![]() ![]() “The term ‘great relationship guy’ is overused in this business, but Rick IS that guy,” said Andrew Judelson, chief commercial officer at Endeavor’s Diamond Baseball Holdings. Three leagues later, he found the place where he could be influential across sports. No surprise then that Dudley now counts his almost 20 years at Octagon as his professional zenith. He was always good with people and ended up running an agency - exactly the right place to optimize those skills.” “Rick was always very smart, persuasive, and focused. ![]() “We evolved from a protector of NFL trademarks into a real marketing company with the help of Rick and other consumer products guys who could speak marketers’ language,” said Bello, who now owns Reed’s/Virgil’s Natural Beverages. Since then, NFL sponsorship revenue has grown from the tens of thousands to billions, in some cases.Īfter decades leading the development of the sports marketing industry, Rick Dudley says he’s retired. Dudley was part of a core of packaged-goods marketers recruited to pro sports by then NFL Properties head John Bello. If I’d known that, I’d have gotten into this business 10 years earlier.”īut his time as a property marketer would then be missed industrywide. “There’s so many different things you can do in the agency business. “I couldn’t get away from the appeal of working at a league - that’s where all the action supposedly was,” he said. Looking through the lens of a retirement that began just months ago, Dudley now says he should have moved to the agency business sooner. Around 40 years ago, when Rick Dudley quit as a brand marketer to enter sports marketing, his boss at Richardson-Vicks admonished him for “throwing his career away.” Having since worked in senior marketing jobs at three of the biggest stick-and-ball leagues during their most expansive growth periods, and spent the past 20 years running Octagon, the largest sports agency, it’s apparent that Dudley’s instincts were unusually incisive, even at a time when most people thought sports marketing meant filling your cart at Modell’s or Herman’s.
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