Vegas Golden Knights Case Study

So I’m super privileged to be the V.P. of entertainment production here. Part of the production team an entertainment team here at the Vegas Golden Knights. Happy editing. No, it’s fine you guys can talk. Just don’t drop f-bombs.

I’m Ayron Sequeira, Senior Director of Entertainment Production for the Vegas Golden Knights.

So game presentation is, there’s more to the experience for the fans than the game itself. You’re trying to create an atmosphere and environment for the fans and engage fans and give them compelling stories and narratives that hopefully it complements a winning game because it’s always a lot more fun when you win 5-1 and everybody’s party and you’re playing YMCA. But sometimes you don’t always win all the games and since we can’t score the goals, it’s our job and the game presentation world to create an atmosphere that, in case you do happen to lose the game or the crowd’s a little flat that night, our job is to entertain and embrace the fun creating home-ice advantage and giving people something to talk about long after the game is over.

So as senior director,  my job is to write all of the game day scripts. It’s to ideate our TV time outs and our intermissions. And it’s to basically lead the team of stage managers and show producers. At the core of, in my opinion a successful team, it’s the people. You can have the most talented people in the world but if there’s not a synergy and creative energy that’s shared and a vision that’s shared and a passion that’s shared, if you don’t have that you can have the most talented people on earth. And I don’t think the fans are going to feel the love that you create in what you build and what you do so we need to do all the right tools to be able to do that. It starts with people but the tools is a very close second after that and you have to have the right ones to do the right things and we all know and live events. You write up the perfect script and it’s 100 it’d be an A-plus in an English class. But the minute the puck drops everything changes. So a product like Shoflo allows us to be fluid to give the fans the best experience and to make changes on the fly and the communication cascades to everyone for success.

My prior teams it was an all Excel-based for scripting. You want to start where you plan to end. And being efficient and being transparent was really important to our team.

One of the big phrases from our team president is visibility creates accountability

To be visible to be transparent you’re putting yourself out there and in the game presentation world do you do that. Do you take a camera shot you put up a video you play a song you’re up for scrutiny. People say I love it or I hate it. That’s part of being transparent Shoflo enables us to be as confident as we can to be visible to all aspects of our business.

Eighteen seasons of Excel files you kind of get into a rut you get familiar and you get comfortable. Making the jump to Shoflo wasn’t terribly scary, it really wasn’t. We were very fortunate that Stephen and the team there were like, “give us your Excel files we’ll import them for you so that your formats are already in there.” So there’s a comfort there the fact that we can have real-time chat and we can ask questions. I had a bunch of questions when we started about like, “hey, how do I do a group change or how do I do move things?” If you can do Excel, you can do Shoflo.

Our script isn’t just game presentation… Marketing cares about what’s going on as there are certain initiatives that they need to see that’s making sure everything’s accurate. Sponsorship needs to know what’s going on. Is that the right logo, is that the right timeout, are things in the right places? Ticket sales has messaging where they need to hear what’s going on. Hockey Operations wants to know about certain timings that are going on. So Shoflo allows us to be incredibly transparent. There’s a whole myriad of ways to see the story we’re trying to tell on paper and the more eyes you have on something and the more producers and people that can help improve us to be the best we can be.

It’s just so accessible. You can see it on your phone, you can see it on an iPod, you can see it on a desktop, you see it on screens in the control room! It’s accessible and immediately up-to-date in a way that Excel or Word or whatever else will never be. It’s a time saver.

It’s one of those wonderful products that you don’t know you need until you’re using it.