marketing – The "True" North

The title of this post is based on the great line from Bob Marley’s 1980 classic, Redemption Song, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.”

According to the Wikipedia article on the song, Marley took these lines from a speech Marcus Garvey gave at Menelik Hall in Sydney, Nova Scotia, during October 1937 and published in his magazine, The Black Man:

“We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.”

The minds behind the pro sports marketing machine have made slaves of millions of intelligent people. But they haven’t done it by forcing people to stop developing or using their minds. They’ve done it, and continue to do it, in ways that train people to think certain ways about certain things – and not to think about certain other things at all.

The Machine gets millions of people to care (many of them deeply for years) about whether millionaires playing for billionaires win games and titles. The Machine does this by training fans to do a number of key things:

Cheer for the “home” team, meaning the team representing the city or country they live in;
See the athletes as people very much like them who care about their communities; and
Never think about team owners, who are almost all billionaires.

As most fans appear to do the first two things without ever thinking twice about why, let’s take a closer look at them…

It makes perfect sense why we cheer for amateur home teams like our kids’ teams. But very few of us or our kids have ever played for professional teams so why do we cheer on professional “home” teams? Some people would argue that’s just as natural as cheering for our kids’ teams. It’s not…

We cheer our kids’ (or nephews’ or nieces’) teams because we know and love our kids and want them to succeed. Part of this is because their success is literally a reflection on us because so much of who they are and what they do is due to us. This isn’t at all the case with pro teams and athletes. The only influence fans have on pro athletes performance is how loud they yell in the stands – and we all know that has mixed results. So why are so many people more emotionally invested in pro athletes’ victories than some parents are in their own kids’ wins? Because they’ve been trained to be.

Why should we cheer for a pro team simply because we live in the same city or country – especially when many of the athletes aren’t from the same city or country? Most people don’t know the names of most of the players on the pro teams they cheer for let alone anything about them beyond how well they they play. So if we don’t actually know (or therefore care) about the individual players, then what exactly are we cheering for?

In his 2012 article in Maryland’s Capital Gazette, Psychology: Rooting for your favorite team is good for you, Scott Smith offers some insights. Smith says research has shown that people root for a sports team for many different reasons including being socialized into it by family and friends or simply liking or identifying with the name of the team, the color or style of their uniform, or their winning ways. He also says:

“It was long theorized that those who avidly root for sports teams are lonely, alienated people who suffer from low self-esteem and have no real social ties to meet their emotional needs. Research, however, is showing that just the opposite is true. A study at the University of Kansas found that sports fans are happier and actually suffer fewer bouts of depression and report lower levels of alienation than people who are not interested in sports. In fact, most sports fans are high functioning, well educated and successful people – how else could they even afford a ticket at today’s prices!” (Smith doesn’t include the links to the University of Kansas study.) So Smith offers some ideas why people cheer for teams and some evidence that doing so has some benefits.

Neither Smith nor any of the articles I found online mentioned sports marketing as something that might influence why people cheer for their home team, or any team. It seems sports marketing is so effective that everyone has joined their home team. Even NPR (National Public Radio), that doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable topics, only had articles talking mostly about how sports marketing works – but not critiquing it. The first NPR item that came up when I Googled “NPR “sports marketing” was NPR’s The Business Side podcast, “Sports Marketing pioneer Jim Host & The Birth Of ‘The Bundle'”.

This lack of articles is a pretty big omission considering pro sports are billion dollar industries with corresponding marketing budgets.

In addition to training us to cheer for a home team full of millionaires we know nothing about, the Machine also trains us to see those millionaires as just normal folk who care about “their” communities and to rarely, if ever, think about their billionaire owners.

We see heart warming media stories about athletes visiting children in hospital and many of these athletes are no doubt sincere in their concern for the kids. However, what we almost never see or hear is athletes doing anything about or commenting on any social issue in the community – unless the issue has first gained popular support. For example, some athletes, like NHL star Sidney Crosby, joined millions of others in condemning racial injustice following George Floyd’s murder. However, most of the time, most athletes keep their heads down and their mouths shut. Is that what someone who really cares about their community does?

Now, it’s not hard to imagine why athletes stay silent when they see what happens to people like NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick when they speak out – or take a knee. Kaepernick played six seasons for the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers. In 2016, he knelt during the national anthem at the start of NFL games in protest of police brutality and racial inequality in the United States – and never played in the NFL again. In November 2017, he filed a grievance against the NFL and its owners, accusing them of colluding to keep him out of the league. Kaepernick withdrew the grievance in February 2019 after reaching a confidential settlement with the NFL.

So athletes, even if they wanted to speak out, are forced into silence and inaction with threats of dismissal. So, in the absence of hearing from the athletes themselves, the Machine is able to sell us an image of them as just hard-working guys who take time from their busy schedule to visit sick kids (and it’s all guys because I’m referring to the Machine behind the NHL, NFL, NBA and MLB).

And while the Machine has us thinking the athletes are just great guys very much like us (well, except the exceptional athletic ability part) – it trains us to never think about the billionaires who own the teams for which the athletes we love play.

So what do we know about these folks who we help make boatloads of cash?

Well, one thing that shouldn’t be surprising is that, to become, and stay, billionaires, they do whatever they can to lower their taxes. In fact, according to a July 2021 ProPublica article, The Billionaire Playbook: How Sports Owners Use Their Teams to Avoid Millions in Taxes, billionaire owners like NBA Los Angeles Clippers owner and former Microsoft executive Steve Balmer, legally use tax laws to pay lower tax rates than players and even stadium workers. Does it being legal make it right?

One way owners use all those tax savings is donating to political parties. According to an Oct. 2020 ESPN article, American professional sports owners contributed nearly $47 million in U.S. federal elections since 2015, including $10 million to Republican causes and $1.9 million to Democratic causes by the time the article was posted in October in the run up to the Nov. 2020 election. That strong Republican lean is consistent with owners’ spending in the 2018 and 2016 federal elections as well. ESPN’s research on principal owners, controlling owners, co-owners and commissioners from the NBA, NFL, NHL, WNBA, MLB and NASCAR revealed they donated $34.2 million (72.9%) to Republican campaigns or super PACs purely supporting Republican causes, compared to $10.1 million (21.5%) to Democrats over the past three elections. The research includes more than 160 owners and commissioners spanning 125 teams.

So the next time you think about buying that ticket to see that big game in person or you catch a game on TV munching away through the really expensive ads, remember who’s pockets you’ve helping fill…and remember Bob Marley’s words.

Note: One week after posting this I got an email from LeadNow asking Canadians to sign a petition to STOP RICH TAX CHEATS. CLOSE TAX LOOPHOLES. The petition followed the release of the Pandora Papers which revealed that at least 500 wealthy Canadians have been hiding money and dodging taxes in offshore tax-havens.

Is there a Black brand and, if so, do Black people own any part of it?

I’ve thought a lot about this throughout my life but the picture above, from a local mall, inspired this post. It’s the perfect visual analogy of using Blackness to sell as the products are clear in the foreground but the Black folks are obscured in the back so you can’t see them clearly – and there’s a 90% chance this display is in a store not owned by Black folks. The Black brand is also used to sell things but images of real Black life are omitted or obscured and Black folks don’t own most of the places this happens.

Using Blackness to sell products means showing a very narrow image of Blackness, not Blackness and Black people in all (or any) of their complexity.

The most obvious examples are in music, sports and the associated clothing. A recent experience I had with my 15-yr-old son and his white teammates on the way to a soccer tournament really got me thinking about this. The boys were playing their music in the car – exclusively rap music. At one point, I laid down the rule that they could only play music that had less than two BPMs (“bitches” per minute). Being an old guy brought up with Public Enemy’s Fight the Power, hearing rap music with mostly young, Black men mentioning “bitches” and/or money every few seconds got me thinking about how narrow an idea of Black men my son and his friends were being exposed to. It also got me Googling.

As usual, I found lots of stuff that made me realize the issue is more complex than I originally thought – and I also got an important history lesson.

The term brand comes from branding living property, i.e. cattle and slaves. In her Aug. 2017 article What Is Branding? A Brief History, Taylor Holland says, “What we brand, how we brand it, and why we brand it has changed. But branding in the twenty-first century is still about taking ownership.” Black folks must keep this in mind.

One article I found that backed up what I suspected was Hannah J Davies’ Guardian article, For white hipsters, blackness is a thing to consume but not engage with. Davies’ argues that the blackness marketed to white folks can’t be “too black” and highlights the problem for Black creators. “How can you create great art in a world where being “too black” is seen as a legitimate criticism?”, she asks. She cites examples of stories “that prioritise a proximity to whiteness picking up awards over those with radical narratives.” She mentions Boots Riley’s anti-capitalist, Afrofuturist epic Sorry to Bother You, which wasn’t even nominated at the Oscars (and I bet you never heard of), as an example of one of those radical narratives. To that, I’d add Nate Parker’s 2016 Birth of a Nation based on the true story of the slave rebellion led by slave preacher, Nat Turner. Davies gives an alternate opinion on two popular Black cultural symbols: Meghan Markle and the movie Green Book. She quotes Elaine Musiwa in a 2017 article for US Vogue saying, “Meghan Markle is the type of black that the majority of right-leaning white America wishes we all could be, if there were to be blackness at all.” On Green Book, which won five Oscars including Best Picture, Davies reveals (at least to me) that the film was created by white people and despised by the family of its Black subject, pianist Don Shirley. “Why does the turgid black-white buddy trope still persist in cinema? For many, [the film was] a highly revisionist piece of cinema, framing [Shirley and his Italian driver Tony] as friends rather than employer and employee respectively. The Shirley family was not consulted during the making of the film, with [Don’s] brother Maurice telling Essence magazine that the film was “a continuation of white privilege””.

But while Davies focuses on the pressure to not be “too Black”, other forces demand Black artists be “more Black.” R&B singer, PJ Morton’s song, Claustrophophic, tells of the pressure he got from record labels to be Blacker. Morton sings, “PJ, you’re not quite street enough/Thug life my nigga/Can you act a little more tough/Or, can you switch your style up a little more?/You can be yourself later, for now we need the radio.” Are the rappers my son and his buddies listen to told to be “more street” to sell more records?

Also, would Davies’ explain the massive success of Pulitzer Prize-winning Kendrick Lamar, and his straight-outa-Compton self and lyrics as being just “street enough” to sell to white folks? And what about the 2018 blockbuster movie Black Panther that raked in billions with a story by, and about, Black people? Black Panther’s Killmonger arguably was the on-screen expression of Black desire for revenge for historical injustices – and white people loved it.

Branding is about ownership. Those who own the channels using the Black brand control how Black are people are represented in those channels, including what’s too much or too little Blackness.

Black folks need to keep pushing to be the ones defining Blackness and telling its stories in all its beautiful, messy complexity – using more of our own channels where we’re not selling stuff.

Some great Canadian examples are: The Black Power Hour (Halifax), Black On Black (Ottawa) and Desmond Cole’s radio show (Toronto.)