SCOTT JACOBS

It is sure to cause a firestorm. A flurry of controversy in an already controversial, backwards world, but former sports agent Josh Luchs is coming clean: he paid college football players (lots of them) and it wasn’t always his fault.  That’s the main message that comes from George Dohrmann’s fabulous piece on Luchs, who became a sports agent at the wildly implausible (at least nowadays) age of 20.  No college degree.  Still living at home with his parents.  He didn’t even dream of becoming an agent, he simply wanted to work for the Raiders, his favorite team.

But an unpaid internship he had with a radio station eventually led to his repayment as a ball boy with the then Los Angeles Raiders.  Relationships with players were formed, and one day, three years after he started with the team, star cornerback Greg Townsend proposed what would nowadays be considered a crazy idea: he wanted the 19 year old kid to represent him as his agent.

Well, that was the start of Luch’s rocky career as an agent, one which saw many highs, and plenty of lows.

In the piece Luchs divulges paying off both small amounts, and quite handsome amounts of money to players all over the West Coast.  College players that were looking to make it big in the NFL, whom he saw a golden carrot at the end of their college careers.

But plenty of times he paid them (My mom’s sick, can you help us with rent?, one player allegedly said) and then a teammate of that player would contact him propositioning him for money too.  And round and round we go.  He knew it was wrong, but the players were the ones coming to him, and he wanted to get an “in” with them, in addition to helping them out.

And it all raises a fascinating debate, one that has raged on for years and decades.

Whose at fault here?  The agent or the player?  Or is the system so unreasonably absurd that it creates this toxic atmosphere where the further the NCAA cracks down on agent payments to players, the further underground, and less-directly connected the agent gets– while still ultimately getting money over to a player.

For years we’ve painted the agent as the bad guy. He knows the rules.  He does this for a living.  He’s the one putting unfair pressure on some talented athlete whose still just a kid.  He doesn’t know any better.

But doesn’t the game change when it’s the player coming to the agent with that Twinkie attached to the end of a stick, saying help me out, and maybe you can sign me.  Signing me equals a life-changing pay day for you.  Signing me could put you on the map.

O these games that athletes and agents play.  Off the field major level sports is nothing more than politics wrapped in shiny jewelery and presented as entertainment and fun.  Ask agents who have to fight off ruthless competitors (one reason why I myself could never survive in that kind of cut-throat world).  Now I’m not saying that agents are blame-less in all of this.  The NCAA blatantly states that it’s illegal to pay a player while in school with the exception of a free education (one Luchs says many don’t take seriously), but as has been argued forever, you’re still talking about guys, many of whom come from the ghettos and poor areas in bad neighborhoods.

The whole system is at fault for this mess.  Players should get stipends because they are practically employees of the school, and the school and the NCAA greatly benefit for the jobs they do and the work they put in.  Instead you have great athletes getting good educations, while still being just as broke generally as they were before.  So what to do?  Can you blame them if they seek out some money to help themselves out?

I have a problem when a college athlete takes extravagant gifts, like a beautiful car or even a house.  But an agent paying a player money so that their sick mom can make rent?  Is that such a terrible thing?  And the kicker in all of this is that there is no guarantee whatsoever that the agent will ever even get that player as a client.  Which is hilariously brutal, because the agent can take an epic fall if they get caught, and it more than likely may be a player that never even became their client.

So in reality these agents are breaking a rigid rule with the hope that maybe it will work.  As I said, there is no guarantee.  According to Luchs, many players will take large sums right away and never talk to an agent again.  Amazing.  The trick he said is to pay in small, but important enough amounts (like $500/month) to keep them in close contact.  Of course the other key to remember is that players don’t take the fall for this when they get to the NFL.  They don’t have to pay back the money an agent gave them if the NCAA finds out about it later on.  But the agent gets suspended, their reputation takes a nose-dive, and many get fired, losing their jobs for a player that they never even represented.

So how do you fix this whole mess?  Would a stipend do it?  Hard to say.  And if there was one, how do you allocate what goes where, so that players aren’t burning their stipends on hookers and booze?  More regulations then.

I just think that this whole thing is not as black and white as we make it to be.  Agents are to blame.  Players are to blame.  Even the rule is to blame.

Expecting these players to be angels when they’re getting thrown around money, the likes they’ve never seen before is a little ridiculous don’t you think?  And to expect agents to be perfect in the dog-eat-dog, step on your opponent’s back world of their profession, is just as absurd.

This kind of thing goes on everywhere.  Some just don’t get caught.

Read the entire SI story here

Photo: AP

Some of them were in Chinese.

Well, it’s not that weird, considering Yao Ming plays for the Rockets, and there will be millions of Chinese watching many of his games.

Chinese companies have been advertising at the Rockets arena ever since they drafted Yao.

From the Wall Street Journal in 2003:

Last summer, the U.S. distributor for Yanjing Beer Group Corp., of Beijing, leased billboards lining the Houston Rockets’ arena, home court of the 7-foot-5-inch Mr. Yao. The advertising deal, valued at just over $6 million for five years, marks the first time a Chinese company has sponsored a National Basketball Association team. It probably won’t be the last.

SCOTT JACOBS

Once upon a time a cute little kid (now probably in his late 30’s) handed Mean Joe Greene a Coke, and the infamous tough guy returned the favor by throwing his jersey to the kid.  “Hey kid, catch!”  Okay, so I wasn’t actually alive then, but I’ve seen the ad (as have you most likely) many, many times.  It’s considered one of the greatest ads in Super Bowl history.  Not to mention one of the most memorable.

Well, could you imagine if after the kid got the jersey, he peered into the lens of the camera and stated aloud, “see more at coke.com/meanjoe.”  Now before you go hustling over to that website which is fictional and does not exist, I want you to think about how much advetising has changed and how the internet has turned the world of advertising on its head.  I’m not exactly re-inventing the wheel telling you this, but it dawned on me yesterday during the Super Bowl, that ads have gone from 30 second masterpieces handcrafted to maximize every ounce of their multi mullion dollar time slot, to teasers with more to see on their websites.

I’m not quite sure where this trend emerged.  You may recall Reebok’s very popular Terry Tate ads, which told viewers that if they wanted to see more, they could, at reebok.com/terrytate.  That’s the first company I really recall doing that.

Of course yesterday, advertisers for the Super Bowl showed the direction that advertisements are really going in– the internet.  No longer is 30 seconds enough to get our attention and get out of the way.  Everything has to be extended, uncensored, unrated, out of control, or just simply continued.  When Apple rolled out their epically bizarre 1984 commercial many years ago, could you have imagined if it said, “see if the world ends at apple.com.”

Yeah, me neither.

I carefully went back and looked at all of the big Super Bowl ads from yesterday.  True to their nature Coke unveiled another brilliant masterpiece of color and sound with the familiar Coke bottle using Simpsons characters this time to carry out their message that all your problems can be solved by Coke.  Actually I think the real message was closer along the lines of ‘do something nice for someone who’s down and you have no idea how much that will brighten their day.’  But, Coke being Coke, chooses to instead portray Coke as saving the world.  You had your typical crazy beer commercials from a house made of beer (brilliant) to the world going to end because of a meteor (hysterical) all the way to your typical crazy Doritos commercials with dogs controlling man (funny) and man faking his own death to be buried in a casket with Doritos and tv (disturbing).  Those are the type of ads we come to expect from these companies on Super Sunday for years.

Where the game of advertising has changed is with companies like GoDaddy.com and new faces like HomeAway and For the Family, offering trailer like clips of their commercial on TV, before giving you the chance to watch the entire thing on their website.  GoDaddy.com has been doing raunchy, some might say offensive ads for years.  But as my colleague Mitch pointed out, people remember their name because of it, and isn’t that the point of advertising?

The internet has given us not only the opportunity to basically immortalize our favorite ads, but it has also given companies a chance to latch onto their target audience and drag them deeper into what they want to sell.

But GoDaddy.com is old news, despite their creative approaches to making fun of pop culture.  HomeAway is brand new.  Well, not brand new, but I’d never heard of it until yesterday.  They took a really intriguing new approach to advertising.  A trailer to a short film, which in essence makes a brilliant case for why you should stay in a rented house over a hotel.

The commercial which ran for about 30 seconds saw Chevy Chase and Beverly DeAngelo reprise their roles as the Griswolds in a short film called  Hotel Hell Vacation.  The film was nearly 14 minutes long.  You would never have seen anything like this some 15-20 years ago.  Commercials then were quick, many forgotten, and the few that stuck out were shown a few more times and then put away in the annals of history.

But in the rat race that is today’s advertising world, companies have come up with new and creative ways to get people to become interested in their product.  Some work, others flop.  But the internet has given us not only the opportunity to basically immortalize our favorite ads, but it has also given companies a chance to latch onto their target audience and drag them deeper into what they want to sell.

The short film, which I expected to be dumb and relatively short, was hysterical and well thought out.  Had it not been for a company, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it on TV as just a regular made for TV program.  I went to the website Focus on the Family after Tim Tebow’s somewhat controversial ad about abortion ran.  There they had a good 10 minute plus video sit down interview with Tim’s parents, who came clean about the entire story.  While the commercial touched the surface of Tebow’s story, the video on their website unveiled all of it.

While the story was wrapped all around religious overtones, the details were pretty amazing.  Tebow’s mother, despite already having four kids, was willing to risk her life to give berth to Tim.  Pro-life or Pro-choice, it’s an incredible story.

The point here is this.  Advertisers have a platform unlike ever before to sell their products and brand their name.  In fact, the future is a little scary.  Vizio’s ad which featured Beyonce announced to the world that they now have applications for your television.  Instead of going online to see the message, you can now apparently just use your TV through the internet?

While the Hyundai ad with Brett Favre’s waffling was a slam dunk, the message of the commercial was even more interesting: Just what will the world be like in 10 years?  If the evolution of ads are any indication, I don’t even know where to begin.

But isn’t it ironic that while some companies use this new platform to market their product, some old tried and true companies simply choose to re-make ads that were once upon a time, so simple, so innovative, and had no ‘to be continued.’  Coke Zero did it last year with Troy Polamulu taking over for Mean Joe Greene and this past Super Bowl, McDonalds remade their famous Larry Bird-Michael Jordan horse commercial from many, many years ago.  Only this one featured Dwight Howard and LeBron James.  At the end, an older, much different looking Bird looks out at the two stars, while holding his McDonalds bag, and simply quips, “Great show guys!  And thanks for lunch.”

“Who’s that guy?” says Dwight.  “I have no idea,” says Lebron.

That’s where advertising is heading.  Ten years from now what will advertising be like?  I have no idea either.

MITCH BLATT

I cover sports business for JSB, as well as writing general posts, so I figure I should tackle the Super Bowl ads: not just which ones were funniest but which ones did the best job of marketing their products.

However, we will start off with which ones are funniest.

The envelope please…

1.) Brett Favre in 2020 – Hyundai

Not only was it hilarious imagining what Brett Favre will look like 10 years from now when he’s still playing the game, this ad actually related directly to the product it promoted and, I think, connected with the audience. (From thinking about Favre’s 10-year future, the ad transitioned from that uncertainty to the certainty that your Hyundai will still be under warranty. That’s the challenge of Super Bowl ads: They have to entertain the fans while still selling a product. Talking about product features isn’t entertaining.

2.) Green Police – Audi

Also hilarious, and also relates directly to the product, and a good song, too!

Here are some related videos on the Green Police theme from Audi:

Green Police YouTube Channel

3.) Charles Barkley doing Dr. Suess about Taco Bell

Charles Barkley is awesome even without rhyming about Taco Bell. Remember what a star he was in his 2008 T-Mobile Super Bowl ad with Dwyane Wade?

4.) Fiddling Beaver – Monster

Monster has had good ads for the past two years now:

5.) Mr. Burns goes broke – Coke

I thought it would be funny if Abu just gave Burns a Coke and left. Yay, you can be happy just by drinking Coke, not by having good friends!

Now for some other notable ads…

Best marketing campaigns

The best marketing campaign by far this year was Focus on the Family. They announced they were running an abortion-related ad featuring Tim Tebow, and they generated all sorts of controversy for running an advocacy ad during the Super Bowl. As it was, the ad itself simply showed Tebow’s mother sharing her love for Tim (and didn’t mention abortion at all) and told viewers to go to their website for the full story. In effect, they got a whole lot of free publicity to push a message that CBS wouldn’t have allowed to run during the Super Bowl in the first place.

Go Daddy has the best on going marketing campaign, and they continued the same thing this year. They get a good share of (well-deserved) criticism for objectifying women, but when I bought the domain name for Juiced Sports Blog, there was only one registrar I thought of: Go Daddy. Who else is there? There’s a reason Go Daddy dominates the domain name game with 29% of the market share. (Their leading competitor has 8% of the market share.) Go Daddy took a boring product–domain names–and made people talk about it. Not everyone is going to buy a domain name, but with the growth of the internet over the past decade, people already had Go Daddy’s name in their head from the Super Bowl, so when they did decide to buy a domain name, they already knew who sold them.

Weirdest ads

Census ad

It’s not every year that the federal government buys a Super Bowl ad. It was kind of a slow ad without much of a climax. I was disappointed.

There’s a lot of related ads on their YouTube channel like this one:

The commercial is supposed to be a mockumentary, and it includes “interviews” with the characters on YouTube. It’s directed by Christopher Guest, one of the writers of This is Spinal Tap.

Dove for Men

Dove is trying to expand its market to include men. We’ll see how it works:

The target audience for this campaign is older men who are done raising their kids, so I think they might be able to get some of the market. Obviously they’re not going to get any of the market of young men.

Mark Sanchez ad evokes FotF ad?

When this Mark Sanchez ad came on, it grabbed my attention at first, because it sounded like it could be a response to the controversy generated by the Tim Tebow ad. Listen to the first lines (which were said as the sound of a heartbeat was playing): “I’m Mark Sanchez, and I’ve got something to say to women…” (It ended up being an awareness ad of heart attack symptoms.)

On a sidenote, is Mark Sanchez becoming the pretty boy Tom Brady was?

Dr. Pepper KISS ad flop

Dr. Pepper did a really lame ad that wasn’t even much of a change from their regular non-Super Bowl ad rotations featuring Gene Simmons telling people to drink Dr. Pepper, because “he’s a doctor.”

Come on, you’ve got KISS, a band that is older than Brett Favre, and you’ve got The Who doing the halftime show. Dr. Pepper should have used KISS to joke about how old guys always do the halftime show now

Denny’s Only Day of Business All Year

Last year Denny’s gave away free grand slams the day after the Super Bowl, and lots of people went, but I’m not sure anyone returned. Not having improved their food, I’m not sure how they think this year will be any different. One difference is this year Free Grand Slam Day is Tuesday, not Monday, so maybe they were hoping a lot of people would come today, thinking the food was free, then end up actually buying food.

The ad is entertaining, if only to see a chicken sitting in the Oval Office wearing a tie:

VW Fails in Bringing Back 10-Year-Old Trend

Remember when you were 10 years old and you thought it was funny to hit people when you saw a VW Beatle? Well it’s still not funny:

That’s $2.8 million dollar the drain…

MITCHELL BLATT, sports business

Every year when the bowl season starts out with two 7-5 teams playing each other in the Meineke Car Care Bowl, or some other cheaply-named bowl game, there are the jokes about how there are too many bowl games.

“Hey, the Hoosiers deserve to play in the Toilet Bowl this year!”
(For more on some of the less prestigious bowl games, read our interview with the promoters of the EagleBank Bowl.)

Some of the early bowl games have particularly cumbersome names:
S.D. County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl, St. Petersburg Bowl pres. by Beef ‘O’ Brady’s, and of course the PapaJohns.com Bowl (not the Pizza Bowl).

But for an early bowl game that no one watches, having a stupid name can be a good thing, maybe even a better value than sponsoring a big name bowl.

For example, let me ask you who sponsors the Rose Bowl?

Stumped?

It’s Citi.

I bet you didn’t need to think for a second to know who sponsors the PapaJohns.com Bowl.

When that bowl gets written about, the sponsor itself is the name of the bowl. That bowl game does seem to stick out to me whenever I read it just because it is such a lame name. Not only is it named exclusively after a sponsor, it’s named after the sponsor’s website! So even if I never watch it, Papa Johns does get brand name penetration with me.

(As for the Rose Bowl, the official name is The Rose Bowl Game presented by Citi. Allstate and Tostitos and FedEx will get more brand penetration with the Sugar, Fiesta, and Orange bowls, respectively, because their names precede their bowl games, so they won’t be dropped in media coverage. Tostitos has the best bang for their buck, because they sponsored a game that relates to their product: Tostitos Fiesta.)

The brand penetration that comes from sponsoring an event comes not just from the event itself, but from the media preceding the event, when people are talking about who will win the FedEx Orange Bowl, for example.

However, most fans aren’t going to refer to the Orange Bowl as the FedEx Orange Bowl, but the media might. As with Papa Johns, here are some other companies that decided to sponsor a bowl game named exclusively after the sponsor:
Little Caesars, EagleBank, Chick-fil-A, Capital One, GMAC, Insight, Outback.

The Insight Bowl and Outback Bowl even manage to not sound tacky, but with the Insight Bowl, I’d question whether some people recognize immediately that it is sponsored by Insight Enterprises, because it does sound like it could be the name of a bowl game itself. That would dull name penetration, if they didn’t.

The basis of my survey was to find out how marketers are targeting sports blogs, and if they are being successful, with press releases in mind. At Juiced Sports, we receive press releases from a lot of promoters of books, websites, and other products, so we were interested to hear if other sites did, and how they handled them.

We sent out some emails to bloggers, and we only got 16 responses back, so it’s definitely not a good sample size by any means, but we will present the results as they are, not for any scientific or official means, but just to spur thinking about the issues.

Thanks to the bloggers at Losers With Socks, One Bronco Nation Under God, Gridiron Goddess, Tailgating Ideas, Moondog Sports, Double Extra Point, The Big Eleventh, The Sports Union, OC Domer, Block-C, Song Book Sports, Year 2, Waiting For Next Year, YepYep, Guyism, and Project Spurs for taking part.

What we found was that most of those surveyed do not regularly receive press releases or publicity mailings. Only 12.5% often receive press releases and 50% receive them rarely or seldom.

However, when sports bloggers do receive press releases, they typically read them. 62.5% said they usually read them, with 31.2% answering that they almost always read them. 31.2% usually don’t read them, and 6.2% almost never read them.

But sports bloggers will not often write about the products or services advertised.

6.2% said it was pretty likely they would write about what is being promoted, while 75% said they probably wouldn’t.

When sports bloggers do give publicity to a product or service, it is usually not negative. 56.2% said that when they post about a promoted product, it is usually neutral or favorable. Only 6.2% said that their coverage is usually negative. 75% said that their coverage is not negative very often, with 62.5% saying it is almost never negative. A few responders specifically noted that they just don’t cover releases, if they think it is a low quality or useless product being advertised, rather than give it negative coverage. (For the methodology of the poll, visit here.)

Some comments from responders on how marketers can better connect with blogs:

“The best press releases are sold and created as information…I’m not looking for spin and can see right through it, but if there is an event, award or research story that could be of interest to me that I might not otherwise have found, I’ll give that a mention…”

With athletes creating controversy this year by Tweeting during games–or in severe cases, getting released in an incident related to Twitter, as Larry Johnson was–the NFL is on top of the game. They created Twitter guidelines earlier this year, and they have created tens of accounts for all aspects of their brand, from NFL Media, NFL PR, Commissioner Goodell’s office, even to political-related NFL news.

Not only that, but they even created lists to make it easy to follow:
NFL Players
NFL Alumni
NFL Front Office

Here are some of the NFL’s accounts:
NFLFootballInfo
280Buzz
NFLonTheHill
NFLCommish
InsideNFLMedia
SupEvents
NFL
JoannaNFL
NFLprGuy
brennareneeNFL
NFLPlayerDev

280Buzz is using a good strategy to get fans involved. That account is listed as being run by John Buzzeo, NFL VP, Business Operations and Administration.

Each week, he has a “buzz contest” to see who will successfully predict something about the coming week’s matchups, for example:

we’re back, baby! buzz contest – pick the team that will have the most interceptions this week! how many picks and the player w/ the most!

congrats to @GONYJETS for winning this week’s buzz contest! He picked the sack leader – Calvin Pace! Get me your name and address for swag!

forgot to mention! let me know who will lead in yards (rushing and passing) AND how many they will have! 2 winners get some team swag!

And since we’re talking about Twitter, follow me at Mitchell_Blatt.