Yankees Make an Unbeatable Marketing Play with Avid

The New York Yankees are one of the most recognized and celebrated sports franchises in the world, with a brand that extends across many platforms. In order to create exciting experiences for fans and continue building the team’s legendary franchise brand, the Yankees leverage Avid’s industry-leading media management solutions (built upon the Avid MediaCentral platform).

New York Yankees: Make an Unbeatable Marketing Play with Avid

Thanks to Avid’s integrated workflows, Yankees editors can work on partially edited pieces from a laptop in Florida during spring training, then ship the content back to New York for fast capture and delivery. ISIS shared storage enables the team to utilize, protect, and optimize its valuable media assets—such as iconic footage of memorable plays or players—without having to access source tape.

New stadium, new Avid

With today’s professional sports organizations, the building of a stadium typically requires an entirely new production system. To build a competitive franchise on the brand level, creating an engaging fan experience is key. Greg Colello, Producer, Scoreboard and Broadcasting, and his crew chose Avid hands down.

“Avid to us is the industry standard in terms of editing,” Colello says. “We like to feel that as the Yankees, we’re kind of the industry standard for baseball. So having the two go hand in hand is a pretty good marriage.”

“Today, we can tell our fans about upcoming promotions, edit small packages to highlight the in-stadium steak house and Hard Rock Café, suites, tickets, and all the different ventures we’ve got going around here.”

Sports-centric workflow in play

In the new stadium, the Yankees have a complete sports-centric Avid workflow in play, comprised of four Media Composer editing systems, 48 terabytes of ISIS storage, an Interplay | Production asset management system providing editors with access to any piece of content at any time, and Transfer Manager software to move that content from editing station to clip server and play it out directly to the scoreboard.

With this end-to-end Avid workflow, the Yankees production group can produce all the content the organization needs. This not only helps the team make money through incremental revenue generators like the steak house and luxury suites, but save money by producing promotions in house rather than outsourcing.

Stimulating profit and creativity

Avid workflows have allowed the production team to enhance collaboration and streamline the production and distribution processes. Editors can now set up shared bins labeled, “historic footage,” or “rally footage,” or “player footage,” or any designation of choice in the Interplay system.

Once these have been established, they can search, retrieve, and replace footage, and use it repeatedly in a virtually limitless array of vehicles—from television spots and scoreboard highlights to taxi cab ads.

If I need a shot of CC Sabathia with the fist pump in the ’09 World Series, I don’t have to go down in the vault looking for it anymore,” comments Brandon Mihm, Yankees On Demand Producer. “I just type in CC ’09, ALDS, or ALCS, and boom, up it pops.”

“Right now, I’m working on a video about Yogi Berra, who’s getting a lifetime achievement award at a dinner coming up,” Colello adds. “All I have to do is open my Interplay window, search for Yogi, and tons of footage pops up. It makes my life a whole lot easier.”

Quality is key

From the production team’s perspective, it would be virtually impossible to do what they do without the level of quality Avid’s proven and trusted solutions bring to the stadium. “Everything we do is contained in the Avid workflow, from what we shoot on game day, take in and play out of the EVS server, to higher production level work,” says Michael Bonner, Senior Director of Scoreboard and Broadcasting.

Bonner says Avid’s legacy of reliability and performance are key for the team. “If these systems didn’t work as well as they do to get content to the scoreboard, Yankees.com, and television, we’d be in a lot of trouble,” Bonner explains.

“We just can’t afford to fail,” declares Pete Gergely, Yankees On Demand co-producer. “Just one day down could make us fall behind a week, because games keep happening, and we have to keep up. But when occasional things do happen, and we need a system restart, or there’s a problem we can’t figure out, it’s great to know Avid support is there, ready and waiting to help us get things straightened out.”