Does he have the best job in Sports? Most people will say yes! What does Eric Oberman Do? Find out!

The Chris DeBlasio Podcast

Does he have the best job in Sports? Most people will say yes! What does Eric Oberman Do? Find out!

- Without our integrity, without our character, what else do we have? You could have 40 years of amazing work experience. If you're not a good person, you don't treat people well, you don't work hard, it's gonna come back to bite you. So those are some of the intangibles that I tell when I'm talking to, to folks who are looking for experience.

- So Eric, hey, thanks for having me out. This is a pretty impressive office here. I mean, you've got all the, all the basketballs and, and, so, I wanted to learn a little bit more about you, get into your background, you know, and we're gonna talk about a lot of different things, like leadership, and team development, and what, how to identify talent and stuff like. But tell me a little bit about you. Where are you from, and how'd you get into all this?

- Absolutely. I'm from Ohio, born and raised. Went to the Ohio State University, very proud of that. And graduated, got into sports communications at a pretty early age. I love sports, and my major was in the school of journalism, so.

- Specific, specific sport you were interested in, or just sports in general?

- You know growing up in Columbus, the only, I joke, the only pro team we had was college football.

- [Chris] Right, right.

- So, cut my teeth on college football and major league baseball. Ohio State Buckeyes and Cincinnati Reds were my, my two passions. And started at a small agency in Columbus, and from there I moved to Chicago. A lot of my friends wanted the bigger city, so we all moved up there. And my career took off at that point. I realized that communications was, was my passion and anything I could do to bring sports into the mix, I did. So for example, my first client was, was with Procter and Gamble and it was Crest toothpaste.

- Uh oh. I'm hearing product placement. That's Procter and Gamble.

- Well, but Crest sponsored a program tied to the Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Indians where, every time one of their players got a base hit, they would donate money to charity. Then they'd get a local sponsor to match it. So even though 95% of the work I did had nothing to do with sports, that 5% that did was really what made it worthwhile to get up and go to work each day. And that, that took me to Chicago, where I worked at Ketchum. I worked on Motorola was a client, and they sponsored the PGA Tour Western Open. So again, 90 something percent was, cellular technology, and cellular phones, new products. But just enough with sports to, to really light the fire and keep the passion going.