Steve Politziner, Good Karma Brands/ESPN West Palm
Steve Politziner is president of Good Karma Brands/ESPN West Palm. He joined the then-newly formed Good Karma Brands in 1998, after working one year as a financial analyst. At Good Karma, Politziner began on both the sales side and as an on-air personality hosting a daily sports talk show. He later helped to launch ESPN in West Palm Beach in 2003, and then worked 15 years as the general manager of ESPN West Palm.
About: Most people know us because of the power brand name — ESPN — but we are actually our own private company called Good Karma Brands. The company began as an affiliate operator for ESPN radio and has grown to a full-scale sports media and marketing company, operating everything from a college football bowl game, including the media, event and hospitality elements, to providing the sports content and talent for local newscasts on WPTVNBC 5 and WFLX-Fox 29, to representing digital inventory at ESPN Digital, ESPN.com and the ESPN app.
On the job
What I do: I have strategic and operational involvement across all of our ESPN markets, reaching over 2 million people in South Florida. It’s my role to ensure we are providing compelling content to our fans, representing our brand appropriately and developing effective solutions for our advertising partners.
What’s new: People are watching, listening, reading and communicating at record rates digitally, and the
ability for businesses to utilize our scale to distribute their brand’s message has massively altered our role of importance for companies and ad agencies clients’ brand building efforts.
Typical day: Conference calls; collaborating with our leadership teams across sales-content-marketing, attending a board meeting or visiting a station event or a networking event.
Industry wisdom: Having a name product will only get you so far, but having a culture that values people is the path to sustained success and long-term growth.
On the side
Reading: “Mindset — The New Psychology of Success,” by Carol S. Dweck