Beyond the ballpark: How the SF Giants build year-round connections

An EMS preview

Ahead of their session at Experiential Marketing Summit 2026, this episode of Invision’s Inside the Brand Experience, Invision’s Rodrigo Espinosa, SVP, Integrated Campaigns, sat down with Sara Grauf, SVP of Experience Development at the San Francisco Giants, to talk about how one of the most iconic franchises in sports is redefining what it means to engage fans today.

From her 25-year journey with the Giants, Sara shared how the organization has evolved from a transactional model, selling tickets and calling it a day, into a year-round, experience-driven brand. They explored how every touchpoint, from the moment fans arrive in the neighborhood to what they eat and share on social, is intentionally designed to build deeper connection.

This isn’t just about baseball. It’s about designing for relationships, not transactions, and creating moments people want to come back to again and again.

Transcript

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Welcome to the Invision podcast, Inside the Brand Experience, where we discuss trends and approaches that cut through the noise and allow brands to own every moment with their customers. Today, we're kicking off with our new series, Innovators in Experiential, where we spotlight fresh, practical ideas shaping the future of event marketing. And today we're welcoming Sara, Sara Grauf from the San Francisco Giants.

Sara Grauf:

Hi, Rodrigo. Thanks for having me.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Thank you, Sara. Thank you for joining us. And you've been quite the innovator over your career at the San Francisco Giants and beyond, specifically in experiential and customer design and customer flow and experiential design. Take us a little bit about when you landed at the Giants, what it was like and then how that's evolved from an experiential perspective.

Sara Grauf:

Sure. Well, I joined the club about 25 years ago. So well before experiential marketing was a thing and we had chief experience officers and everything else. But really I had joined when the ballpark had just opened in 2000. I joined the club in 2001, but we were still in what I would call the prior era of sports where you were still in a little bit more of a transactional element. People were building really cool buildings and facilities that were evolving the experience a bit, but you were still basically marketing to someone, selling a ticket, saying goodbye on their way out, and then waiting until the next game, and it was kind of a rinse and repeat.

And I think over the last 25 years, we've seen just this incredible growth in terms of how brands and I think sports franchises in particular are really trying to reach their customers, stay engaged with them on a longer horizon, and just become more embedded in the fabric of who our fans are as people, not just who they are as patrons.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

That's a great setup to how experiential sports marketing has evolved, going from transactions and how many transactions can you garner and creating experiences specifically for the transaction momentum that one wants to have, a sports team in this case wants to have or any other brand. And something that's super unique that the Giants has done is you've really gone beyond the game itself. What was the behavior shifts that you saw and also your own organizational shifts that you saw that led you guys to this sort of, it's not just the game, it's so much more than the game for our fans.

Sara Grauf:

Yeah, I think there's a lot that factors into that. You have the rise of social media, so you just have so many more touchpoints with your fans and how you can interface with them when you're outside of your event day experience. You have whatever's happening in your market or community. So we're obviously an urban based ballpark. We have competition with other sports teams, but there's also a rising tides mentality that as we all start to do more for our fans, we grow and take up a bigger part of the entertainment space. And then you have what's going on economically. For us in San Francisco and many sports facilities that you're seeing, you have these large mixed use developments that are coming out alongside sports facilities because the economics of our industry has changed and you're now looking for a much more diverse revenue portfolio. And that also ties into how you engage and interact and keep your fans really operating within your ecosystem on a year-round basis.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Thank you. Thank you for that. Gosh, there's so much there that plays into it, like you said, there's the economic, there's a changing landscape of the urban environment. I mean, I remember when the ballpark opened up and there was a trend there of ballparks like San Diego and others going back in these urban environments versus outside of the city and so forth. And when you first decided to do that and kind of incorporate your guys into that urban environment and become part of the city, what was the reaction to the fans initially?

Sara Grauf:

Yeah, well, I think our fans were happy that we were staying in San Francisco. So it saved the team from moving to Florida. We were able to privately finance a ballpark. And I think we did that always with an eye toward the future, always knowing that we wanted to be stewards of an incredible experience for our fans and for our community. So while it was a 15-year conversation for all of this stuff to come to fruition, we've finally now gotten Mission Rock out of the ground. We've got some incredible buildings built, we've got a beautiful waterfront park, and that's now really the front door for our fans as they're experiencing our venue.

So we're now kind of taking that next step of saying, okay, how are we reaching our fans earlier? How are we creating a full day long adventure for them as opposed to a two and a half hour baseball game? How are we creating memories for them outside of our ballpark in addition to those just unforgettable, real, live-driven moments that sport provides. Now we get to be co-creators of that entire day for them, which is a really unique experience and also a pretty big responsibility in some ways, but it's a lot of fun. So we're enjoying it.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

It's fascinating to see, and I think there's so many parallels to the business as a whole from an experiential perspective that the game and the players are still obviously super important, but it's one moment in time tethered by all these other moments. And I think that when you look at the Super Bowl, for example, or any major event or significance that sort of pops into Vegas or into San Francisco or into Chicago, there is this palette where you can design an experience from the ground up. You have X number of games every year, you're designing experiences every day for hundreds of times a year for an audience, a loyal audience, sometimes as a tourist audience. What are the two or three things that you and your organization take into account when doing the mapping of the experience outside of the ballgame?

Sara Grauf:

Yeah, I mean, I think outside of the ballgame in particular, we have to think about who a lot of our fans are that are coming. You may need to create a very different experience for a family with young children than you need to create for a super-fan who's been coming to the ballpark for 20 years, and that's very different than your casual social 30-something-year-old fan who's coming, and this is really the first stop on a lot of things that they're going to be doing in their day or evening in San Francisco. So really thinking through the customer journey is important to us, and that customer profile is really important to us. And so a lot of what I do is I spend time taking what our CMO's brand marketing strategy is in terms of how do we create that initial relevance with different demographics or potential fan groups.

And then I try to think about, okay, well then how do we help bring that to life on every touchpoint of their journey, thinking about where they're coming from, where they may be sitting, where they're going to after the game. So it's a lot about, again, that initial brand strategy and how do we get the attention of these fans in the first place? That's really done a lot in our marketing team side. And then my team spends a lot of time focusing on what's the true manifestation of that as people come in. And we have to think about where are they spending their dollars? Where again, are they coming in from? So a lot of stuff around transportation in an urban environment. We've started doing some really cool things thinking about the last mile of what is that user experience like coming off of a transit platform for them walking to the ballpark?

Or if they're landing from a ferry on the waterfront, can they take a petty cab to get to the ballpark? And if so, we see that as a touchpoint. So how can we brand that? How can we make that experience part of their journey? So it's really been an awesome way for us to extend our palette to get outside of the walls of the ballpark.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Yeah. You shared with me the pedicabs and that you folks gave them the certain music to play on their boomboxes in the pedicabs, correct?

Sara Grauf:

We did an anthem for our team a little while ago just going with a new marketing campaign. And so being able to get that sound out on the streets well in advance of the ballpark to really get the energy up and get people thinking about their experience, that's not necessarily a brand new thing for us. I mean, when you think about All-Star Games that we hosted here back in 2007, we've still tried to think about how you have this connectivity, but I think this layered experience and the depth at which we're trying to go at all points of the customer journey has really increased over the years.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Yeah, that's something I want to spend a little bit of time with is the depth of the layered experience because I think traditionally integrated campaign marketing, experiential marketing into account, are there two or three things in general that you take into account that then you drill down into the layers that are more specific?

Sara Grauf:

I mean, I think there are. There's a couple different ways to approach this one. So obviously being in San Francisco, we're a food-first culture. So we think about food as a major touchpoint, whether that is how is your culture reflected in food or how are your pop culture interests reflected in food? We theme a lot of things for our special events nights when we have people in the ballpark. So we always see food as central to our experience, and that's one area where you can go a lot deeper. I think we think a lot about just lifestyle brand in general and potential advocacy.

So going deep with our customers is really where you can build loyalty and advocacy. You can, again, cast a wide net and become relevant to a lot of people, but how do you keep it sticky? We think a lot about intersectionality. So what other interests do these consumers have that we can really play up and bring the Giants brand into? Fashion, food, pop culture, music. There's just so many of those elements that we really think a lot about when we're designing that fan experience.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

You folks are bringing in 45,000 people into a game on a regular basis. What are the measurement elements that you look at to know that you're hitting the cultural aspects well for such a diverse ... 45,000 people is a really big group of people coming in. How do you know you're hitting that cultural nuance or maybe even not overstepping it sometimes or under delivering it on it?

Sara Grauf:

Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting question. I mean, tying it to food specifically. Think about how many times you go into restaurants and you see everybody taking Instagram pictures of their food. So obviously it's important to people. It's part of how they identify and share their experience. So we could look at a lot of metrics. We could look at how many chicken tenders we sell or where we rank in terms of how great our hotdog is, or we can look at how many people are sharing their food experience on social media. How many people are expressing positive sentiment relative to a food item that has a cultural element to it, or again, a pop culture element or some of these other things. How many people are sharing stories of discovery, the serendipity of coming to the ballpark and experiencing something new as opposed to getting the same thing every time.

So I think we try to look at it very holistically. Yes, at the end of the day, revenue is a huge component of any team's food and beverage strategy, but we also need to think about maybe you don't make as much on one particular item, but that makes that fan want to come back again because they want to share that with their friend. They want to break bread, so to speak, in our ballpark over an item that they now have a little bit more of an emotional connection to or an identity with. And so those are really compelling things for us. We obviously do a lot of pop-up programming in the ballpark around certain elements, and we look at the trends of how do they sell, but again, how do they show up in terms of that individual consumer advocacy so that we can see if we're starting to hit on some of the right trends or opportunities for our fans?

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Share with me the advocacy piece, because you look at the standard linear marketing funnel that's pretty much Uber fragmented now, but that advocacy piece that you talked about there about you can measure how many chicken nuggets you sell or how many X things you sell, but you can also measure how much a particular food item was shared. And that's so fascinating to me because you're looking at such a different, you're not linear in the measurement aspect of it. And so from a social perspective, what are the metrics that you look for if something's hitting or not hitting?

Sara Grauf:

Well, I think a lot of times what we see is who our first-time buyers are going to be. So you may have someone who now we have so many metrics around your identified fan and attendance. Can you actually pinpoint the profile of your fan that's here or who that particular consumer is? And you may have people that didn't buy a ticket, but you can tell now from social media, they were here, they were engaging, they must have been a friend of a fan, and now they're purchasing their own first ticket. They're now entering our funnel as a consuming fan as opposed to maybe somebody that we were reaching from a secondary or tertiary perspective.

So looking at those first time buyers is really important. And then also how many of those first time buyers are converting and coming back to the ballpark again and again for various things. Are they continuing to buy on special event nights or heritage nights or are they continuing to buy on nights with a different type of pricing strategy? So you can dig into all these things to really start to understand what's driving the consumers to come back.

But a lot of it is, it goes into decision-making. We live in a very noisy world. Email's popping off all the time. You're getting all these text messages about what ticket to buy and what to do. But at the end of the day, a lot of us make a decision when a buddy says, "Hey, let's go to the ballpark tonight." And so it's how do we become that thing that people want to share with each other? How do we build not a transaction, but a relationship? How do we go from dating once to getting engaged and getting married and staying relevant with these fans on a much longer time horizon and making them want to share us with the rest of their family? It's that mind shift that I think we really try to embrace. We want to be more than a transaction for our fans. We just really want to be in a relationship with them and part of their true ecosystem.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

That's fascinating. And also such a great learning, just generally speaking from an experiential marketing perspective is that we've moved away from transactions and it's always been about relationships, but the models in place have been about transactions. I often talk about how did Sears lose its way because they were a box in the suburbs doing transactions and they knew nothing about their customers and Amazon knows everything about their customers and it's more of a relationship when you log on to their app, they know who you are, they know where you live, et cetera. It's a real interesting transition. The consumers are so much more empowered today.

And if you're delivering a message or delivering a product, you're delivering a service, an experience that's worth sharing, you're going to share it because your customer, to your point about, hey, my buddy says let's go to the game. That's your best marketing channel. Is that word of mouth? Is it enticing them in that way? From a trigger perspective, like an experiential design perspective, do you design moments where you think are going to be more impactful than others? From a design perspective, they walk in, they walk out or this side of the park or that side of the park or your partners around the park. You guys have designed a beautiful neighborhood. You're essentially the anchor of the newest neighborhood in San Francisco. Do you rate or design according to different moments in time?

Sara Grauf:

Well, I mean, I think that's part of the beauty of live sport, is you never know what's going to happen in the facility on any given day. And we still want that to be our core. That's what cannot be replaced is this unscripted entertainment spectacle that people get to enjoy, but can we augment that? Can we play in these adjacent spaces? Absolutely. We can do things like making sure that on sunny summer afternoon that we're encouraging people to get out in kayaks and be in our cove to catch home run balls and do something that you can't do in any other ballpark. We can think about, again, that fan who's coming to the game for their first time and it maybe can't sit through nine innings of baseball, but they can go play ski ball down in our bullpen boardwalk or they can play Papa Shot and then get back into the seats or go down the Coke bottle slides.

You have to think about how you are rounding out those moments where the person isn't maybe fully focused on the strike that's going across the plate or the home run that's being hit at that time. So we do a lot of things about building the physical environment and that fan journey through there. And I think those things all, again, they help because if it is a day where your product is a little bit less flat, if you're not hitting home runs and winning that game, people are still having an excellent time.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

You folks, you've got the team, obviously, you've got a championship team, that's your main product. You have the design, the beautiful ballpark, to your point about the architecture and the moments and times. But from a competition perspective, what do you see as something that you got to be conscious about that your ideal customer may choose to do versus coming to experience a ballgame?

Sara Grauf:

Well, you nailed it. I mean, time is the biggest thing that we think about because people's time is often worth more than their money. They only have so much of it and want to make sure that they're building experiences that they, again, want to share with others. And that could be going to a movie theater, it could be a musical concert, it could be a Broadway play, it could be sports, it could be one of the many sports that we compete with in market. So that time factor is huge for us. We also think a lot about the fact that we have 81 games a year. We're unlike some other sports, football or soccer where they're actually only trying to have this relationship in ballpark and drive that experience 15, 20 times a year. That's very different than trying to do it on a scale of 81 games.

So how do we stay relevant, but not boring to people and not be so predictable in terms of what people can experience, but also be comfortable. These are all these fine lines. We think a lot about how do we stay true to the heritage and the tradition of our club, but also appeal to fans that again, have this intersection of interests that are causing us to present the game in slightly different ways. There's an ever ongoing discussion around how many stats, there's too many stats and how much data do our fans want to consume. So all of those things are what we think about in terms of the trade-off of the experience that we're trying to provide.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

And what are you seeing out there as a marketer, as an experiential marketer that has impressed you? Not necessarily in your industry, but just in general, we just had the Super Bowl here in both of our backyards in San Francisco. There's some pretty impressive things San Francisco did. I know you folks are part of bringing San Francisco back to life, which is going very well this past 12, 18 months or so, which is wonderful. And you folks played such a role in being such an iconic brand and team of San Francisco to bring people back into the city.

But what are you seeing out there, your sister teams, you got the Warriors playing literally blocks away from where you're at, the 49ers. Are you seeing anything from them? Are you seeing anything in general sports? I mean, there's been such a earthquake for viewing rights and for the way people digest content where it's pushed us more to live, which is beneficial for us in our space. But what have you seen out there be like, wow, I wish I'd done that, or that's interesting, or how did they get to that place?

Sara Grauf:

Yeah, I think it's interesting that you bring up the content piece. I mean, short form content and behind the scenes content is vitally important to our strategy because again, people can buy a ticket and see what happens on the field, but they want to feel a part of what's happening in the clubhouse or in spring training. And so being really intentional about how do you capture and package content that you can use at various points depending on how the team's doing, what messaging you're trying to get across. That's something that I think our team has done a really good job of.

And I think, again, it's kind of showed up a couple times in this conversation, but just the ingenuity behind collaborations, whether that's with retail brands or with companies that are presenting content and experiences in different ways and making maybe some opportunities more accessible to consumers that weren't before because they're creating an experience or a lounge or something that makes it unique so the consumer doesn't even need to think about it. There's a lot happening there that I think is exciting.

And I also think just venues in general are starting to build in a way that is massively different than it was in the past. And just the way that we're tailoring facilities to different types of fan experiences, I think is going to be really fun to watch over the next decade or so with how purpose-built facilities are coming online, it's really exciting.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Analog is hip again, right? And the whole idea of architecture and being in an environment that is inspiring, physical aspect of the environment that's inspiring. And I don't think we're going to be putting our phones down anytime soon, but I do the sharing and the being in the physical presence, you mentioned sports and the uniqueness of sports, the idea of being there on a certain home run. I mean, I was there when, again, dating myself when Barry Bonds hit his home run that took him over the top. I mean, you can't relive that. That drives people. And I agree with you from a venue's perspective, it used to be the venue was the shell and the content that was in the venue was what drove people in, which it still is, but the experience of being in that shell, if you will, and that venue has become so much more important.

And as marketers who do events and do conferences, who listen to us and are putting moments and moments together, tethering those moments together, it's often overlooked that the venue itself is part of the experience. It's not just people are coming and they're experiencing the atmosphere, the vibe, whether it's urban or suburban or international or not. What are you folks doing specifically? I know you're doing a revamping of the stadium, a refresh, if you will, right? How have you taken the refresh of the architecture and maybe tweaked it to the audience today versus if you were doing this tweak 10 years ago or so?

Sara Grauf:

Well, I think again, it's designing for certain types of consumers. So you have to look at your premium inventory very differently now than we did 25 years ago. Brands are building these product ladders now where you have your entry level experience that is for the masses and that people want, and then you have your higher price point experience that is locked in exclusivity. And there's something else there that's driving a different type of consumer profile. So we think a lot about those spaces. I think we think a lot about just how people move. People used to be able to come in and we had an attention span where you sat in your seat for most of the game except for the one or two times you went up to use the restroom or get your food and beverage. Now people are on a discovery journey when they walk in these buildings.

So how do you actually think through the pedestrian paths in your journey and your people movement strategies to make sure that you're guiding them in efficient ways and enjoyable ways so that they can experience everything that you want to showcase in your facility? So those are the things that are driving some of our decision making now. How do you present things like your retail in a different way than you did before? It used to be one store at a facility.

Now you've got a lot of micro hubs that you're starting to see because you want it to be easy for people to access, but then you also need to think about how do you carry product at different parts in your ballpark. So there's a whole thing that goes into that. You think a lot about food delivery, like where are you ordering in seats versus people that are getting up to share their own belly up concessions experience. So there's a lot of people mapping that happens when you're starting to look at the future of your facility.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Thank you, Sara. As we get closer to wrapping up, what have you seen in the audience, the audience desire, the audience? I mean, we in our work, we're catering to multiple generations from Gen Z all the way up to Boomers. And you see in your 45,000 folks that come see your ballgame, you see all that. What has surprised you in how audiences are engaging differently now? You talked about the digestion of content that certainly is there. You talk about the getting around and the pedestrian walks. And you're right, when I go to a game, I walk around with my kids and sort of exploring, even though we've been there a number of times. But what is one area that caught you by surprise, maybe the newer fans coming into the Giants that you've been like, oh, okay, that's very different than the previous generations?

Sara Grauf:

One of the things that we're thinking about a lot right now is how the pendulum's swinging and how technology delivers experiences and when is technology too much technology? When are younger fans actually yearning for a little bit more of the personal interaction versus when are they on second and third screens in their seats and not really caring if there are people there to assist them? So I think we're thinking a lot about that balance still. And that's obviously a conversation that's been going on for a little while, but I do think we're starting to get to a point where you mentioned it earlier where analog's becoming really important again. And so how do we create some of those spaces as we start to see how the next generation of consumers is going to show up here?

But then also, as we've mentioned before, consumers these days have what I call a web of interest. There's not one or two things anymore. It's how do nine things capture their attention? They're starting to be fans of individual players more than just teams. So how do you leverage some of that if you have a visiting team or a visiting player, for instance, in your ballpark where you're still putting your brand first and foremost, but maybe creating an opportunity for all those fans who are really identifying with another player to share a moment in a different way. So there's just a lot of that that we think about in terms of the layered experience for our fans.

Rodrigo Espinosa:

Well, you guys over there, you and your entire team are crushing it, so I congratulate you on that. I thank you for your time. To our audience, thank you. And please join us at the Experiential Marketing Summit taking place May 18th to 20th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Our session, where we'll explore more of these topics, is taking place on Monday the 18th at 3:00 PM. And for more information, go on to eventmarketer.com.

Thank you again for joining the podcast today. Thank you, Sara. And to our audience, stay tuned for our next episode of Innovators in Experiential. Thank you, Sara.

Sara Grauf:

Thank you.