They Were the First To Welcome Fans Back To The Stands! 

On this episode of Fired Up, Drew Bedard, Vice President of Marketing for Bristol Motor Speedway and Kentucky Speedway provides great insights on how collaboration and agility across multiple disciplines and properties are making a difference. And how important it has been in the successful reintroduction of fans present at a live event. You may recall that Bristol Motor Speedway hosted the NASCAR All-Star Race on July 15 with nearly 30,000 fans in the stands – and they executed with precision.

‍You’ll love this episode of Fired Up! After all, “IT’S BRISTOL BABY!”

Chris Wise:

Welcome to Fired Up. It’s really good to be back with you all again and today it’s really exciting to have with us. Drew Bedard. We’ve been working with Drew for about a decade and Drew’s Vice President of Marketing at Bristol Motor Speedway and Dragway and Kentucky Speedway. And Drew, great to have you here. Thanks.

Drew Bedard:

Thanks Chris. I am excited to be here. I’m fired up if I may say.

Chris Wise:

That’s a good move. Thanks. Just to start off, just tell us about yourself, your background, your position, responsibilities, how you found your way to Northeast Tennessee and what your day-to-day looks like now compared to five months ago.

Drew Bedard:

Okay. I’ll give you the quick history part. Grew up in Massachusetts. My dad’s a civil engineer by trade. He got moved around a lot, Florida then Massachusetts. But my extended family’s in Massachusetts as well. That’s where I was born, but we moved back up there. And then when I was 18, I came down to North Carolina. I went to Elon University for four years. I say four years, because one brother went five years and the other went six years. And my dad likes to say that I went four years. So he’s very … I’m just kidding. They had reasons for that sports and other things.

Drew Bedard:

So after Elon, I moved to Charlotte, did a year in sales and then was able, very fortunate to hook on with Newell Rubbermaid at the time and be a field marketing representative. Of course, Newell Rubbermaid was very heavy into NASCAR at that time with sponsorship of Kurt Busch and the 97 cars, sponsorship of the Sharpie 500. Of course, then Irwin Tools became very heavily involved in NASCAR. So I worked for Newell Rubbermaid, both in a field position and a mobile marketing position for Sharpie for two and a half years.

Drew Bedard:

And then I was fortunate then to kind of stairstep to a small sports marketing agency in Charlotte called HB&M Sports and I worked there for six years. I kind of transitioned into that role as coming off of working directly for Sharpie to working on Sharpie’s business, because that was the agency of record for the hospitality and activation for the Sharpie 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Drew Bedard:

So you can see how all these dots connect, but six years into that role, they had an opportunity available at Bristol. It had always been a dream especially because my wife is from East Tennessee, she’s from Knoxville. And we said if we could lay in there, that’d be great. Because we’re very close with my in-laws. We’re very close to my parents in North Carolina as well, but we see my in-laws quite often. So we said that’d be a great situation.

Drew Bedard:

I was able to hook on with Bristol in a role in sales for a year. And they could tell that I wasn’t a very good salesman and that I was infinitely passionate about marketing because I kept bugging the marketing department day in and day out of ideas and all this other stuff. So after about a year, Logan McCabe who’s now kind of semi-retired, but you know Logan very well, Jerry Caldwell, who is the general manager at Bristol, they asked me if I wanted to move over to the marketing department take on kind of a brand role. And that’s how I got into the role that I’m in today.

Drew Bedard:

And again, I’ve worked with you on the research front for the better part of a decade. Wow, I feel like I’m getting old. So yeah, I’ve been at Bristol for 10 years. Just recently this past year had the added responsibility of marketing over Kentucky Speedway, which really just sort of a realignment in March after COVID hit and was able to pick up that and additional responsibility.

Drew Bedard:

But that has been so much fun. I’ve really enjoyed that so far. So my day-to-day looks a lot like what it did in 2019, as far as Bristol was concerned. Now I’ve just added Kentucky and I think one more element to the whole thing is that now I report directly to Jeff Alrich, who is essentially our chief marketing officer, he is the Senior Vice president of Consumer Marketing in Charlotte at Speedway Motorsports obviously our corporation and I report directly to him now. And I am one of a few marketing leads across the company.

Drew Bedard:

And really we’re in this sort of collaborative environment now where we work on each other’s businesses and we help each other on each race, on each event, kind of just as far as creative strategy, copy, could be anything marketing, anything communications wise, we’re all kind of in it together now. And we were before, but I would say this has definitely taken a shift in 2020, and that’s where I am today. So I’m recording from downtown Johnson City at a friend’s business down here, but normally I’m either at my house with obviously the ability to be a remote worker or I’m at Bristol Motor Speedway that’s my home base.

Chris Wise:

So pandemic aside, you have seen obviously a few changes this year. Thinking about the realities of life and business and for all sports organizations, all sports organizations have been explorers in this journey through this uncharted time in this uncharted territory. It’s appeared that NASCAR more than any other sport has appeared to make some really bold and appropriate moves, which seem to be serving the sport very, very well.

Chris Wise:

Tell us about those moves and the impact both short-term and long-term for the sport in general and for the two properties that you focus on.

Drew Bedard:

Well, I think first, when you look at the moves that NASCAR was making right off the bat like right as the shutdown occurred for most professional sports, I think NASCAR right out of the gate wanted to be back to work as quickly as possible. So when you look at kind of what they did to ramp that up, now another luxury would say was that it’s a fully outdoor event. But of course they were faced with the idea of, do we have fans or do we not have fans for safety purposes? But the call was made early on and I completely admire, and I’m not just blowing smoke here.

Drew Bedard:

I think Steve Phelps is a fantastic leader. I think he came from a great pedigree at the NFL and I think Steve’s just a really smart in touch guy and he knew that we could probably get back to work or the NASCAR industry could get back to work safely quickly. And I think that you saw that deployed very quickly as far as the getting back to racing. Of course, without fans, which is not the way that we want it. Because as you could tell from the first few races out of the gate, it was great to be able to watch a product on TV, live sports on TV, but it was very difficult from an atmosphere standpoint probably more for the tracks and then maybe for the winning driver in particular, that there were no fans to feed off of.

Drew Bedard:

But it was very smart because also economically if you look at how NASCAR pays everybody or how the ecosystem works, we, the industry as a whole needed to get back to work because everybody benefits from the TV contracts and other things like that. So the tracks, the drivers, the teams. And then obviously from a sponsorship perspective, the longer those cars and the longer the cars are off the track and the longer the banners and the track signage and things like that are not being shown, there’s more sponsors that are calling and saying, “I’m not getting my value.”

Drew Bedard:

And I think that that was another huge consideration to say, “We have to get back on the track to give our partners their value, to give our fans a product to watch.” And because we’re an outdoor and we have a small grouping of, it’s almost like how the NBA is doing in Orlando. Think about that in a NASCAR garage every weekend. It’s very similar people who are going and operating an event. So they’re kind of in a bubble in the infield. And I think NASCAR was innovators in that way to say, “We can do this.” We can even enter into different markets around the country, but keep our industry very bubbled.

Drew Bedard:

And so, I think it’s been great. And it was strange on May 31st and June 1st at Bristol to not have fans, but it was great to operate the races. Obviously, we had some exciting racing with a Chase Elliott and Joey Logano kind of wrecking in the last few laps. And then I was able to go to Kentucky Speedway here in July. We had an awesome five races over four days. It was a blast to operate. Obviously, we miss the fans and that was not great to see, but it was good for Kentucky Speedway to get some good product on the track and to get that race in.

Drew Bedard:

And I think we’ll be able to build on it for 2021. So again, kudos to NASCAR and Marcus Smith, our CEO and the folks, the leadership at NASCAR. And when I say there’s a NASCAR, the entity and of course now IFC, the International Speedway Corporation is kind of NASCAR tracks now. So look at the NASCAR track leadership, the SMI, or the Speedway Motorsports track leadership. And then of course the leadership at NASCAR for just really pushing, but pushing safely to get back on the track and give people a product.

Chris Wise:

Yeah. It also appears through some of their, I will say socially conscious decisions that a new fan is being attracted to the sport. And I also-

Drew Bedard:

Absolutely. The iRacing thing was huge. So keep going.

Chris Wise:

With iRacing and Black Lives Matter and a number of other things and and the whole thing around the Confederate flag, et cetera, that a whole new audience is emerging. That’s really kind of exciting. It’s very exciting to see that happen. And then I’ve heard lots of positive comments all around the country and talking to folks. And just thinking of that, do you think this will have great long-term impact for racing?

Drew Bedard:

Again, I’m not trying to like be captain positive all the time. I am a very positive person, but I’m not trying to lie to you either. I absolutely think that this will have long-term benefit for the sport. And let’s start with iRacing. I think, and this was even done and you probably saw it in some research circles that there were I think in NASCAR released some stats that said that there was something like a million new people watching these races because they were video games essentially. And so you’re bringing a lot of the younger and we have been killing ourselves trying to figure out how to get the younger audience to the racetrack.

Drew Bedard:

Well, we may have just found the secret sauce, which is integrating more iRacing into what we’re doing. And actually I’m still watching iRacing today. I’ll watch the iRacing product, the NASCAR Heat product that they’re putting out every single week. So I think that that’s huge. I also think that NASCAR kind of being first out of the gate with a live sport, you could look at Twitter on those race weekends and you could absolutely see people desperate for live sports and just people saying, “Hey, this is on, I’m in. Teach me about it. Let me know what’s happening.”

Drew Bedard:

So whether that is going to pan out to something long-term, I think we all believe it will. And I think we have to work against that from the track perspective. But I’m hopeful, I guess, is the way to put it. I don’t know if you can bank on it for the future, but I’m very hopeful that we’ll be able to retain that audience. And even if you look at what we did at the All-Star Race with just a few tweaks and innovations with the underglow, the numbers, the car numbers on the sides that looked a little bit more like Lightning McQueen for kids, which is the way I looked at it. Because that’s what it looked like to me. I think there’s a lot of different things that NASCAR is doing to try to bring not only a younger audience, but a more diverse audience to the table.

Chris Wise:

Awesome. The whole idea of eSports and integrating with live sports, everybody’s adopting it. I mean, it’s got to be, if you don’t, it doesn’t seem to bode well for the future so.

Drew Bedard:

Absolutely. I love it. And I actually hope one of the things I tweeted out probably the week after we started back racing was man, I’m missing this iRacing product. Can we keep the pro invitational series where it’s the big stars were racing as if they were still racing on the racetrack, but I loved the product. I thought it was really cool to see them kind of in T-shirts and shorts at home, racing their rigs and talking and interacting.

Drew Bedard:

We had a lot of fun doing different promotions with different drivers. I mean, I’m actually missing that product at this point. And I hope that in the future, that can be elevated that can we have an Esport and a live sport co-exist and kind of help each other feed off each other?

Chris Wise:

So we talked a little bit even through our research, which you’ve seen and other research you’ve seen that people have been hungry and hungry for a very long time for real live sports. They were okay watching reruns, oh, like for a week or two. And that got old really fast for folks. And there was just a hunger, a thirst that needed to be satiated that anything that was going to be on air live, people were going to gravitate to. And indeed we’ve seen that happen. The viewership numbers in sports even NASCAR, your almost even NASCAR numbers year to year, almost even from last year. And you’ve lost how many races? A bunch.

Chris Wise:

That’s again, that’s exciting and content, we need always need fresh content and people just love sports. Because they need the competition. They need that energy that comes with that and we’ve seen that over and over and over again. So it has to be fulfilled so.

Drew Bedard:

Yeah. I couldn’t watch the reruns. The thing that got me back into sports was the Last Dance actually. Because I other than Esports I couldn’t watch all the reruns. Like my dad, who’s just a die hard New England sports fan, he was watching Red Sox and Bruins highlight. And I’m like, “I can’t do this. I need a live sport.” Yeah. And the Last Dance was like it was kind of cool because it was kind of reliving a part of my youth, but I’m sorry, keep going.

Chris Wise:

Oh no, no, that’s cool. Because that seemed to be the catalyst for people coming back to the viewing anything they can get their hands on. And right after that-

Drew Bedard:

Funnily enough, I started watching it all over again today on Netflix. So I started with episode one. I was working out today and I was like, “You know what? I’m going to start the Last Dance over again.”

Chris Wise:

Now that is funny. So you had Last Dance, you had Korean baseball and a few other things, but people were watching because it was fresh and people didn’t know what the outcome was going to be. So anyway. Do you see that translating to a re-energized and possibly larger fan base just because of that? And the people are coming back and at least watching it on TV and now re-engaging rather than being bored and stuff is happening in their life or is this kind of a blip in time and we’re going to come back to where we were from a viewership standpoint?

Drew Bedard:

Well, I think you have to look at each one individually. I think the NBA is killing it right now. I think what they’re doing with the bubble and what they’re doing with Orlando and getting the season in I’m all in. I’m hooked. I can’t wait to watch the Lakers and Clippers tonight. I can’t wait to watch my Celtics play. I think what they’re doing, they’re keeping people safe and healthy. I think Adam Silver is a genius.

Drew Bedard:

So I think the NBA, they’re only going to go up from here because honestly the other cool thing about the way they did the bubble and the way they did the court in Orlando is it kind of looks like a video game. So I think you’re going to cater to a new audience. Now, the one I’m worried about, well, we don’t know where the NFL is going to go. We don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re probably going to have a very MLB model, but the MLB is the one I’m concerned about. Because I’ve watched a few Red Sox games and it just is weird.

Drew Bedard:

First of all, we’ve already had some COVID cases out of the gate with the Marlins and that’s probably not going to be the last team that’s going to have that, but the teams are traveling to different markets and then you’ve got empty, large empty stadiums. And I guess you could look at NASCAR, but I think NASCAR, I don’t know. There was a way to shoot it and I think Fox, kudos to them. I think Fox did a great job of shooting it because not only did they tighten up their shots on the racetrack, but they used the drone really effectively in their early coverage to make it so that empty grand stands wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Drew Bedard:

It was like something cool you get to see, you’ve never seen before because they could fly over like our races at Bristol May 31st and June 1st, that guy on the drone was having so much, it was the best branding I think I’ve ever seen. Because you were really seeing the mountains and the area and even the facility in its grandeur. But I think the MLB so far has felt a little strange to me. And I wonder, does it have a negative effect? Again, I want to be positive and say I love my Red Sox and I love watching baseball on TV, but it felt weird to me so far.

Drew Bedard:

What will the NFL do? I don’t know, what’s the best way? The gorilla, elephant in the room, they’re the thousand pound whatever. They’re the giant, they’re the leader. Are they going to learn from what’s going on? Can they learn from NASCAR? Can they learn from MLB and positives and negatives? Can they learn from the NBA? Can they learn from the NHL? I think the NHL, they’re kind of doing a modified bubble in Canada. So I think if you’re open to it and vulnerable enough, I think you can learn from each other and you can build the best product because like you said, it’s will this help to retain customers for the future? Will it retain long-term watchers. And then live in person consumers when we’re able to do that at a more regular clip.

Chris Wise:

Yeah. Yeah.

Drew Bedard:

So lots of question marks there, but I do think that there’s some great case studies so far and with the shining star, I think obviously I’m very bullish on NASCAR, but I think the shining star so far has been the NBA and we’re just getting started. So we’ll see where that goes.

Chris Wise:

Yeah, I think you’re right. And your view of Major League Baseball is spot on. And they’ve from a fan standpoint, they’ve been struggling for a while anyway, so.

Drew Bedard:

Right. But they expose something, it’s exposing something. I listen to Bill Simmons’ podcast all the time and they were talking with CC Sabathia and some other guys the other day, but it’s exposing something about baseball, which probably a guy that you and I both follow, Jesse Cole of the Savannah Bananas. Jesse has been trying and innovating, and there’s lots of minor league parks around the country who’ve been trying this sort of festival-style circus, the old school sort of put on a show and the baseball’s just there, just happens to be there.

Drew Bedard:

But I think baseball has to innovate quickly in the entertainment realm, but then they’re struggling with, “Well, how can we entertain when we have no fans there?” We got to figure something out. Even if they scale down too and of course they will naturally scale down with the playoffs to just a few teams, but does the playoff stadiums look different? Do they put large LED screens in the backgrounds? Can they innovate effectively so that they come out healthy in 2021?

Chris Wise:

Right. Let’s come back to the All-Star Race since that was really the first race to welcome fans back in the stands. So limited offerings of tickets, only part of the equation. If you could share some of the considerations, both from an operational perspective as well as the marketing PR perspective that really went into the execution of the plan. And then with that, what were the great lessons learned through all that?

Drew Bedard:

First of all, the All-Star Race was something that was unbelievable for the Bristol staff to kind of get gifted that opportunity. Obviously, it’s been at Charlotte Motor Speedway. It’s only been two places. It was at Atlanta Motor Speedway one time. And then it’s been in Charlotte Motor Speedway, but our CEO, I give him all the credit of thinking outside the box of thinking, “Where can we put this thing to put on a good show?” And obviously Governor Bill Lee in Tennessee working with us on, yes, you can have a small capacity of live fans there. Now there’s been statements made that there was no one reason why that happened. It was a host of different reasons, including leadership at NASCAR leadership at Speedway Motorsports and a host of different reasons.

Drew Bedard:

But the idea of having fans live for the All-Star Race was something that was obviously a positive for it. So we get it’s probably five weeks out from the event when that call gets made. Now, we had been hearing for a couple of days and I’ll quickly get to the event, because I know you want to hear about the operation side, but we kind of hear midweek about five weeks out this might be happening. So the Bristol staff kind of gets warned or the leadership at Bristol kind of gets warned like this might be happening. So just wrap your head around it a little bit.

Drew Bedard:

So then you get to Friday and it’s like, “Nah, don’t think it’s going to happen. Really cool if it would have, but no big deal. We’ll support our team in Charlotte.” And Saturday comes along and it’s happening. So it’s going to get shifted. And then Monday that next Monday was announced on Race Hub by Marcus Smith. So then we are off and running. It was a really cool case study of collaboration. Because what ended up happening was we thought Texas was going to be our first Speedway Motorsports facility out of the gate with new protocols, as far as live fans were concerned.

Drew Bedard:

Well, we just got shoved up to the front of the line. So we’re up to the front of the line, we have four and a half weeks to put this thing together. Well, it was everybody jumped in. Everybody jumped in together, led by Jeff and Jason Bowling at corporate kind of on ticket ops and marketing. And then there’s Scott Cooper and the communications team, Becky Cox at Bristol, just everybody. And then you got to look at Landon Owen who’s my colleague at Bristol and Kentucky and tickets, just everybody jumping in. “Okay, how do we figure all these things out?”

Drew Bedard:

And now the first thing is you have to make a list of what are we trying to figure out? What do we need to do? What’s going to be different? Well, the whole thing’s going to be different. We’re going to have a modified capacity with social distancing. So Landon has to work out the ticket manifest. We have exchanges coming from other racetracks. So we have to work that out. How’s that going to work and also for maybe new fans that just want to come to the All-Star Race at Bristol.

Drew Bedard:

Digital ticketing, we had been fully paper ticketing up until 2020. We were going to make a slow kind of move towards digital ticketing in 2020, but then boom, it hits. We got to go all digital ticketing 100% at this event. So everything gets built out on the backend. We had teams like Atlanta Motor Speedway, who had already had their event postpone, were maybe going to have their makeup event, but they jumped in from a marketing and PR perspective to really help us build videos and tutorials and different things like that.

Drew Bedard:

Then we had an elaborate marketing communications plan on how to educate people about COVID protocols, safety, hygiene, how we’re going to treat the facility, how people are going to enter the facility, how screening and clear bags and everything that goes into that. So I’m kind of rapidly getting to that it was a great case study in collaboration by not just one or two tracks or maybe one track and their home office. This was everybody in it together. I had friends out or my colleagues out at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, or maybe Sonoma who are jumping in doing creative projects who were helping us with email projects. And so then you get to race week, which really is only one day it’s race day, which is different for us where we’re used to an entire weekend.

Drew Bedard:

I talked about this earlier today with somebody else, but Becky Cox did an amazing job from our PR communications perspective of also educating the marketing and ticketing teams really took on the consumer and said, “We have to educate, we have to get everybody ready. We have to get their digital tickets downloaded.” And there was a lot of backend work there. Becky really took on the how do we educate the media or get the media involved in this so that they can help spread the word on all the safety protocols going on.

Drew Bedard:

So Becky had a big elaborate tour on Tuesday afternoon. If I can remember this correctly, Tuesday afternoon, where we had kind of a short press conference with Jerry Caldwell, then we were able to roll out into kind of a facility tour to kind of take people around Adam Rust, Steve Swift. I’m throwing out a lot of names that people don’t know, but these are all very, very smart, very capable people on both the Speedway Motorsports end and the Bristol Motor Speedway end who were kind of jumping in together and making sure that we could figure it out.

Drew Bedard:

Then when we got to race day, Chris, it was really about execute a safe event and put on a good show. Because at the end of the day, Speedway Motorsports wants to be known for family and fun and friends. And we want you to have a good time when you come to the event. So we were so excited that NASCAR wanted to do the underglow and we brought in a live DJ and we did a light show with phones right before they went green. And we did a lot of different things to try to make it really fun for the people that were there.

Drew Bedard:

So just a really cool opportunity. I was glad to be a part of it, a very, very small part of it. And it was very fun to execute. And I don’t know. One of the things that we kept in the background and kept in the back of our minds was this was probably very important from not only a Bristol and Speedway Motorsports perspective, but it was very important from a national perspective to have a live event with fans that was well-executed or had the sentiment after the event of being well-executed. And I think so far in some of the research that we’ve seen is that we feel like we’re seeing that. And I mean that the consumer doesn’t lie when you send out a consumer survey, you’re going to get honest feedback, good or bad. Most of the time if it’s vocal, it’s bad, but we got a lot of positive feedback.

Drew Bedard:

And even to the point of I think one stat that I saw was if Bristol was to have another event and they were able to replicate a lot of the safety protocols like they did at the All-Star Race, would you be willing to return? And 80% of people said yes. So that’s a good thing. And I think and I know your podcast and this show has been kind of chronicling over time how the sentiment or maybe the fan feelings have changed over time minus a vaccine, which would make all of us feel better is can the live event facilities execute a safe event. And I think people are maybe willing more and more and more to step out and do that, but then it’s on the venues themselves to actually execute the play. So I’m sorry to be long-winded, but that’s the story of the All-Star Race.

Chris Wise:

No, no, that’s great because it was pivotal as far as having fans in the stands for the first time. And I think you’re right. From a national perspective, all eyes were on Bristol, Tennessee and everything that we’ve seen in our work it’s been very, very positive. So kudos to you and the team. Just a couple more questions. Overall, this whole disruption to our status quo, good thing, bad thing, or just a thing?

Drew Bedard:

I don’t know. It depends on how you look at it. I mean, I’m kind of a glass half full guy. I’ve even looked at my being able to work remotely and I’m just very blessed that my parents haven’t gotten sick or my brothers haven’t gotten sick or my kids haven’t gotten sick. And I feel for all those families who have gone through this and gone through the worst of it. But when you look at it, I’m going to go glass half full and say, I hope and I think we will come out better for it. I think from a facility and from event operators, we will come out smarter and better for it. I think the sports will.

Drew Bedard:

The sports are being forced to innovate right now, which is always a good thing when you’re forced into innovation, not you get to do it at your leisure. So, no, I think this is a very serious thing. I mean, I’m pretty sure 30, 50 years from now, this will be chronicled in the history whatever, not books probably, but history web that this year of 2020, this chaotic year will be chronicled. But I hope, it is my hope that we will all come out the better for it. That we will be even better from a health perspective and how we take care of ourselves and how we take of our neighbors. So I’m hoping for the best. And I know that I will come out of this hopefully a better person, a better marketer, a better dad, a better husband, all those things. I mean, I hope to come out on the better side of this. So that’s kind of my perspective.

Chris Wise:

Okay. Okay. One last question, which rolls right off of that is how do you use this time to build the institutional marketing behavior, as well as your own personal approach to marketing?

Drew Bedard:

That’s a great question. You know me, we’ve known each other for a long time, so you know that I’m really kind of a marketing nerd and I like my craft and I like to read, I like to research. I like all that stuff, but I do know that I guess this entire time and probably all marketers operators, business runners are coming out of this challenging all the assumptions they may have had. And I think that’s always a good thing because then that puts you at a place of maybe out of your comfort zone, but maybe really focusing on your consumer and being a well-read, well-studied craftsman of whatever that craft is. If that is event operations or if it’s research or if it’s marketing. I don’t know. I hope that answers your question and if it doesn’t, we can do a follow-up for sure.

Chris Wise:

No, we’re good.

Drew Bedard:

Yeah, I’m quite the marketing nerd and I love my craft, but I do think that it has challenged my assumptions on a lot of things. And it has taught me that I not only need to listen to my colleagues around me, but I need to keep studying and I need to keep learning because again, and that’s why talking about before I’m watching so intently what the NBA is doing. Because I do think that they’re onto something. There’s something there. There’s a spark or a bit of magic just like I talked about Jesse Cole’s in Savannah Bananas. He was doing it when there was no COVID.

Drew Bedard:

Whether it was Walt Disney in the 50s and 60s, or you look at this time period or Jeff Bezos with Amazon, or you look at all these different things. There are great innovations that come out of difficult times. And I think what I’m trying to do is just make sure I keep learning and keep listening.

Chris Wise:

Good deal. Drew, I really appreciate you spending time with us today.

Drew Bedard:

It’s been awesome.

Chris Wise:

Yes, sir. Thank you, Chris. This has been Fired Up, a podcast from Ignite Fan Insights part of Designsensory Intelligence. Until next time, take care. Bye.

Chris McAdoo:

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Chris McAdoo:

Fired Up is hosted by Chris Wise and myself, Chris McAdoo. Thanks again for listening, tune in next time and as always, y’all stay Fired Up.