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of how from management’s point of view the spots were about how the show was produced and the journalism part of it—the part that John Walsh brought and a lot of the other guys there, how good they were as journalists. Then you talk to the talent, whether it was somebody like Craig Kilborn, who was very irreverent, or Keith Olbermann, who was very opinionated, or Dan Patrick, who was just a great guy to hang out with—a lot of great personalities there. And it was great for me to sort of sit back and say, “You’re both right”—the fact that SportsCenter does have this credibility and you’ve got the journalism thing going for it, it allows people like Kilborn, who I was watching a lot, to be very irreverent and just have fun with it. You could tell the guy just wanted to do comedy basically; in a certain sense they let him, because it was a 2:00 a.m. show.

ALAN BROCE:

We’d have to watch every night after we shot, we would sort of get together in a small conference room and go over, like, here’s who’s the talent, the athletes, that are coming in tomorrow; here’s the basic idea that we’re going to shoot; and here’s where we’re going to shoot. So every day was like a new adventure. And I shuttled back and forth between that core creative team and usually Norby or Vince or John Walsh’s office or somebody in operations saying, “This is what we want to do.” They’re like, “You want to do what? You’re going to land a helicopter?” And they were always flying by the seat of their pants.

GARY MILLER:

Keith would actually show up to these things in, like, a robe and a pipe, like he was on the set of a movie or a sitcom or something. I mean, he was in almost all of them. And Dan too, obviously, ’cause they were the main anchors. I didn’t try to influence the producers or anything, but I know Keith did. Management wouldn’t let talent do commercials. People would come to them with offers, but it was always, “Oh, no, you can’t advertise a product.” And I don’t know if it was Keith’s Boston Market commercial that broke the ice or Dan’s Coors stuff or whatever, but eventually they had to cave in, and I think the “This is SportsCenter” campaign is what really changed everything, because it made us look human.

There’d been many “cool” and funny TV commercials and promos over the long history of the medium, but the dryly witty ESPN campaign was unique in the annals of on-air promotion. This was not the kind of thing networks did to advertise themselves—especially unlikely, one might have thought, from a channel devoted to sports for a broad mass market. The spots were anything but the artsy indulgences of some elite boutique outfit; they were there to raise brand consciousness and encourage viewer loyalty, two very practical concerns being dealt with in a gratifyingly smart, original way.

The campaign was certainly a creative extension of the smart-alecky, softly self-mocking humor practiced by ESPN personalities. That helps explain why some of those personalities took so naturally to performing in the promos and contributing ideas. This was ESPN “attitude” raised to an inspired new level.

Not every spot was a thing of genius, but more than a few had a cockeyed comic sparkle that made viewers glad to see them pop up—so glad that more than once, ESPN filled an entire hour of primetime with nothing but spots back-to-back. Viewers who’d missed them could catch up; others could laugh again at old favorites. Yes, people sat there and watched a solid hour of nothing but network promos.

Wieden + Kennedy’s “This is SportsCenter” campaign: Step Number Seven in ESPN’s rise to world dominance.

MEL KIPER Jr., Pro Football Analyst:

Back in 1994, Freddie Gaudelli was producing the NFL draft and he said to me, “We’re coming back to you to get your reaction to what [Indianapolis Colts VP] Bill Tobin just said about you. He was ripping you back in Indianapolis.” Among other things, Tobin had said that I had never been offered anything in the NFL, which was not accurate. Ironically, I was offered a position with the Baltimore Colts back in 1983, right before