Monday was my first day in the office in over a week. The National Lacrosse League had the past week off, but they still gave me an assignment for the week, which was to update their entire media guide with statistics from 2012. Fortunately, I did not have to go in to work and I was allowed to do the work from my dorm room. The NLL is in their off-season so some days are busier than others, and today was one of those quiet days. I did absolutely nothing at work regarding to the National Lacrosse League, but I did keep myself busy with LinkedIn, sportsnetworker.com, and researching information for my next blog post, which was about the average height of every position in baseball.
That night, our speaker for the evening was Jeffrey Hayzlett, who is the CEO of the Hayzlett Group, and was once the Chief Marketing Officer of Kodak. Mr. Hayzlett talked a lot about marketing and told us some of the projects that he had employed when he was at Kodak. The most successful project was the “Kodak Challenge”, which is still an on-going venture on the PGA Tour. Kodak picks a hole on each golf course on the PGA Tour, and over the course of the year the player with the lowest score, relative to par, on the Kodak Challenge holes wins $1 million. Kodak patented and trademarked the Challenge, so there activation costs were very low. It cost them around $2 million, as opposed to the $10 million it would cost to be the title sponsor of a PGA Tour event.
Another thing that Jeffrey talked about was the fact that he has never stayed at a job for more than 4 years. He told us that he has 3 things that are required for him to stay at a job. They are: Build wealth, grow professionally, and have fun. He told us that he left Kodak because he was not having fun and he was not building wealth. The company was moving in the wrong direction.
I really enjoyed Mr. Hayzlett’s speech and so did everyone else that I asked. He was very up-front and went into lots of depth about marketing and some of the marketing projects that he has employed in the past.