Like any other industry, professional sports leagues experience periods of boom and bust. With a deep roster of dynamic young stars, rule changes that continue to be popular, and a 2024 season that saw record revenue, strong viewership, and attendance numbers, it’s clear that Major League Baseball is currently in a strong position. To better understand how MLB intends to sustain these positive trends, Awful Announcing had a wide-ranging conversation with Uzma Rawn Dowler, the league’s new Chief Marketing Officer.
Rawn Dowler took over the top marketing spot in December 2024 after spending a decade in various sponsorship sales and corporate partnerships positions with the league. She is just one of a handful of women in executive leadership positions at a major sports property today.
Some quotes in the Q&A below have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Coming off a very successful 2024 season fueled by young stars and rule changes that continue to be popular (among other things), how do you see MLB’s positioning in 2025?
We are on fire right now. It is a really, really exciting time to come to work. From viewership to attendance to engagement, our numbers are all trending upward in a big way. Just through this past weekend, we’ve already had the highest April attendance levels since 2008.
It feels like we’re in a sweet spot where we’re adapting the game for the future while also honing in on what has always made it special. We just have incredible momentum, both competitively and culturally.
What key pillars or themes are you thinking about as you take over the top marketing role at this exciting time in the league’s history?
For me, the answer is players, players, players. And this is because we know two things to be true. First, MLB has diverse, dynamic players that are playing at a higher skill level than ever before. Second, young fans are increasingly identifying with individual players more so than teams. So, we’re committed to being super player-centric in all of our marketing initiatives and creative storytelling, both on and off the field.
From Paul Skenes to Elly De La Cruz, MLB is rich with Gen Z stars. How is the league thinking about marketing these young players today, and how, if at all, does it vary from the league’s approach to marketing young stars in previous eras?
I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s too much different or any easier than before. But because these players have all grown up online, they’re super savvy when it comes to media stuff and they’re really leaning in. They all have their own swagger and style and personality that they want to showcase for themselves, which we love.
Skenes is a great example of this. Just in the last few weeks, he’s been in GQ, he’s been on late night shows, he’s been everywhere. The young guys are definitely bringing in a lot of new audiences.
Sticking with the youth theme for another question, what is the league doing to stay top-of-mind with young fans who have grown up with access to a nonstop stream of content since birth?
I would say one of the most important things we’re doing to connect with young fans is non-traditional storytelling. Our 2025 brand campaign, “Heroes of the Game” imagined several of our mega-stars, including Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge, as anime superheroes, which we know is something a lot of younger fans are interested in outside of baseball. We also produced another campaign featuring Elly De La Cruz as sort of a video game character come to life.
Both of these were a little bit different for us to do, but they were well-received. So we’re going to keep looking into ways that we can highlight our players through different mediums or areas of interest that are a little bit unexpected for baseball.
MLB’s tone on social media has seemingly evolved in recent years. It’s more playful and embracing of trends and off-the-field content. How would you describe MLB’s approach to social media today?
We approach social media with a growth mindset, meaning we think of it as a tool to help new people fall in love with baseball. And we’ve found that documenting the ancillary aspects of the game — like ballpark food and fashion or players’ families and lifestyles — is a really great way to do that, in addition to spotlighting our amazing gameplay. But we’re always experimenting with tone and subject matter.
Influencers and content are such a big part of culture today. How does MLB view engagement with this cohort as content partners? Is there a coordinated, league-level effort to identify and work with influencers, or does that happen more often at the team level?
We definitely have a strategy from a league perspective, and influencers are very important to our marketing goals. We’ll most often partner with two types of creators — baseball-specific creators who can showcase the game in a new or different way, or more general, lifestyle creators who can tie the game into other hobbies, again such as food or fashion. With this approach, we’re able to speak to both our core fans and our more casual ones.
In-season eventi-ification is a major trend in professional sports right now (e.g., NBA Cup, NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off, WNBA Commissioner’s Cup). It’s proving to be a solid way to add some stakes, visibility, and engagement mid-season. Given the length of the MLB schedule, is this something the league is considering?
Big picture, we love the idea of doing something in-season that taps into fan interests in short bursts. That said, our special event games have worked really well for us so far.
Our “Field of Dreams” games in 2021 and 2022 drew tons of interest and they offered such cool visual moments with our players coming out of the cornfields. Honoring the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field last year was so special, too. Overall, these games do a great job of bringing baseball to a live audience that doest necessarily get it all the time, and of spotlighting the game’s iconic place in American history and culture. We’re going to keep exploring with the format.
You spent a lot of time on the Global Partnerships team prior to your current role. How would you categorize MLB’s level of investment in global marketing and general game growth in 2025?
Major League Baseball is an inherently global sport. We have players from so many different geographic backgrounds, so that offers us a natural way to lean into our commitment to growing the game around the world — in terms of everything from world tour events and playing regular season games internationally to general marketing.
The “Heroes of the Game” brand campaign didn’t just run here in the U.S. We showed up at The Cube in London, at the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, and at Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo. The latter coincided with our opening series there between the Dodgers and the Cubs, which averaged 24 million Japanese viewers, shattering previous international records. We also partnered with a lot of local businesses, including all 22,000 of 7-Eleven’s Japanese locations, to ensure that the league’s presence was felt beyond the games themselves. You really couldn’t turn around in Tokyo that week without seeing the MLB silhouette logo.
All of this speaks to the global prominence of our game. We don’t want these things to be one-and-done either. We’re keeping the marketing lights on in a lot of different markets, even when we’re not playing there.
It’s still quite rare for women to hold leadership positions at professional sports properties of any kind. What does earning this role mean to you, and how do you hope to leave your mark on MLB?
This question is particularly poignant because I had a very bright young woman move on from my team last week. I’ve been traveling, so I couldn’t open the thank you card she left on my desk until yesterday. I’m paraphrasing a little, but she wrote something to the effect of, “You made me believe that someone who looks more like me than the traditional sports executive truly does belong here and can thrive and lead at the highest level.”
That was such a nice reminder about the weight this kind of role holds. And in it, before anything else, I want to be known as someone who is totally committed to taking care of her people and the MLB team at large.