Augmenting collegiate athletic staffs in branding, marketing & the game day fan experience.

Guido D’Elia has been creating strategic communications and advising corporations and institutions for forty years. First, at age 24 he produced live telecasts of Pirate Baseball, Penguins Hockey and Penn State Football. His live event production eventually included several SEC Basketball tournaments and Liberty Bowl telecasts. Before 30 Mr. D’Elia created his first sports documentary titled “The Irish Challenge” on the legacy of Notre Dame Quarterbacks, as well as an award-winning one-hour feature on the tradition of ACC Basketball. Later Mr. D’Elia redesigned Penn State football’s communication vehicles and replaced the traditional coaches’ show with a feature-based format. This weekly program, “The Penn State Football Story”, was soon seen in over sixty-five per cent of the country as the new program’s appeal extended beyond traditional boundaries.

In his thirties he co-founded D’Elia-Wittkofski Productions, a firm that would grow to over a fifty-person strategy & production firm. Specializing in higher education the Pittsburgh based firm served the recruiting, fundraising and sports marketing needs of academia. Their impact reached nationally winning multiple higher education marketing awards. The firm’s continued work on “The Penn State Football Story” won multiple regional Emmys and national recognition for work with Duke Basketball and Rutgers Football.

Recognizing that Internet distribution and interactive elements would soon impact all productions; Mr. D’Elia acquired Mind Over Media, an interactive spin-off of Carnegie-Mellon University, thereby combining video production and interactive thinking into a multi-platform company. The company adopted the name Mind Over Media and later added a research and branding group from Boston that rounded out the firm’s full service capabilities to include quantitative analysis.

Most recently Mr. D’Elia managed the Penn State Football brand and game day production. His role included oversight on external media relations including broadcast entities, the team’s television, web, creative on recruiting & promotions materials, as well as the orchestration of the atmosphere inside and out of the stadium on game days.

During his seven year tenure at Penn State as Director of Football Branding & Communications the team was the first to develop a recruiting only web site and lead others in deploying social media and branded content to recruit and promote.  The “Penn State Football Story”, the teams feature driven weekly television show, broke the mold of highlight rehashes earning multiple Emmys and increasing its reach. D’Elia’s group transformed Penn State’s crowd, previously know as the quietest 100,000 fans, into a sustainable home field advantage for the team, an enviable fan experience & recruiting differential. Sports Illustrated labeled the game day atmosphere as “The Greatest Show in College Football” and Kirk Herbstreit called the student section the best in college football.  Penn State fans were first to distinguish themselves with a student white and later first with full stadium “whitehouse” setting a trend that would follow in sports venues.

Mr. D’Elia, who is on the Rose Bowl game day advisory board, currently consults collegiate athletic departments and coaches nationwide. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, grew up in Altoona, PA, attended Penn State and now resides in State College, PA. His daughter Sara is CEO of a dot com in Boulder, CO; daughter Bianca is an internet marketing manager in New York City; son Will is a river boat guide based in Missoula, MT and son Matteo an aspiring movie writer currently starving in Brooklyn.