World Congress 2020: Terry Lefton

Below is a sampling of his comments and answers, edited for clarity and brevity:

My experience has been at the best of times, marketers are timid. Most companies are conserving cash, some are laying off and furloughing employees because they’re looking at second-quarter projections that are 90% short or more. These are when marketing budgets get cut. So I could talk about a lot of good marketing ideas, but there’s a depressing reality out there. There may not be any money to spend on marketing. I read an analyst report just this morning that despite the amount of people that are home, Facebook and Google combined will lose $44 billion — or in other words, gain $44 billion less worldwide in ad revenue than they were projected to — even as more people use those products. That’s fairly sobering.

Now, of course, every crisis has some opportunity. So the opportunity to eventually align your brand with a message of “We’re here to help.” That message is a really good message. Once again, are you going to be able to fund it? … I’d also hope that just as the first responders were the heroes of 9/11 and campaigns like Verizon, health-care professionals will be the heroes of this pandemic. 

… Health care will certainly never be the same. So yeah, you’ve already got a health care deal. They’ve got to change. They’ve got to come to the forefront. The expectations have changed. Now, they say doctors should become heroes and nurses and all the first responders that are associated with this crisis.

Agreed regarding health care first responders and all essential workers should be the focus of present and future acknowledgement by this industry. What kind of long-term strategies can be built around messaging like that?

It’s not difficult to make heroes out of health-care people in good times, right, because they actually are lifesavers. But I think, generally, the activation and every team has one, two, three, or four health-care providers, every property. So I think this is an opportunity to give them more to activate. Can you do something in the stadium? Can you feature them with players? Can you tell their stories?

… If I could get ahold of a few team doctors, you know what they’re doing these days. They’re not taking care of a hundred million-dollar athletes. They’re taking care of people on the front lines, and they all have great stories. Wouldn’t that be a good way to get your story out there even now? I think that they’ll be the new heroes and I think they could be the new heroes for a long time.

Fans had been asked to pay rising ticket prices for years, many resulting from next-generation venues popping up all over the U.S. To what extent do teams have a responsibility to find meaningful ways for fans who’ve lost their jobs to still attend games and keep their fandom intact?

There has to be again, “We’re helping you out. We’re helping you through all this mess.” There has to be a, “Here’s a certain section, here’s a discount. Here’s something for all fans.” I remember seeing that after 2008 and I certainly remember seeing it after 9/11. Yeah, you have to be out there helping fans.

The biggest message I see out there that isn’t being expressed, yet that I think needs to be, are local businesses. There are going to be thousands of bars and restaurants that go under. They don’t have a lot of margin. They don’t have a lot of cash on hand. They’ve already laid off a lot of their people, if not all of them. So I’m wondering if there’s something there? Could every property donate digital signage to use to a certain extent or in a certain section, to have an endless variety of local businesses? And could they try to generate money for them that way? … It’s incumbent upon local properties to join each other for a message. And I think that would be powerful.