The NBA Wants to Hug You With Commercials

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry” may make a tidy message for a tear-jerker about a college kid who loses the love of his young life. But it doesn’t resonate well in long-empty NBA arenas, where a lockout-abbreviated season tips off tonight.

So, in commercials that began running this week on NBC and TBS, the National Basketball Assn.’s marketing department is offering a public apology to fans by tweaking its strife-tarnished slogan. How long the new slogan, “I still love this game,” remains in the picture depends upon how quickly fans and television viewers embrace players and owners who came within a jump shot of losing the entire 1999 season.

“The word ‘still’ is our way of acknowledging that people have had reason to question whether or not they did love the game the same way,” said Rick Welts, president of NBA Properties.

In Los Angeles, the Lakers open tonight against Houston at the Forum, while the Clippers take on Phoenix at the Sports Arena.

The NBA is preparing another commercial that will use humor to try to build interest in the truncated season. Its task is made doubly difficult, observers say, because the advertisements come at a time when many fans feel estranged from athletes whose paychecks and lifestyles set them far apart from wage earners. And in the last year or so, the NBA has been hit with a cavalcade of negative news clips ranging from reports about Latrell Sprewell choking his coach to the arrests of several NBA players on criminal charges.

“If [NBA players] show the same attitudes and keep misbehaving . . . the league can only do so much with image ads,” said David Carter, a Los Angeles-based sports marketing consultant. “They have to make sure that, as a group, the NBA is offering a good product.”

Welts acknowledged that ads alone won’t erase ill feelings among fans.

“I don’t know the answer to how long we will be going with ‘I still love this game,’ ” he said. “A lot depends on what plays out in the next four months. We really have an opportunity to present this game in a different way. And if we don’t, shame on us for having squandered an opportunity.”

The ads cast players as guys who are simply glad to be back on the job after a six-month lockout that postponed the start of the season by three months.

In one of the commercials, love songs play in the background as players do their thing on the court. Another series of ads, filmed in a grainy documentary style during recent open practices in NBA arenas, shows players offering fans handshakes, high-fives and hugs.

The NBA isn’t the only professional sports league using feel-good commercials to burnish its brand of entertainment.

Major League Baseball used snapshots from last season’s home run derby between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to curry favor among fans still grumbling about the strike-shortened 1994 season.

And during Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast, the National Football League rolled out a campaign that shows star players consulting checklists as they thank NFL fans around the country for their support.

While commercials for pro sports typically feature the athleticism of their stars, the new campaigns try to portray players as caring human beings. It’s the same strategy, observers say, that an energy company like Chevron uses in commercials featuring employees to humanize a giant corporation.

“These players are, collectively, a very wealthy corporation, and these commercials are their form of brand advertising,” said Kevin Lane Keller, a marketing professor at Dartmouth College.

“But successful branding campaigns include a lot of intangibles . . . and in this case, it goes beyond the sheer pleasure of watching great passes and dunk shots to whether the players are indeed going to walk the walk when it comes to truly being fan-friendly.”