Assistant Athletic Director Of Marketing & Fan Engagement Dan Heck Helps Auburn Fans Feel Connected To Campus

1Tell us about your role as Assistant Athletics Director of Marketing & Fan Engagement for the Auburn University Athletics Department. What does a typical day look like for you?

While cliché, I love that no two days are the same, especially in 2020. While it feels like this year has been 20 years crammed into 8 months, the opportunities to adapt, adjust, test, learn, fail and look at things from a different perspective has been an amazing opportunity to grow. That said, our answers to ‘a typical day’ look a lot differently now than they did in February, right?   

While I personally spend most of my time working on football and men’s basketball revenue generation campaigns and fan experience, I love working with our marketing staff and external teams to make sure that all of our teams and programs have what they need to be successful.

In the world of COVID-19, collaborating and planning campaigns together with our marketing/external teams and coaches is primarily happening through Zoom or other digital/virtual mediums, so a typical day will involve an average of 4-5 hours on Zoom or phone calls and texts to communicate – football game weeks for me, that will increase significantly.

With resources being more stretched than ever, collaborating and doing things together, no matter what that looks like has been the key to success.

Thankful to be at a place like Auburn where our staff has volunteered to work and assist on ‘other duties as assigned’ just to do what is necessary and best for our student-athletes and fans.

At Auburn, we have been working under a hybrid system where we have some staff in the office, some at home and some rotating multiple days.

This model as a new Dad (our beautiful son, Webb, is our ‘pandemic baby’ born on the weekend that sports shut down on 3/14/20) has been rewarding and challenging at the same time.

There is not a true work/life balance in college athletics, so working from home for much of the first 8 months of Webb’s life has been one unexpected blessing of 2020 that may never happen again in my career!

My amazing wife, Courtney, also works from home and has been the rock in allowing me to pursue my dreams of college athletics, no matter what where I am working from (home, office or game day), the last 8 months of working from home with a newborn would not have been possible without her!

2Let’s go back to the beginning of your sports industry career – why collegiate athletics and why marketing? Was there a moment you knew you had found your fit within collegiate athletics?

I am one of the few young professionals in America who are blessed to be working in the field that I studied in – a proud two-time alum of Central Michigan University (CMU)… “Fire Up Chips!” While I wish I could say that I entered the undergraduate sports management program with aspirations of being an AD someday like I do now, I really didn’t know that I was obsessed with college athletics administration until someone took a chance on me.

That someone is Mike Dabbs, who now works as the Director of Regional Development at CMU and a great friend/mentor. Like so many of us, all it takes is one person to take a chance on you, invest in you and mentor you.

Heading into my senior year of college (2008-09) all I knew was that I needed an internship to graduate. Little did I know that this ‘formality’ of completing an internship would transform my life and pave the way for where I am at now at Auburn University in the SEC. I am completely blessed and will never take for granted my ‘roots’ in the mid-major world at CMU.

I will never forget my first week as an intern in the CMU athletics marketing department – it was the first week of class and the home opener for CMU football. I just remember coming into the office on the Sunday of that game week for our intern orientation with an open mind and wanting to go way over the top. I officially “drank the Kool-Aid” served to me by the full-time/graduate student staff and being wound up being hooked.

I wanted to go all-in. I had no clue if I had any skills, but wanted to just work as many hours as possible and be as reliable as possible to get the job. I think that first week of the internship I ended up coming into the office each day that week. Being a game week, I could just feel the ‘buzz’ of being inside of an athletics department gearing up for a game day.

The “wow” moment came during pregame where I had the chance to be on-field to help with team entrance to the field and in-game promotions. It was at some point in the 1st quarter where the sun was setting on a perfect #MACtion Friday night heading into a Labor Day weekend where I looked around and felt the energy of the crowd, the pageantry and buzz of a new college football season and just said “Wow, this is really surreal that I am doing this.

I see my bosses making money doing this… if they can do this for a career and come to work every day at a football stadium or athletics facility then that’s what I want to do!” I was hooked.

3In your role, you oversee and direct the marketing and promotional plans for all 21 sports at Auburn University with an emphasis on football and men’s basketball. How do different sports vary in the marketing tactics used?

I love this about working college athletics. I think I would be bored working in professional sports or with a team that only focuses on one sport.

We are blessed to have a marketing staff and external teams who care greatly about the sports that they work with. We work in pod systems/external teams, so while our pillars of driving revenue, building the brand and creating amazing experiences for fans and athletes are our core, the way we accomplish those things may look different to each coach based off of priorities or even in-season vs off-season.

The main thing is listening within those external teams to keep our core diverse and flexible enough to fit the unique vision or personality of the program. The diversity and variety of our sports, coaches and their priorities are what makes this industry so unique!

4How do the marketing strategies for Auburn compare to other schools in the NCAA? What are some things you are considering now when creating campaigns that you might not have before? How does Auburn stand out?

I have had the honor of working in the MAC, Pac-12 and now SEC, so regardless of the level and resources, we are all at the end of the day looking to accomplish the same thing – (driving revenue, building the brand and creating amazing experiences for fans and athletes) so while our priorities are the same, our tactics may be a little bit different based off of our fanbase.

Some things that we consider now that we may not have before is how do we connect with our fans at home? So much of what we have done in the past is to pack our venues, to bring people to visit campus.

Especially at a place like Auburn, there is a ‘feeling’ you get when you come to campus or our venues, so now in 2020, how do we bring that experience to your home and how do we drive that FOMO that will make the Auburn Family want to return someday when things are safe? Part of that is what makes Auburn stand out.

Our 2020-21 branding campaign, ‘Believe in Auburn,’ says nothing about wins or losses or exciting plays on the field, it speaks to the emotion of Auburn as a whole. It’s a feeling, not just about buying a ticket.

Auburn stands out because of the feeling that our fans, student-athletes and alumni have – the people, tradition and generational culture makes it special. It’s not just about sports, it’s ‘that feeling’ you get when you pull off I-85 and into town that transcends sports.

It’s things like the “Auburn Creed,” Toomer’s Corner and “War Eagle” that resonates so much with our fans, regardless of the capacities of our venues. Tapping into that emotional appeal is critical now more than ever for our campaigns to make sure everyone feels connected to campus.