When he became commissioner of the NBA in 1984, David Stern already had a model of how best to expand the league’s marketing, media and merchandising businesses: the Walt Disney Co., which was renowned for its integrated marketing, long before that term existed.
So it would have been fair to call the NBA a Mickey Mouse operation. Nor would it have been pejorative: A dozen years before Disney bought ABC and ESPN in 1996, Stern would show how the Disney model could work within sports marketing.
“David was obsessed with Disney,’’ said New York Knicks President Steve Mills, whose first job in sports was in 1984, working as a special assistant to Stern and former Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik. “Look at the two companies and you can see the same attention to detail, the importance of a shared corporate culture and everybody being on the same page, and protecting and nurturing of the brand being paramount. Every little detail was always the most important thing.’’
Stern subsequently hired David Schreff from the Disney Channel to run the league’s Global Marketing and Media Group in 1990. Two minutes after meeting Schreff, Stern showed his cards. “I want to make the NBA the Disney of sports,’’ the commissioner told Schreff. “Our athletes are our characters and we want to make our arenas more like theme parks, with nonstop entertainment, and we want to make our sponsors and licensees global amplifiers that can shape and share the league everywhere. We need someone from Disney to help us do that.”
Schreff received a job offer just a few days later, but he still wonders why Stern never asked him what he knew about basketball. Of course, Stern was more concerned about whether Schreff could sell the NBA to top-level media and marketing executives, which, as it turned out, he could.
Across the industry for years, Stern’s negotiating skills have been lauded. A favorite industry story concerning the intersection of Disney and the NBA took place shortly before Disney’s Wide World of Sports complex near Orlando opened in 1997. Sports was a different direction for Disney, and Stern headed an NBA delegation taking a presentation on the new theme park.
Michael Eisner, then Disney’s chairman and CEO, was pitching the creation of an “NBA Land” within Disney World, with basketball-themed facilities and events, which Eisner said would cost “only a $100 million sponsorship fee.” Without flinching, Stern turned the proposition around, telling Eisner and the assembled Disneyites that $100 million was exactly what they had in mind as a fee for Disney to access the NBA’s valuable IP rights. The 44,000-square-foot NBA Experience at Disney Springs opened last August, seemingly unrelated.
Still, for Schreff, the measure of Stern’s success can best be measured in the grassroots.
“Through David Stern’s sustained efforts, millions of boys and girls are playing basketball, enjoying the sport, and aspiring to be NBA and WNBA athletes, across countries and cultures,’’ said Schreff, now CEO of ACTV8me, an advertising technology company. “So when you talk about growing the sport of basketball, David Stern did it at every level.’’
