilton Hotels signed a sponsorship agreement with the U.S. Olympic Committee in 2005, it was one of the company’s first sports sponsorships. The results over the last three years were positive, so in April, the company announced an extension of that relationship through 2012. In Beijing, Jeff Diskin, the company’s senior vice president for brand management, spoke with SportsBusiness Journal staff writer Tripp Mickle about that decision.
What are you most pleased that you have been able to accomplish during these Games to date?
Diskin: All of the cultural awareness now [of the] transformation of the Chinese people that some of our owners who have been here before and those that have been here a few years ago are really taken aback. … This is a huge growth market for us and our company. It’s important for the people that can help us invest in growing our brand to truly see what the opportunity is. It’s important for them to come out and say, “Beijing is not the place I remember it to be.”
You say this is an important market, but you don’t have any local or international Olympic sponsorship rights. How do you make the most of your U.S. rights here on the ground?
Diskin: Here on the ground as the U.S. sponsor we can host anyone we want to in terms of hospitality. We have the most important guest, U.S. owners in the hospitality portion of what we’re doing. We’re also able to do small things in the Bank of America Hometown Hopefuls and USA House to make people see us in the light of this sponsorship. We’re certainly not able to go in at a BOCOG level, but we’re here with the rings and the U.S. flag on our caps.
Does that work in giving you the global tie you talked about when Hilton renewed its sponsorship in April?
Diskin: We’re still working on that. We talked about when we renewed what the Olympics mean to the world, it’s such a great fit with who Hilton is. At the same time, we are in 84 countries, but 2,800 of our 3,000 hotels are in the U.S., so at this point it makes the most sense to have a U.S. sponsorship. I’d love to have a global sponsorship at some point, but it’s tough to make the economics work.
Are you targeting U.S. citizens going abroad for the Olympics?
Diskin: At its core, our hospitality is really about ownership, the people who grow and develop hotels. Lots of those people have interests outside the U.S.
When you bring in U.S. owners, what are you doing?
Diskin: What we did while we’re here is we did a presentation with them showing where we are in the world, what the current level — an industry term — pipeline of hotels is in the marketplace. It’s really in some respects promoting global investment on their part, which we hope they’ll do with us … as they get to know us better. We want to put 1,000 hotels outside the U.S. in the next 10 years, and 300 of them in Asia and the Pacific. We want to work the people here to facilitate that.
When you look at Hilton’s sports portfolio, do you see it expanding outside the Olympics at all?
Diskin: I would like to see it grow within the Olympic movement. … We think the Olympics brand is a great value, great interest. It’s unique. We don’t think any other sports propositions can check off on the broad level of customers we have, from the mid-level brand of the Hampton with boxing, track and field to the luxury brand with equestrian or tennis.
How are you making the connection at home in the U.S.?
Diskin: For the consumers, we have a $15 million marketing campaign on NBC designed to tell consumers who’s in our family of brands, that we’re an Olympic sponsor and connect the values similar between them.
