FIS Media & Marketing Open For Business

It has been a busy summer at the International Ski and Snowboard Federation. In the span of two months, the governing body for six Winter Olympic disciplines has built from scratch an all-new FIS Media and Marketing division.

Headed by Chief Commercial Director Christian Salomon, the arm of FIS, known as FIS M&M, will lead all commercial and partnership activities in the future as FIS adapts its marketing structure to centralize its broadcast and sponsorship rights.

FIS has made it well-known in the last year that the goal of the organization is to bring the rights all back under the FIS roof to be centrally managed. This includes most notably the rights for, broadcast, sponsorship and digital.

“It isn’t often that such an amazing opportunity presents itself,” said Salomon. “To build an entire media and marketing division from the bottom to the top is an ambitious goal and one that I am firmly convinced we can achieve. The entire FIS M&M team is firmly committed to adding new value to FIS and elevating its sports to a new level.”

Salomon has spent his first months building his team. Notably, Olivier Kraus signed on at the same time as Salomon as the Director of Global Partnerships with the focus on building up a strong base of partners.

Also joining FIS M&M at the start of this month is Roberto Nosotti as the Director of Media Rights, who is no stranger to the winter sports world having worked decades in winter sports broadcast rights. Oliver Quast, an experienced sports and media lawyer formerly with FIFA and the EBU will join the team as the Director of Business and Legal Affairs in due course.

With the key team members in place, it is now full steam ahead for FIS M&M to begin its operations.

The first priority will be going to market with open sponsorship packages. Those packages include the title partnerships for the FIS World Cup tours, Data and Timing partnerships and Central partners for the Nordic World Cups. Already the team has been busy renewing existing title partnerships, which will be announced as the winter season nears.

FIS will additionally take in house the implementation of all partner packages and has already hired a team made up of four individuals who will oversee the partner visibility on the various World Cup tours.

While the primary initial focus of FIS M&M lies with building strong partnership relationships, the next phase will move into digital and production activities. These go hand-in-hand with finding strong partners to support a professional product.