Christi De Ved Brings Game Play to Game Day

“You learn to walk, and then you play lacrosse.”

Christi De Ved explains how things work in Baltimore. By the time she picked up a stick, she was already a regular at the ballpark: her father, a CPA and CFP, spent decades advising professional athletes, including Major League Baseball players, on the financial decisions that came with their careers. Nights and weekends revolved around sports. Playing them was inevitable.

“I was enjoying sports before I was playing sports,” she says.

She continued playing club Lacrosse at the University of Georgia. Years on teams taught her to show up prepared and keep practicing on days she would rather stay home. Working towards an outcome as a team was a way of life well before it became a way of working.

Then sports became the job. Over twelve years at IMG, Christi helped activate sponsorships at the Super Bowl, MLB All-Star events, College championships, PGA events, and the Olympics. Her clients included DIRECTV, Coca-Cola, Visa and Under Armour.

As a Group Director at Sageworx, she expanded into brand strategy and integration. Now Vice President of Marketing at DAZN for Business (formerly EverPass Media), she works at the intersection of sports distribution, brand and customer experience – helping translate an increasingly complex media landscape into something commercial venues can actually use.

Christi's approach to leadership still looks a lot like a team sport: high standards, low ego and a focus on the collective result.

“I make sure that they’re recognized for everything they do,” she says of her team. “I care about doing good work. I care about the win.”

Experiential marketing allowed her to watch the consequences of decisions unfold in real time. She watched for “what really sparks joy, that moment,” and what caused unexpected reactions. Sometimes ideas that sounded terrific in planning could land differently on-site. Like a QB calling an audible, she got comfortable adjusting to what was happening in front of her.

She and Sageworx co-founder Pat Conreaux spent years together in agencies, worrying about generators cutting out and having enough brand ambassadors to run an event. During COVID, with three young boys at home, she stopped to consider what she wanted next.

Pat was building Sageworx with co-founder Marc Calamia, and they wanted her in it. Senior sports marketers who know how to produce against big budgets and premier live moments are hard enough to find, but when you combine Christi’s work ethic with her knowledge of integrated marketing promotions and her natural ability to lead cross-functional teams, they knew she was the right fit. She joined Sageworx as Group Director, and before long Pat and Marc were talking to her about becoming a partner in the business.

At Sageworx, her clients were startup brands and SMBs making their first major investments. A reimagined logo or a first website was a huge deal for many of them.

“They cared so much about those things because it’s their baby,” she says.

She had come from large sponsorship budgets, but at Sageworx the clients’ close involvement pulled her further into their businesses. Working alongside Sageworx specialists, she helped launch brands and put together go-to-market plans built to support the founders’ ambitions and scale aggressively. The work stretched her past sponsorships and live experiences into brand strategy and full funnel marketing integration. In her words, “it has grown my love of brand work.”

Then came EverPass. The company was brand new, backed by the NFL, and built to put commercial sports content on one platform so bars, restaurants and other hospitality venues could show the right game without juggling separate services. Its CMO was Bryan Icenhower, one of her previous mentors from IMG.

For Christi, the pieces lined up almost too neatly. A lifetime around sports. Twelve years activating at its biggest events. A history of working with DIRECTV. Fresh brand-building and go to market experience from Sageworx. And now the chance to help build a company from its first days, with ambitions as big as any client she had served. She joined as the second person on its marketing team.

Losing a would-be partner usually stings, but Pat and Marc were thrilled anyway. This was the kind of opportunity Sageworx exists to help their members say yes to. “We celebrated her decision,” explains Pat. “It felt right for her career and she was perfect for what they needed.”

Now she sat on the other side of the table. EverPass had a high-profile board to answer to, and growing quickly was non-negotiable. Her small team needed experienced marketers, “so I obviously knew where to go for that.”

Christi came back to Sageworx, this time as a client. She brought in teams she had once led, now helping her build the EverPass brand. The partnership ran for more than three years. “I care so much about this brand. I’m invested in telling our story and building our narrative,” she says. “I got to work with friends, and we produced really great work.”

For Sageworx, it is the best version of an alumni story: someone strong enough to nearly become a partner, who left for a bigger shot and kept working with the people she trusted.

At EverPass (now DAZN for Business), the brand had to make sense to the operator serving the sports fan. A neighborhood might have plenty of Premier League fans, but an owner has to determine whether the local fandom can justify the investment.

And then they literally have to get the match on the screen. Christi describes hospitality staff juggling customers’ requests and forgotten logins, trying to remember which box carries which event. Patrons get frustrated with the venue, and the operator puts the blame on the provider. She'd seen it before, building training playbooks for DIRECTV call centers early in her career: a small technical failure lands on the brand, not the box.

DAZN for Business brings commercial sports content into a unified platform so venue managers and staff can find the right game without hunting across separate services. What comes next for Christi is prioritizing the operator who has paid for that access and now needs to actually use it: “How can we help you see the return on that?”

She works with content partners to secure promotional assets venues can use to tell patrons what’s showing and encourage them to come back. Those assets are part of the conversation about content agreements, since a bar needs a way to promote the programming it buys.

All of this is growing in importance as watching from home gets more complicated. Christi understands it as a marketer, but she also understands the perspective of a fan. Because she is one.

Christi doubts viewers can keep paying for separate services to follow the few teams or sports they love. Downloading another app or finding where a game is showing asks people to make another decision before they can watch, and that’s a risk to viewership and fans’ connection with a sports property.

Christi does not expect the answer to be a return to one traditional bundle. Instead, she sees an opportunity for platforms to absorb more of the complexity behind the scenes while giving fans a simpler experience on the front end. That ability to aggregate content, technology and distribution is part of what makes DAZN's expansion in the U.S. compelling to her.

A venue that gets the game on gives people a place to watch together. Take a moment to think about a favorite sports memory. “I’m sure it wasn’t sitting on the couch alone,” she says. It was in a stadium, or with friends watching a huge game in a bar. The operator cultivates the physical place for a bigger experience.

And as a mother of three boys, Christi knows exactly what would get her own family through the door.

Christi’s ideal place to watch sports has room for kids to run and play while the adults enjoy the game. She appreciates being able to make a day of it around the Braves’ stadium, with places to stop and green space where the kids can play before anyone goes inside.

Her boys are already changing what her family watches. A player catches their interest, and suddenly they want to turn on a Champions League match they might otherwise have missed.

Most weekends, though, Christi is at the fields watching the boys themselves.

She hopes they keep playing a team sport, whatever level they choose – she enjoys seeing them enjoy it. And when the game moves to the backyard, she jumps right in.

Christi has spent years creating sports experiences, and experiencing sports. She wants to watch with friends, and make space for memories with her kids, too. The venue she imagines has two games worth sharing, the one everyone came to watch, and the other playing out among them.

Christi De Ved is an Atlanta-based vice president of marketing at DAZN for Business whose work spans sponsorship activation, go-to-market strategy and brand integration. She served as a Sageworx Group Director before returning as a client at EverPass Media. We’re proud to have worked with her on both sides of the table.

Follow Christi on LinkedIn.