History
In 1992, when Ben C. Sutton, Jr., decided to leave the comfort of Wake Forest University, where he had earned an undergraduate and a law degree and worked in the athletic department for nine years, ISP, America's Home for College Sports, was born.
Although, the company wouldn't have been considered America's Home for College Sports back then.
As the director of sports marketing at Wake Forest, Sutton realized an inefficiency in the way most athletic departments sold their media rights. Often, radio, television, print and stadium signage rights each went to different companies, who then were forced to compete with each other for advertising revenue.
Sutton's vision was simple: what if a single entity took over all of the media rights and sold packaged deals to sponsors looking to advertise with the school's athletic programs?
Wake Forest, then under the leadership of Athletic Director Gene Hooks, bought into the theory and became ISP's first partner in 1992. The new business made its humble beginnings with one partner school and two employees in a small office space in an old barn in Reynolda Village in Winston-Salem, N.C.
In the first few years, ISP diversified its services in order to build a client base, doing various sports marketing, public relations and consulting projects for venues and properties such as the Southern Conference, Greensboro Coliseum and Exxon Co. USA. ISP even produced and marketed parcels of artificial turf from the University of Tennessee's football stadium when it was converted to a grass playing field in 1993.
Despite exploring different marketing avenues at first, the focus was always on acquiring multimedia rights for collegiate properties. And, in 1995, ISP got one step closer to that goal. Right after obtaining sales and marketing rights for the Vantage Championship, a PGA tournament held at Tanglewood Park in nearby Clemmons, N.C., ISP landed the multimedia rights to Virginia Tech. Sutton credited the acquisition with elevating ISP from a local sports marketing company to a regional one.
From there, business started growing. ISP continued to spend a lot of energy marketing events, including the Vantage Championship and Great Eight basketball tournament, in addition to Wake Forest and Virginia Tech, but other collegiate properties would soon be fast added to the mix.
In 1998, ISP secured the rights to Marshall and partnered with Learfield Communications to establish a joint venture at Alabama, doubling its collegiate client base. The next year Georgia Tech, Cincinnati, Ohio and Syracuse joined the growing family of ISP partner schools.
Sutton was honored in 1999 with the Entrepreneurial Success of the Year award from the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce in recognition for ISP's growth, which included a staff of 40 people and offices in eight cities outside of Winston-Salem - a far cry from the two employees and cramped office space in the beginning.
By 2000, it had become evident that ISP had found its niche in the realm of college athletics, and the 8-year-old company decided to drop events like the Vantage Championship and Great Eight in order to completely invest itself in its collegiate partnerships.
Over the next four years, ISP added Southern Miss, Vanderbilt, Villanova, UCF, Tulane, Houston and Auburn as well as joint ventures at Clemson, Miami and South Carolina to its constantly growing partner list.
The last three years have been astounding in terms of growth of the company. Since 2005, ISP has established alliances with more than 30 partners, including five conferences and two bowl games, and has extended its network from predominantly eastern and central states all the way to the West Coast, where it picked up Pac-10 schools Cal, UCLA and Washington.
ISP expanded its reach to conferences in 2006 when it agreed to work with the Mid-American Conference and has since added the BIG EAST, the Sun Belt, Conference USA and a national radio network for the Atlantic Coast Conference. ISP also contracted with the Meineke Car Care Bowl and the Fed Ex Orange Bowl in 2006.
Having outgrown the office building that seemed so spacious almost a decade earlier, ISP moved its corporate headquarters in 2007, this time to downtown Winston-Salem, where a brand-new mixed-use office, retail and condo building provides a state-of-the-art home for ISP's behind-the-scenes operations and radio production.
While the budding company in 1992 may not yet have been America's Home for College Sports, the ISP of today, who works with over 50 partners, counts more than 250 employees, takes pride in saying it has never lost a collegiate client and aptly calls itself America's largest and fastest growing multimedia rightsholder, certainly is.