Marketing Mid-term:
D for "Duh"

Michael Cox

With Midsummer Night passed and the Midsummer Classic only a couple of weeks away (damn, that makes the summer seem short), enough time has elapsed where Major League Baseball's marketing strategies should have begun to come to fruition. Therefore, we should be able to take a look at what Bud Selig and the gang have done to build on The Season That Saved Baseball (Again).

So, with the help of the accounting firm of Ernst and Young (actually Chet Ernst and Elroy Young, accountants who don't get much work due to the obvious name confusion so we felt sorry for 'em), let's now tally what the sport has done to whip fans and potential fans into a frenzy.

-- An ad starring an unknown chubby actor and the voice of Tony Gwynn.

-- Another ad featuring an unknown dorky actor and the voice of Nomar Garciaparra.

That's it.

No Griffey, no McGwire, no Sosa. No visible actual ballplayers at all.

And aside from the realization that Nomar has one of the better speaking voices in sports (if he can learn a few cliches, Tim McCarver watch out), the ads have all the fun and imagination that I'd have expected of Madison Avenue...circa 1970.

What were they thinking...?

(SCENE: An ad agency, somewhere in NYC. Winter 1998.)

AD MAN 1: This is soooo cool, man -- we got Major League Baseball! I've been dreaming of this since I was a kid! I feel just like Darren from Bewitched!

AD MAN 2: The Dick York Darren, or the Dick Sargent Darren?

AD MAN 3: You're still all kids. In my day you had to apprentice for twenty years just to hold up the storyboards for the real ad men. It was me who thought up the guy what flies into the Hertz rental car, you know...

AD MAN 1: I have just the idea: Mark McGwire hits a homer into an old lady's Starbuck's and she sues him, but drops the lawsuit 'cause he's so darned nice.

AD MAN 2: Or Griffey -- you know how he always has those kids from the Make-A-Wish Foundation with him? Instead of a kid, it could be some old dumb guy, like Carrot Top.

(MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL COMMISSIONER BUD SELIG sticks head in door)

SELIG: Uh, guys? One more thing -- the players say they don't have time to do any ads in person. They were demanding extra off days. A couple of the guys did say you could hang around the locker room with a tape recorder, though.

(SELIG exits.)

AD MEN 1 & 2: D'oh.

AD MAN 3: Did I ever tell you I wrote that "that'sa spicy meat-a-ball" thing...?

AD MAN 2: Well, back to the drawing board. Man, no players. Damn. That means we have to do fan stuff. Did you ever see those old NBA ads? This bites.

AD MAN 1: Well, I'm stuck now.

AD MAN 3: I'm seeing an idea...it's a fan...he...forgets the words to the national anthem! Now, that's funny.

AD MAN 1: Are you sure you weren't frozen in 1967 and just unthawed?

AD MAN 2: Let the geezer do it. No players -- how stupid is that?

AD MAN 1: You're right. Race you to Scores.

(AD MEN 1 & 2 leave)

AD MAN 3: And that rally cap thing there. I bust a gut with that...did I ever mention that I had the idea for "where's the beef"...?

So we end up with the sorry state MLB marketing is in now. No building on the monumental 1998 season, no drawing in the casual fan with their favorite players, not even a modicum of humor. Frosted Wheaties does a better job of leveraging Griffey than MLB does of using its entire stable of players.

Of course, where there's player non-participation, there's the slight pungent aroma of the MLB Players' Association, which likely had a hand in making sure its members didn't get overworked or anything. An MLBPA leader with a brain should be demanding the players get more air time, not less. It almost seems that they haven't yet figured out the simple equation:

Number of fans entertained = Amount of cash for salaries.

Nike, on the other hand, knew exactly how to exploit the Great Home Run Chase of 1998. Their ad guys cranked out a brilliant series featuring pitchers wanting to "go yard," including the Glavine/Maddux gut-buster (in more ways than one) that may be the best baseball ad ever, coining the widely-used catchphrase, "chicks dig the longball."

The follow-up ads, tossing in every celebrity from Rush Limbaugh to Daisy Fuentes to KISS bassist Gene Simmons, were icing on a rich cake. Classic and effective. Now if only there were a huge market for baseball cleats.

But MLB, ever on the lookout for ways to cheap out their product, decided not to promote with ads, but by covertly abetting an avalanche of offense. Between the juiced ball and the clever reverse psychology resulting in the squeezed strike zone (Selig had to realize that telling the umps to make the zone bigger would have this result), second basemen are knocking balls over the fence the other way, one-handed. Jose Canseco is practically bunting homers.

It's as if the only lesson MLB learned from '98 is that more scoring and more homers = more fans. They forgot to factor in cheapened home run records, more ruined young pitchers and four-hour games. Woo. It's fan-tastic.

But wait -- it gets better. One of MLB's nouveau riche, the Coors-assisted Larry Walker, told the press just the other day that he doesn't even like baseball. "I wish I could tell you I love baseball and love watching baseball on TV because it's so exciting, but it isn't," he said. "It's boring on TV, and even more boring in person."

And he offered that nugget up without prodding -- he was simply asked if he talks baseball with fans he meets.

Maybe it was a good idea to not put the players in the ads, after all.

about the author

Michael Cox wanted to center an entire season's ad campaign around the slogan, "We gotta whole lot of boysenberries, Chuckie." Not taking no for an answer, he's asking that Crispin Glover get in touch with him at mc@strikethree.com.