Podcast Alert: Ariel Kelman – Oracle

Transcript

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Ariel Kelman: [00:00:00] Being able to clearly explain to customers what your product does and why it’s different is the most important thing beyond the product. And a lot of companies just don’t get that. They go out of their way to make things too complicated. They forget that buying decisions are made by humans, who don’t like to be confused.

They like to understand things.

Jeff Nelson: Hello, welcome to the Navigating Sports Business Podcast. I’m your guest host today. Jeff Nelson, the president of Navigate we are a data-driven consulting firm, guiding major strategies and decisions in sports and entertainment. We started this podcast to share the experiences and the stories of some of the amazing people we get to work with.

They’re not the star athletes on the field, but they are the [00:01:00] most influential people off of it. Hopefully you learn a little something about them and a little something from them over the course of our conversation.

Today, I am happy to be joined by Ariel Kelman. The CMO at Oracle. I know this is a podcast and so people can’t see the awesome view behind him, but he’s in his office, in the bay area with, uh, a lake and, uh, a beautiful scene behind him. It is a pleasure to talk to you, Ariel how are doing?

Ariel Kelman: I’m doing great. I’m really happy to be here, Jeff.

Jeff Nelson: Yeah, me too. We’ve had the pleasure of working with Toby quite a bit on your team. And we’ll talk about that in a little bit and some of the deals, but certainly what you’ve done at Oracle has been impactful right off the bat. And so it’s going to be fun to dive in and ask you about [00:02:00] some of those questions and some of those deals, but also go back and get a little background on you and your, your history.

And also just learn a little bit more about you as a person. I do want to start with some of these deals that you’ve struck in the past year, because they’ve been true headline makers. Let’s start with Red Bull Racing since we’ve had an unbelievable F1 season and that’s been a really incredible deal. I think everybody loves the story of a deal, right. In our space. So was F1 something that when you started at Oracle, uh, about two years ago, Was that something that you were immediately targeting?

Ariel Kelman: I was thinking when I started that Formula 1 would be one of the places that we look it’s just such a data driven sport that makes it a great vehicle for storytelling around how our technology is used in an impactful way, you know, for these guys impactful to their business and impactful to their [00:03:00] results on track, you know, I love great storytelling opportunities for technology with sports, because I find that it, it helps better explain in a more sort of broadly understandable way.

The magic of technology of when customers say this has completely changed the way I work, you know, if you’re a, a food packaging equipment maker. Okay. That story, you know, will be great, understandable to people, in that industry. But maybe not as widely accessible where sports, everyone kind of understands and relates to it.

So what I’ve found is that if you can explain and show how these sports organizations or in a sports broadcast, how your technology is being used, it’s a very, you know, powerful, alternative to traditional advertising because you’re not just telling people, you’re showing them, you’re showing how your technology is being used.

Jeff Nelson: It makes total sense. And I’ll admit that I followed F1 from a far, but didn’t know a whole lot about it. And certainly didn’t quite grasp the level of [00:04:00] real time, data and analytics that are being used as, you know, lap by lap in a race until. Like so many Americans drive to survive came into my life. Was that something that you were watching early on? I think it debuted in 2018.

Ariel Kelman: Kind of funny. I started in my previous job. I did some work with Formula 1 and the league level and. We started working with them in 2018, right. As that show came out and I like many Americans didn’t really know too much about Formula 1. I mean, I knew what it was and sort of it was in the periphery, but it wasn’t something I followed and, you know, you couldn’t create a better guide to getting into a sport than what they did there.

And so that really helped me ramp up in like totally sucked me in. I went from. Not really caring about the sport, to be honest to you know, it being probably the number one sport that I follow right now, maybe the exception of the Warriors, but. Yeah. It was really, really smart that, I mean, you [00:05:00] think about one of the best sports media deals of all time outside of the mega broadcasting billion dollar deals, Netflix and Formula 1, agreeing to that type of deal that gave the production team, that level of.

It was one of the smartest things. There’s woman named Ellie that runs communications For Formula 1. And, you know, she was behind a lot of it. And I think it’s been the best marketing they’ve ever done.

Jeff Nelson: Right. Every league right now. How do we, how do we make the next drive to survive? It’s amazing. Well, like I said, we, we had the pleasure of working with, uh, Toby McAuliffe on your team on kind of sketching out.

Okay. F1. Yes. But who, right. Which team and the different value propositions of the different teams and the type of exposure.

Ariel Kelman: We looked at it. So we had a bunch of criteria, right? It’s like hiring someone, multidimensional optimization exercise. Ideally you want someone that’s a 10 on like 12 dimensions, but it’s a little bit of a different [00:06:00] levels for each person. So we wanted to, first of all, you got to have someone that’s towards the top of the grid. You know, you got to have a team that’s winning both, you know, from a brand perspective, but also just practically the top of the field is on TV substantially more than the rest, but really mostly about, you know, we want to be associated with winners and we want.

Our technology, help them win even more. So that was one criteria. Then another criteria would be that they are kind of modern and creative in their approach to marketing that w we want to have a team that we come to them with like a crazy idea that we think can get a lot of awareness. They’re like, cool.

That sounds like a great idea. Not, Ooh, I don’t know. That sounds like a lot of work and there’s a very broad spectrum of scores I’d rate all the teams on, on that category. And I’d say next would be an, I mean, this is like a absolute prerequisite is they have to be interested and aggressive in using technology and viewing their technology choices and technology [00:07:00] development work is strategic to them winning. Also modern in their approach while Oracle’s been around for 40 plus years, we’re only marketing our cloud products and we want a cloud forward partner for all of our partnerships. They really gotta be into doing everything in the cloud, which Red Bull obviously was. Yeah. I mean, you sort of combine all those things together and.

You know, you get narrowed down to a couple teams and, you know, red bull, we were just aligned on, on everything. I mean, Christian is built, uh, Christian Horner, the team principle built, uh, he’s just built an incredible culture there where they are very, very serious. They’re very into the details.

Dedicated, super professional. They don’t take themselves too seriously. They want to have fun, you know, fundamentally Red Bull understands marketing as a corporation, so they have been incredible to work with. And then on the technology side, I mean, they jumped right in and you know, some of the implementations that we’ve done with them, both on our cloud infrastructure and our [00:08:00] marketing tools.

I mean, there’s some of the fastest we’ve ever done simply because. They got really sharp people who want to move quickly. And we had our team and we just went and did stuff really fast. And that was, that was exciting.

Jeff Nelson: And how has that been received throughout Oracle? Up to Larry Ellison?

Ariel Kelman: Yeah. I mean, internally it’s been exciting, useful.

We’ve gotten a lot of good reception. Larry’s a big racing and car fan. And, you know, we talked about it at first and he thought this was a great vehicle for telling technology stories and was pretty involved in the selection process. And he’s happy with the results. Um, it’s been a great season, but I think internally, you know, one of the things I’ve learned in my career with these sports partnerships, when you do them, right, and you have a very good credible technology.

Story to tell, you know, here’s what they’re actually doing with these products. And, you know, here’s the impact. It has a much larger impact on I think sales people, especially than the typical story, because I find these sports stories when they’re done well, they [00:09:00] generate a lot of energy and confidence with sales teams when they’re going to explain to customers cause they get genuinely excited about it.

It’s they end up being disproportionately valuable. Customer stories and we believe like customer reference selling, you know, is everything in technology now because people are skeptical. Yeah. That’s

really interesting. I guess, related to that would be one of the other big deals from this past year, the premier league.

So we’d love to hear the Genesis for that. Well, knowing we looked at both clubs and leagues, so on, on the red bull side, right, you did a deal with a team here you went with a league. Well, here’s the interesting thing that is sort of a repercussion of the different ways, different sports work when it comes to partnerships.

So there’s 32 teams in the NFL and you know, let’s say even NFL teams decide to sell, you know, as the non-American football world would call front of kit. You know, if you get an NFL team to put your logo on right [00:10:00] on the top of their Jersey, not a little one, like the NBA, even it’s a big one. It’s going to be on TV.

There’s 32 teams, one 16th of the games. Whereas with Formula 1, every team plays each other every week. Just kind of a very like interesting dynamic. It also, I think creates a lot of the drama in the sport. You have these 10 teams of people in this relatively small paddock area, and it’s a traveling circus around the.

And so in general, I very much prefer league-wide deals where you can get something on in the global broadcast, because it’s just more scalable from a storytelling platform. And so, uh, the team deals look, it’s more intense in some areas like we did a partnership with the Seattle Sounders football club and it’s because they just had such a great machine learning and AI.

The story around how they were using Oracle cloud infrastructure. And, you know, Seattle’s a, it’s a big market for us, but [00:11:00] you know, the league ones are always interesting. And that’s why Formula 1, it’s sort of, there’s a little bit, um, you get a little bit of a league wide reach with the team sponsorship with that.

You don’t get with other sports

when you are crafting. The premier league deal and how you wanted that use case to come out, technology, advanced stats, things like that are more controversial, I would say, among your traditional football fan globally than maybe your F1 fan. I mean, there, you know, you talked about expected goals, things like

that.

It, uh, you’d be surprised if you, the amount of. Uh, amongst F1 fans on a really F1 insights graphics. If you look at some of these discussion board forums, a level of discussion and debate and emotion that I’ve not seen in American sports, and you get a little bit of that with, with premier league too. Um, but it’s [00:12:00] just going to grow as we start to.

Develop some new, you know, even more advanced analytics, but that’s good. You want to have people notice it having worked with embedded sponsored analytics graphics in the broadcast. I’ve done this with major league baseball, the NFL Formula 1, and now premier league. It’s, it’s a really hard thing to get, right.

Because. You can actually hurt your brand if you do it wrong, because you need to come up with something that the average fan that knows nothing about your product just thinks it’s good. And it adds to the broadcast, or even at worst neutral, like, okay, I didn’t really notice it, but you want your target market in our case, the technology executives, developers to say, oh, I understand.

The way you do that is it’s a machine learning problem and you know, that’s cool. They do. That must be a lot of data. They start to think about what they can do in their business. But if you put something on air, that’s just dumb, it’s a disaster because look, most marketing, you know, get, get rid of sponsorships, but I’m going to go do a [00:13:00] promotion advertising campaign to go sell a product.

And I go spend $5 million on Google ad words and online advertising. And the ad sucks. I basically didn’t make a profit. I lost some money, but it didn’t really do anything negative to the business besides losing the money. But if you do a bad integration, you can do worse than zero. You can hurt your brand.

We’ve seen some of this, you know, in other sports a little bit. So I’ve been really careful. Try and make sure that we’re doing sponsored graphics that tell a good technology story that add value to the average fan. And I think most importantly, that they’re easy to execute for the TV production teams.

And they’re easy to talk about for talent because you don’t get those last two parts. Right? Nothing really. It’s kind of like the tires on the sports car. If you know, the talent gets something doesn’t make sense to them, they can talk about it on it. Then it doesn’t matter. What’s on screen. You’re still not going to look good

Jeff Nelson: Do you have an [00:14:00] educational piece of it where you actually interact with the talent and try to walk them through it?

Ariel Kelman: Yeah, it’s a part of it. It’s been pretty lightweight for our Premier League, uh, partnership to date, but a lot of it depends on how new and different some of the graphics are. And the first set are fairly straightforward and, you know, we’ll probably end up doing more high touch, you know, as we move along in the.

And also as we get feedback from the broadcasters, you know, what’s working, what’s not

Jeff Nelson: Beyond all of the tech stories, both with Red Bull Racing in the premier league. Talk to me about the hospitality elements of it. I mean, the ability to host people in Monaco or at old Trafford, uh, how important were those considerations in these two deals?

Ariel Kelman: So my view on hospitality is, uh, in general, I, I prefer to do hospitality when. It is, there’s a technical story attached to it. When you can make [00:15:00] it about executive events that you hold, where the customers get to come and learn a little bit about your technology. Ideally from the sports organization is sponsoring and, and also interact with other executives and to have the hospitality be a portion of the event versus just handing out tickets to salespeople.

And it’s not, there’s anything wrong with the building relationships aspect of handing out tickets to salespeople, but it’s better. If you can also attach good storytelling to it. And so we actually did our first significant executive event in, you know, since before COVID in October in Austin at the U.S. Grand Prix in austin, uh, with Red Bull and it was just great to get back to these in-person events, where we had a bunch of CTO, CIO, CMOs, and they got to learn how red bull racing was using our cloud infrastructure, our marketing tools, you know, we’re not putting them through like a, a huge amount of [00:16:00] content, but you know, a good. You know, overview, and this is, and they loved that.

That was the best portion of the event. And then they can go talk to each other and talk to our salespeople and found it to be very complimentary. So I love doing programs like that. Um, I’ve just found that they end up the customers love them. They’re efficient use of the assets and, uh, they end up being useful for furthering, you know, creating new sales opportunities.

Jeff Nelson: You are working on or executing some of the quite frankly, most prestigious deals with the coolest properties in the world on behalf of one of the biggest brands in the world. And I want to use that as kind of a segue to rewind and learn a little bit more about you. Is this something you dreamt of as a kid?

What was the dream job when you were a kid?.

Ariel Kelman: Well, I mean, when I grew up, my, my father was used to say, you can do whatever you want after you graduate from medical school. And when I was a kid and I always had the back of my head, I’m [00:17:00] like, I don’t want to be a doctor. Um, so luckily he, wasn’t obviously serious about that.

I never really thought I was going to go into marketing. I, when I graduated, I’m going to college at Berkeley. I majored in economics. I took half the computer science major decided that that wasn’t really, for me, uh, it was educational, but I was going to be a very mediocre computer programmer. Um, so I didn’t further that like a lot of people graduate in college, you look for a job what’s out there and I’m doing management consulting and working for a software company doing consulting work.

And then, you know, ended up doing a startup with a couple of friends. And it was, it was during that startup. I mean, at first I was working on product management, designing what the product did. The startup was, we were trying to solve one of the sales and marketing disconnects around messaging. So how do you get your messages out to salespeople?

So they use them in their materials. Um, it was this very sort of interesting new way to have marketing people put [00:18:00] content together and automatically build proposals and PowerPoints for salespeople. But anyways, through that process, I kind of got exposed more to marketing. And then at some point in the phase of the startup, I sort of switched over to running marketing, and then I’ve been doing marketing ever since, but I never, you know, I didn’t plan on it. If you ask me in college what’s marketing, I probably would say, I don’t know, advertising

Jeff Nelson: Yet another story for any young folks listening that there is no one path right. To these jobs that somebody inspired to.aspire to

It’s funny,

Ariel Kelman: there is no one path. And part of me wants to tell people like in college or high school, like, you know, don’t over script, what you want to do.

But then the other side of me says the most practical advice is, you know, your first job should be a place to learn. You go find someone to work for that you can learn from almost as a apprenticeship kind of approach. I honestly like even don’t go to college, go find that company go work for. And learn that I don’t look at what college people into, on the resumes, but [00:19:00] yeah.

Okay, sure. Go to college. But afterwards where you’re working and who you’re working for, and what you learn is, is just the most important thing. And so in that case, you kind of need to know what you want to do, but it’s okay. If you don’t people think.

Jeff Nelson: Well in the way that you came into marketing, did you end up finding that person or is there anybody who you think of as having really mentored or influenced the type of marketing approach or philosophy that you developed?

Ariel Kelman: I don’t know, like, so it started with, um, when I was at this startup and we were spending a lot of time on like, how do you make compelling pitches for salespeople to give to customers? How do you make their presentations? Their proposals better? A lot of it was, I was a sales engineer, like a sales consultant.

It was a company called micro strategy and we were, uh, analytics tools. Query tools. And so as sales consultants, we were spending a lot of time like building demos for sales pitches, and just basically [00:20:00] talking to salespeople about, Hey, well, this is a banking customer and we’re competing against this company.

What should we emphasize? And so I didn’t know that was sort of marketing, but at the time we did the startup afterwards, I started to learn like, oh, well this is product marketing. It’s coming up with the messaging and positioning. To convince customers, why they should look at your products, why they’re better than your competitors. And I sort of evolved into a product marketing mindset kind of person, which I think I did on my own, but my knowledge of product marketing, I think, was really taken to the next level by when I worked at Salesforce and I got to spend a lot of time with Mark Benioff, who really is a product marketing person by nature.

It’s in my time, there was a lot of how we thought, what would I just find? So fascinating now is when I finally met with Larry at Oracle, I could see how a lot of that was sort of a shared mentality because I think as you know, Mark worked for Larry for a long period of time and he [00:21:00] considers Larry his mentor.

Both of them have that very similar mentality of being a, this sounds so simple, but being able to clearly explain to customers. What your product does and why it’s different is like the most important thing beyond the product. And a lot of companies just don’t get that. They just don’t get it. They go out of their way to make things too complicated.

They forget that buying decisions are made by humans who don’t like to be confused, but they like to understand things.

Jeff Nelson: Well, you mentioned earlier how sports can be such a great platform and use case and tangible example to show. This is what we do. This is how it works. This is the benefits you can derive.

When was the first time in that career progression, maybe at Salesforce or was it later at Amazon? When did you first realize or work on an example of this? Where sports came into play?

Ariel Kelman: So the first time I got involved in sports marketing [00:22:00] was when I was at Amazon. One of our business development people came to me with, Hey, major league baseball is interested in finding out are we interested in doing some, you know, sponsorships?

And I remember looking through a list of different things we could sponsor. And a lot of them were like, put your logo on this. Or as I would call brought to you by or sponsored. What I wanted was something that was like powered by what can show, what would you use our technology? And you could legitimately say it was powered by this.

And so then I saw Statcast and I had never heard of it before. I was like, oh, they’re doing, um, player and ball tracking, which generates massive amounts of day. And then they’re going to come up with advanced analytics and this is a sport that’s super into analytics. It just seemed like a good way to be able to explain the power of products we had for machine learning analytics.

And that sort of started my journey in that area. I [00:23:00] was lucky to the major league baseball Statcast team. I mean, MLB has a very long history of caring about data and stats and analytics. So it was sort of the best place to start. I mean, they look, they have led all the sports leagues in advanced analytics and really apply having sizable data science teams of people on each of those teams.

Now, good luck getting any MLB team to tell me, tell you how many people they have or what tools they’re doing or anything, or even giving you their names. They’re like little special forces teams that are hidden away. And so, yeah, we spent a lot of time thinking about what are good analytics for the sport.

You know, this is not even technology stuff. It’s like, what are new ways? We should look at the data, trying to figure out how to put them in a broadcast, how to get the different broadcast partners to agree to them operationally, like some ideas were good, but the latency of how long you could show. You know, if it took five minutes, you’ve missed the window to show a replace.

You can’t even do it. And then down to [00:24:00] negotiating with John Smoltz on whether he thought it’s a good idea before he’s gonna talk about it in the broadcast, because he wants to, you know, he has high integrity and he’s going to use things if they help the storytelling. So it was lots and lots of stuff there.

And once we thought that was a useful partnership, we started to look at other things in other sports.

Jeff Nelson: Did the NFL approach you, or did you approach the NFL?

Ariel Kelman: I don’t remember. They had, they had their next gen stats project for a while. It needed a sponsor to really get off the ground. And so we spent a lot of time working with them and, and it was great.

That ended up being pretty useful as well and led to a larger business relationship between the two companies.

Jeff Nelson: I mean, you were at Amazon in a period of mindblowing growth for Amazon as a behemoth for Amazon web services. What’s it like to be in that sort of marketing function? When everything around you is scaling up massively and obviously [00:25:00] led by a visionary and by all accounts, pretty hard driving founder.

I just can’t imagine what it was like. Uh, what do we call that decade? The tens, I don’t know what to

call it. But to be at Amazon through basically the whole decade

Ariel Kelman: look, it was a lot of fun because I came there when AWS was a pretty substantial business with a lot of revenue, but in some ways it was still a, a startup.

What, what attracts me in marketing jobs is when there is fantastic technology, but the world doesn’t sufficiently perceive. And that, you know, when I started Amazon 2011, the idea of using them for enterprise I.T.Infrastructure was like, what? I mean, I heard startups use. And then also they hadn’t really built up a marketing organization.

So, you know, I got to go try and figure out as this company was growing well, what type of things should we do? And what should we [00:26:00] not do? And what do we take from all these other companies and what do we create? That’s new. So really got to build a lot of that up from scratch. And, you know, it’s also what attracted me about coming to Oracle that, you know, while our company has been around for a while, we’ve only had cloud applications and cloud infrastructure platforms for, you know, and only the recent past and that the technology I found to be far ahead, The perception and awareness and, you know, that’s a great marketing problem.

And also, you know, we’re a company. Had previously had very decentralized marketing and sort of had it all over the company in lots of places. And they hadn’t had anyone build up a central marketing organization with kind of a cohesive strategy. So it’s that, that building up that was seemed to pick a very similar opportunity and just found it to be very exciting.

And also with talking to Larry and seeing how aligned we were on, on marketing. Storytelling and messaging and all these other aspects. It just seemed like a great, great opportunity for me.

Jeff Nelson: Start [00:27:00] there in January of 2020, and you basically have two months before the world

Ariel Kelman: stops.

Yeahh, it was like mid January.

I remember came to the office for a couple of weeks. We had an event out in London. Funny. I don’t know why that sticks in my head. My father, as I said before, our father’s a doctor, you know that in the February time period, it’s like, oh, COVID could be a thing. Could not be a thing he’s saying don’t touch any surfaces.

So I’m sending. Pictures to my family, you know, text chat with me, touching every railing of escalators did not get COVID. I have not gotten COVID. So come back from that in the office for, I don’t know, two weeks, and then everything shuts down and I’ve barely met the team. And you know, that that was the.

Jeff Nelson: Did you think you would be able to, I guess, make progress in, in that initial vision that had excited you, the pro you know, you talked about the marketing problem. Was there a point where you thought my hands are tied here or did you think you could still make progress [00:28:00] even as everybody’s at home?

Ariel Kelman: And that’s why I felt good about being able to make progress.

Um, despite the constraints of working from. Is that I’d spent eight years working for a Seattle headquartered company living in the bay area. And I was up there a lot, but there’s certain groups of individuals who’ve dealt with this for a long time. So I was that person on the screen in the conference room.

There’s like two people remote. So I was doing that all the time and I was pretty effective at being able to get stuff done. So I kind of just did what I was doing before in terms of. Meeting with people. One-on-one small groups trying to build relationships, trying to get aligned on the things we want to change and priorities.

The one thing that was the most difficult, you know, with remote work and not traveling is getting to know your broader teams. If you get hired into a, a team, you’re going to manage a team of a thousand people that are distributed around the world. If in the like travel, go to the office world, [00:29:00] you can get to know at least half, maybe 70% of the.

Let’s get a little bit of an impression. In six months you go visit different places. You have lunches, happy hours, dinners with a bunch of people you can sit in on, you know, meet with them and see how they interact with each other. You know, start to figure out who were the people that are maybe under utilized and you want to put them bigger positions where the people that aren’t a good fit.

So that kind of building of the team thing is harder. And you’re much more reliant on the people that work for you. And I just don’t think we’ve figured out the technology to have broader casual interactions,

Jeff Nelson: The water cooler and the virtual world and in effect. Yeah. Yeah. Big or small. I think everybody is struggling with that.

When you looked at the sports and entertainment landscape, basically being shut down. Was that an opportunity for Oracle? Because in a lot of ways, organizations like F1 teams or like their Premier League or its clubs [00:30:00] needed revenue needed, new partners needed new technologies. To cope with some of the challenge.

Ariel Kelman: Yeah. I mean, I think in some ways, as someone who wants to do who has a preference for creating like credible exciting technology stories and distributing them more scalably and not just hospitality and it’s a kind of clarified the conversations and look when you don’t have anyone in the stands, but you have a technology story and in the broadcast, or I’d say adjacent to the broadcast, like with Red Bull.

You know, we can tell the story in our website, people are technology. People can understand, you don’t need the people in the stands. You don’t need the people at the games when it gets better, when they are. But, you know, it also gave us an opportunity to kind of look at some of our partners and a lot of people were restructuring deals.

And so we were looking with some of our partners to say, okay, well, instead of us taking a credit or this signage, maybe there’s a new technology project. So we did have a lot of those conversations. And the way we approached it with [00:31:00] our partners is like we have long-term contracts. We treat them as partners.

They’re part of the family. And we wanted to be very flexible at helping them through a very difficult time.

Jeff Nelson: Do you think we will ever see Oracle’s name on a building again, or, or logo on one of these Jersey patches. You know, there are more and more with presumably MLB down the, down the pike. Do you think that is still a possibility or is everybody listening right now from a team who’s thinking about Jersey patch or naming rights prospecting, should they not think about Oracle?

Ariel Kelman: I mean, look personally, I don’t find arena names or arena naming rights or front of kit, you know, big Jersey things as being that useful. Look in general what, and I’ve talked to a bunch of these organizations and I think those types of opportunities are way more valuable for consumers. ’cause you think about if you’re a consumer [00:32:00] brand, a much higher percentage of the impressions, if you just think about this pure advertising.

So crypto.com buys the Staples Center versus Oracle on the naming rights and with crypto.com, they’re trying to get individuals to open crypto trading accounts and something I don’t know enough about. Maybe that’s good. Maybe that’s bad unclear. So very high percentage of the people that are seeing that are potential customers.

Whereas with us, it’s less, you know, because we sell to business. We market also to developers, but their developers in those businesses. So I think there are people selling those naming rights and front of kit deals are probably going to find a, a much larger number of consumer products, companies that are interested in paying the kind of money that they’re, they’re looking.

Jeff Nelson: Okay, take that a step further. And in the interest really of saving, hopefully you time and other people time, I think you’ve touched on, uh, you know, a few of your priorities and what you find useful and what you [00:33:00] don’t in the course of this conversation. But if you were trying to give somebody on the team side, kind of the answers to the test, so to speak, when should they call you?

Ariel Kelman: And when, I mean, look, I’m interested. And looking at new opportunities all the time, but they need to have a real and meaty technology story underneath them that involves use of our cloud infrastructure or cloud applications. And it’s more interesting, the more scale. In terms of how broad of an audience we can tell with the least amount of activation effort.

That’s why putting embedded analytics in the broadcast, especially in a global broadcast, it gets you the broadest reach with the least amount of incremental activation.

Jeff Nelson: So if the head of partnerships, so the team is thinking about Oracle, they better come to that conversation with their CTO and with ideas.

Here’s the

Ariel Kelman: list of technology projects that we think are really innovative that we’d like to partner with.

You see, see, [00:34:00] that’s the kind of, the key thing is partnership and sponsorship is two different words. Like I only want to do sponsorships when there is a partnership. You know, I, I tell a, I’ve told all these organizations I’ve done deals with that. I only want you to do a sponsorship deal with us. If your technology team would use our technology, if there was no sponsorship opportunity, cause it’s gotta be credible, otherwise it doesn’t turn into a good story.

So it’s like, you know, I tell the person on that team, Hey, come to me with a list of technology projects that you guys think are strategic that you think, you know, likely we could help you with. Where there are, are sponsorship opportunities for us to tell that.

With everything you’ve said the priorities for 2022.

So you did the premier league deal. You did the red bull deal. You did a big warriors deal in 2021 going into 2022. Do you have any, whether it’s a market, whether it’s a type of sport, is there anything that [00:35:00] stands out? For you as, as a goal or a

priority. I mean, I think the, the biggest priority that I’ve given this sports marketing team here is to really focus on our existing partners and making sure they’re successful with our technology.

They all have different technology projects that are in different stages and, you know, making them wildly successful. It’s a lot of work and that’s the primary focus. And I think we’re going to be opportunistic. You know, new deals.

Jeff Nelson: I’m not sure where I even want to take this question. So I’m just going to say the word to start and then, and then you can take it in any direction I think you want, but I’m curious what this word evokes for you.

When you think about Oracle, when you think about sports and entertainment, tech, everything metaverse.

Ariel Kelman: Yeah. Yeah. So this started being used a lot recently, right. With its name. Um, and the thing I keep thinking back to is like ready, ready player one. Like these people having this, like I think that’s what they’re talking about.

[00:36:00] People have this big, you know, virtual life that is different. If this is a big thing, if ends up being successful longterm or becoming broadly pervasive. It’s a software application that needs databases that needs cloud infrastructure to run fast, you know, just like online gambling, uh, crypto trading, ATM machines, or buying tickets for an airplane.

And so in some ways it’s another technology workload that people will need to run in the cloud. Who knows? I wouldn’t say never, but I think it’s unlikely. We’re going to end up selling people virtual reality. T-shirts and.

Jeff Nelson: Before we get to some odds and ends to wrap up here. I also wanted to ask about Larry and his influence on your decision-making and the cadence you have and working with him.

I mean, obviously a very outsized kind of legendary figure, right. And Silicon valley and the business world, but one that Joe average or somebody [00:37:00] like me doesn’t have a ton of insight into. So would love for you to share with us,

Ariel Kelman: but it’s like to work with him. I mean, Larry’s, I mean, he’s very passionate about sports.

He’s very passionate about technology and marketing. I’d say most of the time I spend with him are usually in our engineering meetings. He spends the vast majority of his time with our engineering teams, working with them on their future products. But you know, when we work on marketing, we’re pretty aligned.

It’s sort of why I came here that, that he’s a guy that is product marketing. Technical product marketing. He has that in his DNA. He believes in the primacy of clarity and storytelling and compelling differentiation. It’s been great to be able to have him both as a generator of ideas, a refiner of some of the ideas that we have and, you know, a partner on trying to figure out how we can best market our company.

Jeff Nelson: I believe he’s famous for bringing Oracle into sailing. Right. Did you know anything about sailing previous to joining [00:38:00] Oracle?

Ariel Kelman: I did not know a lot about sailing previously to joining here and we haven’t talked about Sail GP, but it is a very interesting organization. I have got to spend a good chunk of time with them. I’m looking forward to going to their, their race in San Francisco in March for the first time. But it’s just a really interesting story around a new sport. So Larry created a new sailing racing league. A lot of what they were trying to do is around how do we deal with some of the problems with America’s cup, with the massive amount of calls.

The constant fighting over roles. And so this is a sports league that has a, it’s a spec boat that the league creates for all the, all the teams. And this kind of gets into auto racing too. Right. You have Formula 2, Formula 3. Everyone has the same car Formula 1. Everyone has a completely custom car. Then you get Indy Car that’s kind of a little more towards the spec car. Somewhat in between is they get [00:39:00] some choices on arrow and engines. I believe so, let’s manufacture one sailboat for all the teams so we can control costs and then let’s come up. Let’s recruit the best sailors. Some of the people that have been around for a while, like Ben Ainslie and, you know, a lot of new people put a woman on every team and Russell Coutts, you know, has been running the operation and it’s exciting. And I think the TV product they’ve created, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s one of the most compelling live sports viewing experiences I’ve seen because they’ve done a tremendous job of overlaying data and analytics with a, with a, you know, augmented reality approach.

Directly in the broadcast with very little latency and then they’re producing this broadcast with people all around the world. And so it’s helped me get more knowledgeable about sailing. It’s an up and coming sport. Uh, I think as more and more people see it on TV, it is going to keep getting more and more popular.

And I think with our partnership with Endeavor, um, I, if you’ve [00:40:00] seen recently, they’ve added a new teams, they’ve added a lot of new sponsors. They’re they’re really doing.

Jeff Nelson: And then where can we watch?

Ariel Kelman: Um, if you go to SailGP.com, it’ll tell you also just search Sail GP on YouTube. They put replays of all of the races there.

That’s probably the easiest way to go.

Jeff Nelson: All right.

Well, I appreciate all the time. Yeah, of course you’ve given me, but I want to end on a few rapid fire questions, uh, odds and ends some hopefully more fun things. Who’s the one person you would be tongue tied

to meet?

Uh, probably

Ariel Kelman: Obama, very interested in meeting him.

I, no idea what I would talk about.

Jeff Nelson: What is the one sporting event still at the top of your bucket list?

Ariel Kelman: I mean, I got to say the Monaco grand Prix. I mean, it is the most historic car race in the world in just an absolutely crazy place to do a, a car race. Hopefully I can get to go. Uh, next year. That’d be fantastic.

Jeff Nelson: How many people, since you signed that deal have asked you about Monaco and going to Monaco?

A few people

Ariel Kelman: have asked, look, having COVID [00:41:00] making it harder for people to travel. Definitely has reduced the amount of people asking me for tickets. That that’s one of the good things

Jeff Nelson: Asking for a friend here, but how, how would one go about asking you for a ticket to Monaco

no, I’m kidding. All right. I have one meal to eat in the bay area. Where should I go?

Ariel Kelman: I would go to Saison on Brandon street in San Francisco. It is, I think really an amazing restaurant. If you want the multi-course fine dining thing in a very casual atmosphere with local ingredients. I think it’s one of the best meals I’ve ever had.

Jeff Nelson: Yeah. Sounds like a good recommendation. What comedian or TV show makes you laugh? The hardest?

Ariel Kelman: Well, I’m going to say a show that it’s debatable, whether it’s a, a comedy or a drama is I’ve been watching a lot of Succession recently and, uh, you know, for a very serious show that has very uncomfortable things to watch.

And a lot of personal tragedy. It is crazy funny. I mean, the comedy [00:42:00] they have in there is just brilliant.

Jeff Nelson: If you haven’t read it yet, there’s a Jeremy Strong profile in there. New Yorker that I just read.

I read about half

Ariel Kelman: of it. It was a very long, I think it was a short book, but

Jeff Nelson: It is, it’s a long one. Yeah. If you could be a F1 driver or a star Premier League player.

So let’s take the two deals you did this past year. Uh, which would you be in?

Ariel Kelman: Yeah. You know, I think I, I would be less likely to kill myself playing premier league, although I need to get my cardio back in shape. Right. So that would probably be a better choice.

Jeff Nelson: Uh, the life of a famous football or it looks pretty glamorous and yes, I think that’s one driving.

Have you done any?

Ariel Kelman: With the simulators and video games. I haven’t. Um, I’ve ridden in a car on a track. I haven’t done it yet. I would like to go at some point, but someday.

Jeff Nelson: Yeah, it looks interesting, but also terrifying. And I’m pretty sure if I didn’t die doing [00:43:00] it, my mother would kill me even to this day.

Well, let’s end on one piece of advice for a student or someone just starting out in marketing and our sports marketing that you would give.

Ariel Kelman: Yeah. I mean, if you’re just starting out, I think as I sort of talked about a little bit before, find a mentor, you can learn from that early in your career. The most important thing is that you’re going to learn and if you’re not learning and you feel like you’re doing kind of dumb stuff, which can happen sometimes.

Go change jobs. Choose your boss, because especially now marketing tech marketing, there’s a lot of, a lot of opportunities. So if you’re not learning and growing, do something else, don’t stick around. I mean, the most valuable thing you have is your time,

Jeff Nelson: Great advice. Well, thank you for your time Arielle. We really appreciate it.

And obviously, like I said, have appreciated working with members of your team in the past year, year and a half exciting stuff that you’ve been doing thus far at Oracle. Can’t wait to see what’s next. So, thank you again. [00:44:00]

Ariel Kelman: Great. Thanks a lot. I had a good time here

Jeff Nelson: For the listener. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to us.

My email is jeff@nvgt.com. And you can also connect with me on my personal LinkedIn page or Navigate’s website, we look forward to having you join us again. Next time on navigating sports business, please stay well.