Where “Post-Race” Happens National Basketball Association Branding and the Recontextualization of Archival Sports Footage

From May through September 2014, the National Basketball Association (NBA) was publicly embroiled in controversy concerning the racist remarks made by two of its teams’ majority owners, Donald Sterling and Bruce Levenson. While the more infamous of these two, Sterling, was banned for life from the NBA and forced to sell his ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers after a very public litigation process, Levenson voluntarily sold his majority stake in the Atlanta Hawks while an NBA investigation was still under way. In both instances, league commissioner Adam Silver, as the NBA’s (white) figurehead, was quick to decry the owners’ remarks as “contrary to the principles of inclusion and respect that form the foundation of our diverse, multicultural and multiethnic league . . . an institution that has historically taken such a leadership role in matters of race relations.”¹ This was, as the Washington Post described it, the NBA’s “Summer of Race,” which received much popular press coverage and, subsequently, some scholarly attention.² What has not been discussed, however, is the degree to which the NBA’s effort to contrast the views of these owners with the league’s purportedly progressive historical position on matters of race has long been deployed in the league’s mediated branding practices. This essay examines how the invocation and recontextualization of history, specifically in the form of archival footage as it is deployed in the NBA’s four most recent marketing campaigns (2007–16), promulgate the notion that the NBA is the quintessential progressive American institution by (re)producing a “post-racial” ideology.

Of primary concern for this essay is how the deployment of archival and historical imagery effectively communicated a progressive brand association for the NBA. In that sense, assessing how this footage positions viewers to recognize and understand the past is crucial for understanding how these marketing campaigns use the documented past to construct a contemporary narrative about the NBA. Thus, this analysis also examines the way(s) in which the incorporation of archival footage in contemporary marketing media produced for the NBA discursively (re)produces broader cultural discourse about race. Finally, this essay questions the degree to which memory and nostalgia are activated in these campaigns to perpetuate long-standing myths about the NBA, sport, and American society. In other words, I explore how the league utilizes nostalgic narratives of the past to present and preserve the identity of the NBA as progressive and, ultimately, “post-race.” Arguing that the league relies on imagery of the past to assert its record of being the most progressive major U.S. sport, I contend that these NBA marketing campaigns engender an imagined parity between the idealized images of the past and the contemporary moment to elide focus on the institutional racism and traditions of white supremacy that structure the league.

To this end, I engage with extant literature, including Jaimie Baron’s concept of the “archive effect”³ and John Fiske’s definition of the three techniques of white supremacy,⁴ to map out the ways that archival footage can be exploited as a source of collective memory and a tool of ideological power. Then, turning to the case study of the four NBA promotional campaigns produced from 2007 through 2016, I perform discursive and textual analyses to examine how discourse about the league’s history combines with the visual and aural aesthetics of these campaigns to perpetuate a “progressive” identity of the NBA brand—and U.S. society more broadly. Pursuant to this focus, the campaigns analyzed here each coincide with the period that scholars have identified as the “post-race” era⁵ and are therefore revealing in the ways that they elide consideration of factors such as institutional racism. As with other scholarship focused on the study of “post-racial” discourse, the analysis undertaken here is predicated upon the understanding that race is socially constructed: while it is not biologically determined, it is one of several factors that inform an individual’s political identity.

Another subsequent reason these campaigns were chosen for the present analysis is because they were steered by a variety of individuals at both the executive and creative levels. The four campaigns were overseen by five different NBA marketing executives—Gary Zarr (2007–8), Carol Albert (2008–9), Danny Meiseles (2010–11), Jamie Gallo (2012–14), and Pam El (2014 to the present)—and they were produced by two different marketing companies, Goodby Silverstein and Partners (2007–14) and Translation (2015 to the present). Examining four campaigns spanning the influence of disparate intermediaries will lend added credence to the longevity and power of the investment in “remembering” the NBA as an always already progressive, “post-racial” brand.

COLLECTIVE MEMORY, ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE, AND IDEOLOGIES OF WHITENESS

Maurice Halbwachs argues that memories are created in the present moment as a response to pressures that obligate “people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up . . . so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess.”⁶ However, others, such as Joanne Garde-Hansen, have more recently suggested that this formulation of collective memory holds a particular externalizing quality, to the degree that “it ensures our memories are made and remade from the perspective of those on the outside.”⁷ Though this conception of group memory might otherwise ignore the fact that individuals belong to many groups concurrently, Halbwachs posits that “memory of the same fact can be placed within many frameworks,”⁸ but always in a collective context. Such contexts include, along with ceremonies, reunions, funerals, and war, practices of commemoration.⁹

In discussing the use of landscape as a site of commemoration, Kenneth Foote proffers an institutional definition of collective memory. Similarly arguing that “collective memory refers to beliefs and ideas held in common by many individuals that together produces a sense of social solidarity,” he urges a recognition of how “individuals and organizations act collectively to maintain records of the past.”¹⁰ Considering the possible reasons for this record keeping—which we might call “institutional memory making”— Foote suggests that sites might be maintained to remember the past (through sanctification, designation, or rectification) or to forget it altogether (through effacement). To the degree that the NBA recontextualizes certain historical records within new media contexts, it is important to recognize the ways in which its marketing campaigns prompt viewers to remember the past, while at the same time forgetting particular aspects. In both instances, Foote suggests, “the length of time required for transformation to occur” is considerable.¹¹ It is in this sense that the NBA, as an institution attempting to commemorate its historic self-image in contemporary marketing material, constructs these collective memories by inserting footage that is likewise “transformed” across a temporal gap.

Grappling with how the archival footage deployed by the NBA bridges this gap, it is useful to consider Jaimie Baron’s notion of the archive effect. Examining the incorporation of archival or “found” footage within new content that deliberately displaces and/or recalls the original context, Baron argues that this audiovisual medium uses the recorded past to construct new narratives from a present viewpoint. Indicating that some media use archival footage to augment a history or “truth” already known to the general public, she posits that other forms work to disrupt accepted historical narratives by offering new or counternarratives. Though the incorporation of archival footage in NBA marketing more often adheres to the former of these practices, the same “experience” of history pervades both, because “the authority that adheres to the archival document as evidence underpins the films’ claims to representing history.”¹² Therefore the audiovisual experience of history largely depends on the viewer’s ability to perceive the incorporation of this material from another context or intended use. In an analysis of NBA marketing campaigns, then, it is particularly important to focus on how historical game footage is utilized and how the players, teams, and sociohistorical context displayed (or implied) therein are demarcated from the contemporary moment.

With sports institutions like the NBA being forced to compete for the shrinking discretionary income of consumers, sports marketing researchers have noted that this competition has forced organizations to rethink methods for attracting fans and viewers. Stephen Ross maintains that “this importance is heightened given that sport teams provide an experiential service that leaves nothing but memories for the spectator.”¹³ In light of this, the NBA’s decision to appeal to fans by incorporating footage of historical events or moments that many viewers may not have personally experienced seems a particularly perplexing branding strategy. As such, understanding how this footage is visually, aurally, and discursively juxtaposed to the present moment is crucial for recognizing how the NBA expects viewers to react to these moments and the degree to which the passing of time is used to augment understanding of the NBA brand.

Baron argues that drawing attention to this passing of time within media content results in a “temporal disparity” or “the perception by the viewer ...of a ‘then’ and ‘now’ generated within a single text.”¹⁴ In addition to this epistemological effect, Baron postulates that this disparity also produces an emotional effect.¹⁵ For example, by investing the archival footage it uses in marketing campaigns with the authority of a “real” past, the NBA potentially foments in viewers a sense of longing for a time that has since passed. To the degree that this engenders a nostalgic remembrance of an idealized past, it implicates the NBA as an institution capable of (re)producing collective memories and thus ideological meaning. Because this ideology is racialized in its disposition toward a discourse about racial “progress,” particularly for the overrepresented black males who participate in the sport, it becomes important to investigate what this discourse potentially obfuscates.

Numerous scholars have discussed the discursive, cultural, and social invisibility of whiteness.¹⁶ One of the earliest to do so, John Fiske, contends that whiteness “is not an essence, but a power whose techniques differ according to the conditions of its application.”¹⁷ Among these, he argues that exnomination, or the ability to avoid being named, inhibits the disruption of the interests and practices of whites. Though this technique is always deployed in tandem with the practices of naturalization and universalization, all three of these techniques work to obscure the power of whiteness and the interests in which whites are invested. If, as Garde-Hansen argues, “the local, national and international complexity of media organizations means that only certain memories get mediated,”¹⁸ then the degree to which these insidious techniques of white supremacy are embedded in the institutional memory making of NBA marketing campaigns is an integral focus for analysis. If the NBA positions viewers to recognize a past that has not always been ideal, yet compels them to look to the league for ways in which it was an ideal organization in those less-than-ideal times, the NBA is invested in both a reflective and a restorative nostalgia.¹⁹ In other words, the NBA is able to promote its progressive identity by emphasizing in its 2007–16 marketing campaigns those moments it constructs as racially progressive within their particular historical contexts, thereby obfuscating the structures of white supremacy and racism that continue to pervade the league and its investment in “post-racial” ideology.

THE YEARS 2007–2011: A RACELESS SPACE “WHERE AMAZING HAPPENS”

Prior to 2007, the NBA was perceived to be far less than amazing. Aside from a desire to reinvigorate the league brand amid declining attendance and television ratings, a renewed interest in the NBA’s self-image gathered momentum as the league struggled to deal with events in which race played a large, if underdiscussed, role. Despite the NBA’s embrace of hip-hop culture, which began in the mid-1990s,²⁰ the league started distancing itself from the more “urban” aspects of this culture in 2005.²¹ Some people, including then NBA commissioner David Stern, implicitly linked these coded practices of policing blackness and black bodies to the league’s attempt to right its economic decline. Speaking about the 2005 implementation of a “business casual” dress code for all players, Stern opined, “There are different uniforms for different occasions. . . . We’re just changing the definition of the uniform that you wear when you are on NBA business.”²² Unmooring the attire associated with hip-hop from its racialized cultural roots by analogizing it to other raceless “uniforms,” Stern’s strategy even won support from a small segment of players, with Shawn Marion observing, “If they’re trying to change the image of the league, that’s cool.”²³ With policy changes aimed at retooling the “urban” image of the league by marking it a diverse but raceless space, the NBA began a new marketing campaign in 2007 that incorporated archival footage in such a way as to further advance this discourse.

The NBA provided marketing agency Goodby Silverstein and Partners with a $40 million budget in 2007 to promote a new brand for the league.²⁴ The agency’s first order of business was to transition the NBA away from its nearly two-and-a-half-decade-old “I Love This Game” campaign, marking both the beginning of its tenure and a revitalization of the NBA identity with the new marketing tagline “Where Amazing Happens.” The first iteration of commercials that accompanied the launch of this campaign at the outset of the 2007–8 season were, unlike previous NBA campaigns, highly stylized.

The “Where Amazing Happens” campaign consisted of four commercials that, in addition to airing on network and cable television, were supplemented with streaming video versions available via YouTube and NBA.com.²⁵ Each of the four thirty-second ads, all set to the same dramatic piano riff, consisted of cross-fading between multiple photographic stills of contemporary NBA athletes in motion. As the images slowly faded in, a short phrase playing on the campaign’s tagline—for example, “Where anticipation happens” or “Where nowhere to hide happens”—faded in and out with each picture. Throughout the four separate spots, each of these phrases ended with the word “happens,” except for one. In the second of the spots, titled Immovable, accompanying the phrase “Where short shorts happened,” appeared the only black-and-white photograph featured in the entire campaign.²⁶ The image, which featured the dynastic 1950 Minneapolis Lakers team, was also the only clearly posed photograph. Though the Lakers are one of the more storied teams in NBA lore (the likely reason for the inclusion of their photograph here), the team was also among the last in the league to desegregate. Indeed, though the NBA had begun racial integration in 1950, the very season during which this picture was taken, this photograph of the Lakers presents the team in all their preintegrated glory.

Figure 1.

The photograph of the 1950s Minneapolis Lakers team was distinct within the NBA’s “Where Amazing Happens” campaign. Screen grabs courtesy of the author.

The clear demarcation of this image from the others with which it was contextually placed was heightened by the accompanying phrase, the only in the series to read “happened” instead of “happens.” These distinctions evoke the temporal disparity necessary to juxtapose the segregated Lakers (and thus the NBA as it “used to be”) to the league’s contemporary athletes (and thus the NBA as it “exists now”). As such, the spot potentially triggers within viewers an archive effect similar to that described by Baron. As she notes, “the experience of the archive effect . . . can be sometimes difficult to guarantee, at least without some explicit form of labeling provided by the filmmaker.”²⁷ By visually representing the segregated Lakers as aesthetically different from those teams and players currently competing in the NBA, the Lakers are thus placed in a different context from the contemporary moment. But, to the degree that the archive effect prompts viewers to compare and contrast the moments that have produced this temporal disparity, the contemporary moment is also understood relationally to the earlier sociohistorical context in which the 1950 Lakers have been placed. In other words, as the footage recalls the segregation of the NBA—and, I would argue, America—it also places this moment in the distant past. By juxtaposing this black-and-white image of the problematic past with more colorful pictures of contemporary athletes in action, the ad constructs the NBA as an institutional space in which race is no longer an inhibitor of progress.

David Stern, commissioner at the launch of the “Where Amazing Happens” campaign, has long touted the league’s progressive promise using the contradictory rhetoric of color-blind logic. In addition to suggesting that “this is the first sport where it became fashionable and allowable to talk about race,” Stern has called the impact of racial considerations on the league’s image “both a fact of life and a cop-out.” Choosing to “deal with that as a marketing problem, as a challenge,” Stern claimed “that if everything else went right, race would not be an abiding issue to the N.B.A. fans.”²⁸ Thus, inasmuch as the NBA’s white patriarchal figurehead was invested in moving past the consideration of race, doing so with a branding strategy that sought to maximize the appearance of racial diversity while minimizing racial significance, he also discursively signaled the complicity of NBA audiences in this strategy. That is, by arguing that fans would otherwise overlook race as a concern so long as they were subjected to particular marketing campaigns, the implication is that these NBA spectators and viewers do not want to “see” race. Recalling Ross’s observation that the product provided to fans by sports organizations is primarily an experiential commodity, Stern’s invocation of fan involvement is neither unsurprising nor limited to these comments. NBA fans were hailed as direct participants in the next phase of the “Where Amazing Happens” campaign.

The NBA and Goodby Silverstein and Partners built on the highly stylized aesthetics of the first series of commercials by incorporating advanced CGI techniques in the second wave of ads produced for the 2008–9 season. Focusing this time on slow-motion game footage from several “amazing moments” in NBA playoff history, these thirty-second spots first removed then incrementally reincorporated the sounds, players, and live crowds that appeared in the original archival footage. Each of the four commercials again began with a fade-in over another dramatic piano chord; but here the camera panned along an empty basketball court. In one of the spots (though all are relatively similar), the sound of a basketball bouncing off the court echoed as an image of Philadelphia 76er Julius Erving circa 1980 dissolved into the frame. Driving toward an apparently unguarded basket, two Los Angeles Lakers defenders suddenly manifest in front of him. While he leaps around them and underneath the rim, two more Lakers players appear, but not in time to prevent his reverse layup from sinking through the hoop. As it does, the erstwhile empty stadium seats suddenly fill with spectators who jump to their feet, their cheers abruptly saturating the audio track. Then, as Erving jogs away from the hoop, the sounds, crowd, and each of the players dissolve from sight, leaving only the empty seats as background for the superimposition of the commercial’s visual tagline: “Where will amazing happen this year?”²⁹

Figure 2.

Incorporating CGI technology in the “Where Amazing Happens” campaign, archival footage is manipulated to implicate fans as witnesses to NBA history. Screen grabs courtesy of the author.

Like this spot, none of the commercials in the series includes contemporary footage to which the archival footage on display can be juxtaposed. Nevertheless, each spot still produces a temporal disparity and thus an archive effect. That these commercials invoke a sense of history cannot be denied. Yet, to the degree that viewers are forced to visualize what this history would have been like without the presence of fans, it prompts them to self-identify as witnesses to the next potential “amazing moment.” That is, by asking viewers where those amazing moments will “happen this year,” the spots ask viewers to recognize the contemporary moment that has not yet been recorded. Importantly, though, these commercials also position viewers in the dual position of present-day witnesses to these historic experiences.

As witnesses to the digital inclusion and erasure of fans in this archival footage, contemporary viewers are urged to recognize that there is no drama or history without the presence of a crowd. Though Baron suggests “the historical authority of the archival document ...is relentlessly threatened by digital technology,”³⁰ these spots use the tools of digital technology to interpellate viewers as imagined witnesses to the original moment. This process is made doubly problematic, though, in that it divorces these moments from their original sociohistorical context. Julius Erving’s reverse layup can be celebrated as an amazing moment only to the degree that it is decontextualized from the racist views that circulated around the league in the early 1980s, fueled by allegations about the widespread drug use among, and stratospheric salaries of, the league’s predominantly black players.³¹ As such, collective memory is being both activated and constructed here to remember through a “post-racial” lens only the positive (i.e., dehistoricized) aspects of a league that just so happened to employ a disproportionate number of black men.

2011–14: A LOCKOUT AND THE LEAGUE’S “BIG” RESPONSE

The “post-racial” (re)production of the past within the “Where Amazing Happens” marketing continued into the NBA’s next branding campaign. Though Goodby Silverstein and Partners’ ads coincided with a surge in NBA television ratings throughout their four seasons of distribution, the NBA encountered a full-court press of bad news coverage as the 2011 season approached. Stemming from a division between players and team owners over what was perceived by players to be an inequitable division of league revenue and an attempt by team owners to imbalance their leverage by restructuring both the league’s salary cap and luxury tax, the NBA experienced its fourth lockout in league history. Delaying the start of the 2011–12 season by fifty-five days, the lockout ultimately shortened the regular season from eighty-two to sixty-six games.³² Examining journalistic coverage of the lockout, sports media scholars David Leonard and Bruce Hazelwood found that most accounts were harshest toward the league’s players. As they summarize it, most articles took the position that “people are losing jobs and fans are losing games because the NBA is at the mercy of its stupid/uneducated black players.” Some coverage did implicate the owners, but only to the degree that they “ha[d] an obligation to fix the situation” because they “allow[ed] players, who lack intelligence, to have input into the situation.”³³ Just as the 2005 dress code was a de facto means of policing blackness from a position of white patriarchy, so, too, in the media coverage of the 2011 lockout do we find a similar reinforcement of white paternalism—yet another demonstration of the ways in which race remains a powerful but invisible factor within discourse about the NBA.

While proponents of a color-blind ethos denied the continued significance of race, some, like sportscaster and media personality Bryant Gumbel, used the moment to raise awareness of the underlying racial meanings. Referring to David Stern as “the NBA’s infamously egocentric commissioner,” Gumbel decried Stern’s tactics in the labor negotiations as “typical of a commissioner who has always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men as if they were his boys.”³⁴ Gumbel’s comments drew swift and sharp criticism, with sports commentator Jason Whitlock at the forefront of these objections. Refusing to acknowledge the racialized ideologies at work, Whitlock steadfastly opined that “these NBA players are . . . victims of their own immaturity, stupidity and delusion.”³⁵ As discourse such as this circulated in the media at large, reinforcing the notion that all black athletes are greedy and un-educated, the challenge for NBA marketing was to construct a new campaign that would entice viewers to return to a lockout-shortened NBA season and minimize the racially charged conversations about the league and its players.

Danny Meiseles, executive vice president of production, programming, and broadcasting for the NBA during this period, presented its 2011 marketing campaign as an opportunity to “refresh” the league’s brand. “The ‘Big’ campaign is,” as Meiseles described it, “a way to speak about our game in a different way.”³⁶ Some of these differences represented, at least initially, aesthetic departures from the “Where Amazing Happens” campaign. Most notably, no longer did there appear to be an interest in incorporating archival footage in the league’s ads, nor was there the typical focus on the NBA’s more prominent players. The slow-motion contemporary game footage in these first four commercials centered on younger players in their first or second seasons in the league, as phrases like “PASSION,” “JOY,” and “TOGETHER” flashed across the screen and a thumping techno beat played on the audio track.³⁷ While Meiseles downplayed the lack of “star power” in the ads, suggesting, “We have four more months to focus on other players,” this tactic was likely also a marketing strategy to move past the (still fresh) memories of the contentious lockout. That is, by focusing on younger players and their “passion” for the game, these ads diverted attention from the well-known and highly paid NBA stars who had garnered so much attention during the contract negotiations.

As the shortened 2011–12 season drew to a close, though, archival footage once again became a major component of the “BIG” campaign. In commercials advertising the NBA championship finals, the amount of archival footage utilized in ads sharply increased. One such sixty-second advertisement used the same techno beat from the season’s earlier commercials and similarly began with slow-motion footage of contemporary players preparing for games. While the footage rolled, words flashed on the screen in a one-at-a-time, staccato fashion, with certain words emphasized in a larger or italicized font. This visual narration began with the proclamation, “It’s. Not. A. GAME. Or. A. SPORT. Or. A. SERIES. It’s. A. SHOT. At. IMMORTALITY. But. It’s. Not. Just. One. Team. Against. Another. It’s. Two. Teams. Against. All. Who. Have. Come. BEFORE.”

At this point, the ad switched to archival footage of NBA stars from the past as they prepared for historic games. Included first were Larry Bird and the 1981 Boston Celtics championship team, over which the words “The. LEGENDS” flashed. Then, Houston Rockets players Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon were shown along with the words “The. GIANTS.” The slow-motion effects continued as the ad switched to archival footage of these historic players in action. “But. History. Won’t. GIVE. You. Must. TAKE.” Cutting to footage of Michael Jordan and fellow Chicago Bulls teammate Scottie Pippen, the words “Because. The. Past. Is. PRESENT” darted across the screen, followed by “And. It’s. Setting. The. Tone. Breaking. You. Down.” Footage of Magic Johnson strategizing with a teammate then rolled as more quasi-descriptive narration flit over them. “Making. You. Think. And. If. That’s. A. BURDEN. Your. Team. Can’t. Carry. You. Can’t. WIN.” At that point, the slow-motion footage switched back to contemporary athletes in various moments of celebration as the final words of the ad proclaimed, “Because. For. CHAMPIONS. The. Chance. To. Live. FOREVER. Is. Way. Too. BIG.”³⁸

There are few examples in NBA marketing that come as close to such a blatant recontextualization of the recorded past to construct a narrative about the present. The choice to focus the ad on prominent historical stars with major economic and cultural capital, such as Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan, is a clear strategy to appeal to the ethos for which these men are perceived to stand. In this respect, Jordan and Johnson represent particularly potent signifiers in that they have long been marked as “model” black athletes. Andrews and Mower, for example, have argued that Jordan was “the archetypal, raced neoliberal subject, whose very being seemingly confirmed . . . a meritocratic and open class structure, economic mobility, racial tolerance and an unfettered individualism, all of which pointed to the ready access of the American Dream to black Americans.”³⁹ Other sports media scholars have offered similar assessments, suggesting that Jordan and his black colleagues in the late 1980s and early 1990s were marketed and showcased to attract, rather than threaten, white audiences.⁴⁰ To the degree, then, that these desirable, idealized black athletes were connected to the contemporary NBA players via the temporal disparity engendered by the archive effect, we can further discern the “BIG” campaign’s strategy to mitigate both the economic and racial discourse that afflicted the league’s contemporary image.

Figure 3.

The NBA’s “BIG” campaign deployed archival footage of “model” players juxtaposed against the league’s contemporary athletes. Screen grabs courtesy of the author.

The NBA carried the “BIG” campaign into the following season with an initial series of commercials that once again omitted the use of archival footage.⁴¹ However, as with the 2011–12 season of the “BIG” campaign, the NBA’s deployment of archival footage in marketing material intensified as the 2012–13 NBA finals approached. One advertisement, titled Finally Forever, set to the music and lyrics of alternative rock artist Chris Cornell, was a thirty-second spot that started with separate archival shots of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird walking onto the court in their warm-up gear. The ad then cut to footage from the final seconds of the 1985 finals, wherein the Los Angeles Lakers finally beat the Boston Celtics after eight years of the two teams competing for the league championship. Jumping ahead ten years, the ad cut to footage of Michael Jordan soaring through the air in slow-motion. As he switched his ball hand to deliver a reverse layup, the ad temporally reverted to Julius Erving executing a similar reverse layup in 1980. Transitioning back to the contemporary moment, the ad then featured current Celtics star Kevin Garnett and the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant celebrating after victories by their respective teams. The ad then switched back to archival footage, with shots of Scottie Pippen embracing Michael Jordan in the mid-1990s and another earlier shot from a 1964 championship win in which the white head coach of the Boston Celtics, Red Auerbach, embraced Celtics players Bill Russell and John Havlicek in either arm. Pivoting one last time to the contemporary moment, the ad ended with shots of players Tim Duncan and LeBron James celebrating respective championships as Chris Cornell raspily crooned the words “finally forever.”⁴²

Figure 4.

Footage of three distinct generations of NBA camaraderie bolsters the league’s progressive, “post-race” brand in the “BIG” campaign. Screen grabs courtesy of the author.

In both the 2012 and 2013 ads, the NBA’s past is depicted as being constituted by players invested in passion, play, and camaraderie. There are no implications, other than the underlying ideological ones discussed in this essay, of the structural or institutional barriers that NBA players of the past and present are forced to confront. Invoking Jordan and other black players like him as signifiers of the league’s “progressive” credentials belies the notion that the United States and its cultural institutions are now or have ever been “post-race.” As is evident through its policies, discourse, and branding strategies, the NBA remains mired in practices that appeal to viewers by utilizing the universalized cultural norms and narratives that speak to white interests, while celebrating those athletes of color who have successfully pursued these same interests. Some, such as the founder and director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, Richard Lapchick, have inadvertently perpetuated the league’s racially progressive brand by doubling down on the “post-racial” preclusion of ideological interrogation in favor of a focus on diversity.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Lapchick suggested that the NBA “is more in tune with moving in the right direction in terms of diversity and inclusion than all of the other leagues. And that’s been the case for a long time.”⁴³ We need to problematize the way in which views such as these encourage an examination of comparative metrics and inhibit a focus on pervasive practices of institutional racism. It is, after all, only in a supposedly “post-race” culture that the NBA can be considered a racially progressive institution. When Lapchick’s own studies have shown that people of color compose 76.7 percent of persons competing in the NBA and yet occupy only two of the majority ownership positions in the league,⁴⁴ the degree to which a progressive identity is built on a foundation of the players of color who constitute the league’s public face should be unmistakable. By using marketing campaigns that focus on a diverse group of players, and thus the agency and space they are provided in which to amass economic and cultural capital—as with Michael Jordan—the NBA appropriates the discursive and ideological power to distance itself from the institutional and structural racism in which it remains mired. When we fail to reflect on the way in which the ideologies and practices of racial policing that are part of the NBA’s past and present are (re)constructed in marketing campaigns that invoke the recorded past in the contemporary context, we thus allow whiteness (however codified) to be reinforced.

THE YEARS 2014–2016: GETTING “EVERYBODY UP” TO EXPLAIN “THIS IS WHY WE PLAY”

The 2014–15 NBA season began with a series of important transitions for the league. David Stern ended his thirty-year reign as commissioner, stepping aside for another former lawyer, Adam Silver. The NBA also inked a new, highly lucrative media rights deal estimated at $2.6 billion annually—a 180 percent increase over its previous 2007 contract with TNT and ESPN.⁴⁵ The organization also hired Pam El to be its chief marketing officer, the first person to hold the position since the 1990s and the only woman or person of color ever to do so. As the league looked to produce a new marketing campaign to mark this season of change, these developments combined to make it the most costly and broad-reaching campaign yet.

The strategy for the NBA’s new campaign, dubbed “Everybody Up,” was, as El explained, “to be much more aggressive with our marketing . . . to go after a larger fan base.”⁴⁶ Part of this newfound aggression involved airing commercials across a wider array of cable channels. While in years past, NBA promotional spots ran only on TNT and ESPN, the NBA was now expanding its reach to include channels like BET, CNN, TBS, and VH1. That the league would be looking to increase the fan base by courting more casual viewers is unsurprising, given the size of the annual media rights payments doled out by TNT and ESPN. As some have maintained, the exorbitant contract with the NBA is likely to increase the cost of these channels’ carriage fees and thus raise the overall cable costs for casual viewers.⁴⁷ Perhaps with that prospect in mind, the first ad of the campaign, Roll Call, adopted a distinctively inclusive tone.

Set to the iconic organ riff from Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say?,” the sixty-second spot featured the standard footage of contemporary NBA players and coaches preparing for and performing in games, but it also included shots of various individuals who viewers are led to believe might be fans of the NBA. As R&B performing artist Common intoned, “All of you baby sizes, Shaq sizes . . . fantasy owners, tweeters, blog-readers, gamers, game-timers,” footage of people, quite literally of all sizes and apparent ethnicities, who meet these descriptions rolled underneath the narration.⁴⁸ El described the spot as a declaration “that teams win championships, individuals don’t. . . . The team is a combination of the players and the coaches, but also the staff and employees and the fans and the families—and that all of those folks actually contribute to the NBA experience.”⁴⁹

Along with the thematic appeal to a wider audience, the campaign utilized its $135.8 million budget to reach those viewers formerly seen as nontraditional NBA fans.⁵⁰ This perhaps indicates a reason why the “Everybody Up” campaign was the first NBA marketing strategy in seven years not to incorporate any archival footage in its ads. The absence of archival footage is telling here, with respect to the observations by Ross that sports marketing is invested in selling an experience.⁵¹ To the degree that the league’s appeal to more casual fans meant garnering the attention of viewers or spectators unfamiliar with the NBA product, choosing to focus on a universal experience shared by fans of the contemporary league seems the safest marketing choice. The NBA likely did not want to draw on historical events or moments that would be unrecognizable to these more casual fans, and thus footage of such events is omitted from the “Everybody Up” campaign. Incidentally, the campaign was also the last to be produced by the NBA’s longtime creative agency collaborator, Goodby Silverstein and Partners.

At the start of the 2015–16 season, the NBA and chief marketing officer Pam El began working with the marketing agency Translation on the league’s fifth branding campaign in under a decade. The new campaign, titled “This Is Why We Play,” was slated to become the league’s first multiyear marketing campaign since the “BIG” advertisements of 2011–14. El explained that the new campaign would “be integrated across all NBA platforms and social media, and it is designed to showcase not only the game, players and coaches, but also fans of the game.”⁵² As such, the campaign ads aired across an even broader array of channels, including HGTV, ABC Family, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, and Spike.⁵³

Translation’s founder and CEO, Steve Stoute, has frequently balanced a personal interest in hip-hop culture with his involvement in corporate America. In 2012, Stoute worked to promote Brooklyn’s Barclays Center because his longtime friend Jay-Z had a substantial financial stake in the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets. Stoute has described his marketing approach in the superficially progressive rhetoric of “post-racial” discourse, claiming, “It’s too easy to look at archetypes—that person is an African American, that person is 18–34 or Caucasian. . . . Contemporary culture doesn’t abide by those rules.”⁵⁴ Color-blind sentimentality such as this fosters the notion that, because the stereotyping of any one group would be harmful, we need to appeal to commonalities that exist across those groups. With El describing the NBA and Translation’s new “This Is Why We Play” campaign as being focused on “the universal appeal of the game,”⁵⁵ the league’s underlying gesture toward these commonalities seems readily apparent. That the NBA’s ads represent these commonalities via the rhetoric of “post-racial” ideology, and thus a universalized (i.e., white) interest, once again marks them as essential points of analysis.

Pam El described the first ad of the campaign, Anthem, as being “all about the game, but . . . much more than the game itself on the court.”⁵⁶ The sixty-second spot purported to explain what constituted this “much more” as it began with a voice-over questioning, “Why do we play?” Incorporating footage of young boys of color playing basketball on what appears to be a schoolyard court, a female member of a wheelchair basketball league passing the ball to a teammate, and slow-motion game footage of NBA player Blake Griffin shooting the ball, the narration answered its own question, responding, “We play for jumpers, passers, and shooters.” The ad’s voice-over continued, “We play for ballers,” as a shot of an elderly white woman shooting the ball in a gymnasium was shown. “Shot callers,” as footage rolled of black NBA coach Doc Rivers calling plays from the bench. Then, as the narrator declared, “Game changers,” the first bit of archival footage appeared in the ad: a two-second clip featuring Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics and Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers as the designated “game changers,” pounding fists mid-contest between their two rival teams.⁵⁷

The ad also included a shot of Jason Collins, the NBA player who outed himself in 2013 to become the first openly gay athlete in the four major U.S. sports leagues, marching in a pride parade. Also shown were the San Antonio Spurs’ Becky Hammon, who, in 2014, became the first full-time female paid assistant coach in any of the four major sports, and female referee Violet Palmer, shown making an emphatic call during an NBA game. Each of these shots appears in succession as the narrator asserted, “We play . . . for breaking through, breaking barriers, and paradigms.” The spot ended with footage of contemporary NBA athletes in various moments of action on the court and in the community as the accompanying voice-over summarized, “We play for chasing a dream on and off the court. We play for all that, and whatever comes.”

Figure 5.

In the “This Is Why We Play” campaign, archival footage links contemporary “game changers” in the realms of gender and sexual equality to the “game changers” of the NBA’s dubious past. Screen grabs courtesy of the author.

As with the earlier “BIG” campaign and its commercial for the 2012–13 finals, within this ad, we again see the recorded past being used to construct a contemporary narrative about racial (as well as sexual and gender) equality in the NBA. In both spots, the use of archival footage featuring Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, as well as their respective Lakers and Celtics teams, is particularly revealing of the way in which this equality is imagined. Basketball has frequently been described by sports media scholars as a “telegenic sport,” meaning that, because athletes’ faces are not covered by helmets, as in baseball or football, it makes for more visually emotive and dramatic television. With this in mind, Andrews has argued that “Larry Bird’s whiteness and Magic Johnson’s disarming black smile and style were intensively mined as part of the remodeling of the NBA into a racially ambiguous—and thereby accessible to mainstream American sensibilities—popular cultural space.”⁵⁸ Thus, as the archive effect connects the supposed racial progress signified by Bird and Johnson to the progress signified by Collins, Hammon, and Palmer in the contemporary moment—and, we might reason, the “[American] dream” being chased “on and off the court”—we can discern yet another way in which the league’s investment in this progress narrative rests on its ability to construct new memories about the archived past.

As suggested by the continued representation of the competition between the Lakers and Celtics as an example of the NBA’s racial transcendence, the history the league (re)constructs through marketing campaigns is revisionist at best. As Boyd and Shropshire have argued, “to side with the Lakers or the Celtics was to embrace a racial position and a specific set of cultural politics. . . . The battles between Magic and Bird, L.A. and Boston, black and white, could be described as the late twentieth century’s version of an acceptable race war.”⁵⁹ It is not, however, uncommon for the invocation of a recorded past in contemporary media to be revisionist. Baron goes so far as to insist that “every (recognizable) appropriation of found documents is, on some level, a ‘misuse’ in that the original intended use of a found document is never coincident with its later use.”⁶⁰ But, when archival footage—like that of these two storied sports teams—is divorced from sociohistorical context and connected visually to the contemporary moment, the “misuse” is amplified. It is in this respect that the NBA (re)produces the mythic appeal of sports as always already a “post-racial” fantasy. In other words, it uses archival footage of a partially reimagined past to perpetuate the narrative that sports are a meritocratic space in which race cannot, therefore, be a factor. As evidence of the league’s color-blindness, and thus the virtue of America’s continued investment in this “post-racial” ethos, the marketing campaign trots out one popular black star after another to avoid confronting the ideologies of race still operating within, and which are subsequently (re)produced by, the league.

CONCLUSION

NBA basketball is but one case study demonstrating the ways that contemporary marketing and branding recontextualize archival sports footage. As Griffin and Calafell have keenly observed, all sport is “a pedagogical space that is instructive of how racial hierarchies in the United States reflect larger systems of domination.”⁶¹ With brand management and marketing serving as tools of both sport and these broader systems of domination, these strategies and practices are important points of analysis for media scholars seeking to chart the ways in which archival footage is deployed to bolster the development of these ideologies over long periods of time. By focusing the present analysis of marketing on the “post-race” era, this essay has shown how the NBA in particular routinely uses footage of the recorded past in various ways to present itself as a progressive organization. The league has used archival images of its historically segregated squads to present its contemporary teams, and, by extension, the NBA as it currently exists, as being well beyond the concerns of racial discrimination. The NBA has also incorporated historical footage, safely divorced from its problematic past, in contemporary media to celebrate the economic and cultural successes of certain players of color, while mitigating the racist discourse that circulates about the success of its contemporary athletes of color. This marketing media (re)produces a past divorced from context and thus constructs in the contemporary moment new memories of an imagined progressive past that never existed and a “post-racial” moment that has not yet arrived.

The NBA is certainly not alone in these practices and branding strategies. It seems that sports marketing is inherently uninterested in presenting narratives that might counter the mythic notions of sport as the ultimate “level playing field.” To the extent, then, that archival footage of historical sports moments is situated within original contexts that reveal the fragility of sport’s meritocratic myth, there is a commercial and cultural imperative to recontextualize rather than emphasize these histories. Indeed, while Baron discusses the “intentional disparity” that may be deliberately pronounced when deploying archival footage in new contexts,⁶² this essay has shown that the NBA actively avoids this kind of disparity within its branding content. But because the NBA’s deployment of archival sports footage within its marketing and promotional media discussed in this essay is likely to have parallels in other leagues and sports organizations, additional research is necessary to understand the extent of these practices. As such, media scholars and those interested in the commercial use of archival footage must more thoughtfully consider sports institutions, media, and marketing in future analyses. Through a more comprehensive analysis of this sort, we might better understand whether “intentional disparities” are attuned to emphasizing the underlying ideological construction of sports as a meritocratic “post-racial” fantasyland. At present, it remains doubtful that this sort of discourse would find its way into the marketing for sports organizations, as they remain tightly controlled by the (majority white) executives who work therein.

Though the executive ranks in the NBA remain predominantly white, the young athletes of color who continue to enter the league arrive armed with nuanced historical understandings of the ways in which “post-racial” and color-blind ideology pervade the NBA and the United States. In December 2014, a period we might—taking a cue from the Washington Post—call the NBA’s “Winter of Race,” several of the league’s most prominent players began to more openly address these ideologies and their social and physical manifestations. Some of these players, using their public positions as athlete-celebrities, protested the police murder of Eric Garner by donning T-shirts emblazoned with the words “I CAN’T BREATHE” as they participated in pregame warm-ups. Throughout the subsequent years, the voices and actions of NBA athletes have only grown louder and more prominent. Indeed, after the 2016 U.S. elections, it is perhaps more difficult for the wider public to entertain the notion of a “post-race” America. And as black NBA superstars like LeBron James and Stephen Curry have become increasingly vocal in response to the racial politics of Donald Trump and many of his supporters, these athletes’ protests and social commentary have so far been tacitly accepted by the NBA’s largely white governing body. However, as this essay has made clear, we should be especially mindful of how these player-led protests allow the NBA to continue bolstering its progressive brand. It may not be long before footage from this moment surfaces in recontextualized form to serve as markers of the NBA’s progressive brand rather than the principled stances of the brave athletes of color who were truly vulnerable in the contemporary moment.