Behind The Scenes

Super Mobility Conference offers super opportunity for ESPN to show its mobile leadership

LAS VEGAS – This week, ESPN is taking part in the CTIA Super Mobility Conference – North America’s biggest mobile conference of the year – at the Sands Expo Center, where more than 1,100 technical exhibitors and 34 pavilions and “tech zones” spread across 275,000 square feet of convention space.

Two ESPN Executive Vice Presidents Sean Bratches and John Kosner, are speaking at the three-day conference, signifying the importance of ESPN’s participation.

Leadership in the mobile space is crucial to fulfilling ESPN’s mission to serve fans anytime, anywhere. It is also an essential component of ESPN’s multi-screen approach for serving content and advertising partners. It’s all part of an overall digital strategy to which ESPN has been committed for many years and which manifested itself daily during ESPN’s summer coverage of the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

Bratches, EVP Sales and Marketing at ESPN, discussed the World Cup during yesterday’s opening keynote panel with Verizon Wireless President and CEO Dan Mead. Bratches noted that the World Cup on WatchESPN was a huge success for the company. It was the most streamed event in cable history, with more than five million unique mobile devices, driving unprecedented digital success for ESPN across all platforms including ESPN.com, ESPN FC and the flagship SportsCenter app.

Bratches emphasized the importance of the company’s World Cup immersion in which it served fans with access to all of the World Cup matches and other World Cup content across ESPN platforms. Additionally, the tremendous scale across screens allowed ESPN to create new opportunities for advertising partners, allowing them to reach an engaged, desirable audience unmatched in the industry.

Similarly, Kosner, ESPN’s EVP Digital and Print Media, will be on a keynote Sports Roundtable panel here on Thursday to discuss the growing importance of sports programming in the digital space. He will join NFL Network’s Chief Correspondent, Andrea Kremer; NASCAR’s Managing Director of Digital Media, Colin Smith; Pro Football Hall of Fame running back, Emmitt Smith; and Simon Wardle, Chief Strategy Officer at Octagon to talk about everything from fantasy football to online gaming, as well as the growing significance of mobile. Within that context, Kosner will share his views on the development of unique opportunities in the digital media industry, as the highly personal, instant environment of social media converges with the live nature of sports.

Watch Kosner and the other Sports Roundtable panelists on CTIA’s LiveKeynote feed tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. ET.

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