Sports & Brand Partnerships Manager, U.S

Role Context

Our client, a growth-stage retail company, has established valuable partnerships across professional sports, entertainment, live events, tradeshows, and adjacent cultural platforms. These relationships provide national visibility, access to passionate and relevant audiences, and distinctive opportunities to introduce the brand and products to new customers.

The value of these partnerships extends beyond visibility. When managed and coordinated effectively, they can support customer-data acquisition, content creation, social growth, product sales, earned media, retail traffic, and broader commercial performance.

Each partnership includes contractual rights, obligations, restrictions, timelines, content opportunities, approval processes, events, reporting requirements, and internal dependencies that must be actively managed throughout the year.

Today, responsibility for this work is distributed across multiple internal teams. This makes it difficult to maintain one complete view of partner commitments, deadlines, opportunities, approvals, reporting, and required internal actions.

The company needs a dedicated U.S.-based team member who can manage the relationships day to day, bring structure to the partnership portfolio, coordinate delivery across teams, and help the organization obtain greater measurable value from its existing investments.

Partner Relationship and Rights Management

Serve as the primary day-to-day contact for assigned sports, entertainment, and brand partner entities.

Establish a regular communication cadence, prepare for partner meetings, document decisions and next steps, and ensure agreed actions are completed.

Build credible, collaborative relationships while maintaining clear expectations and directing partner requests to the appropriate internal owners with sufficient context.

Identify additional opportunities within existing agreements, including content access, audience programs, appearances, hospitality, added-value inventory, and commercial extensions.

Escalate missed commitments, relationship risks, or material delivery issues early and represent the company professionally at relevant partner meetings and events.

Maintain a clear understanding of the rights, obligations, restrictions, deliverables, timelines, and commercial terms contained within each assigned agreement.

Maintain a centralized rights and deliverables tracker for the U.S. partnership portfolio.

Monitor contracted deliverables, approval deadlines, appearances, reporting requirements, renewal windows, and termination dates so valuable rights are not left unused.

Support the Senior Vice President of Global Sports & Brand Partnerships and Legal in commercial negotiations, renewals, amendments, make-goods, and discussions regarding additional rights.

Prepare relevant background information and performance history, coordinate documentation, and participate in negotiations when appropriate while senior commercial ownership remains with the SVP.

Track open terms and decisions and ensure agreed commercial or contractual changes are implemented across the relevant teams.

Maintain organized records of final agreements, amendments, approved terms, rights utilization, and operational commitments.

Integrated Partnership Planning and Delivery

Translate contractual partnership rights into integrated plans and maintain a master calendar covering deliverables, campaigns, content opportunities, creative approvals, partner events, hospitality, reporting deadlines, and renewals.

Develop clear proposals for review and approval, including objectives, target audiences, budgets, timelines, channel opportunities, required assets, responsibilities, and measurement plans.

Connect partnership initiatives to relevant product launches, campaigns, retail moments, customer-acquisition programs, and commercial priorities.

Provide E-Commerce, Performance Marketing, Campaign Management, Creative, Events, CRM, PR, Retail, Sales, and other relevant teams with complete context and sufficient lead time; coordinate working sessions and maintain clear owners, dependencies, decisions, and deadlines.

Share responsibility for onsite and operational delivery with the Tradeshow & Events Manager, coordinating partner requirements, access, rights, approvals, and communication while jointly managing vendors, staffing, logistics, physical assets, and internal handoffs.

Creative Approvals and Cross-Functional Coordination

Manage the end-to-end partner approval process for creative materials, content, paid-media assets, product integrations, signage, talent usage, and other partnership-related materials.

Prepare complete submissions, consolidate partner feedback, and maintain organized records of approvals, restrictions, trademark requirements, usage rights, usage periods, and final authorized assets.

Anticipate review timelines and protect campaign and production schedules from avoidable delays.

Coordinate closely with Creative and Campaign Management so final materials meet both the company's brand standards and partner requirements and all internal teams understand the relevant context.

Reporting, Measurement, and Operational Support

Work with Performance Marketing to establish partnership-level KPIs and measurement requirements, and ensure partner entities understand the required reporting formats, metrics, and delivery deadlines.

Obtain complete and timely partner reporting; validate and organize contracted delivery, reach, impressions, engagement, content performance, audience response, and other agreed indicators, following up when data is incomplete or delayed.

Provide reliable partner-level inputs to Performance Marketing and Campaign Management for inclusion in broader campaign-performance reporting, while contributing contractual and operational context.

Maintain a historical record of partner delivery and performance, support post-program reviews and budget coordination, and collaborate with Performance Marketing, Creative, Campaign Management, and Events on reusable approaches, assets, and working processes.

Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate will have:

Experience in sports partnerships, entertainment partnerships, sponsorship management, account management, integrated marketing, or a related field, ideally with approximately five to seven years of relevant experience.

Comfort serving as the primary day-to-day contact for established sports, entertainment, or national brand partners.

Experience managing contractual deliverables, rights inventories, partner calendars, approval processes, and renewal deadlines.

Familiarity with commercial agreements and capability to prepare negotiation materials, track open topics, and translate agreed terms into operational actions.

Experience coordinating integrated campaigns, partner programs, brand experiences, or high-profile events.

Strong organizational skills and the ability to manage multiple partners, calendars, stakeholders, budgets, approvals, and deadlines without losing sight of priorities.

Strong project and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to give teams complete context rather than simply forwarding requests or tasks.

Comfort working with reach, impressions, engagement, traffic, customer-data capture, conversion, sales, and other performance measures.

Experience requesting, validating, organizing, and following up on reporting received from external partners.

Confidence managing creative reviews and approval workflows involving trademarks, content, talent, and usage rights.

Clear and diplomatic communication skills, with the ability to manage expectations across partner entities, agencies, senior stakeholders, and U.S. and international teams.

Proactive and calm demeanor, with comfort traveling regularly within the U.S. and occasionally working outside standard hours around major partner events.

What the Role Is Not

This is not a sponsorship-sales or senior negotiation role; the focus is managing and maximizing the company's investments. The role supports negotiations, while the SVP retains ownership of major commercial decisions.

This is not a general events position; the person shares responsibility for partner-related events but does not own every company trade show, retail event, corporate event, or internal gathering.

This is not solely a relationship-management or strategic position; strong relationships must translate into completed deliverables, effective coordination, reporting, onsite support, and measurable value.

This is not Campaign Management or Performance Marketing; those teams retain ownership of overall campaign planning, channel execution, tracking, optimization, interpretation, and consolidated campaign reporting.

This is not the sole creative owner or internal Legal counsel; the role coordinates requirements and approvals while Creative develops assets and Legal owns contractual language and risk.

This is not a remote or awareness-only role; this Columbus-based position requires hands-on coordination, regular travel, and a focus on customer, content, audience, and commercial outcomes.

Success in the Role Looks Like

The company has one reliable source of truth for each partnership's rights, obligations, deadlines, deliverables, events, approvals, reporting, and commercial history.

Partner entities receive timely, professional communication and view the company as an organized and valuable partner.

Contracted rights are actively considered and used rather than discovered too late or left unclaimed.

Internal teams receive complete briefs, relevant context, and sufficient lead time to plan and deliver strong work.

Creative approvals are organized and completed without avoidable campaign or production delays.

Partner-related events are delivered effectively through close collaboration with the Tradeshow & Events Manager.

Partner entities provide complete and timely reporting in the agreed format.

Performance Marketing and Campaign Management receive reliable partner-level data that can be incorporated into broader measurement and campaign reporting.

Leadership has clear visibility into contracted delivery, rights utilization, partner performance, costs, open issues, and upcoming decisions.

Renewal and investment discussions are supported by organized records, performance history, and operational learnings, while partnership programs contribute to measurable brand and commercial outcomes.

The company develops more consistent, reusable approaches to partner programs and has a dependable owner who communicates clearly and follows work through to completion.

Working Style

Relationship-driven: builds trust with partners while maintaining clear expectations and accountability.

Highly structured: creates clarity across complex calendars, contracts, stakeholders, deliverables, budgets, and deadlines.

Proactive and context-oriented: identifies risks and decisions early and ensures teams understand the objective, requirements, and timing behind each request.

Commercially aware: understands the value of partnership rights and supports informed investment decisions without overstepping senior commercial ownership.

Metrics-literate: is comfortable requesting, organizing, validating, and interpreting partner performance data.

Operationally capable: moves comfortably between partner meetings, documentation, approvals, planning, and onsite delivery.

Diplomatic and confident: manages partner and internal expectations constructively, including when priorities or opinions differ.

Collaborative: works effectively across functions and with the Sports & Brand Partnerships team while maintaining ownership of follow-through.

Ownership-oriented: keeps accurate records and follows each initiative from planning and coordination through delivery, reporting, and learning.