Emirates Airline is a major player in the global carrier industry and a big player in sports sponsorship and marketing. So it is significant when Emirates says that it will sign deals with sports organizations such as FIFA and the U.S. Tennis Association but will not sign deals with individual athletes. And much of that strategy has to do with Tiger Woods.

Here we are at the All-Star Break. The pennant races are taking shape and with the other major team sports on hiatus, hopefully, American sports fans are thinking about taking in a ball game in the coming months. Faithful readers of this post know that I recently completed my bucket list item to visit all 30 current MLB ball parks, and with that achievement, I felt compelled to "grade them" on an admittedly subjective basis of my overall experience. But being the data-oriented sports marketing researcher that I am, it wasn't enough to simply let my own opinions address the …

In honor of the July 4th holiday, I thought about the relationship sports have had with America since its beginning and how important sports remains in our culture today. How do we like to pass the time in our daily lives? We watch, read, talk and play sports. This is at the core of where marketers and media outlets will want to find you. It's been this way for a long time.

With the Summer Olympics just a month away (July 27-Aug. 12), participating athletes, teams, coaches and marketing sponsors are awaiting the Games with baited breath. But others feel they have been baited into an unwanted situation.

No, this isn't about the State of New Jersey or breeding Jersey cows or sordid activity "down the Shore," but rather the huge business of licensed apparel. As the recent kerfuffle between Nike and Reebok attests-the former won a judge's order temporarily blocking the latter from using Tim Tebow's name on New York Jets apparel-this is not a game for the faint of heart.

As a marketing researcher who has seen more than my share of poorly executed research in the sports industry, I'll be among the first to advocate to clients about the importance of avoiding the trap of jumping to definitive conclusions off insufficient data. I've aimed my disdain at poorly constructed survey questions, and inappropriate sampling, as often as I've raised caution about the proper deployment of qualitative research. And while my company conducts a large number of focus groups and one-on-one interviews with sports fans and participants in facilities dedicated for these purposes, I'll caveat these engagements with a thorough …

Imagine you were trying to buy your first home (not a pleasant prospect at the moment, I know, but bear with me). However, the people who own the house at the moment refuse to tell you how much they paid for it three years ago. You also have no way of knowing what similar homes in the neighborhood sold for, other than a few rumors (that you have no way of verifying). Because you've never bought a home, you don't know whether it really is quite normal for you to have to pay for the closing costs and a vacation …

I just spent an exhilarating day at the Northeast Regionals of the Reebok CrossFit Games. The Regionals are a step in the process of naming the "Fittest Man and Woman on Earth." They're also part of a smart marketing initiative by Reebok to position itself as a leader in "The Sport of Fitness"-a phrase it is now using as a tag line in its marketing. This new initiative seems an obvious return to Reebok's fitness roots-not to mention a good way to carve out a unique identity in the competitive world of sports shoes and apparel.

In 2010, Procter & Gamble signed two deals that arguably could be described as the most significant and as having the most marketing impact in the company's history, one to become a global Olympics partner with the International Olympic Committee, the other to become the "official locker room" marketing partner of the NFL.

I spent much of the past week on one of my many pilgrimages to New York City - the media capital of the world. From the YouTube Brandcast event that highlighted the amazing effort Google is making to advance video content on the web, to the much more modest dinner roundtable event that my company hosted in the Village to discuss the dynamic between content context and audience targeting, I left the Big Apple more excited than ever to be a content publisher - that is, to be in the content-creation and audience-engagement business.