9 Rules for making the most of sports property/ad agency relationships
Sports Business Journal - September 24, 2007
by Terry Lefton, Staff Writer

Back when Dan Price was a Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche marketer, a former Pepsi executive was lecturing him on the merits of applying package-goods marketing principles to sports properties.

Now as the sports business has grown during the past 20 years, more traditional marketers have come to hold positions with teams and leagues. They'll all stress that the businesses are not the same.

A soap or canned goods manufacturer won't change the color of a label one shade without six months of testing and a file-cabinet's-worth of consumer research. By their nature, sports are more dynamic and their marketing is more seat-of-the-pants.

In fact, when examining the ties between ad agencies and sports properties, nine rules can be used to guide the relationships, develop effective creative, and avoid embarrassing missteps.

Rule No. 1
The consistency of consumer products breeds marketing constancy. The opposite is true of teams and leagues.

That's the retort Price has for that Pepsi executive.

"If you want to market sports the way you market Coke or Pepsi, then you'd have to imagine that every time you'd open a can of soda it was a different drink," said Price, who's now principal and chief operating officer of branding agency Adrenalin, Denver.

Procter & Gamble wants the first bar of Ivory soap you purchase to be identical to your latest. That degree of similarity is anathema to any live entertainment brand, so the people who market leagues and teams have to market differently.

"A fan's relationship with a team or league changes every day and you have to allow for that," said Tom Froberg, of Frederick & Froberg Design. The Montclair, N.J., firm has worked for leagues and teams in all of the big five sports. "It evolves in a way that just doesn't happen with shampoo."

Great advertising adds emotion where there is none. Debit and credit cards become "priceless." Batteries morph into a hyperkinetic bunny. And carbonated sugar water teaches the "world to sing in perfect harmony."

Those charged with marketing teams and leagues have the opposite problem — no one's rooting for a six-pack of Coke; emotion is ever present. They just have to learn to harness it.

"Clearly there are people that wouldn't start the day without a Diet Pepsi, but when you are marketing a sport itself, you are living in a world where affiliation, passion and community rule," said Lisa Baird, an IBM, Procter & Gamble and General Motors marketer before joining the NFL, where she's senior vice president of marketing and consumer products.

Arnold Worldwide developed a campaign
for the U.S. Open that tried to appeal to the
many different ways fans view the event,
from the simple sport to fashion.

"The huge opportunity is that sports has so many emotional touch points you can have an enormous impact on the fan and quickly," Baird said. "The challenge is to orchestrate them with a common thread."

"What makes sports different as far as doing creative work is speed and reach," echoed John Staffen, chief creative officer for Arnold Worldwide, which handles the U.S. Open Series and U.S. Open advertising. "The pace of sports means this is something you really have to amp up your work to match. Sports are so multifaceted. The [U.S.] Open is sports, sure, but it's also part fashion, part people-watching, part cuisine-fest and part New York City happening — balancing all those things isn't easy."

Welcome to the world of marketing teams, leagues and sporting events and the unique differences in selling them.

"A sports team can fail spectacularly in the marketplace and still sell a ton of tickets and merchandise," said James Skiles, principal at Phoenix Design Works, New York, which has done logo and advertising work for teams including the University of Alabama and MLB's Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies. "A beer or coffee brand would be taken off the shelves under the same circumstances."

Rule No. 2
The business arrangements are not the norm.

At the team level, many agencies are willing to do the work gratis. That never happens when General Motors or Procter & Gamble are looking for new creative shops.

"Many teams are looking for a local agency that just feels lucky to do their work so they'll do it for nothing, or for tickets or a suite," said Price, whose most recent sports property assignment is the relaunch of the WUSA and its teams. "A lot of times our competition is agencies we literally can't compete with."

Ad agencies don't make much money on teams and leagues, but "it's always a nice thing to have leading off your [ad] reel," said Arnold's Saffen, "and in the case of USTA, we feel like we have made a difference in their business."

In fact, there's still some debate within teams as to whether it's even advisable to seek outside help. At the league level, things are slightly more sophisticated — most leagues have creative and branding shops.

After six years at ad agency DDB Needham, and 15 years at the NFL, John Collins, NHL senior executive vice president of business and media, has come to the conclusion that having an agency for both strategy and creative "is a must, because you can get too close to make decisions without an outside viewpoint. There are always agencies out there willing to work for nothing and they might even come in with some creative that looks good, but if it doesn't have strategy behind it, it will not move your business."

Rule No. 3
Branding should precede advertising.

Advertising itself is never a wholesale solution. Still, many sports properties often see a new campaign as a panacea. Any solid marketing campaign has to start with a deep understanding of the brand, followed by advertising that conforms. In the world of consumer products, that happens most of the time. With sports properties, especially at the team level, it's much more variable.

"If there's a real understanding of the brand position internally, you'll eventually have good creative," said Phoenix Design's Skiles, "but before you design a new logo or the first frame of a storyboard, you've got to decide as a brand who you are and what you do. Practiced properly, good brand positioning builds an armor that is going to protect you if something goes wrong — because by its nature, it's enduring."

Before there's any creative work attempted, the approach at SME Branding, New York, is to build a "brand synthesis" by surveying team executives, season-ticket holders, fans and other stakeholders.

"What we look to do is get to a truth that the brand can be built out on," said Ed O'Hara, SME senior partner and chief creative officer. "That's more valuable than advertising, because it will affect every expression of the team."

Agencies recommend campaign themes that
use something other than wins and losses.

An example of a current campaign is "Hockey Headquarters" now running in the Phoenix market for the Coyotes. The challenge is selling hockey in the desert. The undisputed truth arrived at after a few months of research was to embrace what some might consider a weakness — after all, no one else could claim to provide world class hockey in the Southwest.

Another team campaign from SME celebrated the Boston Bruins' status as an "Original Six" NHL franchise, using "the Hub of Hockey." The Bruins followed that campaign with a dismal season on the ice, but because the campaign didn't rely on performance, it's still in use.

"I've had plenty of owners tell me that wins and losses will be their marketing campaigns," said Bill Frederick, of Frederick & Froberg. "No matter how good a season it is, that just can't last."

Given the amount of inventory a baseball team has, almost every ad has some sort of ticket message. This year's slogan from Ogilvy & Mather for the New York Mets, a team on its way to an attendance record: "Your season has come."

The most successful themes are those that
can be built upon regardless of records.

Explained David Newman, the Mets' senior vice president of marketing and communications, who has also crafted campaigns for the USTA and NFL, "After last season [which ended on a called third strike in the National League Championship Series] there was a feeling of wanting more. So we went from wanting something like 'More fun, more celebration, more Mets' to 'Your Season Has Come,' which is apparitional and adaptable to ticketing and tune-in messages. On the air, it's about the shared experience, so we have as much high-fiving among fans as we do player highlights."

There's plenty of good creative from touchstone sports brands such as Gatorade, ESPN and Nike. They can always fall back on product benefits. Selling the experience of watching a team is altogether different.

Rule No. 4
Advertising sports products is not the same as advertising sports properties.

"Lots of agencies understand the consumer product side of sports, but you can always fall back on product attributes there," said Mike Capiraso, who was the NFL's executive creative director for four years before leaving in February to join WPP's Prism as North American CEO. "The passion and engagement that goes along with sports is very different from the emotion a consumer feels when buying a box of Tide. That seems obvious, but it's really hard to find agencies that understand that."

Rule No. 5
Campaigns for sports properties that promise performance will invariably underperform.

Shop swap
A number of sports advertisers have switched agencies recently or put their account up for review:
Brand
Former agency
New agency
Beck's
Leo Burnett Co.
Lowe
BMW
Fallon
GSD&M Idea City
Buick, GMC, Pontiac
McCann Erickson Worldwide
Leo Burnett Co.
Cadillac
Leo Burnett Co.
Modernista
Chili's Grill & Bar
GSD&M Idea City
Hill Holliday
Citibank
Fallon
Publicis West
Converse
Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners
Anomaly
Domino's
JWT
Crispin Porter & Bogusky
Heineken
Publicis USA/Vigilante
Berlin Cameron United
IOC
Saatchi & Saatchi
Voluntarily United Group of Creative Agencies
Lowe's (digital)
R/GA
Tribal DDB
Miller Lite
Crispin Porter & Bogusky
Bartle Bogle Hegarty, New York
New Balance
Boathouse Group
In review
Nike (running shoes)
Wieden & Kennedy
Crispin Porter & Bogusky
Safeway
Euro RSCG Worldwide
DDB
Sony PlayStation
TBWA\Chiat\Day
In review
Wal-Mart
DraftFCB
The Martin Agency
Source: SportsBusiness Journal research

Everyone in the business has a story about a campaign with a promise that was unfulfilled. Before they won Julius Erving's only NBA ring, a 76ers campaign promised fans, "We owe you one," after squandering a 2-0 NBA Finals lead to Portland. The team ended up owing fans more than one before finally winning a trophy.

There are plenty of other examples. Before the Detroit Pistons employed SME's "Hard Work Every Night," they used the ill-advised "Taking the NBA to School." Price recalled this tag for the Denver Nuggets: "Turn 'Em Loose." By midway through the dismal season, fans were asking ownership to do the same thing to the coach and most of the players. During the 2004 season, in which the Milwaukee Brewers finished a disastrous 67-94, the team's tag line was "It's The Way We Play." Ouch!

Rule No. 6
Team and league campaigns are under scrutiny that belies their normally paltry media budgets.

"We used to talk seriously about how the press was going to blast a perspective campaign if the team started to lose — that really is a big consideration," Price said. "No team or league spends much real money on media, so you worry about whether it's going to work. If you are Coke or Bud, you work with a big budget so you worry about wasting money."

In crafting campaigns, teams often take something intrinsic to the sport and try to claim it as their own. Every team in every sport thinks it is fast, edgy, unpredictable and explosive. If it isn't a unique attribute, it isn't marketable.

"Every team we've ever worked with wants to say they are fast, fierce and aggressive," said SME's O'Hara. "Even if that's true, it's not unique and that's something teams and leagues are still figuring out. They need to determine the real point of difference and build out from there."

Rule No. 7
Sports consumers know their product far better than other consumers, so respect their knowledge.

Sports fans know their product cold. Accordingly, their BS meter is high. Marketers must respect that.

"We tapped into this amazing reservoir of love and knowledge when we took on the NFL account," said Al Merrin, vice chairman and executive creative director at BBDO, New York. "We learned quickly that fans know right away if you are genuine and if you aren't, they are gone. The way it differs from mainstream advertising is that you don't have to convince them the product works — they are already believers."

In the current NFL player image spots from BBDO, Baird said the league and BBDO walked a bit of a tightrope. "We were trying to keep it between the guardrails," she said. " That's what attracts fans to sports in the first place. You could create a great ad campaign for IBM without knowing how an OS functioned, but that would never work in sports."

With properties simultaneously trying to sell brand, tickets and licensed merchandise and push TV viewing, the message can be muddled.

Rule No. 8
Sell the brand first — everything else will follow.

"It should be less about ticket plans, features and benefits and more about what sports can do for them," said Brad Higdon, account supervisor at The Martin Agency, Richmond, Va., the agency of record for NASCAR's Nextel Cup championship series. "It should be an extension of what consumers already love about the sport."

In the case of NASCAR, Martin's original work was the "Timeless" campaign in which archival footage was mixed with modern clips so that icons such as Richard Petty and Fireball Roberts race contemporary stars such as Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Gordon.

The objective was to make NASCAR fans feel good about changes in the format by celebrating a history they share.

Rule No. 9
Sports are social currency; spend it wisely.

"The most important drivers in the sports and entertainment category are social," said the NHL's Collins.

"The best in entertainment and sports brings friends and family together. Sports are a bonding agent — your marketing has to start from there."