Gen Z: Alex Parker

The Miami Dolphins have not won a playoff game since 2000, a time when many members of Gen Z weren’t even born, or reached a Super Bowl since many of their parents were teenagers. Like all teams, though, they have been aggressive in catering to that audience in recent years, and have seen some promising results.

— As told to Daniel Kaplan

Tom [Garfinkel, Dolphins team president] had a vision about three years ago to build an in-house creative team of video editors, producers, filmers, photographers and designers with the main goal of creating digital assets and platforms that we could reach younger audiences with. So he kind of saw around the corner with this understanding that it was becoming a key part for us and for the company. That was the first step, creating this in-house creative agency.

After that, the agency created content franchises, episodic video series that lived on our digital platforms. These are anything that span from the “Dolphins Daily,” which is a daily show hosted by staff members, cheerleaders, partners, players, alumni, five days a week and it is the latest and greatest in everything from Dolphins news to a community-based show.

Step two, which I have been working on for the last couple years, is the strategy to maximize these series in order to reach these younger generations, including Gen Z. Where it started was developing a strategy for this content to do three main things: One was to maximize the content performance itself; the second was to drive ticket sales; and the third was for sponsoring that content. 

The real “a-ha” moment for us about using analytics to drive creative decision-making was when we saw we had 68 to 72 percent of our viewers watching with the sound off. So we said, “Let’s try putting closed captions into this content and see if we keep viewers engaged.” And that ended up driving the view-through rate. That led us to find that about 25 percent of our audience were Gen Zers