Innovating The Miami Hurricanes Brand With Assistant AD Of Digital Strategy, Tim Brogdon

1Tell us about your role as Assistant Athletics Director of Digital Strategy for the University of Miami Athletics. What does a typical day look like for you?

Usually, my day winds through meetings with coworkers to discuss daily, weekly and upcoming content plans and posting strategy concerning our football channels.

After those discussions occur, I’ll check in with our digital and communication teams to ensure we’re working through items we’ll need to address, whether that’s special events or other stories we need to promote or distribute.

After we’ve discussed the distribution and publishing of items, we’ll discuss analytics throughout our digital ecosystem to see how we’re doing and make decisions on what we need to do differently.

Then, working with our video and graphics teams, I’ll make sure I’m publishing our football content for the day or scheduling it for distribution based on when it’ll do the best it can.

Obviously, as things have changed for everyone across the spectrum, we’re meeting all virtually however sometimes capturing content in person, safely when there is football practice or travel for football games.

2The University of Miami is a HUGE brand within collegiate athletics. With that being said, what are the fundamental components you and your team harness in order to give the University of Miami a competitive edge? Why is such brand identity so important?

For us, it’s got to be the harnessing, understanding and implementation of authenticity when it comes to the Miami brand. We’re fortunate enough to have a lot of things that our fan base resonates with all the time.

Things like fantastic weather, beautiful scenery, a budding art culture, incredible diversity and swagger – all things we’ve highlighted in campaigns and more – always strike a chord.

We know, also, that our fans are hungry for innovation mixed with culture, whether that’s music, art or otherwise, we’re trying to hold to those pieces of authenticity.

I think something that is also very clear, especially when you’re running brand accounts that have a larger fanbase, is when your fans like it or don’t like it.

The one interesting thing about social, the feedback loop is immediate and sometimes harsh, so – although that’s not the end all be all, it’s definitely something that can help assess whether your post was on brand.

3The University of Miami may attract hundreds of thousands of fans however, digital strategy is still extremely important for both fan engagement and retention. In today’s digital sporting world, how do you capture the attention of an audience that has so many options and avenues to choose from?

This is a great question and probably should be asked more, especially here at Miami. We have a lot to compete with.

Those same things we take and make a part of our authentic storytelling are the same things we compete within a regular year. Compound all the festivities, weather, culture with the other pro sports teams in the region, including a brand new one in Inter Miami and you have a lot of competition.

We know we can’t combat all of that, but we can diversify and multiply to be in as many places as we can in the digital space.

We’ve put a heavy emphasis on a mobile app that is continuing to see new functionality and new ways to deliver content. We have an AppleTV app that is directly connected to all of our videos. We continue incredible upkeep of our YouTube account, which is seeing a reassurance as people watch YouTube on their connected TVs.

We continue to deliver compelling content on our website for all sports, pushing it via mobile app notifications, email and social to ensure we’re covering out basis. It takes a lot of people who are focusing on digital to make sure all of this is getting the attention it deserves.

4Often, people think content creation is an in the moment, reactive process. Being in a role like digital strategy, explain how you plan and strategize the content and coverage of the Miami Hurricanes.

Well, like many, we tend to get a little caught up in the day-to-day as we go from event to event and ensure we’re on top of it if we see a big win or a magical moment.

One thing that has come out of the continuing pandemic is the realization that digital is so important, therefore the more people involved, hopefully, the more you can plan.

We try to utilize the tools at our disposal to help plan and strategize as much as we can – Wrike for project management, Teams for document sharing, communication and content calendars and Zoom for meetings.

While this has been a major shift in how we’ve done things in the past, it’s forced our entire communications and digital team to plan more and more while all folks have eyeballs on it.

So, we know when we go into our meetings who’s working on what and what we can do to enhance those pieces of content. We’re also looking at more long-term projects, so we’re forced to think about things in that sense than before.