By Tom Ryan
Stealing from the playbook of Big Oil and big drug companies, the National Football League last week launched an advertising campaign touting the positive aspects of many of its player's on- and off-field lives in a bid to counter the outcry over the criminal behavior of a few.
In one ad, according to The New York Times, a player is seen reading to his daughter. In another, a player tells his mom, "I love you," over the phone, and then tells the camera that she encouraged him to play football as a child to keep him out of trouble. In a third, a player describes his goal of going to law school and talks about how hard he worked as a student at Notre Dame.
News of the NFL has recently been dominated by media coverage of the Atlanta Falcon's Michael Vick, who pleaded guilty to harboring a dog-fighting kennel. But the NFL faced many other incidents during its off-season, including Chicago Bears Lance Briggs being recently charged with leaving the scene of an accident after crashing his Lamborghini.
In promoting its more clean-cut stars, the NFL avoided directly confronting its image problems.
"When you're directly addressing a particular issue, you run the risk of reminding people of that issue," said Abe Novick, business development director at the Baltimore office of Euro RSCG Worldwide told The Times. By contrast, "if you keep the focus on the good the players do, people will realize there's this whole other side to their behavior. This humanizes them, and that's a good thing."
In developing the campaign, Lisa Baird, the NFL's senior vice president for marketing, said league executives were worried that "the misdeeds of a few" were starting to "represent the image of all 2,000." NFL research also found that younger fans, in particular teenagers to age 24, were following news of misbehaving players closely over the internet.
While the NFL "did give some thought" to a more direct discussion of player misbehavior, the final decision was to have team members "talk about their families and themselves" as an alternate way to make the point about "the character of our players."
"I don't want to be in a defensive mode with my brand," Ms. Baird said. "We want to be proactive."
Many giant marketers use N.F.L. players to represent their brands, among them Anheuser-Busch and Pepsico, and seem more aware of the risks around building an expensive campaign around a young athlete.
"Our consumers are passionate about their players and their teams," said Ken Stickevers, vice president for marketing at the hearty soup group at Campbell Soup, which increased the number of NFL players it's using as part of its Chunky campaign this year. "Of course we're a bit concerned" about player misconduct, "but it's pretty isolated in the N.F.L. community."
Discussion Questions: Is "accentuating the positive" enough to help improve on the NFL's tarnished image? Do you agree with the sentiment that it is a mistake to be in a defensive mode when it comes to the NFL brand? Are there lessons in this for other consumer brands and retail businesses?