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If you are part of the tourist board for Paris or Tokyo or New York, you have visitors coming in all the time, for millions of different reasons.
If you are a smaller town or less urban region, you have to look around and ask some hard questions….what do we have that can draw visitors and tourism dollars since we appear to have misplaced our Eiffel Tower?
One answer is sports tourism.
According to Wikipedia, “The Rooney Rule, established in 2003, requires National Football league teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operations opportunities. The rule is named for Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the chairman of the league’s diversity committee, and indirectly the Rooney family in general, due to the Steelers’ long history of giving African Americans opportunities to serve in team leadership roles. It is often cited as an example of affirmative action.”
Those are the facts in a nutshell. The opinions and results, however, are steeped in controversy and conjecture. Any potential NFL coach is groomed and prepared with years of hands-on training and development, progressing from a supporting role to head coach. Coaches are chosen based on character, commitment, work ethic, leadership and motivational skills, and of course the ability to create winning football teams.
I swore to myself before the start of the NBA free-agency period that I wouldn’t write about LeBron James. Sports media are putting in enough hours of coverage about his team status, for all of us.
I realized, however, that I work in and write about sports publicity and PR, and since James announced he would share his intentions of what team he’ll join for the next few years in an hour-long broadcast on ESPN, his story became a good PR/bad PR story.
Just before July 1, the Nets began to unveil a 225 foot x 95 foot painted sign on the side of a building at 34th Street & 8th Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The wall features prominent images of the Nets’ new owner, 6’8″ Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, and part owner & hip-hop legend, Jay-Z. Above their faces is the phrase, “The Blueprint for Greatness.” The Nets feel strongly about the direction their team is heading, and the wall is a tribute to the positive growth this organization continues to make.
The wall is part of an aggressive marketing campaign (along with several major digital and print advertisements), placed within walking distance of New York Penn Station, a major hub for the Nets moving forward. They will move to Newark for the next two seasons, at least, and then permanently to Brooklyn. Many, many Nets fans will pass through Penn Station in the years to come.
Last week former tennis star and current broadcast analyst, John McEnroe, was right when he said that the three-day, 11-hour record-blasting Wimbledon match between John Isner of the United States and Nicolas Mahut of France was “the greatest advertisement for our sport.”
Change channels to World Cup soccer where referees became the story. Players, coaches and analysts seemed to question calls at every turn. Fans, particularly in the United States where soccer popularity remains infantile, have been outraged.
There is a lot of drama on and off the pitch at this year’s World Cup, and the following nine stories are some that have managed to make the headlines so far. France’s Saga How do you go from last World Cup’s runner-up to failing to win a game in this one? Ask France, who…
Some have called the vuvuzela’s sound bothersome, others want them banned, and South Africa calls it a symbol of its brand of football. Last Friday, World Cup soccer began with the biggest buzz I’ve every heard when soccer was the lead topic. Game chat didn’t last long, however. It was drowned out by another kind of buzz, the vuvuzela.
Following on from my last article, The World Cup Brings Big Opportunities Brands, I’d like to keep the focus on the World Cup and highlight another great marketing campaign revolving around the tournament.
Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with a few members of the team from 1000heads, a word of mouth agency here in London, and one of the (many) things we spoke about was their 32 Dishes campaign.
When you think of brand positioning for Apple Inc. (Public, NASDAQ:AAPL) a few words come to mind: creative, quality, dynamic design and secretive. In light of the last definition, most all information that has any hint of a new product, design or circuitry hits every mode of media within minutes. Apple’s PR department has one…
In the last weeks I’ve thought a lot about a hot button issue that began with a political decision, yet has touched sports organizations from the National Basketball League to Major League Baseball…or should I say that they hit on the topic by no choice of their own. As if the Arizona Immigration Law SB 1070…
Here’s my interview with Peter Berg. He’s the director of one of the greatest sports films of all time “Friday Night Lights,” and recent box office smash “Hancock.” Peter and I met at his film 44 studio in Santa Monica, CA to talk about his role in a television movie, where he took on the…
(This is a guest article by Wesley Mallette) Gentlemen, It’s almost here. Big weekend. Life-changing weekend for you and your families. You are going to hear a lot of things throughout the course of the next several days leading up to the draft, straight through the completion of your first season. Sometime between Thursday and…
