Full Sail Degree To Integrate AV and Media/Marketing for Sports

A number of media-technology academies have instituted sports-broadcasting AV programs, but the online degree program announced this week by Full Sail University will integrate technical AV education with a marketing and media curriculum aimed specifically at the sports industry.

Think Jerry McGuire with a headset and an iPad loaded with PowerPoint and connected to Facebook.

Sports Marketing and Media, a 32-month online program awarding a BS degree, is scheduled to enroll its first class in early 2011. Students will develop and refine skills in modern marketing concepts and practices that the program’s outline says will apply to communication, game operations, sponsorship, and revenue generation throughout the various types of companies that comprise the sports business: leagues, franchises, collegiate athletic departments, agencies, management companies, sports media outlets, and sponsors.

Josh Mora, Full Sail’s program director of sports marketing and media, who developed the program, says it is designed to meld business and technical domains, particularly digital-media platforms and digital sales and distribution channels for content, including broadcast, cable, satellite, interactive TV, terrestrial and satellite radio, social media, mobile media, online media, and location-based media, such as retail signage.

“The students will learn content creation at all levels for audio, video, and animation and how all of that content contributes to the marketing of sports for broadcast or any other channel,” Mora said during a break in Sports Business Journal’s Sports Media Technology Conference this week in New York.

In fact, he added, several panels at the conference underscored the inefficiencies in both creative and marketing roles that the transition to digital platforms is causing.

“If sales people can’t understand how digital platforms like social media work and content creators don’t understand the complexities of marketing and distribution channels, it creates huge inefficiencies in the sports industry,” he pointed out. “We think, with a program like this, we can splice all of those skills together in one person.”

And the degree program’s final graduation project will exemplify that: students will create and produce a targeted sports-marketing campaign. The fact that the course will be offered solely online also reinforces the fact that sports and digital media are a good fit going forward, Mora said: “Much of the sports industry’s future is online, and this program acknowledges that.”

Password must contain the following:

A lowercase letter

A capital (uppercase) letter

A number

Minimum 8 characters