How The NHL’s Seattle Kraken Use LED Everywhere To Drive Game-Day Experiences

The spectacle of pro sports used to be almost entirely about what happened on the playing surface, but these days it’s also about the venue and the technology and creative used to create memorable and shareable experiences.

If you are paying $75 a ticket, and $12 per beer, there should perhaps be more entertainment than someone belting out national anthems.

The Seattle Kraken are a new team in the National Hockey League, based out of one of the most tech-adept cities in the world, in a brand new arena that has digital screens everywhere. There are 224 LED displays at Climate Pledge Arena, populated with content specifically geared to the game day experience of hockey fans.

I had a terrific chat with Jonny Greco, the very exciteable Senior VP of Entertainment and Experience for the Kraken. We spoke about what fans see before and during games, the thinking behind the creative, and the technology used at the venue.

We also get into his mindset and insights drawn from years and years of delivering experiences – including the over-the-top world of WWE pro wrestling and the mother of all pre-match experiences – the knights and swords opener to Las Vegas Golden Knights hockey games.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Jonny. Thank you for joining me. I wanted to read out a description so listeners can get their heads around everything that’s going on with your gig. There are 224 LED displays at Climate Pledge Arena, which has more than 28,000 square feet of digital signs. There are 173 displays outside the main seating bowl. So you have one hell of a lot of screens to operate.

Jonny Greco: That’s a good intro. You’ve got all these amazing world-class tools. You get them during a pandemic while the arena is being built. You’re about to start a brand new franchise, and now what, where do we go? 

So super excited. Unbelievable honor to be here. I truly think we’re just scratching the surface with all of this incredible technology and you’ll hear me a lot as a theme as we chat here, and I’m so thankful to be on your podcast, but “story over sexy”. We can have the most expensive toys and all these phenomenal, shiny lights but if you don’t create a compelling story and a narrative that pulls people in doesn’t really matter. So I’m always threading that line of technology and the art, where they fuse together to find that really happy galvanization of spirit.

Yeah. I think creative direction is so important. I get press releases every day about the next giant LED display at a sports venue and in a lot of cases, it’s a 100 meters/yards along and this big and everything else, they don’t talk at all about what’s on there and it’s just this big ass display and so what?

Jonny Greco: They put up color bars and say, “It’s cool. Look at it!” 

So with all those displays, does your gig extend out into the concourses, or are you just talking about the game experience once you get into the seating bowl? 

Jonny Greco: That’s a thoughtful question because I think traditionally as we know, game presentation, whether you’re juniors, minor league, collegiate, major league sports, game presentations is kind of on the football field, the music, the mascot maybe the cheerleaders, maybe your promotional team the intermission performances or concerts, but everything that lives in the bowl. And I think holistically game presentation has turned into less of a presentation and more of an experience over the last few years especially, and we’re looking at this holistic approach: you can’t just be in the bowl to hear the song, or oh, they just scored. 

You need to know about this on the entire campus that might be your home base. You should know something happened in my opinion, in the parking lot, as you’re walking in, you should know about it whether you’re on Twitter as you’re looking at it as you’re going up the escalator, if you’re in line to get a burger. The screen displays should have your goal animation going if you score a goal and you create this kind of connected experience as we roll and again, as you teed it up 28,000 square feet of lead on a 74 acre campus, there are a lot of screens to cover. So you have to do it thoughtfully, then you have to balance the wayfinding and the marketing, and then just the straight energy game presentation, for that moment, while promoting other events that are coming. So there’s a lot to juggle and like I said, we’re just dipping our toes in the water. So we learn a lot every day and sometimes we get it really right. Sometimes we miss and sometimes we’re like, oh yeah, we forgot about that. So we’re excited about the evolution game in/game out, event in/event out here in Seattle.

So I have not been to a Kraken game. It’s a bit of a drive for me, given where I live. What’s the game day experience? As you described, if you’re out in the parking lot, or you get off the Monorail. So where do you start seeing the stuff that you’re controlling and influencing? 

Jonny Greco: Yeah, I think we have a really connected organization as far as the storytelling of our brand, right? Like early that day, the team had a morning skate. There’s going to be content on all of our social channels that’s going to tell a little bit of the story of that night. We’ve got our own app where it’s going to talk to you about traffic. It’s going to give you your ORCA card so you’re able to take that Monorail that you speak about to be able to get in, to help mitigate the traffic. 

So the game day experience is, you could argue, it starts before the game day, but the day of the morning when you’re getting messages, you’re hearing about what’s going on. You’re finding out what, what’s the strategy going into the game as we play, and it also just ramps up as you get near the puck, things that you had just mentioned that Monorail experience, which you know is a mile or two away, we have an audio file with our broadcasters welcoming fans onto the Monorail, right? We’ve got this armory sort of indoor space that we activate with our promo team, our icebreakers and our C squad. And, we’ve got video screens there and we’re doing trivia. We’re welcoming people in the most hospitable way we can to just thank them for being a part of this. It’s not just, once you sit in your seat and you have your beer at the game that you’re connected to the Seattle Kraken Climate Pledge Arena, it is way more extensive than that and that’s something we’re continuously working on because yes, the screens all over that campus are helping you find your way or teach you about what’s coming. But we also just want to completely engage with our audience all the time, so they get excited. They know what’s going on there. They’re being educated about the process, particularly as this building opens, but we can continuously inform our fans to illuminate their experience when we can. 

Now is part of that because going to a sports event now is expensive? For the ticket, for the concessions, for everything. In my days when I would go to a Calgary Flames game, when I lived out west, the game day experience was getting through the gate, grabbing a beer, sitting down, and then the entertainment was somebody singing “O Canada”, and then the game was on and that’s it.

Modern pro sports is like a total spectacle, right? 

Jonny Greco: I think it’s changed a lot. And don’t do a disservice to O’ Canada. It’s a heck of an Anthem. I love it. But I do think humanity looks at experiences differently than we ever have before. It’s always evolving. You can go back 20 years and what the experience was about, it was exactly what you explained and that even upwards of 10-15 years ago, it was that, and now people want more bang for their buck, whatever they’re paying for tickets or beers or snacks and concessions, time is our most valuable, precious resource and we’re understanding that more than ever over the last couple of years. 

So when we have this time, how we spend it is so important to us. So we need to make sure that we’re being thoughtful in creating that experience that connects people with the brand, with the team, with the game. But in my opinion it also protects you from maybe a game where the Flames at the Saddledome don’t play very well at night and they lose 5-0, but they still had a great experience and they’re telling their friends about it. And even though they have, we’ve done our jobs in creating that fun. Let’s just call it. I go to a game cause I want to have fun for a few hours and I still had fun even though some of the things we couldn’t control didn’t go our way. I think that’s just what fans in general are coming to experience regardless of the costs.

It’s that way, if you’re going to Disney world, if you’re going to a Jazz club or you go to the beach like you want to make sure that you have as much of an engaging experience as you can. It’s definitely part of the consciousness of us as humans nowadays, for sure. 

You came to this gig, having done a whole bunch of what looked like pretty interesting gigs that are mainly in sports. The three that hit me were live event production for pro wrestling and  video direction for curling at the Olympics in Vancouver, a little different for pro wrestling, and then the big one was working for the Las Vegas Golden Knights. 

Is the spectacle that is the openers of the Vegas Knights games with the, with all that hoo ha going on, is that you, did you do that?

Jonny Greco: Yeah. Some people would definitely call it hoo ha. I think, yes, I was a part of and we had a hell of a time. Hell of a great leadership who saw vision and put entertainment at the forefront of the experience and then just knowing you were in Vegas, like you were going to do it a little bit different, right? You were just allowed, you had a different kind of permission to get a little wild that fit the region. On brand, in a style that fits the team, and then, you start winning games. There’s a lot more permission you have to fail and try different things because people just are in a better mood. People like to win. That’s been around for a long time. 

So yeah, I think that list, you just mentioned it. It is a funny list when you go Curling to WWE wrestling, shout out to Halifax. I’ve been there. We did a show there. I loved it. Absolutely beautiful. But, and then, Vegas and Seattle, the truth is though, the more different opportunities I get blessed to be on and be a part of the more projects and teammates I get to like to collaborate with and contribute to the more I realize just how similar there is to all of it, right? Curling again, what we were talking about, it’s an experience you’re enjoying, you may love the sport. You may never have seen it before, but you want it to be at the Olympics, but you’re going to love the music. You’re going to love the natural inherent drama of sport. You may not be a WWE fan, but you probably know who Hulk Hogan is. There’s elements where we’re all connected in these experiences, and the truth is we all love good. Stories have been around for thousands and thousands of years, and it may be the story within a song, maybe a story in the written form of a book. It may be a micro story of the kiss cam within 30 other promotions at a game in St. Louis that you see, but they’re stories inherently every day that we see, and if you can share them in a certain way and you can make your good guys bad guys compelling then all of a sudden people are pulled into it and they care about the story, then they care about, again, whether it’s a pro wrestler, a pro curler or a pro hockey player they’re all characters in the ensemble, of the show, the entertainment of the film, of the movie, of the story that we want to be a part of. 

Did the work that you were involved in with the Las Vegas Golden Knights, the NHL team there, was that what got you up to Seattle? Did the Seattle people go, “Yeah, we want that”? 

Jonny Greco: I think, like all of us. we’re on these journeys and paths and, I was doing some research on you as I was prepping for this podcast and, it said you had a boss back in the day. The Internet’s just a fad. It’s not going to last, but you are somebody who was like, no, I see where this is headed and sometimes you gotta just have the guts to do something that isn’t necessarily what people expect or see, and one of my favorite quotes of all time is from Henry Ford with cars, and he went on to obviously do pretty well for himself, but he was asked at one point, your clients, your people buying this and the thing was, he says, if I would have asked people what they wanted versus just doing my own thing, “if I would have asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said they wanted a faster horse” and I love that because it’s a little bit about sometimes we need to show people or expose people to things that they don’t know they want, they don’t know they’re going to love this, and if we talk about it, we may talk ourselves out of it. Cause it sounds crazy because it’s never been done cause it won’t work and all those reasons, yes, that may be the case, but if we can suspend their own disbelief a little bit and just go for it sometimes and be willing to fail because you’re going to, I think you get really unique opportunities. So Vegas, an amazing opportunity built off of relationships from previous jobs, the team president there is a great friend and just an awesome human being. I used to work with him back in the Cleveland Cavaliers days when we were working with LeBron James a million years ago, and you stay connected to these people. It was a recipe of pretty interesting elements when we got to Vegas, it worked out well and I’ve been given some pretty neat opportunities since then, but I do think the opportunities come from more of the relationships then, and your last gig matters. It really does, but I do think it’s the body of work as you continue on, and I had actually gone from Vegas to Madison Square Garden to go work for the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers, which was unbelievable to be at Mecca, but I’d only done it for nine months before the Seattle opportunity came and there was a pandemic that happened as well. So there were a lot of variables, whereas what’s the right move right now, creatively for my family and everything else.

So it was only a cup of coffee in New York, but I’ve had a few really neat opportunities and I’ve been able to meet and connect with some really interesting people through Vegas, and even before that with WWE and some of the other opportunities as well. 

Yeah, and I must have been pretty cool to effectively have a blank slate that like Madison Square Gardens is a pretty old arena, I don’t know how old it is, 40 years or something, and there’s only so much you can do in terms of LED displays and new technology there versus Seattle is tech central and they went to town with it. 

Jonny Greco: Yeah, they did, and that’s a really good point. You’ve got these beautiful venues and arenas all over the world and you don’t really want to mess with them like Wrigley field, you probably should only go so far with how much led you put there. Fenway, same idea. Like it would almost be a disservice to the history of the game in that space.

I think in Seattle, it was really unique, and at the time, what I had read was it was the most LED in any arena, on the planet, and that probably changes every five minutes. But I know a few months ago that was the case. But they had the opportunity cause it was a brand new arena, in this beautiful city that is this transcendent science technology, medical, you think of Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, all of these companies, Starbucks, these companies that are out here that have these pioneers of creativity and technology, it was very fitting out here. But I think you learn a little, in the hockey term, original programming that is innovative, super unique, but then also honors the original six, right? Honor the tradition knows whose great grandpas were here playing the game and what they loved and trying to fuse it together, and I think depending on the city you’re in, if you’re in Boston, it’s going to be a lot different than if you’re in Arizona, like how you ratio those two elements.

But again, whether you have one screen or you have 344 screens, make sure you’re putting up content. That’s interesting. Otherwise people are going to walk right past and they’re not going to notice it anyway. 

Yeah. That’s one of the things that struck me about what you’re up to or what the, what your team’s up to is, I’ve been in a number of new build or renovated arenas in the last few years when we were still doing things like getting on airplanes, and in those cases, they’re putting in big LED video walls and everything else, but it was all about commerce. 

It was about running different sponsor messages. If it was an NBA game versus an NHL game, it was about efficiency and so on, and what I’m seeing with what’s being done at Climate Pledge is it’s about the experience and it’s about setting the tone. So you’ve got like this giant aquarium and things like that, can you describe what people can see? 

Jonny Greco: Sure. Yeah, and I think it’s interesting, Dave, when you talk about just the philosophy of other venues. Like you go to the arena formerly known as Staples Center in Los Angeles, they need the digital signage to help with some of their changeovers, right? Like I’ve been there when they had an LA Kings game that afternoon, and then an LA Clippers game that night, like they needed to switch from black and white design to red and blue within a few hours, completely transforming the arena, and nothing can make that process quicker than like the digital signage abilities. 

So like you said, not even a few years ago. It was signage. It was sponsorship, and it was like, put the logo here and buy a hot dog or whatever else. But now they’re trying to connect it to just, again, more of like where you’re being sold, but it sure doesn’t feel like being sold. I feel like I’m watching something really cool and threading it into the show, and it was a big part of our own storytelling as you entered the Climate Pledge Arena with this grandiose atrium space that we have, where we were like, one of our taglines for the Kraken is, ”Welcome to the deep” right? 

It’s the deep fear, fear of the deep, we’re in the deep, right? That’s where the Kraken lives, this mythical beast. And, the arena itself is subterranean, it’s underground. To do this insane over billion dollar arena build, they literally lifted the historic roof from 1962, took everything else out of it and rebuilt this insanely beautiful arena underneath, and then put the roof back on. To do that, you had to go underneath as well. So as we looked at the layout of the arena, and as we looked at these video screens, part of this really cool grandiose entrance, as you come in, you get to go down these massive escalators with these huge video LED screens, video screens through Daktronics and we said we could put a Pepsi logo on there, but that’s not again, that’s just a big logo. That’s not innovative. There’s not a story. It doesn’t necessarily make me thirsty. But instead we have the support from our leadership to let’s create an atmosphere and what we thought of it’s like, all right, you’re going down underground. We’re going to the deep, we’re seeing the Kraken which is an underwater creature. We’re in Seattle. Let’s dig deep, and as you go down the escalator, let’s go underwater. Let’s see an Orca that’s indigenous to space. Let’s see the type of rock formations that you would see at the base of the Puget sound. Let’s build out a space to give people again, that kind of experience, and it almost feels like you’re like the Atlanta aquarium or something as you go, and you’re like, oh, there’s a seal. There’s a sea lion going by so it was neat that we had that sort of support, and then instead of just a founding partner logo, splattered all over the place, we have a school of fish swimming by as it goes past the Amazon logo, or the Alaska airlines logo. So it’s a thoughtful way of fusing the two together where it’s like, of course we have incredible partners that we want to honor and showcase, but we also have their support to create this experience that just felt a lot more elegant than even in previous worlds I’ve been a part of it, it’s just not slapping it on there. It’s much more of a collaboration and integration of brand fusion together to help it feel just more like an experience than me just looking at a sign. 

Yeah, I’m guessing you’ve fought this verbal battle a few times with the specialty leasing people and other folks who say yeah, this immersive entertainment stuff is awesome, but I need this Pepsi logo on here or this other logo?

Jonny Greco: Yeah, I think we all have. I think it’s one of our biggest opportunities as people in the sports entertainment production world to lock arms with your corporate partnership side of things, because it does bring in a lot of revenue and it does bring in great brand awareness. It does bring in great relationships long-term that help a business work, but you don’t want it to just be all or nothing. You don’t want it to always be black and white. There’s this really neat fusion of gray that you can find that kind of everyone can be aligned on, and it goes back to the point we were making before about, let’s show you how this works. It’s not always the most quantifiable, but there is a feeling when something just lands well and it’s not a perfect science, and again we make plenty of mistakes on our journeys and our professional careers for sure but it is fun when you’re in a supportive place that nurtures creativity, nurtures storytelling and lets you try some things sometimes. 

We know we did some things pretty well here, but we also know we’ve got a lot of places to grow and develop and keep evolving because everyone’s chasing, everyone’s trying to do a great job together. So let’s lift each other up and inspire one another. 

Does the job touch some of the purely commercial aspects of digital signage? I know in some arenas, if somebody scores a goal, and I think you talked a little bit about this before, the concession displays that are showing a beer is $500 or whatever they cost now, it’ll go to a replay of the goal and then go back to the beer menu or whatever. Are you doing that?

Jonny Greco: Yeah we’re not doing it as well as we’d like yet, but we had some recent meetings about this to do a really thorough walk arounds in the arena itself because when you start and open up a brand new arena this quickly in a pandemic, a lot of is it let’s just get it going. Let’s get it working, and literally as we’re doing this conversation, we just got some decimators to help us with some of our delays on our LED screens on the back wall of our press bridge. Because our fans in that area, this super unique area, they don’t have a complete line of sight to our video screens are twins as we call them. So they have these LED screens with our program out, which is awesome, except it’s, I don’t know what the time is, Two to three second delay on some things, and we all know if you’re a little bit late to the joke or the punchline or the goal, it’s a little bit less of a connected experience.

So there’s constant little technical elevation we’re trying to find a more comprehensive experience for people. But I do think we have ways to go. As far as we score a goal that lights up everywhere, that underwater space currently, when we score a goal, that’s not being lit up with our goal animation and cutting cameras and stuff, but we know that’s where we want to go to just create that moment where even if you’re not in the bowl for a second, you feel what just happened? Cause there’s not many cooler moments in sports entertainment than that horn going off crowd going nuts, and if you can be a part of it, somehow we want to include everyone. But you know what, when you walk out of the bathroom oh, what just happened? No one wants to be the last one to the dance floor. So we want to help everyone feel like they’re the first. 

Is there some sort of a show control system that’s running all this? What are you using? 

Jonny Greco: Yeah, so we work with Daktronics and I’ll say this right away. 15 people way smarter than me on the technology side that I work with, that could go a lot further into this, but it is show control for all of our ribbons and Daktronics video screens. And then we’re using Triple Play for all of our IP TV needs, and that’s run through our incredible group from the Climate Pledge Arena side, because they’re doing more than just the Kraken games. They have events all the time, a hundred percent. 

So if you’re using Daktronics, for that, as you add more stuff, you just go back to them?

Jonny Greco: I think, with technology, you’re always looking for, I don’t want to say the best, but who helps us tell our story? Who helps us create that experience? Daktronics have been incredible partners and they have a whole lot of their product all over the place and they understand that this is this crown jewel space for their own product as well. So it’s just been a really good relationship as far as, Hey, this isn’t working or would we be able to develop this? And they’re on it. They want this to succeed because they’re great partners and we want to keep pushing the envelope, but obviously trying to always see what’s out there. Daktronics does a ton of things, but obviously we’re working with Ross in our switches and acuity expressions. We got Dreamcatcher for our replay systems. Like you’re going to try to grab a whole bunch of different tools and you just want the best tools to create the best kind of narrative that you can and it’s rarely going to be just one thing, right? 

There’s not a one-stop shop for many things. That’s where we are right now, but always looking to evolve what you have, right? 

How many people are working on this? 

Jonny Greco: Ee call it Entertainment experience and production on the Seattle Kraken side, and for that group, which is creating a lot of the social content, we are creating elements like ice projection and half a million dollar shot promotions and, commercial spots and B-roll and everything else. There’s 15 of us in that group. So that’s on the Kraken inside. So that’s your show callers, your scripters we’re working closely with corporate partnerships, you’re working with your promo teams, and so that group of 15 is split into two. As far as the game presentation side, that entertainment experience, but then also just that content and production side as well, which ranges from creating because we are a brand new team, videos for human resources or maybe working and this is really common in pro sports, working on like a free agent video project that’s super secretive or whatever they like. 

So you’re creating the very forward facing stuff, but you’re also doing a lot behind the scenes, and when you have no library to pull from last year, oh, remember Dave, last year when this happened, we didn’t have that. So that’s another role that we talked to a lot of people about, and they were, if you can get it, get that archivist role, get that digital asset management person role in your space. So that’s something we’re working diligently on. We have a person who’s phenomenal and we’re testing the waters, working on this and then we’ll look to be implementing this, over the summer. But just to build that archive, because, season one happens, but really quickly, you’re celebrating your 10th anniversary and remember game six, when that thing happened, you want to have that you want to have those things properly logged and an archived for us and or for the next people who come into this incredible role.

Yeah. I  hadn’t thought about that. I guess you’ve got to do like the player video pieces where, they’re smiling and then they do the arm, the cross arms, and don’t mess with me look and all that stuff, you gotta have all that, right? 

Jonny Greco: Gladiator shots. Yeah, absolutely, and some of that stuff becomes evergreen, so you can shoot it once and use it for a few years, and some of the stuff, as guys get traded or retire, goes away but they may someday have their Jersey retired here. They may just come back, right? You want to use some of those elements. I learned a lot of that at Madison Square garden. It was interesting how they had archived up until this point, and even there they would admit it themselves. We could do a better job with our digital asset management. We’re one year in or half a year in, right like between all those seasons, you’re like a hundred years in. So that’s a lot of games you’ve literally filmed. I remember working at the Cleveland Cavaliers, it was the same idea. We had all of this craziness going on with Betamax and 16 millimeter film, and we had to transfer all of that content as DVDs were coming around and then, it’s like these video files, is that going to last? So when you have to go back and grandfather in content, that’s a much heavier lift, so we’re trying to mitigate that as much as we can. 

Yeah, it’s interesting. Technically, it used to be a lot harder to pull off what you’re doing now, but the flip side of that is there’s a lot more that you have to produce than in the old days.

Jonny Greco: Absolutely. You’re putting out so much content and you’re trying to individualize something on Instagram versus Twitter versus LinkedIn versus in arena versus the app, and that’s something like strategy-wise, I think, everyone’s working on, how are we unique and original but also how are we creating content that can be used in multiple ways, because you don’t need to create, oh we have “Mark Giordano, legendary hockey player, tomorrow night’s going to be us honoring his 1000th game, the silver sticks ceremony,” it’s really cool. 

Do you need a different sort of acknowledgement or graphic on every single one of those channels or do you keep it very brand centric with a look and then you figure out whatever the content design look needs to be to fit that scale, and then you go from there. So it’s a pretty subjective space, but you’re always trying. With the narrative and story in mind first, you’re trying to work smarter, not harder cause we all work hard, we know that, but there’s a lot of content to create, and once you start, you don’t want to pull back. You want to only add to it.

So we started out of the gate with a lot. We know we have a lot more stories to tell. We know we can engage Seattle and Kraken fans in such a different way and further it, and like you said, scratching the surface. We’ve started, but now we’ve got to keep rising. 

Is the pregame show the big job, the one that sucks up most of the time?

Jonny Greco: Yeah, I think depending on the organization, it can be a little bit different here. It was a big part of the show. We ran into a couple of bumps along the way, just again, with the arena opening, supply chain issues, not being able to load some of our beautiful set pieces for the opening night. And it was honestly one of the more frustrating moments for a lot of us because we weren’t able to physically. But we got there and come the new year, we were in place and it’s emotional and it does take a lot of our focus and attention, but as cool as the moment is, it can get cooler and we’re excited to evolve it and grow it, and now that we have all the pieces in place, take that next iteration up another level. 

Yeah, that was going to be my last question. Now that you’ve got yourself grounded there and sorted out all the technology and the folks and know what everybody’s good at and the drill, what’s coming?

Jonny Greco: Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of exciting things that I’m not going to tell you about right now, my friend, but starting a new franchise, just because I’ve been super lucky or super crazy, probably both to have done this now a couple of times, I think you got to look at being a part of a new organization much more than just like a few games or a season. I think to really get your footing and your steps, right? For every part of the business it’s two to three years easy. It’s not a one-year thing. So there’s a lot that we dreamed up a year ago that just wasn’t able to come to fruition this year for a million great reasons but as you get into actually activating right pre op mode versus operating mode, very different for us, right? The red light goes on, lights, camera, action. You see how people handle it, you see how the equipment functions, you see what you dreamed up while we were in Zoom calls saying, Hey, what would be cool is a camera that does this and does this well now we’re using those said cameras and we’re like, oh, what else would be cool. So you want to lock arms. You want to step on each other’s shoulders and jump higher on some of these things, and some of the things that you envision just didn’t really land the way you had expected for a few different reasons.

And in my case, I know sometimes I just dilute myself a little bit because I get so excited about so many things and I don’t keep it concentrated on just a few big ones, and I also like to test and learn. So I like to throw a lot against the wall, and it’s like ooh, that was great. Oh, that was terrible. Ooh, that’s workable. Oh, that was terrible. I would rather cast that super wide net and work off of that, then be like all my eggs in one basket, and whether it works or not, I’m like I don’t want one basket, I want 14 baskets, and that’s a philosophical difference, probably organization to organization, sport to sport that, just personally, that’s the way I like to function. It’s not right or wrong, but it’s definitely the way I look forward to evolving in this season too, because there’s a lot of stuff that we have ready to go that intentionally we’re holding back, like it’s ready to go, but we’re going to wait. We’re going to wait, and plan to do that over the summer, to do that in season two, which generally I don’t have that level of patience. I get so excited. I’m like, let’s do it. Let’s get everybody excited. 

But I do think the chess game, the slow play, sometimes it’s really thoughtful and strategic and it just, it helps with the pacing of the whole experience. If you do think of that brand launch, not just the day the logo comes out, not just your opening night, not just your first season, it’s something we’re building upon it and creating an equity with it’s a nuanced art, I think over the next couple of years that we’re going to be working on.

This was a lot of fun. I appreciate you taking the time with me. 

Jonny Greco: Oh, Dave, thank you so much for asking. Anytime you want to chat about this kind of stuff. I would love to be a guest. It’s an honor to be on the 16:9 podcast and really happy to share some energy with you. 

That’s great. Thank you.