Thursday, June 24, 2010

The NFL’s BACK TO FOOTBALL FRIDAY: The latest corporate con job

A quick trip to http://www.nflrush.com/ brings you to this message: Learn how you could win a $10,000 grant and a visit from an NFL player for your school! As your classes resume in the fall, the NFL goes Back to Football. Your class or school can celebrate by showcasing your NFL team pride on Friday, September 10, 2010.

This NFL social influence campaign is a masterful response to the changing media landscape and its impact on sport media sponsorship patterns; it also is consistent with longterm trends that may eventually lead to an NFL network as the dominant channel through which people will consume NFL football in the US and possibly the world.

Marketing people have known for decades that their success requires that they develop a commitment to their brands as early in a consumer’s life as possible. Some corporations have tried to do this through the schools, but there is growing parental and teacher resistence to this strategy as manifested by drink machines in hallways, logos on buses and school walls, and branded fast food in cafeterias.

At the same time, Pepsi, a longtime Super Bowl sponsor, decided that they would not buy their customary ad spots for the 2010 Super Bowl; instead, they used the $20+ million dollars to develop a new media campaign to link Pepsi with local service projects created primarily by younger people whose beverage decisions are essential to Pepsi’s domestic market share and profits.

This move by Pepsi is among the factors that led the NFL to develop alternative strategies to link its brand with young consumers. Using the local network social influence framework refined by Obama’s campaign team in 2007 and mimicked by Pepsi and others more recently, this new NFLRush “celebrate your team pride” campaign is the NFL’s attempt to create supportive, peer driven networks among younger fans and their significant others. The total “awards” given to schools in this particular campaign cost the NFL about one-tenth of the income the league receives for one 30-second ad during the Super Bowl. But the potential payoff is mind boggling in Gramscian terms: establishing peer maintined message “outposts” in the heads of elementary school children nationwide. If it works, it will be the latest coup by pro sports to boost profits by coopting space in the public sphere.

The campaign appeal to parents is consistent with neoliberal definitions of parental moral worth; as the parents’ page for the campaign states: Let your child's teacher, school administrator or PTO/PTA leader know about this program so you can be a super parent [emphasis added] and your child's school can have a chance to be an NFL PLAY 60 Super School! (http://www.nflrush.com/footballfriday/ ). Similarly, as school budgets have been decimated by neoliberal policy approaches to public education, desperate teachers may be eager to join the NFL RUSH.

This campaign takes the cynical but effective announcement, “Let’s hear it for your (sic) Denver Broncos” to new and more lofty heights. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, an Italian political theorist who wrote from a jail when fascits controlled Italy in cell in fascist Italy (1928-1937): “It’s difficult to fight an enemy that has outposts in your head”—or the heads of your children and students.