John J. Clendening & Jeff Baum, Clients First | The Jeff Crilley Show

With nine World Cup matches headed to North Texas and an estimated $2.1 billion economic impact, host Jeff Crilley sits down with John J. Clendening and Jeff Baum of Clients First Marketing & Communications to talk strategy for local businesses. The duo, who have led global marketing and communications teams for seven Fortune 500 companies, are launching “Team DFW,” a grassroots effort to help bars, restaurants, and retail centers turn global soccer traffic into long-term customers....

Show Notes

Dallas–Fort Worth will host more 2026 World Cup matches than any other city in North America. With an estimated $2.1 billion economic impact and millions of visitors expected, the big question is: how can local businesses get a piece of it?

On this episode of The Jeff Crilley Show, Jeff sits down with John J. Clendening, Founding Principal of Clients First Marketing & Communications, and partner Jeff Baum. Together, they’ve led global marketing and communications teams for seven Fortune 500 companies and are now launching “Team DFW,” a grassroots initiative designed to help small businesses turn World Cup traffic into lasting customer growth.

They discuss:
- Why bars, restaurants, and retail centers are positioned to benefit most
- Creative pre‑World Cup ideas like country‑themed weeks (think Argentina Week with food, wine, and music)
- How organized watch parties can drive serious foot traffic
- Using PR, local influencers, and digital marketing to convert one‑time visitors into repeat customers

With only a fraction of the projected 3.8 million visitors attending matches in person, most fans will be looking for places to gather and watch. This conversation breaks down how to prepare now.

Learn more: https://www.clientsfirstmc.com

What is The Jeff Crilley Show?

Jeff Crilley is a former news reporter, who spent more than 25 years in newsrooms across the country. He’s an Emmy Award winning journalist, who decided to make the jump from news in 2008, when he founded his own PR Firm, Real News Public Relations.

Today, the firm has more than 100 clients, and Jeff continues to tell the stories of interesting people he meets along the way.

These are those stories.

Coming up next on The Jeff Crilley Show, the World Cup coming to Dallas this summer is supposed to generate some $2,100,000,000 in revenue. We're gonna be talking to two marketing gurus who's gonna talk about how they can help local businesses capitalize on that windfall Next. The burglar in his home this morning by webcam. As a journalist of over twenty five years, stories are what make my world turn. Reporting live from The Dallas Newsroom tonight, Jeff Crilley, Fox four news. But in 2008, I took the jump from my familiar life and started a PR firm from my home. We're talking about anyone with a camcorder like the one I'm using becomes a television network. We started slowly growing the company, and we now have over a 100 clients, and we've branched into the world of live digital broadcasting. I now own eight different TV studios and have a huge team. And the stories that I now get to share are sometimes the most important of my life. Life has a funny way of coming around full circle. This is The Jeff Crilley Show. Well, drumbeat is getting louder by the day. The World Cup is just around the corner. We're gonna have the most matches of any town in in on the planet. We're gonna have nine matches, including some finals, to talk about that and how local businesses can capitalize on that. John Clendening and Jeff Baum, they are with Clients First Marketing and Communications. Guys, thanks for coming on the show. Great, thank you. You, Jeff. Really? Yeah. Thank you. Well, I applaud you because you you guys have been very successful in marketing, but I haven't heard anybody talking about how local businesses can take advantage of of what's happening. Do you wanna start, Jeff? I I would love to. So here we are in a huge metropolitan market, and about a quarter of people who live here are immigrants. And what is the most popular sport in the world? Soccer. It may or may not be the most popular for Americans, but if you have grown up somewhere else, you probably have a pretty high love and appreciation for the beautiful game, as they call it. Right? Well, guess what? What's the most popular sporting event in the world? The World Cup, and it is coming here to DFW, and you already mentioned. We are gonna host more matches, nine, than any other region in not just The United States, by the way, but all of North America. Wow. And we're we're gonna start on June 11, go all the way to July 19, so about five weeks of action. And and many more matches outside of DFW as well. The finals in New Jersey. Okay. We have one of the semifinals here. And it's just a really, really exciting time Sure. For a sports fan to be in DFW. Alright. Jeff, you have something called Team DFW. Do you wanna explain that? Right. Yeah. Team DFW is a concept that we've kinda copied from team Houston, who came to us and kinda pitched us on the idea of doing this. And it's just it's us who are, of course, the team, but we've got about 50 freelancers, not only in The US, but around the world, and they're gonna certainly help us out on that. We've got some soccer fans embedded in there. My appreciation of soccer is mostly the Ted Lasso approach to soccer. I never knew what a pitch was, except baseball. I still don't know. No. I still don't know. I still try to figure it out. But but I did grow to appreciate the game and just the fervor of those fans. They go crazy. I mean, the you know, who in this country would sit through three hours of no score, and there's a score at the very end, everyone goes crazy. But it's a different level of appreciation and a level of sportsmanship and ability. Those guys are just you know, amazing. You know, they can run all those distances. So, you know, I've got that appreciation, and certainly people in different countries do as well. So I remember a long time ago, my wife and I were on a vacation in The Caribbean, And it was World Cup time, and it was Brazil versus Germany. And we were at a hotel, and the swim up bar in the pool had people decked out in Brazil shirts, you know, they're green and yellow. And I just thought, this is super cool. And they were just shouting at the the top of their voices. And, you know, what if we could recreate that here? There's so many different bars and restaurants that are perfect. TVs all over the place and have really enthusiastic people. So we were just trying to harness that and let these enterprises take in some of this huge amount of cash, all these people coming into the Dallas area. Sure. So that's the that's the theory behind all of this, and that's why we think it should be successful Absolutely. If we do it right. We're we're gonna pull up your website, and I want you guys to talk about your experience because you guys have had a lifetime of experience in marketing, haven't you? We have, and and we know those people on the spree. We know those people. We got these ugly people to sub for us. That's right. That's right. Give us a little of your background, John. Well, thank you. So between the two of us, we have led global marketing and or communications teams for seven global 50 or Fortune 500 companies. Wow. One of those was EDS, the company based here in in Plano founded by Ross Perot, who in doing so founded the entire IT services industry, by the way. Wow. This is back in 1962. And they that's the company that recruited both of us here. I came from the West Coast. Jeff came from the East Coast. He started one day before me. And I've always been senior to temp. I did I let him forget that? Yeah. Exactly. And we were we were fast friends and almost like war buddies colleagues. EDS was a very intense environment. We loved it. It was just really intense. And, you know, we were transplants here. Right? And we both had young families and didn't really know anybody. And so Friday night would come and the families would go out to dinner and and things like that. And and we've just stayed friends and colleagues, have worked together in a couple of other iterations since then. Sure. And there was no one else that I I think it's fair for me to speak for you here that we were gonna start. When it came time for us to start our own firm, which is something we had talked about forever, there was no one else that we were gonna do this other than one another. And so we started the firm a couple of years ago. We are called clients first, primarily because we think like clients first, because that is the majority of our experience. So yes, we have agency experience, which is good in running an agency, but we're more about, you know, we can say to a CMO or a head of global communications, we've been you. We've been in your chair. We understand the the gravitas that comes with, you know, you end up at the coffee machine with the CEO. Right. Right? That kind of stuff. When it when it's quarterly earnings time, what are the types of things you can't even tell your outside partners? Right? We've just been there. We think like clients first. That's why we call ourselves that. And we're full service marketing and communications. We do advertising, social, PR, crisis Nice. Thought leadership, and just about everything in between. Jeff, share a little bit more about your background. Yeah. I'm from the East Coast. I'm from Pittsburgh. Went to Penn State versus he going to USC. My school's We bicker back at football My vote is better than his score. I don't think there's a comparison there, John, but that's okay. So I I lived in Pittsburgh. I went to Penn State. I started my career actually working for a congressman in DC as a staff assistant. I was there about two years. Went on to a legislative law firm. Went on to become manager of government affairs for a big pharmaceutical and consumer products company. Warner and Amber, I kind of went up the ladder there. I moved to the corporate headquarters in New Jersey, took over internal print communications, which I don't know if people even recognize those anymore. And then I moved on into media relations. And I was recruited at that point to Loosen Technologies where and that was the most widely held stock in the country at that point. I became director of financial media relations, which was a great way to stamp my ticket. Wow. And I got recruited out of there to go to EDS. And my only time in Texas was changing planes at DFW Airport, so I had no concept of what Dallas was like. So I I remember I came down here on a Saturday morning and, you know, EDS, just a behemoth of a building. Yeah. But there were only two other people in an entire building that day. So I I just go in and just looking and wondering. Our eventual boss was up on the 6th Floor. Know, oh, come on up. So it was a whole different atmosphere, and it was intimidating at first. We had a lot to do when we first came in. And but we we made it. We made it. And then from there, we got taken over by Hewlett Packard. I stayed on for a little while, but then I went out on my own. I actually took a few years to kind of play around, have a good time. And then went into the PR agency world. And somehow, when I got to H and K, which is a big deal at that point, somehow I landed here. And, you know, John didn't talk about that very much, but it was all planned out at Starbucks. It's like Herb Kelleher writing this Southwest business plan on a cocktail napkin. That was kind of what we did. Call Herbie. Well, you guys have such great rapport. In fact, you have a very popular podcast called On the Offense. Yeah. Let's go ahead and put this on the screen so we can kind of watch this together. How long have you guys been doing the show? Well, you know, we started in the fall we started the firm in the '24. We started the podcast in the '24. And so the episode that we're going to record later this week, I believe, is going to be episode number 30 already. We we do about twice a month. We do normally twice a month, not always, but normally. And we will talk about whatever's in the news at that point relative to marketing and communications. And then we just kind of run with it from there. Sometimes we have guests. We'd love to have you as a guest at one point. Yeah. Yeah. Return the favor. Right? Clearly, you know what it's like to be on camera. So and and, yes, we are on camera very much on purpose. And, you know, we'll talk about just crazy stuff that's in the news. We'll talk about sports marketing because of the Super Bowl. We've already done a podcast on this, on Team DFW. Whatever's in the news. Remember when the two people got caught on the the video cam at the cops at the Coldplay concert? We did a whole podcast on that. Oh, yeah. And so we do try to have fun with it. We're to the point now where we're getting five to 6,000 views every episode, thanks largely to the YouTube algorithm. And we're really, really excited about it. Outstanding. We were talking before the show of, like, your perfect client for the World Cup, and you came up with an example of a bar or a restaurant. Right. Will you share that? So, yeah. So Team DFW has three campaigns that we are offering to bars, restaurants, community centers, you know, businesses that would naturally be able to host lots of people in one space. Right? So the first campaign is actually meant for pre World Cup. I mean, we could help somebody do an event starting in the next few days, really. And so what that's about is doing themed weeks. So we'll give you an example. So one of the teams coming here is Argentina, and, you know, big soccer, huge soccer tradition, messy and all of that. Right? Well, there are about 14,000 Argentinians who already live in DFW. So the idea here is if you're a bar or restaurant or something like that, you could do Argentina week, for example. Right? You you put out Argentinian stuff, you serve Argentinian steak, you serve Argentinian beer, Argentinian wine, who doesn't like a good Malbec, and Argentinian music and do Argentina week. You could do that a month beforehand to get people into the spirit. Right? Little tango here and there. Little tango here and there, and you could do Argentina week, and then you do Croatia week, or you can just do one or whatever you should write. So the idea there is to build excitement and and and leverage the people already here, all those soccer fans already here. Right? That's that is one idea, one campaign. The second campaign can be done before the World Cup or during the World Cup, and that's largely meant for shopping areas. So if you want if you're North Park or the Galleria or an outdoor shopping venue, you could do a pop up. The pop up could be about soccer in general. It could be about the 11 countries coming here to DFW. It could be anything. Right? And then the third piece is the watch parties themselves. So people when we've talked to people about this, people have said, oh, this is all about watch parties. Well, one of the campaigns is about watch parties. The other stuff, again, can be done before that. But watch parties themselves. So what do the bars and restaurants do, and what's our value? Right? They put on the events. If you're a restaurant, sports bar, what have you, especially a larger one, you're probably used to doing a week or a theme or, you know, we don't necessarily need to do that for the businesses. We can. We have people in our network who can do that. Mhmm. But even if they can do it on their own, our real value, where we really come in, we think, is our professional experience as marketers. So we have we can do the PR for you if you're Joe's Sports Bar in Plano. We'll do the PR for you. We'll do the the social media for you. And by the way, social, that includes things like getting influencers out to your business Nice. Which we believe would drive traffic for the business, certainly drive awareness. And then the third piece is if you do any of that, including watch parties, you're probably going to be building your customer base. Mhmm. Well, what do you do with those names? Right? What do you do? Do you just stack up the business cards over here, do you just chuck them? Maybe? No. You put them into a database, and then we have digital marketing people in our network, all locally based people in DFW, by the way, who can help you figure out what to do with them. Nurture a relationship with them through a digital marketing campaign that goes on for weeks, if not months, after the World Cup is over. Right? So this is about marrying what these businesses do best, create physical environments with great food and and beverages and things like that for people to enjoy big events in one place. And what we do is we tell the Metroplex all about it, which we think will do three things for them. One is just build basic awareness. What bar owner or restaurant owner doesn't want more people to just be aware of them flat out? Right? The second thing we think we'll do is we will drive traffic to their establishments. We will, you know, we'll we'll get more people there through PR and through the influencers. And then the third thing is we, again, nurture their customer base for weeks and months to follow. And so we really think there's something here. We're very excited about this. We are big sports fans. We're not the world's biggest soccer fans, but we're big sports fans. To have. I'll watch the World Cup Championship. Oh, for sure. But it's but but we are what we're what we're really fans of is the idea of a local small business in DFW having the opportunity to capitalize on this, to be able to get a piece of the pie. Right? A huge economic impact from the 3,800,000 people who are going to come here for about five weeks, how many of those 3,800,000 people, Jeff, are gonna go to the nine events? Very few. Right. Right? There's only so many seats. And by the way, those seats are gonna be really expensive. Right? Oh, yeah. So what are the others really expensive? Oh, oh, can you imagine? So what are the 98% of them going to do? They're going to be looking for places to go to watch the events with other like minded crazy soccer fans. That's where we come in. And that's where we come. Jeff, we have about a minute left, so I'm gonna give you the final word. For the small business owner who's watching this right now in the DFW area, why should they contact you? Well, if you got a little pizza joint in Plano, and you've got a bunch of TVs, or hamburger place, and, you know, you have people coming in on the weekends to watch the Cowboys, why not have them come in and watch championship soccer matches? And the whole idea with the influencers is getting these really people these people are seen as really cool around Dallas who go to cool places. So what if we get one of those influencers to come into your restaurant and say, I've never been here before, but this is pretty good. Food's great, and look at this. You know, they're gonna be hosting soccer matches, watch parties. You know, how good is that? So we're really excited about that, particularly that angle. I I know when we heard about it, we're thinking, oh, that's that's brilliant. And these people already have lots of followers. Now, not as many as the world's best influencers, but they've got a huge number of followers right in this area. So if we get them active, they're certainly almost advertising on your behalf. And we can tell them, you know, go down and see Jeff Crilley. He's got a lot of tabbies. We'll host something here. That conference room looks perfect. Have you thought about doing a watch party here? You might have to consider that. Well, I think you should. You know, when you get guests on, the lead you're in twofer. You guys are amazing. We're gonna end with the website, which is clientsfirstmc.com. Jeff and John, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for everybody so much. Really appreciate it. That's it for now. We'll see you next time.