Lucky Socks Media announce a strategic alliance with former senior ECB and FA Executive Russell James at Bazballers Consulting

NEW RIA member Lucky Socks Media are excited to announce a strategic alliance with former senior ECB and FA executive Russell James at Bazballers Consulting.

Led by former BBC Sport, Children’s and News executive, Stuart Rowson, the partnership means Lucky Socks can add a new dimension of partnership and commercial services to their core work of helping sports and media organisations grow reach and engagement with children and young audiences.

Over the past year, Lucky Socks have worked with the likes of England Rugby, the R&A, Planet Sport, the FAW, UK Sport, and the Racing Foundation among others.

Now with Bazballers, Russell, specialises in delivering commercial, partnerships and marketing strategies for a string of clients including Cognizant, IG, BUCS, Hitz Cricket and Charlton Athletic.

Announcing this collaboration means that clients can enjoy a totally flexible model, depending on the services they need, enabling us to offer an end-to-end approach from strategy development to ongoing support and project delivery.

Alongside the Lucky Socks network of ex BBC colleagues across Sport, News and Childrens, the new alliance will open up a wider network across senior c-suite executives, with exciting talks to bring more expertise in the communications and PR sphere.

Stu, a keen marathon runner, said:  “Russell and Bazballers offer complementary services to our offer at Lucky Socks and we’re excited about where the new partnership can take us. We’re already looking at how we can grow it further to offer clients a senior, one-stop solution.”

Russell said: “Having launched Bazballers 18 months ago it has been clear that Brand and Sports entities need trusted, experienced specialists who can drive real change and outcome with craft and quality.  Stu and the Lucky Socks team are thought-leaders in both digital content and around Kids & Sport so a natural compliment for the services we provide.”

Stu and Russell have spent the last six months working closely together to bring an exciting, immersive football arena to market for Rugged Interactive, one of the UK’s leading active fun operators.

Scorze is an interactive football pitch for Gen Alpha giving little ballers the superstar treatment, and features commentary, lights, crowd effects and video replays of goals.

It offers a brilliant physical activation for football fan zones and high footfall areas like shopping centres, as well as delivering on data capture to help brands begin a deeper engagement journey with a new set of fans.

Rugged founder and innovations director, Simon Heap said: 

“Working with Stuart and Russell has given us access to a whole new business sector – their insight in helping us define a go-to-market strategy and then executing it has both invigorated our team and led to product improvements. In fact this was an unexpected benefit, and helped us make Scorze more relevant and simply better.”

As part of our collaboration, Russell and I, and the wider Lucky Socks and Bazballers teams, are leading discussions with a string of football organisations, brands and events to bring Scorze into football across the UK, Europe and more widely. 

Both Lucky Socks and Bazballers will continue to serve their current clients as well as welcoming new conversations to discuss across the sports and media industries.

Stu will be at The Running Conference presented by haku in December.

Check out the Lucky Socks Media RIA Member profile here  .