LONG BEACH STATE MARKETING STUDENTS AT LIONSGATE

With the recent semester project I championed with CSULB, students were challenged to create digital, social, and guerrilla marketing campaigns for an upcoming POP TV series.  Along with producing sound strategy and creative samples within strict budget and timeline parameters, the comedy pilot project enabled students to get hands-on experience with an actual entertainment property.  And when the aspiring marketing and business students provided professional, final presentations of their concepts to the POP TV executive team including the CMO, Head of Distribution Sales, and other executives at the LionsGate offices, the semester project turned into an experience to last a lifetime!

Guest Lectures at Long Beach State

This week, I had the honor of speaking with multiple marketing classes at CSULB.  Taking over the week for Professor Tomlin, I set about to engage the students with real-life case studies and examples of successful marketing activations.  Deploying the same philosophy I utilize in other speaking engagements and in the The Surfer's Guide To Marketing book, I strongly believe that my objective should be to educate, motivate, and entertain the next generation of marketing minds.

Lecturing to the class with video and even some POP show-and-tell

Focusing on some of my favorite cases throughout my career and discussing award-winning marketing efforts with brands like FX, NFL, ESPN, ABC and others, I showcased the promotional spots, POP, and collateral materials to allow the students to better comprehend the strategy, activation, and ROI each of these campaign bring.

The last element of the class was to have the students break into smaller groups and create a strategy for ESPN's Monday Night Football campaign and follow it up with brief presentations of their concepts.  Following their presentations, we showed our version of the Legends of Monday sweepstakes with four Hall of Famers including Ronnie Lott, Marcus Allen, Lawrence Taylor and Tony Dorsett, and the fully engaged class was more than enthused to see our version of their assignment come to fruition.

Working with breakout groups on their ESPN case assignment

In all, the students of CSULB were engaging, eager, and more than up for the challenge of becoming the next wave of marketing greats.  And it was my privilege to hopefully enlighten the classes and motivate them to pursue the world of sports and entertainment marketing as a career opportunity.