NBA's Pam El: ‘Being a mascot is what led me to be CMO, I knew it needed to happen'
Pam El, the chief marketer for the NBA, delivered a keynote about finding your passion at a leadership seminar hosted by women’s trade organization She Runs It earlier this week.
NBA CMO Pam El provides insight from her 35 years in marketing on how to take advantage of your passions / Bennett Bennett
“Getting this job was a dream come true,” she said after playing a montage of NBA highlights, “but it didn’t just happen. It was a plan that I had for a really long time. We’re gonna talk about the thing that helped me get where I am and that’s passion.”
She asked the audience members, a majority of them younger women of color in junior to mid-level roles about passion. After the interactions, she said something that got to the whole room — one that had seconds before broken into laughter at El’s relatable passions: red wine, her husband, Denzel Washington (her ‘future husband,’ she joked) and country superstar Gretchen Wilson — “If you don’t have passion, you will die. And you will die because of boredom.”
She conceded that once someone enters the workplace, they will have a hard time keeping that fire alive, but she gave five tips for the young professionals.
Find the common ground.
El’s first imperative “Find the common ground between your passion and your gig, the people who you have to talk to every day and like to talk to every day.”
She then cited meeting State Farm from Texas, who was billed by the league sponsor as one of its top insurance vendors. An African-American man hailing from a Spanish-speaking market, she pondered how the man was able to connect with his audience.
“How do you communicate with the customer if you can’t speak the language?" she asked.
“I found the common ground," he responded. “I'm a dad. I have kids. I want my kids to be safe. I'm going to go to school, I'm going to make something of themselves and I want them to be good people. And for a lady that’s my customer? I can't speak the language with her, but she has a kid. She wants her kid to go to school. She wants her kid to be steady and she wants her kid to grow up and go to high school with college and be somebody.
“Of course, I do hire people who speak Spanish,” he added, but his key was understanding what things bring people together.
Having a good time and refusing to settle
Citing WNBA player and one-time NBA analyst Chiney Ogunwike, hall-of-famer Becky Hammond, and the league’s 30 mascots, El implored that the audience look into ensuring they find a way to bring their whole selves to the workplace and have fun in it.
Ogunwike, an outspoken member of the Connecticut Sun had been sidelined for a year, but was brought on by ESPN as a broadcast analyst. For her first day on the job, she broke code from what we normally see of suit-and-tie sports reporters, with a bright red jumpsuit that spoke to her fiery personality on and off the court.
And for Hammond, already a retired successful staple of two WNBA franchises, it was her joy of the sport, and her persistence post-retirement, that brought her to the storied San Antonio Spurs team and led her to become the first (and still only) female assistant coach in the league.
El said, “If she can refuse to settle, you can too.”
Keeping in tune with yourself — and be yourself
In preparation of a date with her future husband, El shook off early signs of what turned out to be glaucoma. “I was in LA on a shoot,” she recalled, “and I had trouble seeing from one eye as I was applying mascara. It had been three since I've been to the eye doctor. I knew I needed to maybe go check for glasses. I didn't wear glasses at the time because we were having gone, right. That's when you know three can.”
When her vision worsened, she finally checked herself out with her optometrist, whose diagnosis changed her mindset completely. “Three years, because I wasn't being in tune with myself. Don't do that.” Ever since, to challenge and take care of herself better, she climbs a group of seven mountains in California once, sometimes twice, a year.
When asked if she has a more daily habit from the audience, she said she doesn’t try to have one outside of sleeping earlier. “I used to not need sleep, but now I do.”
She quipped: "Also, there ain’t nothing wrong with a glass of red wine.”
Her final bit of advice, being yourself, involved a call back to her younger days and a stint in school where she withdrew in herself. “I was in the third grade and I was devious. I had a lot of fun, I laughed all the time. I have a ton of competence. I knew I was going to own the world at that age.
“I grew up like most of us did, like most women do, and I started going in myself. I started doubting myself. I started losing that confidence I had as a little girl.”
Once she got to high school, that withdrawal scared her out of attempting to join her friends on the cheerleading squad. With encouragement from her principal, she took her next opportunity to join the squad in another role: the high school mascot.
“If you’ve been a mascot, it’s so much better being a mascot, because there’s only one of you,” she said. “I say that to tell you to follow the road less traveled — it’s so much more fun. And anytime you get horns, a tail, you can’t go wrong.
“That mascot is why I became the CMO of the NBA, and it’s because I knew it needed to happen."