As real estate development becomes an increasingly integral revenue driver for sports team owners, a new marketing agency in Los Angeles is looking to help stakeholders navigate those waters.
Innovative Partnerships Group, which officially launched last week, was formed to connect sports property owners to business partners in ways beyond traditional sponsorship agreements, said founder and Chief Executive Jeff Marks. The veteran sports marketing executive is testing that approach with a high-profile first client: the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
“We’ve been working together on forming partnerships, not just with the Hall of Fame but also the $600 million Hall of Fame Village,” said Pat Lindesmith, who handles sponsorship and inductee relations for the Hall of Fame. “It’s a project that will change the region.”
The village, dubbed Johnson Controls Hall of Fame Village after its lead sponsor, is being developed by L.A.-based Industrial Realty Group, which is overseen by Chief Executive Stuart Lichter. The firm owns more than 100 million square feet of commercial property nationwide. Lichter is also a co-founder of Innovative, which is an affiliate of Industrial Realty, and serves as master developer. As part of the arrangement, Marks has also joined Industrial Realty’s board.
Marks previously served as managing director at Santa Monica’s Premier Partnerships, the firm that worked on naming rights agreements for the National Football League’s Buffalo Bills and the Atlanta Falcons, which signed a 27-year stadium naming rights deal with Mercedes-Benz.
Innovative’s model is geared toward entertainment district developments such as TD Place in Ottawa, Ontario, and Canton’s Hall of Fame Village. The plan is to allow developers to bring in corporate partners earlier and invest less of their own capital up front.
For example, the Hall of Fame’s deal with Milwaukee’s Johnson Controls, an industrial parts manufacturer, not only includes naming rights but also a partnership to provide infrastructure supplies for the project.
“We’re taking a very sophisticated sponsorship and naming rights methodology in the sports industry and transcending that to other properties and industry sectors. (Innovative) is creating new partnerships to help property owners increase their asset value,” Marks said.
Marks and Lichter are joined by Chief Operating Officer Jim Davis, a former marketing executive at eBay Inc. and PepsiCo. Inc. Davis is building a system to help companies track the value of partnerships to their business. He explained that Innovative would work with both property owners and sponsors, but would not represent both sides in a deal. However, the company intends to give data to both parties so that each one can measure a partnership’s value.
Jon Vein, former chief executive of analytics firm MarketShare, has also joined as a strategic adviser. Vein said Innovative’s challenge is to explain its model to sponsors that traditionally sign deals based solely on the size of an audience, and teams that traditionally offer advertising as the main value in a deal.
“It’s not just writing a check, it’s about interests above and beyond the transactional nature of this deal,” Vein said. “Viewing any business as something greater than transactional is necessary if you’re going to have staying power.”
– David Nusbaum
