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By Root 2355 0

ESPN is a sports fan. We should always approach the advertising, whether it’s of an event or of our own shows, like we are a sports fan talking about sports as opposed to a network promoting a show. And that was really front and center in everything that we did. Using Wieden’s words, and trying to stay true to that, I think helped the advertising go from what had already been very good to something that I think was great. When I first got to ESPN, I went around and talked to John Walsh, Howard Katz, and Steve Bornstein, and one of the key things they told me was that the marketing organization needed to embrace sports and, in their opinion, promote some of our proprietary programming. We were promoting “tune in to sporting events,” but it was really time to start making people aware of some of the home-grown programs that ESPN had—Baseball Tonight, NFL GameDay, which I think is now Countdown. So my team, along with Wieden + Kennedy, got together and said the real jewel is SportsCenter because it’s on all the time. It’s on all evening. It’s in reruns in the morning. This was the one that we really should invest in and focus on.

So we sat in my office and brainstormed. And the guys from Wieden + Kennedy said, “We see it on TV, we just want to go there and hang out.” So a group of creatives went and hung out in Bristol and watched SportsCenter. They watched it from the preproduction meeting. They watched the stories being written. They watched the guys put on their makeup. They watched the tapes being handed in at the last minute—this was back in the day of tapes—just in time to get on the air. And after they’d been there for a while, they had an idea. They said that for a sports fan, being in Bristol and watching SportsCenter being produced is the single best sporting event you can ever go to. It’s mecca. Because you’re watching all the highlights. You’re watching guys talk about sports. You’re watching guys debate what are the best events to put on for the night. You’ve got them trying to write their stuff. And then you’ve got the anxiety of trying to put it all together and put it on live and get it all down to ninety to sixty minutes, whatever the show’s length was. It’s the best thing that’s on TV. And they said that helping the consumer see what goes into putting on this show is gold, and that they wanted to create a campaign that gives the viewer an eye on what the making of SportsCenter is. And that was really the genesis of the idea. They said, “What we want to do is do it in a way that’s a little bit of what we call the ‘mockumentary.’ We want to shoot it documentary-style, but we want to have some fun with it. We want to make people know that this is the mecca of sports, so that athletes might hang out at SportsCenter, even mascots might hang out at SportsCenter. But it’s about the show and the guys who are at the anchor desk. And it will give consumers a little eye into what it’s like to be there.”

And that’s how it started. I remember going with my compatriots Al and Mike and talking to John Walsh about it, and he loved it. I remember being in Aspen at one of Steve Bornstein’s staff retreats, sitting next to him at dinner one night, and him looking at me and asking if we were going to “make our announcers stars.” And I said, “No, because it’s about the show.” He says, “No, that’s what you’re going to do—you’re going to make Keith and Dan Patrick and Craig Kilborn stars.” I repeated, “No, it’s about the show.” And he says, “Don’t worry; it’s a brilliant idea. But you’re still going to make them stars and that’s going to cost me money.” And we were very lucky that Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick and Craig Kilborn were among the anchors, because they could pull it off.

HARRIET SEITLER:

We focused Wieden + Kennedy on how do we build this emotional connection, and we identified SportsCenter as the secret sauce—and then, separately, how do we create this other identity for a network?

ALAN BROCE, Director of Advertising:

I had been an advertising director at Pepsi. When I saw that ESPN hired Wieden, I was a huge