On Thursday and Friday last week I had a great opportunity to attend the 2009 College Sport Research Institute (CSRI) Conference in Chapel Hill. The conference brought together some of the brightest sports minds, students and faculty to discuss issues facing college sports. I really enjoyed meeting Jeremy Bloom and hearing about his ordeals with the NCAA. Others such as Jay Bilas, Dick Baddour, Bernie [...]

The Challenge: Teams and properties often include a lot of different assets in packages for sponsors. Signage, radio and TV spots, other media, experiences, tickets and more and the impressions, ratings and other metrics can be difficult to keep track of. When sponsors ask for results at the end of a season or after an event, you need to be able to tell them exactly what they got and what the results [...]

There was a lot happening this week in the sports world, including drama over the Michael Phelps bong photo, discussions about which Super Bowl ads worked and which ones didn’t, National Signing Day and a potential Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger. Here are some interesting stories about these topics, in case you missed them earlier this week:

Today, Gareth from StadiaTech.com posted a short  interview with me. StadiaTech.com is a new blog dedicated to covering new ideas and examples of stadium technology and innovation. The interview covers topics such as how stadiums can utilize social communities and micro-blogging tools such as Twitter to connect with fans. If you’d like to see the interview, head over to StadiaTech.com and check [...]

IEG’s Annual Sponsorship Conference will be held March 8-11 in Chicago. The theme/tagline this year is Singularity: Ideas So Big They Change Everything. Here’s the first few lines of the event description: “Just in time to keep the partnership bull raging, Singularity—sudden, unprecedented progress including breakthroughs in brain science, social media and digital data—alters [...]

Sponsor Pitch, which launched in closed beta in early December, aims to connect sponsors, properties and agencies to improve the sponsorship discovery/pitch process for all parties. I first heard about the company from founder Kris Mathis on Sports Marketing 2.0 about a month ago, so I requested an invite to see what it was all about. According to the Sponsor Pitch blog, they recently had their 1,000th [...]