The Graeme Roustan Show: Amanda Tischler

The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 hockey business annual is available at THN.com/free, featuring the annual 100 people of power and influence list.

W. Graeme Roustan, owner and publisher of The Hockey News, sat down with special guests for peer-to-peer conversations also featured in the issue, including the Washington Capitals' senior VP of marketing, Amanda Tischler.

Here's their full conversation in The Graeme Roustan Show:

Read along with an excerpt from their discussion:

W. GRAEME ROUSTAN: You’ve got a real great team behind the team of professionals that are all working together to be successful.

AMANDA TISCHLER: It’s one of my favorite sayings that you just said, “team behind the team.” That’s what we like to consider ourselves. Since I started in marketing, we have grown significantly because there’s so much work to be done in relation to the Capitals' fan development, the growth of youth hockey and just the strength of the Caps brand in general. We’re lucky because our leadership and our ownership have bought in and recognized how we, as a marketing team, can really help fuel that growth. We’re looked at favorably when we think about the community and city engagement and just the likability of our players. That’s been one of our missions at hand, is to help grow the Capitals brand, create that funnel of fandom and, ultimately, help drive revenue for the team through ticketing, retail and partnerships. We like to consider ourselves the center of how we make that all happen.

WGR: Let’s get to this great organization, the Washington Capitals. It’s been around 50 years. It’s no longer an expansion team; it’s a veteran organization. Now that you’ve been around for 50 years, and you’ve won one Stanley Cup, there’s a lot of pressure to win another. You’ve got a great facility and team. Do you feel some pressure or a desire to get a second Stanley Cup under your belt in the near term? Is that something you think about all the time?

AT: When it comes to Stanley Cups, I mean, they call it the “championship advantage” for a reason. It helps everything. People love winning. We certainly still ride that wave. It’s a part of our history that we are able to celebrate the milestone and the handful of players that are still on that team from that moment in time. Of course, that is the aspirational goal of everything we do.

I think it’s also important in marketing to not always work around wins and losses and to build your brand through the pillars that you feel are foundational to the team. That’s also something that we try to keep in mind with what is authentic to the Capitals and the values of the team.

Our youth-hockey department does a phenomenal job of creating relationships with our rinks, our teams and with community stakeholders to make sure our place in the community is heard, as well as creating offerings for people. That’s really been a focus. We’ve created over 14 rinks as part of the NHL’s Industry Growth Fund throughout D.C., Maryland and Virginia. Not only with ice hockey; we’ve focused on ball hockey and on inline hockey. Then, programs like Learn to Play and our hockey school, which gives equipment to several counties throughout the area, are all just tactics that have paid off in growing fandom and youth hockey development.

WGR: In today’s world, with any NHL franchise, including yours, social media is really important to reaching your customers, isn’t it?

AT: It’s critical. One thing we’re very fortunate with the Caps is to have strong player access because that helps our digital team give the content to the fans that they want to see. Between our network, our production team and our digital team, we’ve done a phenomenal job of storytelling and representing the brand through our digital channels.

Also worth mentioning, our new away-jersey patch partnership with TikTok. That’s been a really successful partnership and how we’ve leaned on that as a short-form storytelling device. We’re constantly trying to invest in that 24-7 nature of how we need to populate our channels, be at the forefront of graphics, short-form video and, ultimately, culturally relevant.

One of the things that always surprises me with our monthly digital reports is, it’s the memes and those things are the best-performing content. That’s a lot of what our fans want. It helps us get younger, too. That’s a big push for us is how we’re connecting with Gen Z and making sure that we’re talking to them on the medium that they want to receive. Our community managers, who are the ones doing the posting on the channels, they’re very effective in sorting through the noise. Between the sponsored content, team coverage and overall initiative pushes, there’s a lot that needs to be represented. They do a really good job about balancing what we want the tone and the voice to be.

At the beginning of the year, we set our guiding principles with what we want our content to be. We’ll always have our mainstays of different video and editorial series, but then there’s the stuff that you have to take advantage of because it’s a trend or an influencer that’s really popular. They’re so good at making sure they’re in touch with that type of content to be a part of the conversation.

WGR: The Washington Capitals have been around for 50 years. You have fans that have been fans for 50 years. You also have to send out messages to Gen Z, X and A, so you’re communicating to people who are in their 70s and also in their teens. How do you balance the messaging and the marketing to different audiences of different age demographics?

AT: It’s interesting because many of those 70-year-olds now have kids and grandkids. I think they’re also observing how their kids and their grandkids are interacting with the brand or getting involved with us.

In some ways, I think there are tried-and-true ways. People love autographs. People love photos. People love experiences. That’s the fundamental way, on a human level, that we can make sure that our marketing is connecting with the right people. But you’re right; we’ve had to shift and to think about how that marketing strategy needs to change. Another big area is influencers and cultural creators. These people have their own following, so it only makes us more powerful to team up with them, and that’s been something big that we’ve leaned on.

For this conversation, more interviews and a deep look into the world of the hockey business, check out The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 issue, available at THN.com/free.