The History of Entertainment and Sports Marketing
It is almost impossible to avoid modern marketing’s gravitational pull. It is all around us — from commercials during your favorite TV show to ads tied to podcasts to endorsements from the famous athletes and influencers you follow on your social media feeds. Brands want to follow your behaviors as a consumer, finding the best way to reach you directly through engaging entertainment and sports marketing campaigns.
How did we get to the current state of marketing? It’s a long winding path leading to the sophisticated, targeted marketing campaigns of today.
Where it all began
Our love of sports and entertainment — ways to seek escapism in our daily lives — has always been a clear way for brands to reach us. The first inkling of modern sports marketing, for instance, stretches back to the 1870s with tobacco cards that highlighted popular baseball players of the age, writes Douglas Idugboe for Smedio. It wouldn’t be until the first half of the 20th century when advancements in technology found a more engaging way than sports cards to reach broad audiences.
The advent of radio broadcasting and television changed everything. In 1922, New York radio station WEAF aired what is considered the first-ever radio commercial for telephone giant AT&T. Just 19 years later, New York media would claim another marketing milestone — the first TV ad, a commercial for Bulova Watch Co. seen during a Brooklyn Dodgers game on what is now WNBC.
The emergence of celebrity
Perhaps what really defines American entertainment and sports marketing is a combination of celebrity and product. The stage was set when on August 26, 1939, an experimental station in New York broadcast the first televised baseball game — a contest between the Cincinnati Reds and Brooklyn Dodgers. The one-and-only Babe Ruth was beamed into 3,000 homes, according to MLB.com, helping to further cement his status as an iconic sports star.
It also marked a precedent for how mass audiences would consume widely distributed images of nationally — even globally — identifiable figures like Ruth.
How we market
In a 2011 piece for The Atlantic, Marc de Swaan Arons highlights how the mid-20th century “Mad Men” of advertising made marketing what it is now. He cites the emergence of major packaged goods companies like Procter and Gamble and General Foods in the 1950s that helped combine targeted advertising, technology and the allure of celebrity to form the kinds of marketing campaigns we know and love today.
A shift occurred as the decades moved on. It wasn’t just brands themselves that were in the advertising business but the retailers that distributed them. Arons writes that by the 1990s, retailers themselves embraced what he calls “the branding game”.
“By selling more, higher quality, but particularly better-branded products, they could not only dramatically improve their margin mix, but that they could raise the profile and reputation of their own brand as a whole,” he writes.
Now, you could almost say we are our own brands and retailers. The universal presence of social media has made it so that we can broadcast to our own audiences what we’re wearing, watching and listening to and why you should do the same, too.
It’s a big part of modern life and one that started through the likes of early telephone ads and grainy black-and-white broadcasts of Babe Ruth.