Anheuser-Busch Head of U.S. Sports Marketing & Sponsorships Matt Davis joins Yahoo Finance Live to weigh on investing in pickleball and Netflix ads, the upcoming World Cup, and Super Bowl advertising.

Video Transcript

- Tom Brady, LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Gary Vaynerchuk, Marc Lasry, and Budweiser. How's that for a six pack? Anheuser-Busch joining the sports and business icons and buying a Major League pickleball team, the first Fortune 500 company to buy a team. Let's talk about it with Matt Davis, Anheuser-Busch, head of US sports marketing sponsorships.

Matt, great to have you here, my man. Very exciting-- fastest growing sport in the country by far. What's the business play, though? Why buy a team and not just sponsor it?

MATT DAVIS: Yeah, it's a great, great question. Appreciate you having me. I'm excited to be here and talk about it. The play for us has always been the same. We want to meet fans where they are and drive excitement with our brands.

What we found with Major League pickleball is that we can bring more to the table than what a traditional sponsorship would afford. We can help them with scale, with connecting with consumers, with finding ways to expand the reach of pickleball to those fans maybe that haven't been approached to it previously and in doing so, really drive excitement inside of the world of pickleball, but the larger ecosystem of sports, that we've been dominant in for the past several decades. And so for us, it was an amazing opportunity to do something that was bigger and really become a new driver of innovation as we look to new and emerging sports, moving forward.

- And that something near and dear to my heart, the World Cup. And we know that Budweiser is the official beer sponsor for it. But talk about how you're navigating, this trying to sell beer in a place where you can't advertise, that where there's sort of limited opportunities for fans to even drink during the matches.

MATT DAVIS: Yeah, sure, we've been working very closely with those on the ground to make sure that we can do so in ways that are complimentary to the fan experience overall. But really for us, the big opportunity for the World Cup is all of the fan bases across the entire globe. How can we be as relevant as possible for all of those in Brazil or America or Belgium to really take and amplify the teams that they love and make them tangible for them in their home countries?