The 2025 Super Bowl is now history. The 2025 Major League Baseball season hasn’t yet begun. Media coverage of the National Basketball League and the National Hockey League is expanding as teams in those leagues battle for post-season playoff slots. And the 2026 Winter Olympic Games in Italy has already had its share of controversies.
For our business, all of the above sports activities have a common denominator: Agency account execs assigned to sports marketing clients who support those events are often envied by their peers despite a proven lesson that is often ignored: That the bigger the sporting event, the more likely it is to receive negative publicity and those on the accounts are consistently on the firing line, because many are agency flagship accounts.
Below are some of the reasons why being assigned to a flagship sports marketing account should be a 24/7, 365 day assignment
A prime example is the recent Super Bowl. Years ago, the media coverage leading up to the Big Game was all about the players and the game. But not for the past decade or so.
It can’t be good news for sports marketers and the rest of the football family that coverage of the Super Bowl has dramatically changed over the years.
That’s because major news sources no longer act as PR arms of sports leagues. Over the past few years, stories leading up to the coin toss of the game have been dominated by articles about internet betting, physical damage to the players and controversies regarding the efficacy of the super-expensive commercials, which this year ranged as high as $ 8-million for a 30-second ad, not including talent and production costs, which can add many more millions for a commercial that a person might miss seeing during a visit to the fridge or a bathroom break or because they’re tired of being bombarded by so many commercials.
And there is no reason to believe those scenarios will change. In fact, as more coverage is given to the brutality of the game, and to the detrimental effects of betting on sports events, it has become more difficult for PR reps to gain positive earned media for the brands they represent.
PR people assigned to mega sports marketing accounts with tie-ins to the National Football League and Olympics must always behave like their clients are in a crisis situation
They must prepare clients for any negative media coverage that might reflect badly on clients, using as training templates the below:
- Protests that began a year prior to the 2024 Paris Olympics and continued throughout the games, (although to listen to the NBCUniversal Olympic team’s happy talk it’s like everything was like peaches and cream).
- The 2014 Sochi Olympics, when brands had to cancel their promotions because they were targeted for participating in the Olympics despite Russia’s anti-gay and LGBT laws.
- Prior to the 2022 Olympics in China, when a bipartisan committee of Congress questioned representatives from Airbnb, Coca-Cola , Intel , Visa and Procter & Gamble about their participating in an Olympics in a country devoid of human rights and worse. (During the hearing Rep. Christopher Smith asked representatives from the companies how they could “reconcile their ostensible commitment to human rights with subsidizing an Olympics held in a country which is actively committing human rights abuses up to and including genocide.”)
- During the just concluded Super Bowl, the protests against Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry’s effort to clear homeless encampments in New Orleans and relocate people, and
- The protests by 17 Louisiana lawmakers, who expressed “serious concerns” with halftime shows being “less than family friendly,” citing two that they found object able — the 2020 performance in Miami of Jennifer Lopez, in which she “wore little clothing and was groped by male and female dancers on stage, while the performer made sexually suggestive gestures and performed on a stripper pole. And the 2023 Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, featuring Rihanna, who “was shown groping herself while she sang song lyrics that were so offensive that few Louisiana adults could read those lyrics before an audience without shame.” The letter said the acts were vulgar and lewd.
Staffers of sports marketing accounts must realize that sports marketing is a business and approach their assignment as if it is a non-sports assignment.
In my experience, that means making certain that staffers are not sports fanatics. .
In my experience, many sports accounts, not only mega ones, are improperly staffed. Because events like the Super Bowl and Olympics are magnets for negative publicity they should include an individual with crisis response experience, who has discussed with clients how to respond to attacks on brands if they occur. Too often they’re not.
