Welts (l) said Chase’s experience in making programs beneficial to fans is second to noneTONY FLOREZ
J.P. Morgan Chase believes the best way to generate a return on sports sponsorship is by buying rights to marquee venues, and it is counting on that being true over the life of the Chase Center, set to open in S.F. in '19. But the standards for the fan experience, and the sponsors’ role in augmenting it, keep getting higher. And perhaps no group of fans will expect more than the Silicon Valley-heavy fan base of the Warriors. “(Chase’s) experience in how to take a program like this and make it beneficial to fans is second to none, based on their Madison Square Garden experience,” said Warriors President & COO Rick Welts on Day 1 of the ’18 Intersport Brand Engagement and Content Summit. Chase has been a prominent part of the experience in New York at both MSG and the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, where in '16 it debuted a charging device that kept fans’ smart phones juiced up and took them off their own data network so they could easily watch action on other courts. That is just one example of how Chase challenges itself to add to the fan experience while marketing to them, and programs like that also make it easier to measure fans’ connection to the brand, said J.P Morgan Chase GM & Senior VP/Sports & Entertainment Marketing Frank Nakano. “As a financial institution, we’ve tried to take what the industry has always thought of as an art and a science, and our CFO does not like art as much as he likes science,” he said.
RAISING THE PROFILE: Chase’s brand is weak on the west coast compared to its presence in N.Y., and Nakano said the new basketball venue will help to connect Chase to a huge swath of Californians because of its expected range of major entertainment event programming. It is the first multi-use major arena built in S.F.. Welts said the economics of the project depend on the Chase Center being seen by touring acts as being on the same level as MSG and the Staples Center. “We’re collectively working hard to make it a place where people obviously want to go to see Warriors games,” Nakano said, “but they also want to go and see what’s happening as a destination.”
