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Erik: After working in marketing and advertising for five years at McCann Ericsson and Coca-Cola
why did you decide to take a step back in your career to pursue your passion for sports?
Randall: When working at Coca-Cola and at McCann Ericsson I had a project that was known
as venue signage which in a nut shell was pretty much working with local bottlers in
each of the markets throughout the country on changing up their signage at anything from
as little as a little league ball park to a major stadium such as the Georgia Dome in
Atlanta what have you. So in just seeing what sort of brand presence that these major players
with Coca-Cola under their umbrella were doing to generate awareness took little bits of
that and decided I really enjoyed working in and around sports marketing, event marketing.
I wanted to know more about it. So I made the decision to take a step away from the
agency side of life in Atlanta and I literally took a step back with the career and got a
job pretty much interning on a Senior PGA Tour tournament in North Atlanta called the
Nationwide Championship and due to the fact that I wanted to learn it from the ground
up, I wanted to see how companies were sponsoring events, why they were sponsoring events, what
value they were getting from their dollars in sponsoring sports events, televised or
not. That change led to my growth in my career with a knowledge base of ‘Okay Nationwide
is a title sponsor for a Senior Tour Event but what does that mean?’ and so I dug deeper
and having the ability to start on a grassroots level with that particular job in that particular
new industry was really a spring board to what I eventually put to use with further
events down the line down in Puerto Rico with the Chrysler event and then further on outside
of just mere sports marketing but marketing in general, over these thirteen years I’ve
taken a little nugget from each of the jobs I’ve had, good bad and different in terms
of the experiences and learned from them and continue to grow.