NEW YORK CITY, USA // Kelsey Philpott is a transformative sports marketing executive who balances creativity with business impact. The recipient of Sports Business Journal 2025 Forty Under 40 and multiple Clio Sports Awards, he brings nearly 20 years of experience leading cross-functional departments in delivering brand strategy, integrated campaigns, multiplatform content, consumer experiences, community engagement, and sponsorship activations that drive revenue and audience growth. This includes time in-house and agency-side while working across some of the worlds biggest properties (e.g., MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA) and corporate sponsors (A-B InBev, adidas, Allstate, Capital One, Danone, JP Morgan Chase, and more).

This journey started with an MBA at the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. Upon graduation, Kelsey joined global sponsorship and experiential agency, GMR Marketing, where he was eventually promoted to Vice President of Sponsorship Consulting to lead strategy for the agency’s North American portfolio. Nearly eight years and three cities later (Milwaukee, San Francisco, and New York), he left GMR to fulfill a dream of working in professional hockey as Head of Marketing for the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden; rebuilding the brand strategy and introducing the critically-acclaimed campaign, No Quit in New York. Kelsey then applied and scaled this team experience at Canucks Sports & Entertainment helping to drive record audience, ticketing, sponsorship, and retail growth across its NHL-AHL-NLL portfolio.

Kelsey is now Senior Vice President and Group Director of Marketing at Major League Baseball. Reporting into the CMO, he’s responsible for leading the day-to-day marketing strategy and operations while accelerating commercial opportunities across the league.