In an industry where there are a lot of cool jobs, Dave Barnett has a really cool job. As the Vice President of Sports Marketing Tampa/Miami for iHeartMedia, Barnett oversees sales for a variety of team partnerships including the Miami Dolphins, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Tampa Bay Rays, the Miami Marlins, the Orlando Magic and the Florida Gators.
Barnett is a 30-year veteran in the industry and as his current position indicates, he has been very successful in his career. Along the way he has spent time in some of the top sports markets in the country. In his earlier days he was with CBS, working for KMOX in St. Louis, selling St. Louis Cardinals baseball and later with iHeart, he ran sports sales in Denver, overseeing sales for both the Denver Broncos and the Colorado Rockies.
His time in Denver coincided with the arrival of Peyton Manning and he explained, “It was an exciting run with Peyton as the quarterback and all the success, so those years were really fun because people were buying basically for tickets, they just wanted access. This was before everyone had to show ROI, they just wanted to be involved.” He also had a second run in Denver recently, where he was able to capitalize on all the hype surrounding Deion Sanders’ arrival in Boulder as the new head coach at the University of Colorado.
Today, of course, it’s a whole new ballgame, so to speak.
“The world has changed,” Barnett said when asked about the changes he has seen in the industry over the last few decades. “Especially at iHeart with all our offerings. We no longer sell just game-day packages. It used to be that you would sell packages and it would just be only about game-day and that was it. Now, we’re integrating in the rest of the week, we are using our digital products to show attribution and that is something that we never had in the past. The sexy part is they are tied into the team, but then we draw people down the conversion funnel with our digital tactics and show attribution.”
Barnett spends time in the key markets and most days is on a number of sales meetings, in person or via Zoom, with one of the forty or so reps who can sell sports for iHeart in the state of Florida. He said the reps having success selling sports are recognizing that play-by-play means game broadcasts and everything around the team. Using football as an example, he said, “For us, Friday is the most important day of the week during football season. It’s when we’re talking about injuries, fantasy, betting, it’s when we’re talking about college, about pro, we are talking all things football on Friday. So that has become just as important as game day.”
When asked to elaborate on the qualities of a great sports seller, Barnett said, “Some things don’t change, you have to be smart, and you have to be driven and you have to have the will to win.”
Barnett said he owes a lot of his success throughout his career to his ability to create strong campaigns for clients and his ability to help create new ideas.
“From day one it was always important to me to make sure I was creating something that would work,” he said. “It was more important for me that it worked for the client than what it cost. And I also like to push the envelope and do things that’d never been done before. A lot of things we’ve done, which are now common practice, we did early because it was cool, and it worked for the client. The thing I have always loved about this job is being able to be creative.”
Barnett has also excelled at building strong relationships with clients and said a lot of that comes from being with them at games.
“I tell all the young people today, I have made more money going to games and being in suites or hanging out with clients at a game than I ever could if I went to their office,” he said. “Because you get to know them, and they get to know you. And then all of a sudden you are friends and that’s a completely different situation. It’s about relationships and the best way to build a relationship is to just go hang out with somebody. You’re not trying to sell them, just hang out with them, get to know them, get to know their family.”
Barnett also believes working for iHeartMedia gives him and his salespeople a big advantage. “We basically never have to say no, which is incredible when you’re a salesperson. No matter what they want to buy, we can say yes.”
He describes the environment as one where sales have become less of an individual sport and more of a team sport. iHeartMedia uses subject or category experts to help sellers once they have discovered the need for a particular advertiser. Barnett provides that for sports in Florida and then no matter what else a rep is trying to sell, there are experts there to assist.
“The salesperson has a lot of support,” he said. “It’s such a long way from where we started where you basically felt like you were on your own. We don’t have that here, tons of support is built in and created that way which makes it really a cool machine.”
As for the future, Barnett is excited that technology will allow for attribution to continue to get better and he also makes a very good point about what lies ahead for sports radio play-by-play, especially as it relates to NFL football.
“I actually think with all of the networks and different streaming services the NFL is going to be on that it is going to help sports radio, not hurt it. I think that if I have to go to YouTube for this one and Paramount+ for this game, I still want to hear my local guys talking about my local team.
“I may watch the game, but pre-game and post-game I want to hear what is about to happen and what just happened to my local team from my local guys. And I think that fragmenting where you watch games makes it more difficult. Radio is still very easy to access and now that we are streaming it all it is incredibly mobile as well.”
As Dave Barnett looks to his own future, he sees finishing out his career doing exactly what he is doing right now.
“I’m having a blast. At this point, after all the years, I have exactly the job I’ve always wanted. So, that’s pretty cool.”
