Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [165]
When I walked into the situation, I expected that people were doing cartwheels down the hall about Wieden + Kennedy’s work. But not everybody was thrilled with Wieden + Kennedy. Not everybody was thrilled with the shift to wanting to build a brand at the expense of just promoting a show, then telling what time a game is going to come on. And so it was a little rough sledding there.
JUDY FEARING:
We sold male eyeballs to advertisers. That’s the business that we were in, and we sold at a price premium because men are hard to reach. Advertisers are not going to pay us a premium to reach women, they could get women much, much cheaper on other television networks. Men are more elusive. That’s the value that we brought to the table.
KEVIN PROUDFOOT, Executive Creative Director, Wieden + Kennedy:
The SportsCenter campaign came about envisioning ESPN, as absurd as it seemed, as sort of the center of the sports universe. Because at that time, no one else was broadcasting sports twenty-four hours a day. And so it seemed this was the twenty-four-hour, seven-day-week home of sports, and if it’s the home of sports, it’s the center of this universe that expands out to all these games and all these athletes and all these personalities, and doesn’t it make sense that when you go behind the scenes at SportsCenter and you’re in the hallways or you’re in the cafeteria, that athletes and mascots and coaches are there too, wandering around, doing whatever it is that they’re doing as they pass through on the way to the next game and whatnot? And so that was the impetus for that whole campaign.
They will come to us with athletes they think would be great to get in the campaign, but at the same time, people who work on it are huge sports fans. And if they have an idea of something that’s happening in the world of sports right now, then we concept a spot and present it to ESPN. After we’ve presented a few rounds of scripts to them and decide on which ones we want to move forward with, ESPN will start reaching out to the athletes to see if they want to be involved in the campaign. One of the interesting things that’s happened over time is that having your own SportsCenter spot as an athlete has become a little bit of a badge. These athletes come out, they come out of college, they’re making a ton of money, and there’s not a lot that they can’t buy. But having a SportsCenter spot—that’s your own, like being part of that, it’s obviously a cool thing to have.
HANK PEARLMAN, Commercial Director:
I came up with This Is SportsCenter for the campaign. Obviously, they’d been saying “This is SportsCenter” for years, at the end of the show. The derivation was Spinal Tap—This Is Spinal Tap, This Is SportsCenter. We needed a line for the end of the spot that kind of cemented the idea that it was a fake documentary about SportsCenter, so you know, This Is Spinal Tap was the fake documentary about that.
I remember presenting the campaign in script form to a roomful of anchors up in Bristol, a room full of talent, before we’d shot anything, basically to get them on board. And nobody was laughing, nobody was smiling; it was tense. I got the sense that all the talent was thinking, How is this going to affect me? How many spots am I going to get? Is management going to let me do what I want to do? The very beginning, before we shot anything, none of them wanted to show up. None of them wanted to show up on their day off. None of them wanted to do it. After they saw the spots, there was never a problem again. I think they saw how good it was for them and for the