Sascha Stalica

It’s all about shared values

After more than 10 years on the company side of international superbrands like Red Bull and Airbnb I decided to join the sports marketing agency and consultancy Apollo18. The CEO kindly offered the opportunity to develop nothing less than “the sports agency of the future” with him and an excellent existing team.

Within two years we not only established a new digital team and location in Berlin, but aimed for pushing the boundaries of highly strategic and state-of-the art sports marketing, making Apollo18 one of the leading players in German sports agency landscape.

Find some insights on our work at Apollo18 on the Sportsmaniac Podcast.

Challenges

• The key challenge was to establish a new company culture, define common values and onboard everyone to the new mission of Apollo18. Through integrative team sessions, rounds of iterative feedback and strong planning we managed to establish an outstanding company culture, respecting the existing team and creating an attractive welcoming culture for new team members.
• Opening a new location in Berlin, we build a full social media, content and creative unit from scratch including the set up of many new work processes, fostering new ways to attract clients and conquering new areas of expertise from CRM, agile project management all the way to C-level strategic consultancy.
• Meanwhile the agency operates with a full digital scope and focus across three locations, helping clients such as Mercedes-Benz, comdirect, Unicef, XING, Gazprom and Allianz to excel in their manifold Sportmarketing and -sponsoring involvements.

UX for the win!

However you tackle the digital challenges in your customer facing business, one of the goals most likely involves creating a seamless and engaging digital user experience in order to position your service or product.

I was challenged with a broad range of challenging tasks for clients across various areas of their digital business.

Challenges

• I supported an international lifestyle brand to develop a digital “rebranding” strategy focusing on sales optimization and brand awareness across their digital channels and e-commerce models.
• The lead agency of an international automotive company requested my help developing a multi-step plan to optimize their national digital channels, implement editorial guidelines, create national content standards and effective channel management workflows.
• A big German sporting good seller asked for help developing a social media channel strategy in order to extend their e-commerce business by creating additional high value sales conversions.
• As part of a project team I helped analyzing the tech solution market for a big German publisher in order to find the most fitting and interlaced content discovery, analytics, CMS and social media management software solutions.

Hail to storytelling!

“Content is king” is still proclaimed by many. I would argue one could rephrase this sentence into “storytelling is king” and in addition to that “distribution is queen”.

Producing the right content, matching your digital business model and drive relevant conversions through smart distribution is crucial for digital success. I had the chance to help create those business model and bring them to life with very different clients and therefore very diverse content approaches.

Challenges

• In collaboration with an agency network I led the development of a content marketing strategy for a new digital product of one of the biggest German insurance companies.
• Within the process of a sports clubs digital business transformation, I was able to deliver an in-depth multi-channel content analysis in order to lay the groundwork for a new content strategy and optimized, data-driven consumer journeys.
• Being tightly connected to one of the most innovative content marketing companies in the FMCG world, I constantly get the chance to support the developments of national media campaigns, multi-channel content packages and technical solutions for new projects and products.

Measure, analyse, adapt, repeat

The digital transformation of businesses is in full swing and here to last. A lot of businesses I offer my service to, are in exactly that phase of transformation, searching for digital business opportunities, scalable business models and ultimately a projectable ROI or solid numbers to back up and measure their marketing spendings.

In order to do so, it is crucial to be able to judge the value of content, conversions and consumer engagement. Helping to find these solutions I was able to provide my services to various clients.

Challenges

• I received the challenging task to lead the analysis of digital market and business potentials for a set of eight international markets for a big FMCG brand. The goal was to develop sustainable business plans and models based on content and digital product distribution, national partnerships, data-matching and brand awareness.
• Together with a successful German service-on-demand startup I was able to create strategies to extend their core business of brand promotions throughout their existing and new digital channels.
• During a phase of digital transformation I led the development of digital business acquisition opportunities for a leading national action sports agency.

Pushing the right buttons!

A “creative idea” can be seen and judged very differently from person to person. Needless to say, working in the area of marketing “creativity” is one of the core qualifications a good storyteller needs to bring to the table. However, to really trigger a strong and effective creative process, there are (like in every professional area) tools, which will not only bring focus to your ideation process, but most likely ensure a higher qualitative outcome.

Following these rules I had the chance to develop workshop formats and run creative sessions across a broad range of topics for different clients.

Challenges

• I was able to develop a tailor-made workshop concept on “content creativity” for the PR branch of the biggest German sports brand.
• In cooperation with a lead agency I was challenged multiple times to develop a set of international digital campaign ideas for Germany`s biggest airline.
• The lead agency of a big automotive brand challenged a creative team under my supervision to create innovative ideas for an international car launch, focusing on connectivity and network intelligence.
• While setting up their annual business plan, an international FMCG brand asked me to run creative sessions with digital influencers to come up with new ways of digital distribution and technical solutions for communications.