the-brands Page 1 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Darren Rovell Squeals At The Sky About The Sanctity Of Endorsements
So California’s Fair Pay to Play Act, a bill permitting athletes at the state’s colleges and universities to seek endorsement deals and make money off the use of their names and likenesses without losing their eligibility or scholarships, became law yesterday. People have concerns!...
Adam Schefter Doing Ads For An NFL Sponsor Is So Embarrassing
ESPN’s Adam Schefter is a reporter who reports on the NFL. That implies certain things, or at least it used to, namely that a reporter should not have a personal financial stake in the NFL, a business they ostensibly cover objectively, making more money. This seems uncontroversial to me, and for dec...
Miami Marlins Sorry For Blaming Tampa Bay Rays For Killing Steve Irwin
A spokesman for the Miami Marlins apologized today for a bit of spicy Twitter banter in which the Marlins’ account blamed the Tampa Bay Rays for Steve Irwin’s death, Miami radio host Andy Slater reported....
ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski Is Now A Corporate Shill For An NBA Sponsor
Adrian Wojnarowski, ESPN’s most prolific and trusted NBA reporter, is now a brand bot for a company that is partnered with the league he is, in theory, supposed to be covering aggressively and adversarially. ...
The UFC's Pride Month Shirts Can't Hide How It Really Feels
Shortly following the start of Pride Month in June, the UFC joined in the grand tradition of brands glomming onto the LGBTQ+ rights movement in order to enhance their profiles:...
Brand Digs Up Jackie Robinson's Corpse To Sell Beer
If people would stop accepting ads like this as being anything beyond an ad, there’s a chance they might stop being made that way. In the meantime, a brand used Jackie Robinson, who didn’t drink alcohol, according to his wife Rachel, and a two-toned baseball (yecccch) as a prompt to sell beer. They ...
It's A Beer Commercial
Ahead of what could be Dwyane Wade’s final NBA home game tonight, a beer company released an advertisement highlighting the Miami Heat player and his generosity. Wade and his wife Gabrielle Union are well-known for their charitable work and activism: The basketball player has established a college s...
The One Ingredient Missing From This Disgusting Hot Dog Is <i>Sports Illustrated</i>'s Integrity
Sports Illustrated may no longer be the revered repository for serious, well-composed, compelling sports writing and photography it once was during the glory days of yore, but that doesn’t mean the shop is no longer an innovator. Careful readers of the publication’s print and online offerings have i...
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....