Sports broadcasting giant ESPN teams up with new baseball superstar Aaron Judge to swing for the fences in a new comic campaign leveraging the (29 March) Opening Day of new Major League Baseball season.
The New York Yankees slugger was last season’s breakout young superstar of the sport, so it is little surprise that the sports network has signed him up as an athlete ambassador and placed him front and centre of its new creative.
The campaign is spearheaded by a pair of silly 30-second spots and the 2017 American League Rookie of the Year filmed the new promo videos in ESPN’s Bristol, Connecticut headquarters and he shared the screen with Scott Van Pelt (the host of the late-night edition of SportsCenter’ and Elle Duncan (the network’s daytime anchor).
The lead commercial, ‘Home Run Trot’, sees the imposing outfielder indulge in a somewhat singular form of lazy, low-impact cardio exercise.
The lead ad debuted during the Wednesday night/Thursday morning (28/29 March) midnight ‘SportsCenter’ telecast, which followed the network’s coverage of an NBA Celtics-Jazz game.
This was rapidly followed by a similarly comic ‘All Rise’ commercial playing on the player’s surname and also featuring a cameo from the Staten Island Yankees mascot Scooter the Holy Cow.
This second spot first aired on Thursday (29 March) at 5 am during the ultra-concentrated ‘SportsCenter’ show that runs twice daily on Snapchat.
The campaign was developed with in-house agency ESPN CreativeWork marks the first advertising for ‘This Is SportsCenter’ produced since ESPN moved on from its longstanding creative agency Wieden & Kennedy.
“As much as it’s not always an easy sell to convince athletes to make the jaunt up to Bristol, Judge was sufficiently enthused about the ‘This Is SportsCenter’ gig that he brought his parents to the shoot,” commented Wanda Young, ESPN senior VP of marketing and consumer engagement.
“CreativeWorks will continue to develop new executions for the iconic campaign, while last summer’s signing, the creative agency Droga5, will handle ESPN’s broader brand initiatives,” she added.
“Wieden was a great partner, but every group is always evaluating its agency relationships,” Young says, adding that the CreativeWorks bench was ready to jump into the breach once it became evident that it was time for a change. There is no reason why we can’t carry this on forward.
Comment:
Despite the change of creative partner, the work maintains the now familiar and traditional ‘This Is SportsCenter’ format.
The aesthetics and themes remain faithful to the approach developed by W&K in its original Sports Center campaigns back in 1995.
The approach of the latest ads matches that of the originals which created a version of ESPN that existed in a parallel universe: where the most famous and admired athletes were re-contextualized by immersing themselves in the absurd mundanity of office life.
Check out some of the best here.
It certainly makes plenty of sense to leverage the new season with the hottest new young player property from last year’s MLB standouts.
The 6′ 7″, 282-lb Judge hit 52 homers last season and helped lead the Yankees to the American League Championship Series.
Plus, the 25-year-old power hitter graced the cover of the season opening edition of Sports Illustrated.
Links:
ESPN Sports Centre
http://www.espn.com/video/sportscenter
https://www.youtube.com/user/ESPN
https://twitter.com/sportscenter?lang=en
http://www.espn.com/espn/apps/espn
https://www.facebook.com/ESPN/
ESPN CreativeWorks
http://showcase.espncreativeworks.com/
