CASE STUDY:
DIGIDECK Transforms The 49ers Recap Season Into a Year-Round Partner Hub
The Challenge
As five-time Super Bowl champions, the San Francisco 49ers run a partnership operation on one rule: no partner gets the same deck as another. Every recap is built for that brand specifically, from the opening goals slide through the last activation photo.
For years that standard ran through PowerPoint, and the calendar shows what it cost.
Every November, the partnership design team started building a recap template that would be finalized in February. Once the season ended, the entire partnership marketing group duplicated that file and worked through it partner by partner, page by page, customizing manually as they went.
The file itself fought back. Recap decks can run up to 80 slides. Video was close to unusable because the file sizes were too large to attach.
“If it were a large partner’s deck I was working on, it would take me an hour to move a photo over, because the deck was so slow at that point.”
Michelle Rosar, Senior Director of Partnership Marketing
Brand integrity was the other casualty. Fonts drifted. Formatting broke. And because partners did not have the 49ers’ fonts installed, the finished deck could not be sent as a PowerPoint at all.
The hardest part was not the labor. It was that the tool was quietly setting a ceiling on the work. Managers were not adding their own ideas to a recap, because there was no time and no headroom left to add them.
“The ability to customize in DIGIDECK, beyond the templates that already adhere to our brand standards, has been game changing for our partner recaps. Storytelling is now easier and more impactful, and the recaps themselves are bespoke and engaging.”
- Annika Schultze, Senior Coordinator of Partnership Design
The Solution
With DIGIDECK, every partner now gets the elevated, tailored experience the 49ers always wanted to give them, and the team gets there in a fraction of the time.
Recaps still take time and care to build. That part has not changed, and the team would not want it to. What changed is where the hours go and how much of that can be spent directly with partners.
The bigger unlock is what a presentation can now contain. Video was effectively off limits in PowerPoint, because the file sizes crashed the application. On DIGIDECK it is standard, and that single change moved the team from describing an activation to showing it.
“When we send them the file of what runs on a video board, it’s hard to mentally picture it in-stadium. When you’re actually watching it play in-stadium through DIGIDECK, it adds a different element of realism,” Michelle Rosar shares.
The delivery itself changed with DIGIDECK too. Now, the 49ers use one link and update it throughout the lifecycle of the partnership (no re-sending and no version confusion).
Even more powerful? The recap itself stopped being something that happens once a year.
Instead, partners now have a living, breathing link they can access all season and off-season, whenever the 49ers are top of mind, on any device, at any time, anywhere in the world.
“My role is making sure we're providing ROI to our partners. We focus a lot on sharing moments and metrics. DIGIDECK blends both of those deliverables in a way where we don't have to tell our partners about ROI. We can show them. Us saying I swear this works is very different from allowing them to see it in a clean way.”
- Michelle Rosar, Senior Director of Partnership Marketing
