Zaileen Janmohamed '05

Position: Senior Director, Global Sponsorship Marketing

Company: Visa Inc.

Location: San Francisco

Program: MBA/M.S. Sport Management

“At Visa, my entire job is problem solving. I am faced with a new set of questions every day – from analyzing the effectiveness of our global sponsorship portfolio to determining the agency structure that will best support our objectives,” observes Zaileen Janmohamed ’05 MBA/M.S. The Isenberg McCormack Sport Management graduate is Senior Director of Sponsorship Intelligence with the Global Sponsorship Marketing group at Visa Inc., based in San Francisco. In her role, Zaileen provides strategic thought leadership and analysis of Visa’s 60+ sponsorships worldwide. She is responsible for oversight of Visa’s sponsorship investments and for determining best practices across a truly global portfolio of sponsorships.

The size and scale of Zaileen’s work at Visa has been formidable. In 2012, she oversaw Visa’s athlete sponsorship program at the London Summer Olympics. For the Games, her challenges included developing Visa’s sponsorship strategy, and its recruitment of and negotiations with 60 athletes for Visa’s Olympic activation and marketing campaigns. The campaign, she says, was the biggest in Visa’s history at the time, with an extensive footprint in social media and other digital formats.

Today, Zaileen continues her quest to understand how sponsorships can help Visa to better meet its business objectives. Working with her team, she creates innovative alignments of brand and product initiatives through sponsorships.

At Isenberg, Zaileen, who hails from Vancouver, completed rewarding, challenging studies examining a Moneyball approach to hockey and the impact of the NHL lockout. Reminiscing on her student experiences at Isenberg and McCormack, Zaileen recalls, “Between the professors, the students, and the encouragement, I felt that I’d been handed a gift—a set of keys that allowed me to open doors to a world that I’d always wanted to get into, but never had the right key for.”

Zaileen’s advice to students: “Take advantage of everything a school has to offer, including the internships and alumni networks, to get all you can out of the experience.”