ESPN’s Latest ‘This Is SportsCenter’ Spot ‘Seconds’ Stars Olympian Sydney McLaughlin

US sports broadcaster rolled out a new spot in its ongoing, long-running ‘This Is Sports Centre’ series on 3 February titled ‘Seconds’ and starring Olympic gold medalist Sydney McLaughlin alongside SportsCenter anchor Hannah Storm.

 

The latest 15-second spot in ESPN’s iconic, comic campaign debuted on linear television during ESPN’s telecast of the Duke v UNC men’s college basketball game.

 

Created, like the opther’s in this new wave of work, by agency Arts & Letters, the ad was filmed inside the ESPN headquarters in Bristol (Connecticut) and features the USA track and field star working in ESPN’s offices when Storm comes over to see if she has time to catch up.

 

“I’ve got 51.46 seconds right after lunch, or I’ve got 51.41 seconds later this afternoon. Or wait, I have 50.86 seconds right now,” McLaughlin responds. The numbers relate to her 400m hurdles world record time when she won Olympic gold in Tokyo, her time at the 2022 USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships (then a world record) and her 2022 World Athletics Championships world record.

 

 

“This Is SportsCenter has featured the greatest athletes of the past three decades. Sydney is the latest superstar athlete to come to our campus in Bristol. She is the very best at her craft,” commented ESPN EVP Of Commercial Marketing Laura Gentile. “It’s really exciting that part of our brand personality is alive and well. It’s always been the fun side of sports.”

 

   

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This is the fourth new ‘This is SportsCenter’ commercial to roll out since the eclectic, fan favourite series restarted in late December. The first was ‘Orange Slices’, the second iteration was ‘Performance Evaluation’ and the third spot to drop was ‘Stoppage Time’.

 

ESPN, which shot all four of the spots released thus far in Bristol in a single day, will roll out more spots in the series through 2023.

 

The ‘This Is SportsCenter’ ad series began back in 1994 – mostly produced by agency Wieden+Kennedy and then in 2017 ESPN brought the campaign in-house: check out some of the campaign’s archive highlights below.