I have never trusted borrowed interest marketing. Build the property or don’t bother. The Flyers Cup, Mites on Ice and the Pepsi Shootout all started as blank pages. They came out of The Flyers’ Hockey Central, the first fan development organization in professional sports, and a fan base raised by the team instead of rented from someone else’s hit.
The NHL went the other way. “Hot for Hockey” hitched itself to Heated Rivalry and Off Campus, turning real player news into 30 to 90 second romance audio shorts. Seven installments, six players, one week on Spotify, then gone. The league now calls it a one week concept tied to opening games, though Sports Business Journal had reported stories rolling out all season. The league won’t say why the whole series came down. Fans gave it 2.4 stars.
Here is what the borrowing missed. Those novels are fiction. The players are not. Anyone who has spent time around the game knows the locker room has always had its own mythology of off ice romances and flings, and it hands out nicknames you would never print on a jersey. Give a romance writer a real name and a real schedule and you are not winking at a subculture. You are hitting too close to home. Fans heard privacy and safety concerns. Some heard a league playing with something it doesn’t own.
The league says every player consented. Fine. Consent to a likeness is not consent to what a room full of fans will whisper next.
Borrowed interest buys a week of attention and a lifetime as a footnote. A property you build gets you a six year old who is still buying tickets at sixty. That was Flyers owner Ed Snider’s vision in 1976, and I got to make that a reality.
Commissioner Bettman said the league figured why not get on board. Because you were never on the boat. Build your own.
Source: Front Office Sports