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By John P. Ourand
If it's Wednesday, it must be Aspen, hitting the slopes and taking in the Winter X Games.
Thursday means a flight to Houston for three days of parties and events preceding the Super Bowl.
There's one more stop-a week in Honolulu for the NFL Pro Bowl-before returning home to New Jersey. Such was the schedule several weeks ago for James Brown, ESPN's SVP, field sales and marketing, who, like most of his colleagues in ESPN's affiliate sales and marketing division, has a frequent-flier portfolio that dwarfs most of the industry's best-traveled executives.
But it's not all fun and games for ESPN's affiliate team. When I caught up with Brown on a Houston golf course on a chilly, misty morning the day before the Super Bowl, he was nursing a bad cold, looking like a guy who should have been at home and in bed.
But there's business to be done. After catching a catnap on the ride back to the hotel, Brown was spotted several hours later doing what he traveled to do in Houston in the first place-schmoozing clients at various pre-Super Bowl parties.
The truth is, Brown had no choice but to recover. That's because ESPN's affiliate sales team, led by Sean Bratches, EVP, affiliate relations and marketing, works as hard as it plays. And recuperative time was not in sight-after the Super Bowl, Bratches and his team spent virtually all of two weeks locked in an Atlanta conference room hammering out a carriage deal with Cox.
But it's during the run-up to the Super Bowl that ESPN works and plays the hardest, treating the event as its version of the cable industry's Super Bowl. It gives cable's most expensive network a chance to demonstrate the value it provides to the industry and mollifies, at least for a weekend, MSO executives who spend the rest of the year complaining about rates. A trip to ESPN's Super Bowl boondoggle is one of the most coveted invites of the year for many of the net's MSO clients.
And it's a place for the net to conduct some real business. ESPN set up several marketing initiatives with the Time Warner Cable Houston system (the industry's largest at 724,000 subscribers) in the weeks before the big game. They included digital and high-speed acquisition campaigns and CSR and direct sales incentives.
"It makes sense for us to include our affiliates in promotions whenever we can," ESPN's VP, national accounts, David Preschlack said. "It was an opportunity for us to do something with the local system in the local market, because the event, when it's stripped down, essentially is local."
Time Warner Cable's Houston system credited the promotions for pushing up its January sales totals. It logged higher-than-normal digital upgrades (more than 4,000), a 30% jump in new Road Runner high-speed customers (13,000) and a 25% subscriber uptick from CSRs and a 16% jump from direct sales.
Perhaps the best-attended co-sponsored event was ESPN Classic's Road Show, which drew a standing-room-only crowd the afternoon before the Super Bowl. The world of work blurred with the world of fun, once again, at the Road Show, as the Chicago-born Preschlack successfully angled to get his photo taken with his boyhood hero, Chicago Bears legend Dick Butkus.
This year, however, ESPN found it tougher to talk some of the higher-level cable execs into going to the game. Carolina and New England weren't big draws, and the host city lacked the appeal of some of the warmer, more urbane sites of previous Super Bowls. Even top ESPN brass George Bodenheimer and Mark Shapiro missed the game (though Shapiro has a good excuse, as he stayed home for the birth of his second son, Jeffrey Thomas). Still, representatives from nearly every MSO were found at ESPN-sponsored events, although Cox and Cablevision executives were notably absent among ESPN's guests.
ESPN ensures that its guests have a full plate of events throughout the weekend, sponsoring events from bass fishing (ESPN owns the BASS fishing tour) to a Houston Rockets game (ESPN also owns the rights to NBA games).
The network also used the weekend to push some of its newer properties. It hosted a party for its poker programming on Friday night (an evening with sharks at the Houston Aquarium, complete with a scuba diver with network signage in one of the fish tanks and professional poker players dealing out advice at several tables). It also celebrated the launch of ESPN Deportes with a Saturday night party at a downtown Houston club, complete with athletes and on-air talent.
And, of course, there was a football game-and a halftime show-on Sunday.
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