February will be a busy month for sports marketing publicity practitioners. It most likely will also be a disappointing month for them, because, as usual, positive earned media for the two mega events—the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics—will be negligible, even though their clients will have spent millions of dollars for the privilege of saying “proud sponsor.”
The Super Bowl will be played on Feb. 8 at Levi’s Stadium (Santa Clara, CA), home of the San Francisco 49ers. Two days earlier the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics will take place in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, and the games will continue until Feb. 22.
As the sports marketing guru for 35 years at two public relations shops—Arthur Cantor/Advance Public relations for 11 years and almost 25 years at Burson-Marsteller (during the days when it was the leading international public relations agency)—I advised on athletes to be used as brand publicity spokespersons, helped develop the creative for sports marketing accounts and managed or played key roles in mega sports marketing events, like the Super Bowl, Winter and Summer Olympics, Asian Games and baseball’s All-Star game, during the days when Gillette was the sole sponsor of the event.
Based on my experience as a reporter and editor at New York City dailies and a couple of years at a political PR shop before jumping the fence to public relations agencies as newspapers disappeared, I soon saw why so many sports marketing publicity efforts failed to achieve earned media. Many agency personnel assigned to sports marketing accounts were generalists and had few ideas how to best publicize a client’s sports marketing promotion. Also, many people assigned to sports marketing accounts came straight from the classrooms and reported to supervisors who also only had classroom experience. Missing was “on the job” experience.
Unlike most agency publicity accounts that are straightforward—business accounts should target business journalists, political accounts should target political writers, food accounts should target food writers, etc., sports marketing stories can be tailored to fit almost every section of a media outlet. But most sports marketing publicists mistakenly only target sports writers.
Making it more difficult for sports marketing publicists to gain earned media for a brand is not understanding the importance of what I consider the Big Five tenets of public relations: timing, tunnel vision, the selection of athletes as spokespersons and ignoring “small market” news outlets and understanding the media:
Here’s how to avoid those mistakes and gain positive earned media for clients that sponsor sports mega events:
Timing
Over the years faulty timing has been a prime reason that many sports marketing publicists fail to gain earned media. Many publicists begin their targeting of journalists a week or so before an event begins. Doing so, unless “hard news” is being disseminated, is a waste of time because as the event nears reporters have to file “hard news” stories “Soft news,” which is the great majority of PR generated material, including arranging interviews with paid athlete spokespersons, should commence at least three months before the beginning of an event, when journalists are not under pressure to file “hard news” deadline articles and are more apt to be receptive to PR pitches.
Tunnel Vision
It’s been years since sports stories were considered trivial and were published in what was known as the “toy department,” usually near the back pages of a newspaper. Today, sports-related articles are published in all sections of print publications, but many sports marketing practitioners still only target sports writers, limiting earned media possibilities. This is especially true when sports fanatics are assigned to sports marketing accounts. There isn’t a sports event happening that can’t be tailored for business, health or life style journalists. Too few sports marketing practitioners do so. With the growth of sportswashing by totalitarian governments, even political writers can be and should be targeted.
Athletes Spokespersons
I’ve always thought that using current athletes as publicity spokespersons for brand promotions was a mistake and only did so when a client said, “That’s what I want.” The reason for my belief was two-fold. 1) Current athletes who are reporter-friendly are available for interviews almost every game day; 2) The only reference to a brand in an article is usually a line saying, “So and So is a spokesperson for the XYZ Company,” with the remainder of the article being about the player. Missing from the article are any brand talking points, making the article worthless in my opinion. I’ve always opted for athletes who have been out of the media spotlight for a while or non-athletes who have a nexus to sports, because those articles are more likely to include a couple of brand talking points.
“Small Market” News Outlets
Most sports marketing publicists only aim for hits in major media news outlets, ignoring that only a handful of daily newspapers have print circulations over 100,000 and that smaller circulation outlets can be a more welcoming target for publicists. There’s an easy way to target “small market” outlets without spending many hours on the phone: Split them into A, B, C groups and send them “exclusive in your state” releases. Each release, written in AP style, would contain one graph detailing why the brand is sponsoring the event, and would also include several additional quotes (at the bottom of the release) which an editor could insert. Depending on the budget, each outlet could be sent two different releases. One for sports, the other for business editors. Targeting editors at outlets that normally were ignored with exclusive material always was appreciated and resulted in positive earned media.
Understanding The Media
Stories about budgets and promotional campaigns are not of interest to journalists who cover sports events. Those types of stories should target marketing writers, advertising pubs and sports business journals. A sure way to become persona non grata to journalists is to send pitches without knowing what topics they cover or to bother them with daily emails.
There’s a major difference between sports marketing brand public relations and other types of public relations: Financial news is slotted for business sections; food news for food editors and political news for political editors. But sports marketing news can be crafted for various sections, because it has elements that contain sports, financial, health and political details, which should be used to develop stories that can be used in all sections of news outlets. Too often it is not and that means clients are being short changed.
