Live sports is the hottest trend in marketing, but brands can’t just show up wearing the team jersey.
ADWEEK’s annual Sports Marketing MVP list recognizes the sports marketing executives crafting savvy strategies to connect with fans while delivering results for their companies.
From the mind behind NBCUniversal’s back-to-back record-setting Olympic Games to the woman ensuring WNBA games will be sold out while the team is still in development, these major league marketers are transforming the business of sports.
Mazen Alawar
Mazen Alawar has helped create an entirely new sports entertainment category with Cosm, building the marketing strategy around the immersive viewing concept he’s dubbed Shared Reality, including its slogan “If you can’t be there, be at Cosm.” Since July 2024, he’s led the launches of venues in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta, helping drive hundreds of sold-out events and partnerships with the NFL, NBA, UFC, ESPN, NBC Sports, and others. His team grew Cosm’s social audience from roughly 400 followers to more than 1.27 million—without paid media—while influencer campaigns generated hundreds of millions of earned views. Alawar also helped make Cosm a recurring sports media story around events including the World Series, Super Bowl, and March Madness by getting the venues into broadcasts, and has expanded into entertainment IP with screenings of Warner Bros. movies and Cirque du Soleil performances.
Stacey Rosenson
Prime Video’s sports portfolio is growing rapidly, driven by Stacey Rosenson. With a remit that spans brand development, creative services, social strategy, and paid media, she’s posted record business performance across franchises. In the span of one year, she led the launch campaign for NBA on Prime—attracting an audience nine years younger than linear channels—and orchestrated the as well as the streamer’s first-ever Masters Tournament. She also expanded NASCAR coverage, including bringing on songwriters Eric Church and CCR’s John Fogerty to reimagine the 1970 hit “Up Around the Bend” to give the racing series a sonic identity. Oh, and she also oversees marketing for the NFL, WNBA, and National Women’s Soccer League, as well as original sports documentaries and series.
Ryan Lehr
To build a brand that endures in sports culture is to understand its fandom. In addition to being co-CCO at Deutsch, Ryan Lehr is a fan himself and knows how to make a brand part of the fun. Now in its ninth season, Dr Pepper’s commercial series Fansville has become its own brand universe, spawning collaborations with Nissan and Aflac and keeping the soda college football’s No. 1 associated brand. Lehr also came up with IHOP’s “Sweetest Punishment” that offered bottomless pancakes to soothe fantasy football players nationwide after New York Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers’ season-ending injury, driving a 117% incremental lift in restaurant visits. Lehr also looks beyond the field, turning a viral Dr Pepper jingle by a TikTok user into a national campaign and creating a commemorative Snapple bottle within two days of the New York Knicks’ NBA championship.
Julia Kang
As the leader of the marketing agency behind the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Julia Kang faces the task that LA28 CEO Renold Hoover has described as pulling off seven Super Bowls per day for a month straight. Good thing she’s already well on her way, with the USOPP in discussions with major brands about programs that extend beyond traditional advertising, including activations and creator campaigns. With Hollywood as its backdrop and the success of this summer’s World Cup, LA28 will be the next big international opportunity for brands increasingly looking to live sports for cultural relevance. Kang’s job will be to guide brand partners to the right moments both within the tournament and beyond its stadiums, whether through enhancing the fan experience or aligning with the right player before they go viral. Game on.
Martin Blich
Being able to anticipate where the marketplace is going put Martin Blich at the head of sports investment and content partnerships for WPP Media. He built a marketing engine that combines media, partnerships, content, experiential, and analytics into a single connected system to help brands make outcome-driven decisions at a time when sports is taking center stadium in the $1.3 trillion ad market. His work on WPP Media’s Women’s Sports Marketplace shifted the conversation from whether brands should invest in the space to how they should show up. To help clients gauge their buy-in, Blich brought on Genius Sports to co-develop the WPP Brand Sports Momentum Score, a guide to buying sports year-round. Initiatives such as AI-powered fan experiences that get fans closer to the Olympic Games also emphasize how Blich embraces technology to create audience-first moments.
Kimberly Veale
First, she took the Golden State Valkyries from idea to the WNBA’s first expansion team in 17 years. For her next act, Kimberly Veale didn’t just relaunch the WNBA’s Portland Fire—she sent the team into the stratosphere. In less than a year, she built the team’s fan strategy and storytelling from the ground up, including “Did You Hear?,” a schedule-release campaign featuring Portlandia stars Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein that became the most-viewed in WNBA history. More than 17,000 fans put down season-ticket deposits before the team played a game, while its inaugural home opener drew a record 19,335 fans. Veale is also helping advance women’s sports through the Kaiser Permanente Performance Center and Rose City Sports Network.
Zach Hilder
Every sports marketer is looking to connect with fans, but Zach Hilder approaches them as brand stewards rather than just consumer segment. As chief creative officer at 72andSunny Los Angeles, Hilder has turned that fan-centered philosophy into scalable campaigns for the NFL, NASCAR, Lay’s, and Google Pixel. His NFL work has spurred a cultural renaissance, including getting women’s flag football to the 2028 Olympics with “Run With It” and this year’s “Champion” Super Bowl ad landing an Emmy Award. To reach new audiences for NASCAR, he put a stock car engine inside a Times Square to create the “World’s Loudest Billboard,” and welcomed casual fans into the soccer mania around the World Cup with Will Ferrell and Lay’s in “Bandwagon.”
Chris Murphy
There was no bigger champion of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the U.S. than Adidas. The athletic brand’s North American team, led by Chris Murphy, poured $242 million in additional marketing spend in Q2 into the game, a 30% boost from 2025 that saw revenues soar 14% YoY. That spend included securing Official Match Ball rights, the cross-sports campaign “Where It All Kicks Off” with Dick’s Sporting Goods starring Lionel Messi and Patrick Mahomes, and building a 25,000-square-foot Home of Soccer fan hub in Brooklyn that blended sports, music, and pop culture. Outside of soccer season, Murphy has also championed new messaging around sports with the ongoing “You Got This” campaign platform that rejects negativity and perfectionism, instead celebrating the joy of getting in the game.
Orlando Baeza
To evolve from a challenger brand into a fintech power player, Chime turned to sports. Leading the strategy is Orlando Baeza, who has expanded Chime’s sports footprint through original content rather than sponsorships, such as the series Ball on a Budget, which has generated 123.6 million views and over 630,000 social engagements. His partnership strategy spans MLS, NBA, and WNBA athletes and creators with the goal of creating fan experiences and telling real money stories. Behind the scenes, Baeza’s AI-enabled creative operation, including its in-house branded entertainment studio In The Green, increased output 377% YoY, helping Chime reach 43% unaided awareness.
Angela Jung
Over 50 million Americans own crypto, a demographic that skews younger, more diverse, and digitally engaged. To reach those who are confident in crypto but haven’t bought in yet, Coinbase’s Angela Jung has built a portfolio of partnerships across the NBA, WNBA, Aston Martin F1, and Riot Games esports to tie the platform to meaningful life moments. The content series NBA Rookie Firsts, about stars’ professional and financial journeys, generated over 18.5 million organic impressions, 749% above benchmark. In F1, Coinbase became the first sponsor to pay Aston Martin in USDC, demonstrating stablecoin utility and driving standout gains in Brazil and Singapore. The campaign generated $4 million in media value and 440 million impressions.
Carlos Padilla II
Where there’s sports, Carlos Padilla II has ensured Dow has a presence—in car racing alone, its portfolio spans NASCAR, IndyCar, and Formula E. Padilla has connected sponsorships directly to CRM pipelines through a custom measurement platform that quantifies B2B impact beyond impressions. His signature “Race to Road” model turns Formula E into a laboratory for EV materials for use by Jaguar Land Rover in developing consumer models, while a Dow-NASCAR engineering R&D alliance helped USA Luge Olympian Ashley Farquharson win bronze at the 2026 Milano Cortina Games. Padilla also expanded the LPGA’s Dow Impact Award, tying its corporate support to athlete recognition, community impact, purpose, and charitable giving.
Scott Mager
Having spent over three decades shaping marketing campaigns for global brands, Scott Mager is now bringing Deloitte into the sports realm, leveraging its sponsorship portfolio for business growth and client engagement. His “Together makes progress” platform, Deloitte’s first-ever unified global brand platform, was launched through sports in 2025 and helped drive a five-point year-over-year increase in brand differentiation and 2.8x growth in web traffic. Partnerships spanning McLaren, the IOC, WNBA, and U.S. Soccer connected executives with Deloitte’s expertise through high-touch experiences, most notably a United States Golf Association campaign that engaged more than 100 clients through exclusive hospitality moments, storytelling, and immersive experiences unusual in the B2B space. Mager has also championed women’s sports, helping Deloitte advance equity and leadership through initiatives such as the Athena Pledge.
Jimmy Spano
Jimmy Spano has spent two decades reshaping sports marketing and media strategies. After 11 years with Dentsu’s Carat, he helped launch Dentsu Media Sports in 2023, connecting linear, streaming, digital, social, audio, OOH, and experiential channels under one model. As head of the division, Spano oversees more than $1 billion in annual sports investments ranging from talent partnerships to merchandising and in-stadium activations. This integrated approach enables clients to engage fans across the entire sports ecosystem, making for smarter, more holistic activations. When Apple struck a 10-year rights deal with Major League Soccer, Spano ensured Dentsu clients could negotiate premium placements and category exclusives. He was also an early champion of women’s sports, helping secure equal paid media investment for NCAA tournaments and advocating for the women’s championship’s move to ABC and primetime windows.
Jo Fox
After earning her sports marketing stripes at Peacock, Sky Sports, and Now TV, Jo Fox joined ESPN at the moment of its biggest product launch in 45 years: moving from legacy broadcaster to direct-to-consumer channel. “Sports Forever,” the campaign connecting ESPN’s history to its streaming future, helped drive 3 million sign-ups between August and October 2025 as every major streamer was competing for the same sports audiences. Fox also championed “BracketBrain,” a pharmaceutical ad spoof that helped ESPN Tournament Challenge generate a fourth consecutive record with 26.6 million brackets in 2026. From ESPN’s first brand identity system to shepherding ESPN Creative Studio’s App-E, its first-ever mascot, Fox is pushing the sports giant to market itself like a modern entertainment brand.
Selena Kalvaria
Credibility and compliance will get your sportsbook in the app stores, but they won’t necessarily get you bets. For that, Fanatics CMO Selena Kalvaria engineers savvy campaigns like the platform’s Super Bowl ad “Bet on Kendall,” which humorously winked at the reality TV star’s checkered dating life to turn sports betting from a transaction into entertainment, generating 27 billion earned media impressions. Kalvaria’s strategy of engaging younger audiences is delivering sustained results elsewhere: During the March men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments, Fanatics Sportsbook saw 32% year‑over‑year growth in total active users. To accomplish all this, she created new systems for cross‑functional collaboration between marketing, legal, product, and analytics that keep creativity at the forefront and aligned with strict regulatory boundaries.
Brad Rakes
Forget Coke and Pepsi—the college kids want Dr Pepper. America’s oldest soda has grown into the most culturally embedded brand in college football through the commercial series Fansville, which has reached new heights through the work of Brad Rakes. The satirical series’ ninth season delivered a 7.5% boost to dollar sales, generating roughly 30% higher incremental return on ad spend than the national campaign average, and helped propel Dr Pepper past Pepsi to become No. 2 soda brand in the U.S. for the second year running. But Dr Pepper doesn’t just advertise to students—Rakes has upped its game with NIL partnerships, creators, campus activations like the Trophy Tour, and mixed-reality integrations in ESPN broadcasts, generating year-round brand loyalty.
Camilo Durana
Soccer is the most popular sport in the world—except in America. That’s changing through the work of Camilo Durana, who executed Major League Soccer’s largest-ever marketing investment ahead of this summer’s World Cup, bringing all 30 clubs together for “Thanks World, We’ll Take It From Here” and activating across all 13 U.S. and Canadian World Cup host markets. His work has helped fuel a record-setting period for MLS with the strongest three-year period of fan growth in league history, 7.9 million weekly live viewers, and 5.71 billion social impressions in just the first three months of 2026. His culturally savvy marketing has also built the youngest fan base among major North American men’s professional sports leagues for MLS, with an average fan age of 39.6.
Charlie Saunders
The Olympic and Paralympic Games may only come around every four years, but Charlie Saunders is ensuring the road to the top of sports is just as exciting as the destination. As SVP of Olympic Sales at NBCUniversal, he delivered record ad revenue for Paris 2024 and Milan Cortina 2026, then connected the Games with Super Bowl LX and NBA All-Star Weekend through the “Legendary February” campaign. The initiative attracted over 250 advertisers—60% of them new since the 2022 Winter Olympics—with nearly 70% investing across multiple events. Saunders is also building momentum toward LA28, helping secure more than a dozen partners more than two years before the Games. By leveraging NBCUniversal’s broader ecosystem for cross-platform storytelling and content integrations, he’s elevating Olympic marketing from event sponsorship into sustained cultural and commercial engagement.
Gabe Spitzer & Shelly Gillyard
The streamer that used to deliver DVDs now delivers live sports, and Shelly Gillyard and Gabe Spitzer are elevating the action on the field with live events, talent, and marketing. NFL Christmas Gameday 2025 was the most-streamed regular season football game in history, drawing 30.5 million viewers worldwide and a halftime show that was more like a halftime party starring Snoop Dogg. Their success locked in the holiday game day through 2029 as well as other tentpole match-ups during the season including Thanksgiving Eve, giving Netflix a presence throughout the NFL season for the first time. They’ve also hit a home run with the MLB, as this year marked the start of Netflix’s three-year partnership with the league including fan experiences and a new tradition of an Opening Night game. And look for the FIFA Women’s World Cup on the streamer in 2027 and 2031.
Camilo Andrade
With the World Cup hosted across the three nations of North America for the first time ever this summer, Camilo Andrade pulled out all the stops to put Nike Football at the center of soccer’s biggest tournament. He led the brand’s 2026 World Cup strategy, from the “Rip the Script” campaign—featuring Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, and stars from other sports and entertainment—to new federation kits and immersive experiences across more than 5,000 retail locations. Nike also looked beyond the U.S. with equipment sponsorship for Mexico’s Chivas de Guadalajara men’s and women’s teams, putting itself in front of the club’s 40 million-strong fan base. When he’s not winning the World Cup of advertising, Andrade is connecting performance innovation with street style to reach the next generation of players.
Erling Haaland
This summer’s World Cup produced many viral moments that broke containment from soccer fandom into the mainstream, but no one did it more reliably than Erling Haaland. The towering Norwegian known for his intense playing style—and personal regiment—captivated audiences on and off the pitch. The record-setting striker scored 38 goals for Manchester City in 2025–26, won his third Premier League Golden Boot in four seasons, and helped propel Norway to its first World Cup since 1998 with 16 qualifying goals. At the tournament, he racked up seven goals before Norway was eliminated, but it’s the endless supply of goofy selfies, expressive celebrations, Birkin bags, and ever-evolving hairstyles along the way that made him a worldwide star, sending his Instagram following from 40 million to 60 million.
Alex Goldenberg
Alex Goldenberg helped turn the New York Knicks’ historic 2026 championship run into a citywide cultural phenomenon. As director of marketing, Goldenberg helped lead the “Always Knicks” playoff campaign, bringing the team’s identity beyond Madison Square Garden through watch parties, street activations, and a championship parade after the NBA team captured its first league title in 53 years. He also helped take the 2025-26 schedule release off-screen with a Stephon Marbury-fronted “Schedule Cart,” while the team’s playoff shirt takeover put Knicks gear throughout the city. Goldenberg’s strategy reflects a modern approach to sports marketing: making the franchise feel like part of the city’s identity rather than just a niche within it.
Kristen Herlihy
Six weeks into the job, Kristen Herlihy built the Omaha Brand Studio from scratch, and has grown it into one of the core revenue engines of Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions, with long-term partners including Bud Light, Nationwide, Macy’s, Visa, T-Mobile, and Workday. Herlihy, leading a team of 30, innovates by creating new formats that put fans at the center: Her Fox Sports Watch Party format helped scale the ManningCast, and she made Breakfast at Bethpage wireless with T-Mobile for more unscripted moments at the Ryder Cup. She is also building the next generation of athlete-owned media infrastructure through projects with Jayson Tatum, Flau’jae Johnson, and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, enabling athletes to own and scale their content while redefining how brands participate in sports media.
Bill Jula
Name, image, and likeness deals are more than just a new kind of athlete sponsorship—Bill Jula recognized early on that they were key to an entirely new creator economy. As CEO and co-founder of Postgame, Jula has grown the company into an over $50 million business, partnering with more than 100 global brands and over 60,000 college athletes. He led one of the most complex NIL campaigns in history during March Madness, activating an athlete from every single men’s and women’s NCAA Tournament team for a single coordinated national program. The campaign with C4 Energy turned the tournament bracket into a live creator ecosystem, delivering national scale while bypassing multimillion-dollar category sponsorship costs. He was also the architect behind the CVS campaign “Epic Beauty,” the largest NIL activation focused on collegiate women athletes to date with 500 participants.
Suzy Deering
Go big or go bigger: For Publicis Sports CEO Suzy Deering, there are no other options. Since taking charge, Deering has scaled the agency’s capabilities with bold moves like acquiring three top sports agencies (Adopt, Bespoke, 160over90) and attracting talent from Nike and Optimum Sports. In 2025, she introduced Women’s Sports Connect, helping brands invest in the ascendant market. Deering also pioneered the proprietary FanID, built on Epsilon’s core identity data, unifying media, sponsorships, audiences, and athlete deals in a single system. Her success has increased total revenue by 100% YoY and 600% since 2023, and the industry is responding, with Publicis Sports adding 15 new brands representing $500 million in annualized revenue.
Jose Diaz
When Deion Sanders, Erin Andrews, and Travis Hunter are considering brand partnerships, they turn to Smac Entertainment’s Jose Diaz. His title may be executive vice president, but Diaz is a one-man band: communications strategist, talent manager, and content producer, facilitating more than 230 brand-talent deals across the company’s 25 clients in 2025, contributing to 16% year-over-year revenue growth. In the past year, SMAC’s expanded in-house content production capabilities have allowed Diaz to expand into client commercials and brand campaigns, from storyboarding to post-production, for brands including Boost Mobile, Diageo, Gerber and Aflac. Alongside Under Armour’s Lab96 Studios, Diaz also produced the Prime Video documentary The Future Is Flag, spotlighting flag football’s rise ahead of LA28.
Lamine Yamal
At just 19 years old, Lamine Yamal has already won a World Cup championship for Spain—but he’d already risen to the status of cultural icon long before that. The youngest player ever to win both the European Championship and World Cup, Yamal is renowned for his fleet-footed dribbling and composure on the field well beyond his years. But his influence extends beyond the pitch, with his taste in clothing, sneakers, and jewelry making him a Gen Z fashion reference, while his move from Nike to Adidas and debuting 28-piece American Eagle collection underscore his commercial pull. Yamal is not just in line to be soccer’s next superstar—he’s also brands’ best hope for the next international sports icon who already has the attention of the rising generation of consumers.
Vicente Fernandez
For over a decade, founder Vicente Fernandez has been translating the vocabulary of fandom into universally understood emojis, turning player animations, GIFs, and AR effects into a language used 200 million times every month. Fernandez’s ability to identify emerging opportunities and translate them into successful partnerships has led to long-term collaborations with ESPN, Meta, FIFA, the Olympics, USWNTPA and the NFLPA, and served clients such as Panini, Gatorade, Kia, and Burger King. For the 2026 FIFA World Cup, SportsManias built a portfolio of 3D animations representing all 48 nations and their star players’ signature celebrations. It was language-agnostic content with worldwide appeal, and contributed to SportsManias assets now having generated over 50 billion engagements.
Ali Debow
How do teams capture and measure the value created by fan participation? Ali Debow built swsh to enable major brands and professional leagues to understand and grow their audience with first-party data, amplifying fan-made content, and measurable ROI. During the Pistons’ playoff run, swsh captured hundreds of fan-generated moments to repurpose into marketing, all the while generating audience data with a 46% form conversion rate. Debow helped TikTok measure the success of its Super Bowl activations, enabling the platform to understand engagement across more than 350 creators. She has also guided swsh through significant growth, closing a $4 million seed round this year, while logging 9 million fan-generated photos and videos across events for the Miami Marlins, Angel City FC, and LinkedIn.
Angel Domenech
Telemundo’s FIFA World Cup 26 marketing required a leader who’s not only fluent in what English and Spanish audiences want, but also the culture around soccer. Angel Domenech paired bilingual storytelling with a live-first strategy, leading the creative direction for the tournament’s official campaign, two-hour music special El Mundial Es Nuestro, and “Somos Más” anthem. To bring non-Hispanic audiences to the broadcast, Domenech paired Owen Wilson with Sofía Vergara for Telemundo and Peacock’s joint Super Bowl campaign, which generated 74.8 million social interactions and nearly 600 million video views. Through the Round of 16, Telemundo and Peacock delivered the 10 most-watched World Cup matches in Spanish-language media history, averaging 5.7 million viewers.
Sebastian Tomich
Seb Tomich is building The Athletic into more than a sports publisher. As chief commercial and development officer, Tomich has helped turn the New York Times-owned newsroom into a profitable, diversified media business spanning advertising, podcasts, video, experiences, and brand collaborations that’s seeing double-digit year-over-year advertising growth. Over the past year, he expanded the podcast network by bringing on Pablo Torre Finds Out and developing The Language of Soccer, an ambitious World Cup platform featuring fans from all 48 nations. The initiative paired original reporting and multimedia storytelling with Google as an exclusive sponsor, creating a new model for brands to align with premium editorial franchises while reaching global sports audiences.
A.P. Chaney
With an instinct for where sports and culture are headed next, A.P. Chaney is bubbling up relevancy and brand equity for Coca-Cola. She revived Sprite’s iconic “Obey Your Thirst” platform, generating 1.6 billion impressions and a 6% sales lift, and tied the revival of Mr. Pibb to NBA legend Scottie Pippen. She then broke new ground by securing Sprite’s first-ever female athlete partnership with Olympic track gold medalist Sha’Carri Richardson, and brokered Sprite’s partnership with Super Bowl champion Jalen Hurts—the first NFL athlete ever signed by the brand. And demonstrating her ability to get in before a trend explodes, she spearheaded Sprite’s sponsorship of the inaugural season of women’s 3-on-3 basketball league Unrivaled, which is growing to new cities and breaking attendance records. The business impact is undeniable: In 2025, Sprite marked eight consecutive years of dollar and volume sales growth.
Sherry Pitkofsky
The popularity of women’s sports has kept Sherry Pitkofsky busy with building a platform to give female athletes the visibility they deserve. The EW Scripps marketing leader has been key to parlaying cultural movement into advertiser demand and audience growth, particularly through the business growth from ION’s transformation from a procedural network into a hub for women’s sports. Fridays are for the WNBA on ION, the first national primetime franchise night dedicated solely to women’s sports, and Pitkofsky has also secured multi-year commitments from women’s hockey and soccer leagues and emerging sports properties like Athlos. Every move treats women’s sports like the premium, mainstream entertainment that they are, from bringing live experiences to Grand Central Terminal to making the sports accessible by helping to launch the free ad-supported Scripps Sports Network.
Jacie deHoop
Since 2019, Jacie deHoop has established her media company The Gist as a power player in women’s sports. She’s forged connections with the NFL and MLB to grow integrated women’s and men’s sports campaigns by 270% year-over-year. DeHoop’s “always on” approach to editorial and commercial strategies engage diverse fans with stories catered to them year-round, ensuring its growing community of over 40 million monthly users (including a million-strong newsletter audience) stays engaged. She’s also moved sponsorships beyond traditional placements into multi-channel partnerships reaching from social media to the court and experiential events for campaigns including getting Nike’s “Just Do It” message to Gen Z across four sports in five cities and a women-focused activation for Toyota at Super Bowl LX.
Jared Smith
Baseball is a sport that famously values tradition. Irreverence was for the upstart Banana Ball league—that is until Jared Smith’s Victus Sports and its customized, personality-forward bats came along. Since its founding in 2012, Victus Sports has gone from a Pennsylvania garage-born bat maker to the top of America’s favorite pastime, being named Major League Baseball’s official bat after 28 years of the Louisville Slugger. After selling bats to individual players for years, Victus’ breakout moment came with its Torpedo model that became a phenomenon when Yankees players began putting up impressive results with it. At the 2026 MLB All-Star Game, Victus also created custom bats for the Home Run Derby and All-Star Game, allowing players to put their personal touch on their biggest moments at the plate—aligning with a broader initiative throughout MLB to tell player stories.
Patrick Arthur
When the Washington Commanders brand needed rebuilding, the team turned to CMO Patrick Arthur and his guiding principle: The fan comes first. Fan feedback was key to learning what mattered and how to honor the franchise’s history ahead of the Commanders’ April uniform and logo relaunch, its biggest since the team was renamed in 2022 and generating 18.9 million social impressions. But he also focused on the basics, pushing for stadium improvements and reconnecting with legacy fans, as well as building community support through supporting over 110,000 youth in the tri-state area, including 177 girls flag football teams. Arthur turned marketing into a business engine by working closely with the Commanders’ revenue teams to turn game-day moments and social content into a full 2025 season of sold-out home games.
Ryan Jann
Athletes have their coaches for performance on the field, and Ryan Jann for performance off of it. As CBO of Wave Sports & Entertainment, Jann and his team of 35 spanning sales, partnerships, marketing, and revenue have transformed the company from a content studio into a full-fledged media business. With Jann’s video-first strategy, Wave combines talent-led programming such as New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce and House of Maher with Ilona Maher with cross-platform monetization strategies that take the shows beyond a content extension into durable franchises. Wave brought together Toyota and Kylie Kelce for a Super Bowl 60 campaign that created Don’t Call Me a WAG, exemplifying the agency’s shift toward integrated partnerships and a brand strategy that drives meaningful connections.
Erynn Hughes
The WNBA’s blockbuster 2025 season—the most watched ever on ESPN—owes much to Erynn Hughes’ work connecting basketball with the culture, fashion, and communities surrounding it. The league’s milestone 30th season campaign, “There’s More Where Thirty Came From,” featured players who helped build the sport but with an irreverent sensibility, memorably having Sheryl Swoopes star alongside literal goats in “Raising G.O.A.T.s.” Hughes also helped develop “Line ’Em Up,” bringing the WNBA’s three-point line to parks nationwide as an invitation to the next generation, and brought back retro nights where players wear the WNBA’s inaugural 1997 looks alongside in-arena moments, bringing the league’s many new fans up to speed in accessible ways.
Naomi Osaka
In the famously stodgy world of tennis style rules, Naomi Osaka has defied expectations with the backing of her brand partner Nike. Over the past year, her pre-match outfits crafted with Nike have grown into must-see tournament moments, from the crystal-encrusted red kit and bubble skirt she wore at the 2025 U.S. Open to the jellyfish-inspired dress at the 2026 Australian Open. Each ensemble embodies Osaka’s personality and heritage: At Roland Garros, she paired a sequined Nike dress with elaborate upcycled layers; Wimbledon brought a Japanese ceremonial dress that peeled away to reveal her Nike kit; and an elaborate tulle and patchwork hooded coat at the 2026 U.S. Open paid tribute to NBA icon (and fellow fashion trailblazer) Allen Iverson.
This story appeared in the Oct. 6, 2026 issue of ADWEEK magazine. Click here to subscribe.
This story appeared in the Oct. 6, 2026 issue of ADWEEK magazine. Click here to subscribe.
