Cameron McLay on leading the Team Scotland digital team on international events

Thanks to Cameron McLay for doing an awesome job in answering all the questions in Sports Geek Nation Ask Me Anything.

Full Transcript available in the Sports Geek Nation Member's Area.

Here's the highlight question from the Sports Geek Nation AMA with Cameron McLay.

Cameron McLay is the Communications Manager at Scottish Golf.

Cameron started his career in sports volunteering at the PGA European Tour as a scorer. After getting a degree in Sports and Recreation Management, he worked for different basketball organisations and became a freelance reporter and a contributor to a weekly podcast where he experienced covering basketball games in Europe and NBA in the United States.

Cameron led the digital content team for Team Scotland at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on Australia's Gold Coast and Commonwealth Youth Games 2017 in the Bahamas. At that time, he also worked for basketballscotland, the National Governing Body for Basketball in Scotland as a Communications Manager.

He has since moved on to Scottish Golf as their Communications Manager where he is responsible for driving the organisation’s community engagement and online presence to target audiences at all levels starting from the grassroots.

Connect with Cameron McLay on Twitter @cameron_mclay, Instagram, LinkedIn and Slack @Cameron_McLay

Find out more about Scottish Golf at scottishgolf.org

Cameron McLay:

Hey @joliegee, thanks for the question.

The Commonwealth Games was an incredible experience that started around 18 months out from the Games.

For me, it was a huge learning experience and I was fortunate enough to be part of a team which brought a huge amount of expertise to the table, from previous Commonwealth Games and Olympics.

With it being an overseas Games, there were a number of factors we had to take into account when developing the digital strategy for Team Scotland at GC2018, especially the time difference between sporting action / medal moments and our core audience of Scottish sport fans.

As part of our preparation, we had a number of team camps in the lead up to departing for Aus, these involved athletes, coaches, team staff as well as our comms team. It really allowed us to build solid relationships with the athletes which in turn meant we could start to push the boundaries and have some fun with them while generating content,

Here’s an example of some of the branded green screen content we produced with some of our top names prior to flying out:

Like any major sports event, access to footage inside event venues is extremely difficult due to the broadcast rights and so by generating content ahead of time, it meant we had athlete-centred footage ready to go as soon as they performed well, thus helping us to capitalise on live reaction from fans as these moments happened. There’s nothing worse than being late to the party!

During the Games we also partnered with a local University in Australia to provide local students internship opportunities within our social team. They were tasked with pulling together content for our key times back home, telling the story of that particular day of the Games through fun and engaging pieces, while our press officers and myself would look to deliver success in real time.

This was hugely beneficial for all the students involved, who got to experience a major sporting event from inside the ropes. They were creating video, graphics and audio with some of the biggest names in sport and without their support, our output would not have been the same.

It was our most successful overseas games, with the team winning 44 medals so we were definitely kept very busy!

• Did you always want to work in sport?
• What was the key for you to securing roles in sport (both early on and up to your current role at Scottish Golf)?

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