Vol 16. Insights from the Portland Trail Blazers CMO

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Meet Kevin Kinghorn

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their careers, insights, and accomplishments. This week, that marketing leader is Kevin Kinghorn.

Currently the EVP and Chief Marketing Officer of the Portland Trail Blazers, Kevin’s spent more than two decades at the intersection of digital innovation and fan engagement in professional sports. 

Here are the need-to-knows about Kevin:

• He spent over 16 years with the Vancouver Canucks, growing from digital writer to CMO.

• He briefly moved agency-side during the pandemic and built a sports arm for a digital agency.

• He currently leads brand and marketing for the Trail Blazers.

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From game recaps to digital expansion

Kevin didn’t start his career off in marketing. After earning a journalism degree, he cut his teeth covering community news. It was, in his words, the hardest job he ever had. “I have so much respect for journalists. It is a grind,” he said. But it also provided invaluable training: storytelling, communicating, organizing information, asking the right questions, understanding an audience. 

That skillset helped him get his entry point into a sports organization. He joined the Canucks— an ideal team for a Canadian who grew up in the interior of British Columbia—writing game recaps and features for the website. It was the earlier days of web (read: before AI could do everything), and Kevin had the digital chops to build out content for the team’s website. From there, he climbed the ladder the way many great marketers do: learning on the job and embracing ambiguity

Then, everything from ticket sales to video consumption moved online, and social media exploded. And it became more apparent that Kevin, who’d grown to Director of Digital, had to grow his team. “I put together a digital content team and our little group became increasingly more important to shaping the brand and stories from the Canucks organization.”

Driving steady sales 

As Kevin took on more responsibility in Vancouver, he also faced one of the defining challenges of sports marketing: winning and losing are out of your control.

“There's always this cycle, right. Every sports team goes through it. When you hit those valleys, my job is to mitigate the depth of them. And then we're doing well, it’s to maximize on those peaks,” he said. “But between the peaks and valleys, I don't think much changes fundamentally in terms of what you're trying to do.”

“But when the team is winning, it’s a lot easier to lean in and build those connections that might not be as impactful when the team is struggling. Conversely, when team performance is low, the city and fan connection are even more vital,” he said. “So you’re always trying to connect all three points of that triangle but perhaps emphasizing one over the others, depending on where you’re at in the cycle.”

Kevin rose from his junior web role with the Canucks all the way up to VP of Marketing. And when asked what he’d lend to his growth, he pointed to his team. “Being able to set a really good strategy is important, of course, but I would not be where I am today if I didn’t have really great, positively minded people on my team who can execute well and push boundaries. I don’t think I’m special in that way, either.”

New team, same triangle

After 16 years with the Canucks, Kevin left during the pandemic and briefly moved to the agency side. There, he helped build a sports division for a digital agency by applying the model he’d used with the Canucks to a completely new business. “It was a very different approach to business but exciting and a fantastic challenge.” 

Then the Trail Blazers called. “It was a big move, changing from Vancouver in Canada to Portland in the US, but I love it. It’s a great sport, a really fantastic league, and a great organization. And the beauty of the NBA and the NHL is that they have similar seasons and they both often have dual purpose arenas. So the change wasn’t that big.”

The transition meant working in a new, relatively small market where only one of the big four sports leagues has a presence. Kevin said in those markets, fans have a different sense of ownership over the team and the brand.

“There's something different when there's history with generations of fans. When I talked about the triangle of fans, team, city, that city component is extra important in a small market.”

A standout campaign

One of Kevin’s favorite campaigns came during the Canucks’ 2011 playoff run. “We had so much serendipity on our side. A bunch of things just converged and all worked together.”

Kevin said the crux of the campaign was to center on the human side of players and fans. So the opening video that played in the arena showed players as kids in their basements shooting balls at the wall or playing minor hockey. “The goal of those videos is to get the hair standing up on people’s arms,” Kevin said. 

“By showing the players as kids, fans were able to relate to the team in a different way. They were able to see this as a payoff to these players’ lifelong dream. Fans were able to see themselves, or their own kids, in the players. And then suddenly, they’re rooting for the people as much as they’re rooting for the crest on the jersey.” 

There were a variety of different touch points to support the campaign. One of them was a mosaic where fans could upload photos of themselves and place it in the mosaic. When you clicked on it, the photo would flip and share the person’s story and why they cared so much. Kevin’s team did one for each playoff series and by then end, he said they had so many photos they couldn’t use them all. And of course, they gathered plenty of email addresses and marketing options along the way.

Advice and takeaways

1) Build and foster your network. 

Kevin said having strong connections is a big aspect of his industry. “The beautiful thing about sports is I’m not in competition with my peers so there’s a ton of collaboration and learning. I can pick up the phone and call the person in Utah who just launched a DTC streaming product and ask them what worked and what didn’t.”

When was the last time you checked in with your industry peers? Consider setting up recurring time with them to share best practices, funny stores, and experiences. When possible, look for ways to set aside competition and open the doors for more learning.

2) Let brand values drive innovation.

One of Kevin’s recent projects was piloting technology that enabled visually impaired fans to follow along with Trail Blazers games. “One of the values of the Trail Blazers is being inclusive and welcoming everyone, so this initiative was a no brainer. It definitely leans to the fan point of the triangle, which is a big focus for our brand team.”

Make sure your work is acting on brand values and not just talking about them. For your audience, it reinforces what your brand is all about. And if your execution goes like Kevin’s, you may get rewarded with some earned media attention along the way. 

3) Manage change with strong storytelling. 

When Portland traded longtime star Damian Lillard, Kevin and his team had to rethink their entire narrative. “Rightly or wrongly, our star player provided so much brand lift for us,” he said. “Once he was gone, we had to reestablish what basketball in Portland means. It was really important that we dove harder into the fans and city to drive storytelling.”

Your brand will go through seismic shifts, whether it’s personnel, market conditions, or cultural expectations. Use moments of transition to re-center around purpose and community. Change is inevitable, but clear storytelling can steady the ship.

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