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July 18, 2007
Baseball Winds Up Its Branding Pitch
If you saw the Home Run Derby on July 9th or the Major League Baseball All-Star game on the 10th, you know that fans love this stuff –– and that branding plays a major role in corporate sponsorships.
San Francisco shined brightly as the host city and our AT&T Park took the spotlight for these two back-to-back events.
Which sponsors muscled up to flex their marketing dollars? Here are just a few examples:
• The DHL FanFest at Moscone Center offered five days and three floors of hosted souvenir shops, pitching, catching, and throwing exhibits that accommodated a few hundred thousand fans.
• Fans paid $100+ per ticket to watch glorified batting practice for the State Farm Home Run Derby, with the insurance company using gold baseballs with its logo for the 10th out for each participant. You can now buy the souvenir balls for $39.99 each on each team’s Website through www.mlb.com. The stadium had over 42,000 fans for this three-hour exhibit.
• The Chevrolet All-Star Game Red Carpet Show literally rolled out a red carpet along The Embarcadero to the ballpark with All-Stars Cal Ripken Jr., Tony Gwynn, and Willie Mays (among others) parading down the street in Chevy convertibles.
• MasterCard and Visa created special TV spots and newspaper ads for the game.
• Chevy also made a splash hit with its giant floating baseballs in McCovey Cove beyond the right field fence, also a huge logo baseball stuck in the mitt sculpture in left-center field, next to the perennial Coca-Cola slide.
• The game itself drew a huge TV audience at AT&T Park and a record San Francisco crowd for a thrilling game that went down to the last pitch –– and the final branded marketing sponsorship.
Posted by MCorp. at 18.07.2007 12:34 | Permalink
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