KENNESAW, Ga. | Nov 21, 2022

Three Kennesaw State University students will visit broadcaster Warner Bros. Discovery Sports U.S. during the 2023 March Madness college basketball tournament to see how the company uses digital sports collectibles in its marketing.

Companies are increasingly using NFTs (nonfungible tokens) to create digital trading cards and other content to engage fans of sporting events, such as March Madness and the Super Bowl. NFTs are images, videos, or other digital assets that use blockchain to trace their path of ownership. Fans collect, trade, buy and sell the digital collectibles.

Students Feyisola Odejimi, Cynthia Quiroz, and Sophie Schohan will learn from Warner Bros. Discovery Sports marketing pros in Atlanta during the tournament as a reward for their first-place finish in Kennesaw State’s first Marketing Innovation and Technology Strategy (MITS) competition. The MITS event was a cross-departmental effort organized by the Kennesaw Marketing Association and Business Technology Club student groups and sponsored by Warner Bros. Discovery Sports.

Student competitors used their knowledge of marketing concepts and emerging Web3 technologies to develop a strategy for using NFTs to build consumer engagement and create corporate sponsorship opportunities during March Madness. Web3 describes the evolution of the internet through increasing use of emerging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and token-based transactions.

Because the use of NFTs affects multiple disciplines, students with backgrounds in marketing or technology were both invited to participate in the MITS competition.

“Before entering, I had only a general knowledge of how marketing and technology were becoming more interconnected,” said Schohan, a senior Media and Entertainment student minoring in Advertising and Digital Media. “Seeing as NFTs and other digital assets are becoming more and more popular, I saw this as an opportunity to broaden my understanding of this emerging market.”

According to Laurie Michaelson, the MITS competition’s faculty advisor and a marketing instructor for the Michael J. Coles College of Business’s Department of Marketing and Professional Sales, it was important that marketing and technology students worked together during the event.

“The cross-discipline nature was a key component,” Michaelson said. “For marketing students, they got to work with technology and understand its limits and what it can do to help create strategy. For technology students, it’s about going beyond creating technology to coming up with ideas for using it.”

Warner Bros. Discovery Sports’ involvement in the event began early, with Michaelson working with Matt McElroy, the company’s senior director of growth and innovation (blockchain/NFT) and digital league streaming, on helping the next generation of marketing professionals leverage Web3 technologies in their strategies.

McElroy brought Warner Bros. Discovery Sports on as a sponsor and developed the competition case, which asked students to propose a strategy for using NFTs of video moments and other media to increase fan engagement, generate consumer revenue, and encourage corporate sponsorship. The winning strategy will be implemented during March Madness.

Sponsoring the competition gave McElroy a chance to interact with the target audience for NFTs, as well as those interested in pursuing careers in the field.

“Many of these emerging technologies are native to younger audiences, and so it’s great to be able to tap into these consumers to get their perspectives,” McElroy said. “Also, as Warner Bros. Discovery Sports continues to establish ourselves as a leader in the Web3 space, we want to establish recruiting pipelines with students who are interested in working in this field.”

For the seven student teams, the competition provided valuable experience solving the types of marketing and technology challenges they will face as professionals.

“Rather than just hearing a lecture on this topic, I was able to apply the knowledge gained from our research,” said Quiroz, a senior marketing major. “This was also my first competition in college, so that was rewarding itself because I was able to push myself out of my comfort zone and challenge myself in a way I had not before.”

The competition was part of a larger career summit hosted on the Kennesaw State campus by the Department of Information Systems and Security. Between the presentations from visiting organizations and the competition, students learned firsthand how prevalent Web3 technologies like NFTs and blockchain are in multiple industries and disciplines.

“Students not only learned about Web3 from a marketing and technology perspective, but from an overall business perspective," Michaelson said. “There’s no better way to learn than by doing.”

-Patrick Harbin