Nationwide's NFL platform. WPMOY, the Invitational, and a dozen-plus team partnerships.
Walter Payton Man of the Year is Nationwide's signature NFL platform. The brand's NFL team partnerships at the time, its annual hospitality flagship, and the agency's intern-AI program all routed through it during my summer at Wasserman.
One platform, a dozen-plus team activations, a hospitality flagship.
Nationwide is the title sponsor of the NFL's Walter Payton Man of the Year award. The league's signature community-service honor. Across the brand's dozen-plus NFL team partnerships (at the time of my internship), WPMOY is the connective tissue: every team has a nominee, and Nationwide co-promotes that nominee with the team locally. The platform also powers Nationwide's largest annual B2B hospitality program, the Nationwide Invitational. Working on the Brands & Properties team at Wasserman, I touched all three.
Asset audits, contract terms, activation prep. Across both conferences.
I produced comprehensive partnership reports outlining key terms, deliverables, entitlements, assets, and financial commitments across the team partnership agreements that made up Nationwide's NFL portfolio at the time. The work sat at the seam of client account management and strategy. Coordinating with partnership-marketing leads on the team side and Nationwide brand-team account leads on the client side. Making sure every WPMOY activation, hospitality asset, and gameday integration was captured, mapped to deliverables, and ready for execution.
The throughline across teams was the WPMOY platform. Videoboard features, locker-room meet-and-greets with team nominees, club seats for the WPMOY-recognition gameday, mobile-app push notifications, social-channel co-promotion. Every team ran a version of it. My job was making sure no asset slipped between the team and the brand.
35 C-suite executives, three days, Columbus, Memorial Tournament week.
Once a year, Nationwide leverages its hometown market of Columbus, Ohio to run an executive-relationship program of unusual scale. In June 2023, that program hosted 35 C-suite and senior executives. Top-performing business intermediaries from Nationwide's Property & Casualty and Financial business units. Through a three-day, two-night experience anchored to Memorial Tournament week.
Tuesday. Lower.com Field
Pairings reveal and dinner. NFL Hall of Famers and a Sunday Night Football sideline reporter on stage; Q&A on the on-field and off-field chapters of long careers in the league.
Wednesday. New Albany Country Club
Celebrity-Am golf tournament. Nineteen groups across Property & Casualty and Nationwide Financial books, one celebrity targeted per group. Half the on-course talent was tied to the Walter Payton Man of the Year platform.
Evening dinner at the Columbus Museum of Art, anchored by a Q&A with the 2022 WPMOY winner.
Thursday. Muirfield Village
Champions Breakfast at the Nationwide Chalet on the 14th-fairway side of the course, the morning of the first round of the Memorial Tournament. Featured a Q&A with Peyton Manning and Jack Nicklaus. Course-side spectating to close out the program.
My team built and shipped the schedule, talent integration plan, hospitality logistics, and the post-program recap. Including measuring guest experience across each touchpoint and feeding it back into the brand-side framework for the following year.
Selected for one of eight intern teams. Topic: AI: The Future of Sports Technology.
Each summer Wasserman runs a capstone program. Eight intern teams, each assigned a strategic topic of interest to the agency. My team's topic was AI: The Future of Sports Technology. I co-led the team and personally authored the AI Overview and Market Analysis sections of our 40-slide framework.
The deck covered AI fundamentals (Narrow / General / Super, Reactive / Limited Memory / Theory of Mind / Self-aware, ML / DL / Generative AI), market sizing ($137B in 2022, growing at 37% CAGR with Advertising & Media as the largest single sector at 19.5% of share), case studies across music, venues, MLB biomechanics, the NFL's adoption of predictive AI, and Wimbledon's IBM-powered highlight editing. And grounded all of it in Wasserman-specific use cases: internal data warehousing, talent finder concepts, customized e-commerce, sponsorship valuation, fan-equity research, and creative-tooling integration with Adobe Firefly and Midjourney.
We presented to a cross-office group of full-time Wasserman employees and executives. 30 minutes plus Q&A. In August 2023. Most agencies weren't doing operational AI work yet. My Stepful AI Champion role and the Open Role + Sales Signal GPTs came eighteen months later. The throughline is the same.
Sponsorship strategy isn't picking individual deals. It's building and operating the platform that connects them. Nationwide's WPMOY platform is exhibit A. A single brand-property idea that threads through a dozen-plus team activations, a marquee hospitality program, and the brand's flagship endorsement architecture. Working across all three at once is what made the summer formative, and what shaped how I think about portfolio management, brand integration, and measurement today.
- Sponsorship platform activation
- Partnership portfolio management
- Client account management
- Partner relationship management
- Asset and entitlement management
- Rights management
- B2B hospitality program design
- On-site executive hospitality
- Talent-integration strategy
- Brand integration
- Cross-functional stakeholder management
- Operational AI in agency