It’s Time for American PR and Sports Marketing Clients to Promote American Values and Democracy

Arthur Solomon, Public Relations Consultant

Here we go again.

The August 19 New York Times ran a lengthy story describing a prominent gymnastic coaches physical and emotional abuse of young athletes.A recent issue (July 16-22) of the SportsBusiness Journal headlined a story, “Scandal slows sales, not sponsor engagement.” It was about how sports marketers have acted since the revelations of the Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics doctor, sex abuse scandal. To summarize, it said that, “The USA Gymnastics-Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal has complicated sponsorship sales elsewhere in the U.S. Olympic sports business but has not turned off current and potential partners wholesale, top governing bodies say.”Substitute the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and the international sports organizations, dominated by the FIFA and the International Olympic Committee, for the US.O.C. and the story could stand as written.Because to these sports entities and their marketing sponsors Going for the Gold means one thing: How much money did we make? And that’s a shame. Certainly, life is not limited to a profit and loss balance sheet. Too many Americans have fought and died for things more important than making a buck, not for having despotic governments use games backed by American money as propaganda vehicles.In international sports, FIFA and the IOC have a long history of ethical and criminal problems. The U.S. sports scene is no better, ranging from the lilywhite days of Major League Baseball and its steroid era, to the National Football League’s non-concussion concussion problems, to the horrendous sexual abuse scandals at Penn State and United States OlympicCommittee’s affiliated governing bodies. And never should be forgotten is America’s participation in Hitler’s Nazi Olympics of 1936, which provided a world-wide propaganda platform for a despotic country, and it s continued involvement in the games played in other totalitarian countries.The U.S. did not have a team playing in the recent World Cup. But it wasn’t because of any principled moral stand or because the games were awarded to the anti-democratic, totalitarian state of Russia, despite its nefarious national and international policies since the emergence of the Putin dictatorship. It was because the U.S. team failed to qualify for the Russia games, which Boris Johnson, the former United Kingdom Foreign Minister said reminded him of the 1936 Nazi Olympics in Berlin.Ever since the Nazi Olympics, sports marketers have joined the IOC and FIFA in believing that democracy takes a back seat to international sporting events. In addition to the 1936 Berlin games, and the Sochi (Russia) Olympics in 2014, the IOC also awarded its games to the Soviet Union in 1980, Yugoslavia in 1984 and China in 2008. (Stay tuned for FIFA and the IOC, fueled with sports marketers’ money – much of it from American companies – to keep on selecting mostly totalitarian countries to host their games as citizens of democratic countries balk at footing the ever-increasing cost of playing host to a short-lived athletic event.)Sports sponsors should admit that Pandora’s Box has been opened and political issues are now part of the sports scene, and closing it will be impossible.This year the football season and mid-term elections will coincide, providing a platform for President Trump’s calling peaceful NFL national anthem protesters anti-American and anti-military. The controversy over the issue is a made-for-media story. Dallas Cowboy owner Jerry Jones has already demanded that his players be on the field and stand during the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner,” despite the league and the players association discussions about how to resolve the matter.But week’s before the NFL season began, in early August, the president stepped up his attacks on African-American athletes by insulting the intelligence of LeBron James, the National Basketball Association’s star, after James told CNN’s Don Lemon that he thought the president was trying to divide the country.For many years, sports marketers just shrugged their shoulders at the negative publicity that the events they were sponsoring received because they were rarely part of the story.For decades, sponsorship stories were relegated to ad trade books and advertising and marketing columnists of print dailies, which reported on the cost of “buys” and their advertising and public relations programs.Back then, negative aspects of the sports scene were mostly omitted from media coverage, especially on the sports pages. “If it didn't happen on the playing field, it’s not a sports story,” was the journalistic rule of many reporters and editors. Now, sports have lost their protective journalistic covering and are treated like any other big business with a plethora of “gotcha” stories. Marketers have become a frequent part of that negative coverage, as media reporting about calls to boycott sponsors of the Sochi Olympics show.Today, sports’ Teflon coating has been breached, never to be closed. Because of the high cost of sports sponsorships, the shrinking TV audience and the politicization of sports, it’s time for sponsors to rethink their knee-jerk response of spending big sponsorship bucks on mega events.

It’s time for new sports marketing thinking.

At the very least, it’s time for sports sponsors to research the efficacy of their sponsorship money regarding sales, instead of just resorting to the decades old, unscientific method of “counting the eyes” to justify dollars spent.And for the money-hungry sports industry and its marketing sponsors, it’s past time for its moguls to look in the mirror and honestly say if they would like their children to be bombarded with TV commercials promoting drinking and gambling.If hawking hard liquor, beer, gambling and junk foods on sports telecasts that are viewed during the day or in prime time by youngsters, and camouflaging  popular athletes as experts to entice viewers to buy products, doesn’t register negatively with marketing execs, maybe a story in the July 12, 2018, Wall Street Journal will. It said that the World Cup rating on Fox’s networks has decreased nearly one-third from the 2014 tourney, joining declining audiences for this year’s Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl, “which had its smallest audience in nearly a decade.” And on August 20, the New York Times, reporting in a story regarding problems facing Major League Baseball, said that attendance is down about 1,500 spectators a game, with 18 teams drawing fewer fans than last year.There’s an easy way for a courageous sports marketer, regardless of its size, to dominate media coverage throughout the year at a fairly low cost: Create a PR campaign urging the international sports organizations to award its games only to democratic countries and not to totalitarian governments that use them as a propaganda tool. And to demand that the U.S.O.C. and its affiliates take immediate action against all manners of harassment by its coaches or risk losing sponsorships dollars. Doing so would ensure even minor sports marketers continuing positive major media coverage, position the company as a good corporate citizen promoting American values and give it a leadership position in the category.It’s time for American sports marketers to promote American values and democracy and not help despotic governments. It’s time for American sports marketers to demand that that the welfare of young American athletes are more important than the number of medals won during international competitions. They should have done so years ago.

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About the Author: Arthur Solomon, a former journalist, was a senior VP/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller, and was responsible for restructuring, managing and playing key roles in some of the most significant national and international sports and non-sports programs. He also traveled internationally as a media adviser to high-ranking government officials. He now is a frequent contributor to public relations publications, consults on public relations projects and is on the Seoul Peace Prize nominating committee. He can be reached at arthursolomon4pr@juno.com.