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People and Pop Culture

Plugged In: Julie Haddon, NFL Media

With early stints at the Los Angeles Dodgers and trading card licensee Major League Marketing, followed by positions with seminal digital media brands eBay and Twitter, Julie Haddon brings a varied background to her new job as senior vice president of marketing for NFL Media. That’s appropriate, given the NFL’s disparate menu of media offerings, which includes NFL Network, NFL Now, NFL Mobile, NFL.com, NFL Films and NFL RedZone.


Having been part of eBay relatively early, I spent a lot of time learning how to market to enthusiast communities. When you are marketing something somebody loves, whether it’s football or Beanie Babies, there is a real art and science to it, because they insist upon authenticity to feed their passion. In that regard, a huge collector of Fiestaware on eBay isn’t all that different from a Buffalo Bills fan in Orchard Park, N.Y. The respect and authenticity that you show them is critical.


Photo by: NFL

The mission of NFL Media: Our fans are on every kind of device, so our job is to connect with them there. I was on a plane one Sunday night recently and just laughed when the guy next to me was watching “Sunday Night Football” on his phone. I asked him if I could take a photo, because when the iPhone first came out in 2007, it’s not something anyone would have predicted.

The power of social media: When I was at Twitter in 2008, the presidential debates were happening and we did a pilot program with Current TV, where when you were watching the debates, you could see what people were saying on Twitter at the bottom of the (Current TV) screen. After that, the whole online/offline engagement thing and notion of “social real time” made sense to me — and that was eight years ago. I knew then that aggregating communities around topics of enthusiasts was the future. That’s what’s wonderful about our deal with Twitter. It’s connecting fans who can then have a real-time dialogue. And it’s a new way to connect to our content.

Remembrances of Twitter’s formative years: I think I was the first person with a real marketing background at Twitter … . We initially weren’t sure of what we had; it was something between a blog and a text message. Initially, we called it a “multiplatform, agnostic, communication channel,” which was not catchy. Pretty quickly, we saw the real-time impact of events and how dependent one could be on the other.

Traditional vs. digital marketing: Regardless of how you arrive at a story, your job is to connect with fans. …We have so many tools now that can give us better analytics. We can get real-time sentiment. Any marketer loves that ability.

— Terry Lefton

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