Adidas exec makes leap to sports rep firm
After a decade at adidas shaping the brand’s basketball brand as its sports marketing head, Chris Grancio has made a fairly unprecedented leap to become the chief marketing officer of the newly launched Independent Sports & Entertainment company, one of the top agencies in the agent landscape.
Formerly part of the Relativity Sports agency, the new company, headed by longtime industry figures Ron Burkle and Hank Ratner, boasts a client roster of more than 300 athletes in the NBA, NFL and MLB. DeMarcus Cousins, Andrew Bogut, Ricky Rubio, Chandler Parsons and Rodney Hood are among some of the top basketball clients under agent Dan Fegan with the company.
Grancio has been at the forefront of marketing in the footwear industry in recent years, leading a shift in strategy for the brand. Adidas moved on from sponsoring the NBA and providing uniforms to all 30 teams, allowing its 11-year, $400 million NBA partnership to expire next summer. Instead, the brand is aggressively signing players to shoe deals.
“Very rarely in life do you get to start with a clean sheet of paper to create a company and a brand, and at the same time start with such an amazing foundation,” Grancio told The Vertical about the move to ISE.
The Vertical recently spoke with Grancio at length about joining ISE, his new outside perspective of the key basketball brands in the marketplace and the portfolio of players that he will look to brand going forward.
The Vertical: Within your new role at ISE, what are some of the key things you’ll be leading?
Grancio: There are three things that I’m going to tackle from Day One. The first is at ISE, we want to build our own brand. We’ll focus on creating value in what Independent Sports & Entertainment stands for and how we want to do business. Job two is working really closely with our principal agents and supporting our current athlete representation business by supporting the marketing contracts and brand building for all of our players.
It’s more than just the idea of managing sponsorships, it’s really the idea of changing the model for us to focus more on brand building for our athletes, in terms of who they are and understanding more about them and what their aspirations are. We want to provide a much more tailored solution for them to help grow locally, nationally and certainly globally. The last part is going to be really blue sky, but also exciting, and focusing on new business for the company. Looking at ways that this agency can really add value, and there are natural extensions into consulting, venue management, hospitality, entertainment and live events.
The Vertical: You’ve worked with Ricky Rubio at adidas, and I understand his shoe deal is actually expiring at the end of this month. Are you going to be involved in those negotiations, where you’re now literally sitting on the opposite side of the table, as the saying goes?
Grancio: I’m probably a little bit more hands off on that one [laughs]. I was involved on that deal when we signed him, and certainly I’ll be working with the guys on it in my new chair. I’ll be more hands off, to avoid any of those good conflicts of interest to start. That conversation is already well under way, and on the ISE side, we look forward to extending Ricky’s partnership with adidas for the long term.
The Vertical: Now that you’ll be brand neutral and have clients with all different brands, what’s it been like to take a step back and assess all of the brands from an outsider’s perspective now?
Grancio: It was interesting just making all of the phone calls. I’ll be sitting down with all of the major sneaker brands and going out and having business conversations now with guys that I’ve seen on the road for years and years. I’m looking forward to it. I obviously bring to ISE a really strong knowledge and understanding of the adidas business philosophy and our strategy. It’s equally important for me to know that about Under Armour, Nike or any of the Chinese brands. In the long term, the best way to create value for our players and for the brands they’re partnered with is understanding strategy and pairing players with the right brands so we can put out the right storytelling. That’s something that I’m going to invest a lot of my time in early on. Not just in the sport space either, whether it’s our different video game partners or larger brands out there. Understanding corporate strategy is one of the things that I can really bring to the ISE team, in terms of understanding who the consumer is and how to build brands for our players.
The Vertical: As you look at Nike, adidas and Under Armour, what are some of the positioning differences you see between the three?
Grancio: If you think about positioning from a brand standpoint, Under Armour has always had a very forward and aggressive marketing tone in the marketplace. They’re much more about the idea of the testosterone of sport. Nike has always been much more about activity and the concept of “Just Do It” being to get out and be motivated. The space that adidas is trying to create today and had kicked off for the last nine months is all about creativity. It’s a very different angle of how to talk to consumers. Finding out the right places and the right athletes to partner with those brands is very important. Clearly, partnering the right athlete with the right brand leads to great work at the end of the day.
The Vertical: This summer, the NBA salary cap took a big jump that everyone noticed. How do you think that’s going to impact the way that brands offer shoe deals, if at all? Do you see shoe deal money rising a bit now, since it might take higher offers to truly get a player’s attention now that their team contracts are skyrocketing so much?
Grancio: I don’t really anticipate a significant change in the shoe contract space because of the jump in the salary cap with the new CBA. If the shoe contract space gets more competitive and prices escalate, I think it’s going to be based on the brands deciding to spend more and compete more for players. Obviously, that trend would be great for us, but if you look at the landscape, Nike has been relatively steady for a long time. They’ve had huge market share leadership in terms of the number of players that wear their product. They have huge affinity from players entering the league that are already predisposed to wanting to wear Nike. Under Armour has been incredibly successful with Steph Curry, but they have a relatively small portfolio of players, and there doesn’t seem to be a significant plan to change that. With the Chinese companies, over the last three years the number of players wearing Chinese brands has probably ticked down just a hair. What we did at adidas over the last couple of years was be pretty aggressive to try and grow the portfolio of endorsers. Unless Nike, Under Armour and adidas all start competing more for players, I don’t see the shoe deal landscape changing. What I think it does for us as marketers is force us to really ask the question of the athlete, “What’s most important to you, what do you want and why?” It’s much less about the dollars involved, and much more around the right partnership and positioning.
The Vertical: How do you think the ways that players have been marketed has evolved in the last five years, whether that’s because of social media or because of other new approaches?
Grancio: I think the biggest thing we’ve seen in the rise of social media is that there are players now that are more engaged, more self aware and more active to create more value for themselves in the way they use that tool. It’s also equally visible that it can hurt players who don’t use it well and are not active, or if they’re destructive, which we’ve seen a few examples of. That’s definitely been the biggest change in the last five years. Before that, it was, “Which players are we going to put in the TV commercial? Which players will we do player exclusive colors for and which players will we use for some retailer promotions?” Now, we’re always on in the landscape of brands and athletes. If you’re following adidas or Nike’s Instagram or Twitter feed, they’re on non-stop all the time. The ambition for our athletes is to cut through that and create a following for our athletes that can really help their brands connect.
The second big change that’s really accelerated over the last couple of years is the combination of basketball and fashion. It’s always been there in the background, but now we’re seeing the NBA staging their own fashion show at All-Star Weekend, and you’re seeing more players doing high fashion and clothing deals, whether that’s with Russell Westbrook’s collection with Barney’s or Stephen Curry’s [past] deal with Express. That’s something that’s been an evolving trend over the last couple of years that I’ve certainly seen on the athlete side. It’s something that we’ll certainly look to explore, and we just had a shoot for DeMarcus Cousins with a fashion magazine. That continues to evolve, and basketball has always led in that space as a sport. The overlap between sports and entertainment, and sports and fashion, has really accelerated over the last couple of years. At ISE, based on our athlete portfolio and all of the other brands that we have in the family of companies that we work with, we see huge potential to really accelerate how our athletes show up in that space.
The Vertical: It’s definitely been an interesting progression to see recently. When the agency was under the Relativity name, I always looked at the agency as having more of a Hollywood and lifestyle approach to how they were positioning players and where guys were showing up for appearances. Chandler of course has been pretty active in that world. How do you see the agency going forward in terms of promoting guys off the court in non-traditional ways?
Grancio: That’s absolutely something that we’re going to look toward. We’ve got a really innovative and forward thinking ownership group and leadership team, and one of the reasons that I signed on was to explore that space. We have access with all of our players and the companies that we’re affiliated with to push aggressively into the entertainment space. We don’t have that blueprint on paper just yet, but it’s going to be something we’ll be aggressively exploring.
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