This story is the latest in our series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profiles here.
Christine Wylie always thought she’d spend her career working on campaigns—just not marketing ones.
With a family that loved to talk politics and an undergraduate degree in political science, Wylie started her career working on political campaigns, including Rudy Giuiani’s run for US Senate against Hillary Clinton in 2000. But about five years later, she realized she wanted out. A lifetime of sports fandom—combined with the fact that she was training to run her first marathon—led her to a Google search that put sports marketing on her radar.
“If you think about it, politics is very similar to marketing,” Wylie told Marketing Brew. “On election day, you’re taking all the steps and doing all the legwork for people to take an action, to go out and vote for your [candidate] on one particular day. It’s not that far of a stretch to then get someone to think about buying Coke, or buying Pepsi, the next time they go into the supermarket.”
Almost 20 years after her pivot, Wylie is now senior director of sponsorships and partnerships at Verizon, where she helps steer the telecom giant’s work with sports properties, one of the biggest being the NFL.
With the football season kicking off soon, Wylie is busy managing Verizon’s 25 NFL team partnerships, plus more than a dozen others across pro leagues, to reach a large portion of the country with the company’s messaging after a recent rebrand.
Home team advantage
Sports were always a part of Wylie’s life, she said. Growing up outside Philadelphia, she was destined to be a die-hard Phillies fan; her mom and grandma had season tickets, and she even wrote her high school senior thesis about the MLB team and what it meant to her family.
Most of Verizon’s sponsorship tie-ups lie with different leagues, predominantly the NFL, NHL, and NBA, according to Wylie. But like her family, Verizon’s marketing group knows the power of individual team affinity, and supplements the brand’s league-wide partnerships with its many team-level deals, she said.
“No one loves the NFL shield,” Wylie said. “People love the New England Patriots. People love the Cleveland Browns. People love the Denver Broncos. What we are trying to do is tap into the passion that fans have for their team and associate our brand with that.”
While Wylie’s mom taught her team fandom, her dad taught her how to golf, which has also played a significant role in her career. When she was at Bucknell, she took a golf class, catching the attention of the coach who was starting the women’s golf team as a result of Title IX. She’d never played competitively, but ended up becoming a Division I athlete anyway, and has since competed in PGA and LPGA ProAms, she said.
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After working at sports and entertainment agency Octagon for about a decade, Wylie landed a job at MetLife, which was an official partner of the PGA Tour. She spent almost five years there before Verizon, a company that was on her job bucket list, reached out, Wylie said.
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At the time, the person running sports and entertainment marketing at Verizon was Yvette Martinez-Rea, now the COO of software company Yext, who said she was looking to hire someone with good people and strategy skills, as well as an understanding of the sports sponsorship landscape. It was Wylie’s competitive nature that made her stand out, Martinez-Rea said.
“She’s very easy to get along with, very sunny, very cheery personality, but that is wrapped around a very core competitive spirit,” Martinez-Rea said. “She’s a competitor, I think, because of her own personal sports background, and so it’s a nice, balanced combo.”
Sunday best
Today, the NFL represents Verizon’s biggest investment in sports marketing in terms of spend, according to Wylie. A 10-year deal between the company and the league, inked in 2021, is reportedly worth more than $1 billion, and between that and Verizon’s deal with Live Nation (also one of its biggest, Wylie said) the brand has massive reach. Verizon surveys have shown that it can reach three in four Americans, largely thanks to its NFL sponsorship, she said.
“You have 60,000 to 70,000 fans who are showing up at a stadium every Sunday to cheer on their favorite team,” she said. “All of those people want to be able to send a text message, they want to call their friends and find out what section they're sitting in and where they’re going to meet at halftime.”
For the half of the year when the NFL isn’t in season, Verizon activates around events like the draft or preseason training, Wylie said. Last month, for instance, the company announced a sign-up promotion that offers some customers access to NFL Sunday Ticket this season at no additional cost. Verizon did something similar last year, Wylie said, and promoted the offer during training camp via its team partnerships.
A competitor through and through, that always-on mindset is one of many reasons Wylie says she prefers marketing over political work.
“I love being busy, and I love being challenged,” Wylie said. “With 25 NFL teams, with six NHL teams, with five NBA teams, we can always do better next year.”
