Michael Jaquet, Vice President of Television and Properties at CBS College Sports, has been selling “non-traditional” media since launching his own action sports magazine in 1996. Freeze Magazine was a youth marketing movement in a sport hundreds of years old and success came from events, television, and online extensions where advertisers could see ROI that a print magazine couldn’t deliver.
That formula landed him the gig of heading sales and marketing at TransWorld Media, makers of Snowboarding, Skateboading, Surf, Motocross, and BMX. What was largely an endemic business soon became booming with every major youth marketing brand buying into the core side of action sports through print, online, events, and home video.
Jaquet joined CSTV (now CBS College) as director of business development in 2004 and has built up the Properties division to include original events and programming as well as the management of its Conference partnerships. That success earned him the added role of filling the 35-million home cable network with sponsored programming and branded content. This May, his signature event at CBS, the Alt Games – a multi-sport festival of Collegiate Championships with more than 150 schools and 1,000 students competing for national championships in snowboarding, freeskiing, wakeboarding, surfing, beach volleyball, ultimate disc, and more – will complete its fifth year with more than 18 hours of original programming kicked off with an hour on CBS.
Jaquet now heads up the sales division at CBS College Sports and has probably never closed a traditional media deal in his life.