Vince Young to save the NFL's image

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/business/media/30adco.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Mending a Bruised Image

By STUART ELLIOTT
Published: August 30, 2007

In one spot, a father sits on the sofa with his young children, reading to them from a large book while a daughter nestles her head on his neck.

In another, a man talks on the telephone to his mother — telling her “I love you” — then tells the camera that she encouraged him to play football as a child to keep him out of trouble.

In a third, a man describes his goal of going to law school and talks about how hard he worked as a student at Notre Dame.

The latest Hallmark campaign? No, the National Football League.

Concerned by growing uneasiness among fans and marketers about athletes gone wild, the league is embarking on an effort to burnish its brand image by accentuating the positive aspects of the on- and off-field lives of its players.

In a television and online campaign that is to begin today, the league and its advertising agency, BBDO Worldwide, are borrowing the playbook, so to speak, of industries like Big Oil and the big drug companies, which have relied on the magic of Madison Avenue to redeem their public images. The N.F.L.’s idea is to counter the outcry over the criminal behavior of some players — not by apologizing for the misdeeds of a few, but by shining a spotlight on what is presented as the good behavior of the many.

“It’s as simple as this,” said Lisa Baird, senior vice president for marketing at the National Football League in New York. “We’re going to do everything necessary to protect the strength of our brand.”

The past year has brought plenty for the league to want to neutralize. The news coverage of professional football has read more like a police blotter. This week, Michael Vick of the Atlanta Falcons pleaded guilty to a federal felony charge of conspiracy stemming from a dog-fighting kennel, while Lance Briggs of the Chicago Bears was charged with leaving the scene of an accident after crashing his Lamborghini sports car.

The commercials feature five players — selected for their marquee names and clean-cut images — and are planned to run through the 2007-8 football season, appearing on television and on Web sites like nfl.com.

The man reading to his daughters is Matt Hasselbeck of the Seattle Seahawks. The one who loves his mother is Willie McGinest of the Cleveland Browns, whose teammate, Brady Quinn, is the aspiring lawyer.

In another spot, Vince Young of the Tennessee Titans discusses how all his rose tattoos are in honor of “the women in my life,” including his mother, sisters, nieces and a grandmother.

“I’m trying to get another rose,” Mr. Young says, “for my other grandmother; I don’t want to upset her.”

An agency executive who is an expert in football-related advertising said he approved of the league’s decision to eschew direct discussion of the problems given the challenges posed by the misbehavior of players like Mr. Vick.

“When you’re directly addressing a particular issue, you run the risk of reminding people of that issue,” said Abe Novick, business development director at the Baltimore office of Euro RSCG Worldwide, who for many years conducted consumer surveys about Super Bowl commercials.

By contrast, “if you keep the focus on the good the players do, people will realize there’s this whole other side to their behavior,” Mr. Novick said. “This humanizes them, and that’s a good thing.”

Executives of the N.F.L. are taking additional steps beyond the campaign, which is to account for about a quarter of the consumer advertising the league will run during the coming season, which begins next Thursday. For instance, standards on player behavior are being tightened, and league security employees discussed issues like animal cruelty during the presentations made to players at preseason training camps.

The origin of the campaign dates to January, Ms. Baird said, after discussions among league executives about player misconduct. Within the league, people were worried that “the misdeeds of a few” were starting to “represent the image of all 2,000,” she said.

In research the league conducted, younger fans in particular, teenagers to age 24, said they were “interested in these stories” about misbehaving players, she added, “finding them and following them” in media that included the Internet.

As the creative approach for the campaign took shape in the spring, Ms. Baird said, “we did give some thought” to a more direct discussion of player misbehavior, but the final decision was to have team members “talk about their families and themselves” as an alternate way to make the point about “the character of our players.”

“I don’t want to be in a defensive mode with my brand,” Ms. Baird said. “We want to be proactive.”

There are six commercials in the campaign. Mr. Hasselbeck appears in two, while Mr. Young, Mr. Quinn and Mr. McGinest appear in one each. A teammate of Mr. McGinest’s and Mr. Quinn’s on the Browns, Braylon Edwards, rounds out the roster.

Mr. Edwards, in his spot, jokes that the football season needs to be 13 or 14 months long so players can train to “compete with the best of the best.”

The players in the campaign were chosen after discussions by executives at the league and BBDO, part of the Omnicom Group, which began working on creative projects for the N.F.L. last year. Mr. Young’s commercial is being used to address the issue of tattoos on players, which some fans find off-putting.

“It’s not one of my favorite things,” said Alfred Merrin, vice chairman and executive creative director at the BBDO New York office, “and culturally, it’s difficult for a lot of people to understand.”

But after listening to Mr. Young describe what the tattoos meant to him, “it was a very moving moment,” Mr. Merrin said.

“It is not a campaign to address the Michael Vicks of the world — it’s bigger than that,” Mr. Merrin said. “It’s about getting inside these guys and revealing something of their character, their values, what it takes to be in the N.F.L.”

Football is as big an industry as some that manufacture products rather than players. Scores of giant marketers use N.F.L. players to represent their brands, among them Anheuser-Busch, Bank of America, FedEx, General Motors, Mars, Molson Coors, PepsiCo, SABMiller and Visa. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on sponsorship deals, buying commercial time during games and promotions in stores.

“Our consumers are passionate about their players and their teams,” said Ken Stickevers, vice president for marketing at the hearty soup group at the Campbell Soup Company, which has featured N.F.L. players in campaigns for its Chunky Soup line since 1997.

“Of course we’re a bit concerned” about player misconduct, Mr. Stickevers said, “but it’s pretty isolated in the N.F.L. community.”

The players the company uses in its campaigns, who include Mr. Hasselbeck, are “the kind of people we want to embody the brand,” he added, which is reinforced by Campbell’s asking them to take part in charitable work like hunger relief.

At a time when some marketers may be questioning the value of associating with N.F.L. players, Campbell Soup is doubling down on its bet. Previous Chunky campaigns have featured three or four players a year; the ads for 2007-8, which begin running next Thursday, will use eight. The Chunky creative agency is Y&R Advertising, part of the Young & Rubicam Brands unit of the WPP Group.

The risk of building an expensive campaign around a young athlete remains on the minds of many in advertising.

“You hope your player doesn’t get into any bad situations,” said Steve O’Connell, executive creative director at a Philadelphia agency named Stick and Move, which is featuring Donovan McNabb of the Philadelphia Eagles in a campaign for Glacéau Vitaminwater, sold by the Coca-Cola Company, that is centered on a Web site (mcnabbisback.com).

Still, “I don’t think the bad apples have tarnished the sport,” Mr. O’Connell said, because many fans believe “nothing bad will happen with their favorite players.”

When asked what would happen if one of the five players in the N.F.L. campaign were to get in trouble, Ms. Laird of the league answered swiftly.

“I’d say we’d pull the ad,” she said.