Donte
Scott
Company: Jack Morton Worldwide
Title: SVP, director of analytics
Age: 34
Where born: Chicago
Education: University of Michigan (B.A., sports management and communications)
Career background: PGA Tour, Leisure Intelligence Group, independent marketing consulting, GM R*Works, Jack Morton Worldwide
Family: Wife, Carrie; sons Jordan (9), Tyler (7) and Ryan (5); daughter, Lauren (3)
Favorite apps: Flixster, iPhone camera and music apps.
Guilty pleasure: Coffee with Bailey’s.
Groups supported: WorldVision, NorthRidge Orphan Care.
Person in the industry I’d most like to meet: Two: Jerry Colangelo, Michael Jordan.
I have a fear of … : What college tuition will cost for my kids.
Most adventurous thing I’ve ever done is … : Take my wife on a 72-hour “Amazing Race” tour of Paris, Barcelona and London.
2014 will be a good year if … : My youngest son passes preschool and my daughter cooperates with her summer swim instructor.
SASHA NIALLA / SASHANIALLA.COM
he explosion of data mining in sports has served Donte Scott well considering that the former basketball walk-on at the University of Michigan has built a career on navigating top-shelf clients through myriad quantitative measurements.
Scott is senior vice president and director of analytics for Jack Morton Worldwide, where he creates sponsorship analytics tools for big-spending sports marketing companies. It’s a
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role he has been developing since he began working for the Leisure Intelligence Group in 2001 after earning his degree in sports management at Michigan.
“I was a bit of a nerd,” Scott said. “I thought I’d be in pre-med, but I carved out a niche in the prediction analytical realm. When I was doing it, it was ahead of its time.”
From 2001 to 2005, his time at Leisure Intelligence, Scott honed his statistical analytical skills, applying his research ability to a variety of companies, including the NFL and MLB. “The beauty of Leisure Intelligence was that I got exposed to high-level projects in the industry that people in the business for 15 to 20 years would get exposed to,” Scott said. “But I reached a point where I thought it would be best to expand my horizon and try something on my own.”
Over the next 18 months, Scott worked as an independent consultant where one of his clients was the General Motors R*Works agency. After he completed a 200-page sports marketing assessment for GM, Scott was on the agency’s radar, and he joined the group in 2007. In 2010, it was absorbed by Jack Morton Worldwide, where today Scott continues to create “black box” real-time analysis for a host of firms.
But Scott is not simply a number cruncher calculating the value of sports sponsorships. “Donte has the ability to get creative about ways to evaluate the actual dollar value the client is getting,” said Brian Patterson, executive vice president and managing director of Jack Morton Worldwide in Detroit. “His baseline skills are in math, but he’s got both the left and right sides firing.”
— John Lombardo
