the-brands - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights



LeBron's A PR Guy Now
If The Oprah Winfrey Show was television’s premier destination for celebrities, often in the aftermath of something qualifying as a public relations scandal, seeking to buff their public images by applying (while pretending to strip off) a few new layers of polish in collaboration with the willing ...

LeBron's A PR Guy Now
If The Oprah Winfrey Show was television’s premier destination for celebrities, often in the aftermath of something qualifying as a public relations scandal, seeking to buff their public images by applying (while pretending to strip off) a few new layers of polish in collaboration with the willing ...

Reebok To Women: Empower Yourself By Sitting On Men's Faces<em></em>
Reebok Russia’s attempt to inject a progressive message into its recent marketing campaign has blown up in its face. This is because it was about face-sitting....

Spencer Dinwiddie Is A Refreshing Change Of Pace From The Standard Brandbot Athlete<em></em>
Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie—who after a patchy early career just inked a three-year, $34 million extension with Brooklyn, and seems to be a generally hilarious dude—has a refreshing worldview on the brands. Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic wrote about the population of NBA players who navigate the le...

This Shit Is Corny
You may have seen a quote from Giants star receiver Odell Beckham Jr. going around this morning, about the New York Giants’ chances of winning the rest of their games and making the playoffs at 9-7. “Six games left, it’s really only crazy until you do it,” Beckham told reporters, as if he were in a ...

Report: Under Armour Ends "Longstanding" Practice Of Expensed Trips To The Strip Club
The Wall Street Journal’s Khadeeja Safdar has a lengthy report out today on the state of Under Armour as the company goes through the process of “grappling with concerns about the treatment of women in the workplace.” According to Safdar’s reporting, several female Under Armour executives have recen...

Bleacher Report Accidentally Owns Ice Cream Shop Harry Giles Is Supposed To Like
Bleacher Report published a profile of Sacramento Kings center Harry Giles that opened with the most hackneyed profile technique of all time: the subject eating. This particular eating scene, however, also included 300 words of what amounted to a kind of press release about the company that makes th...

<i>NBA 2K19</i>'s Brand Humping Is Craven, Shameless, And Straight-Up Evil
If you have read anything about the NBA 2K series in the past couple years, then you know that its centerpiece “MyCareer” mode, in which you guide a custom-created fledgling NBA player to stardom, is a hyper-branded, microtransaction-choked nightmare all but explicitly designed to pressure human pla...

Report: Nike Made Sure Believing In Something Wouldn’t Mean Sacrificing Everything<em></em>
If you are someone who wants to pump your fist about Nike’s big endorsement deal with Colin Kaepernick, try this on: It is probably an encouraging sign of the times that Kaepernick’s demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism have not made him toxic for marketing and public relation...

There Is Nothing More American Than Burning Your Dumb Sneakers
“Calling a dream crazy is not an insult,” Colin Kaepernick says during a two-minute ad that Nike rolled out last Wednesday. “It’s a compliment.” It’s one of many perfectly circular blobules of aspiration that Kaepernick delivers in stop-and-go voiceover throughout the ad, and in that context and the...

People Are Destroying Their Nike Gear Because Of Colin Kaepernick
Colin Kaepernick is the new face of a Nike ad campaign. As you might imagine, this has really angered the type of people who have said, “I’m a Christian first, and a conservative second” out loud at the dinner table. And if there’s one thing you can expect from these people, it’s that they will go a...

There's Nothing Candid About LeBron's <i>The Shop</i>
When you’re watching porn, especially one of those gauzy-lensed sensual ones, you generally do not find yourself thinking, Boy, that porn star fellow must be quite the gentleman at home....