The next morning, we made the short walk from the hotel to Pike Place Market, where the titular Pike Place was closed to the public and coated in magenta carpet for a parade of mascots and stars. From our vantage point between camera crews from SNY and AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh, we saw youth baseball players from the Seattle area berate Houston Astros mascot Orbit as it handed out tissues and players in designer suits do their best to navigate their partners, children and extended families through autograph seekers and live microphones.
“What I think is great about the whole All-Star Weekend is the opportunity for this really to be a community event,” T-Mobile’s Katz said. “There are tens of thousands of people who go into the stadium, but what makes it even better is the opportunity to reach a lot more people that live in the Puget Sound community.”
By the end of it, I had just enough time to speak with a MattressFirm marketer and accompanying local sleep expert about how their All-Star appearance helps convince customers an adjustable bed will fit into a standard frame—while allowing the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Pirate Parrot mascot to get some rest. I made one last stop at Pete & Gerry’s, where CMO Phyllis Rothschild sported a cast on her arm with the company’s logo and CEO Tom Flocco advised visiting their second location on the T-Mobile Park concourse—before briefly hitting the press box for the All-Star Game.
As I explained to a reporter from Atlanta beside me—who asked where I kept going during games—the brands outside the ballpark and in the suites below us were playing their own game during All-Star Week. Fans who never attended a single event could still go home with bags worth of swag and take photos at countless social-ready brand and MLB statues and frames.
When the All-Star teams took the field, we made one last trip to the suite level to speak with MLB CRO Garden about the brand impact on this event and others in MLB. In the hallway, with league Commissioner Rob Manfred beckoning him back in to watch the game, Garden noted that he’d been with MLB since the league last held its All-Star Game in Seattle in 2001. He saw MLB.com and other forays into technology that predated Netflix and the iPhone and has looked for brand partners willing to move similarly ahead of the curve. He found them at the All-Star Game.
“You can’t walk around [Seattle] without seeing T-Mobile,” Garden said, noting that T-Mobile went further by giving away league subscription products with sales of its products. “Capital One, one of our newest partners, these guys are amazing: They want to execute on programs and do different things and be first, so we’re looking for more partners like that.”