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Leagues and Governing Bodies

MLB embarks on aggressive effort to market its players

MLB says it is going all out to market its stars this year, producing commercials and other content featuring young stars like Mike Trout, Yasiel Puig, Andrew McCutchen and Clayton Kershaw.

“Baseball has been working really, really aggressively this year in marketing, in collaboration with the union, our players more comprehensively than before,” said MLB Chief Marketing Officer Jacqueline Parkes.

The effort, which is being produced with players despite their busy in-season schedules, counters a knock on baseball that it doesn’t spend enough time marketing players.

MLB’s new videos will feature stars like Felix Hernandez and the game’s fans.
The league has created 293 pieces of content featuring all 30 clubs and 76 players so far, Parkes said. By the end of the season, MLB should have more than 500 unique pieces of film content to air on television and social media. That’s 40 times more content featuring individual players than aired last season, she said.

The video and commercials

began airing Opening Day on Fox, ESPN, TBS and MLB platforms, including MLB Network and MLB.com, as well as on social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Spanish-language content is running on Fox Deportes and ESPN Deportes.

When top Texas Rangers prospect Joey Gallo made his much-anticipated major league debut earlier this month by going 3-for-4 with a home run and four RBIs, MLB was filming and distributing video of it to multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Vine, within 12 hours. “We are leveraging the moment to connect the stars and the fans in the moment, and that is essential,” Parkes said.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, who took over baseball’s top job earlier this year, said, “I have been meeting with the players on each club since the beginning of spring training. This is one of the topics I have been covering with them.”

MLB Chief Operating Officer Tony Petitti said MLB has focused on players before but never as aggressively or intensely as it has in this campaign.

For the last four years, MLB’s Fan Cave in New York City gave fans a place to visit and interact with players on social media and sometimes in person. MLB shut down the Fan Cave earlier this year.

The new campaign is different in that it focuses on players’ athleticism and personality on film and highlights events on the field as well as their interactions with fans in the stadium.

“The great thing about the campaign was it was really about the players; it wasn’t highlight driven,” Petitti said. “Guys in batting practice, pitching, working out, talking to each other, talking to their coaches. Real fly-on-the-wall-type stuff.”

MLB has never had that kind of access, but got it from the MLB Players Association after talks between the league and the union.

Tim Slavin, MLBPA chief of business affairs, said highlighting the players has long been something that the union wanted, and something that MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark had been pushing the league to do. “When it was clear when Rob won the election, conversations started very quickly about what he wanted to do,” Slavin said.

Both Parkes and Slavin said the union helped the league in making players available to be filmed. The union is optimistic, Slavin said, that the new approach will bring in new fans.

Before the season, MLB targeted nine players: Giancarlo Stanton, David Price, Adam Jones, Carlos Gomez and Felix Hernandez, as well as McCutchen, Trout, Kershaw and Puig. MLB added players as they became stories during the season.

The commercials and other film was produced by Anomaly, MLB’s new creative agency, which replaced Hill Holliday after the 2014 season. The Spanish-language commercials and content were produced by LatinWorks.

“You can see the comedy of Carlos Gomez; you see the focus of a Clayton Kershaw,” said Anomaly founding partner Jason DeLand. “You can see the immense power of Stanton. The preparation of Felix Hernandez and all that he does. And even Max Scherzer’s one-hitter and the fun of him getting doused with chocolate sauce.”

Baseball has been the target of criticism of not marketing its players enough. Part of it is based on MLB’s grueling schedule of 162 regular-season games in 183 days, preceded by six weeks of spring training and followed by a monthlong postseason.

Another reason is that national advertisers see baseball as a largely regional sport and tend to use NFL and NBA players more in national campaigns, said Darin David, founder of Steel Curtain Consulting, a sports marketing company.

“Their game is much more regionalized,” David said. “Fans in Boston automatically identify with David Ortiz and Dustin Pedroia, but those guys don’t attract brands nationally, despite playing in multiple World Series.”

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