Playoff drives keeping true fans interested in NBA

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Further adventures and divergences in marketing and real life:

Love it live?

That's the NBA's new slogan, minus the question mark, of course, a takeoff on the old "I love this game" that served so well in the halcyon 1990s.

"I love this game" was great, with TV spots showing players doing all kinds of artistic, joyous, zany things on the floor, capturing the intimacy that is the game's great selling point.

"Love it live," on the other hand, combines the old slogan with a tacit admission there's a problem -- falling attendance -- making it a downer, like the NFL's recent "Play Football" commercials or baseball's "Rebuilding Baseball in the Inner Cities."

If you're reduced to asking kids to play your game, which used to be a given, all your ads do is alert the nation to your predicament.

Of course, even marketing savants get the blues. At a recent Orlando Magic game, owner and Amway founder Rich DeVos, hailed as a savior for taking the team off the market, took advantage of his new cachet by just asking fans to buy more tickets.

What a great idea! Let's go see a game because: 1) Maybe the Magic will win! 2) We can see Tracy McGrady! 3) Some billionaire whose asset appreciates $10 million a year and who wants the city to build him a new arena, needs our money in the meantime for better cash flow!

Then there was David Stern, who taught the other commissioners how to market, at least in the '90s. Stern appeared at one of SuperSonics owner Howard (Starbucks) Schultz's management seminars last week, and noted, "We have a product that the newspapers are doing a very bad job telling you about."

It's true, we don't have happy news features like "Inside Stuff," but there's a reason for that. Stern is partners with several TV networks, who donate the air time for sappy stories (Rasheed Wallace is a deejay when he's not going after referees or running off reporters), but the NBA has no arrangement with newspapers.

Of course, our approach to covering the NBA was the same in the '90s when everyone was calling Stern a genius, so one thing is clear: Either we're in a slump or Stern is.

Perhaps he should tell it to his TV audience, or the 60 percent of it that remains from peak levels.

Perhaps deconstructing his triumphs would help Stern see what he did right -- and what he had nothing to do with. The '90s weren't just Michael Jordan, the Bulls' dynasty and Stern's marketing savvy, but the zenith of an arena-building boom that provided an additional, widespread but ultimately only a short-term boost.

There's an advertising slogan -- sell the sizzle, not the steak -- which may work in the short term (not to mention the ad biz, where sizzle is what they sell), but in the end, what counts is the product.

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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