One of advertising’s most prolific campaigns is getting a new jolt of life after going dormant for several years.

ESPN is resuscitating its iconic “This Is SportsCenter” campaign with the help of its new lead creative partner, Richmond, VA.-based Arts & Letters. Wieden+Kennedy produced the bulk of the 400-odd ads that began airing in the mid-1990s, but ESPN brought the campaign in-house in 2017 and discontinued it shortly afterward. The campaign will return soon, likely making a splash during the College Football Playoffs in the beginning of 2023. Arts & Letters, which has worked on campaigns across a number of ESPN’s various verticals since 2019, including its brand platform “There’s No Place Like Sports,” will develop the new iterations of the campaign.

“With this new SportsCenter campaign coming into the fold and being awarded to Arts & Letters, it’s just an opportunity to really solidify the messaging and the relationship,” said Laura Gentile, evp, ESPN marketing and commercial marketing, adding, “It brings back a campaign everybody knows and loves and is core to who we are as an entity.”

Despite the multiyear layoff between spots, the newest editions will “stay as true to the concept as possible,” Gentile told Adweek. “We feel like it’s one of those timeless amazing ideas and it’s our job to uphold the magnificence of the idea and execute it in 2023.”

Previously, “This Is SportsCenter” served as the de facto brand platform for ESPN, Charles Hodges, the founder and ecd of Arts & Letters told Adweek. But with “There’s No Place Like Sports” filling that role now, the SportsCenter campaign can highlight ESPN as the center of the sports universe through levity, said Hodges, who worked on the campaign while working for W+K as a copywriter.

In addition to the “This Is SportsCenter” campaign, the indie agency works on the NFL on ESPN, NBA on ESPN, College Football on ESPN, espnW and the ESPN brand. Some of the agency’s biggest hits for ESPN have come in the form of stunts like the victory goggles for the NBA championship and a “postseasoning” spice for college sports tailgates.

Our campus is more polished, better landscaping, more satellite dishes, better cafeteria but the essence [of the campaign] is the same.

Laura Gentile, evp, ESPN marketing and commercial marketing

Building brand love

To get TV viewers to consume more of ESPN’s content on linear TV, online or social media, where the network has a robust presence on Snap and TikTok, data shows ESPN must foster more love for the brand itself.

“If you love us, you spend twice the amount of time with us, and so, we’re building that emotional connection,” Gentile said. ESPN’s goal is to always be top of mind for sports fans, making fans think of ESPN when they go to their phone for that latest piece of news, trade rumor or fantasy sports, Gentile told Adweek.

The campaign will attempt to appeal to all segments of sports fans, like helping the 30-something cord-cutter who fondly remembers the campaign reaffirm their relationship with ESPN to making boys and girls already familiar with the campaign become loyal ESPN viewers. Gentile added that ESPN has an advantage that most of its competitors, which include anything from other sports networks to the leagues and teams themselves, don’t.

“ESPN is something you could relate to you … feel like is a sports fan sitting alongside of you cheering,” Gentile said. “[Others] haven’t built that foundation, where they can really be that humane, personable and connected to their constituents and their consumers.”

Inside the writers’ room

With hundreds of iterations of the campaign, “the creative development cycle for this campaign is a living breathing thing,” Hodges said, pointing out that anyone can have a different perspective on what would connect and resonate with fans. That leads to briefs on athletes, anchors or more general culturally relevant ideas.

In the end, it’s often about volume and fine-tuning the best ideas.

“It’s been our approach to really just make a lot of stuff, have a conversation about it, and then start to shape that script packet together,” Hodges said.

And sometimes that volume and collaboration pays off with a viral hit. Hodges said one of the most absurd ideas greenlit during his W+K days became one of the most memorable ads in the campaign—NFL reporter John Clayton’s appearance in an ad that shows off a ponytail and his love for the band Slayer.

Twitter’s self-described “Complaint Hotline Operator,” Elon Musk, hosted a Twitter Spaces Wednesday afternoon in an effort to allay advertiser concerns about brand safety and ad relevancy.

Brands including Paramount, eBay, Walgreens, Honda and Ford joined the audio conversation along with about 100,000 others.

Advertisers are increasingly concerned about Musk’s definition of free speech and how that can collide with their brand messaging. Musk told the brands his $8 subscription plan, which includes verification, will solving for these concerns. His argument? That a paying user wouldn’t dare break the rules for fear of losing their verification.

“If someone tries to impersonate a brand, their account will be suspended and we will keep their $8,” Musk said.

Maybe this is a dumb decision, but we’ll see.

Elon Musk, Twitter CEO

Not all advertisers are satisfied with this argument. Lou Paskalis, an advertising industry veteran who has held top roles at Bank of America and American Express, said political operatives and foreign actors who spend billions on advertising and could have an interest in spreading harmful misinformation would not be deterred by the prospect of paying $8 a month.

“I don’t think his model is fully baked,” Paskalis told Adweek. “I don’t think it will demote hate speech and it will create headwinds for advertisers.”

The public meeting followed internal meetings Musk held with agencies last week, which also left some advertisers with more questions than answers. This time, Musk still gave limited information on issues such as content moderation, brand safety and how a subscription model would affect advertisers.

Tools to curb hate speech and misinformation

On the call, Musk maintained the platform’s content moderation policies haven’t changed. While he urged the attendees to observe how events play out on Twitter, he reaffirmed rigorously clamping down on bad content, bots and trolls.

Twitter’s head of safety & integrity, Yoel Roth said that the platform has actually gotten safer since Musk took over, citing a stat that the level of hateful activity on Twitter is 95% lower than it was before the acquisition.

However, Tuesday’s midterm elections showed otherwise. The New York Times dug into the Twitter data and found 40,000 tweets about malfunctioning voting machines in Arizona which promoted election misinformation narratives across the platform for much of the night.

Meanwhile, Roth spoke about new tools being built to curb the spread of misinformation and harmful content without having to ban people. These include frameworks like warning messages, interstitials and tools to limit reach. Musk sees a “mild paywall” as another solution.

“Maybe this is a dumb decision, but we’ll see,” said the world’s richest man.

According to Paskalis, Musk seems to fundamentally misunderstand the concerns of advertisers, focusing on brand safety as an issue of ad adjacency.

“The issue isn’t adjacency. Does Twitter allow hate speech on the platform?,” he asked, noting these assurances require a much higher bar than simply ensuring brands aren’t next to harmful content.

If things go wrong, it’s my fault. The buck stops with me

Elon Musk, Twitter CEO

Robin Wheeler, Twitter’s vp of US client solutions, kicked off the 59-minute call. The 10-year Twitter veteran asked Musk about how advertising fits into the platform’s subscription model. While Musk was light on details, a recent update to Twitter’s app in the iOS store noted that Twitter Blue subscribers will see half the ad load of non-subscribers.

On the call, Musk encouraged brands to continue using Twitter, whether through advertising on the platform and via their own accounts. While some brands have paused spend, others have dramatically pared down the use of their Twitter accounts using it primarily for the most basic functions like answering customer concerns, said Amy Gilbert, of social agency The Social Element. 

“There has been some adjustment for all our clients,” said Gilbert.

Gilbert said that since marketers also rely on Twitter for social listening if more users are behind a paywall a whole swath of valuable data could be lost.

Future of brand, its identity, and representation

Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO David Cohen, who was present on the call, probed Musk’s plan of action to address a brand’s bottom-funnel marketing goals, including relevance, brand safety and measurement. 

“We’ve probably not been great on any of them,” said Musk. “We’re terrible at relevance.” 

To address this, Twitter plans to integrate ads into recommended tweets. This needs to be on one software stack, according to Musk. Last week, the platform downsized to a single software from three different software groups.

“The relevance of recommended tweets is much better than the relevance of the ads because they’re two different engines,” Musk said.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s new content moderation council will take a few more months to come together. The team will weigh in on account suspension decisions, according to Musk.

“I’m the chief twit here, so the responsibility is mine,” he said to the thousands of people listening live, which grew to 1.2 million by late Wednesday. “If things go wrong, it’s my fault. The buck stops with me.”

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In meetings with agency and brand leadership this week, Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, has been receptive to concerns about hate speech on the platform while also generally eluding pressing questions about the platform’s future, sources told Adweek.

“Honestly, he seemed a bit all over the place,” said a media buying executive at a large CPG brand, who attended a meeting earlier this week between the company and several brands. The source added that Musk did not answer several questions about his plans for advertising on the platform, including whether tobacco ads would be permissible. 

A second media buyer, who works at a large agency, said a second meeting with the company has been set up to answer more detailed questions that Musk wasn’t able to answer during a meeting earlier in the week.

“He was an active participant and actively listening to concerns of agency leadership about brand safety and what that means for the clients,” said the buyer. “We’re looking for a signal in a lot of noise,” the source said. 

Brands are trying to weigh private conversations with Musk, which have often lacked detail but been respectful, with his public presence on Twitter, where he has been critical of the advertising community. This morning, he tweeted that revenue at Twitter was down because of “activist groups” adding, “we did everything we could to appease advertisers.”

Despite this proclamation, estimates from data analytics firm Pathmatics show Twitter’s U.S. ad revenue has barely budged since Musk’s acquisition. During the first four days of this week, brands spent around $20.29 million on the platform compared to $20.3 million the first four days of last week.

Ebiquity, an ad-tech firm that monitors media spend, told Adweek that nine out of 17 brand advertisers they have contacted this week have instructed their agencies to suspend advertising on Twitter until further notice. Although the company didn’t share the specific brands, some of its clients include Sony, Nestle, Subway and Mazda. 

Some big names have indeed paused spend, including General Mills. But others are still waiting. Our media buyer source says none of their clients are off the platform. Reflecting this reality, CPMs on the platform have not fluctuated dramatically, Avi Ben Zvi, vp of paid social at performance marketing agency Tinuiti said. 

“Until something tangibly, concretely changes, there are a lot of advertisers that are waiting or operating business as usual,” the media buyer source said. 

Adweek contacted Twitter for comment Friday morning, but our emails to a spokesperson bounced back, which may be the result of widespread layoffs. An email to the company Friday afternoon was not returned.

Brands pull eight figures in annual revenue 

A third media buyer source at a large brand said the channel had been a strong performer.

Even before Musk took over and hate speech rapidly increased on the platform, Twitter had struggled with preventing harmful and illegal content, some of it adjacent to ads. In late September, several brands found out they had been inadvertently advertising on accounts peddling child porn, per a report in Reuters. One of those brands, which spends more than $15 million on Twitter, subsequently paused spend on the platform, the third media buyer told Adweek.

The brand was considering returning to the platform recently and had scheduled a meeting this week with the company. But then Twitter abruptly canceled the meeting, souring relations. 

“They just realized all of this was happening and [had] nothing to say,” the source said. 

After this week, with hate speech increasing on the platform and Elon Musk tweeting (and then deleting) an inaccurate story about the attack of Paul Pelosi, the brand isn’t planning to return any time soon.

“It’s a long road of fundamentally making us understand that [Musk] understands what we need from a brand safety standpoint,” the buyer said. “I have zero confidence in that right now.”

The media buying executive from the CPG company also stopped ad spend on Twitter due to a similar incident that also happened a month ago during which ads ran adjacent to predatory accounts. The company’s media spend on Twitter is more than $10 million annually. It’s now shifting budgets to CTV and TikTok.

The company had plans to advertise on Twitter for the upcoming Super Bowl, as it had done in past years, but that’s no longer the case, the source said. 

“Our brand is our most valuable asset, we would not and cannot have them be associated with content that would be hateful or vulgar,” the source said.

Brands and agencies are currently mulling whether advertising on Twitter is still worth the potential brand safety risks that come from the new ownership of Elon Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist.”

In this week’s episode of Yeah, That’s Probably an Ad, creative and inclusion editor Shannon Miller and director of audience engagement Jess Zafarris are joined by Katie Donnel, senior marketer at Uber Eats, and Simon Armour, creative director at Kamp Grizzly to discuss Uber Eats’ Halloween horror film starring Keke Palmer, how the film came together and the next frontier for shoppable creativity.

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You’re 18 and graduating from high school. Your family, friends, teachers ask the age-old question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Fast forward: You’re 22, just landed your first, real “adult” job, and it’s in some marketing-adjacent field. Suddenly, you’re 30 and have crushed it at said job and now have three direct reports. You blink, and you’re 38(-ish) not exactly where you thought you’d be and have found yourself asking the same question from 20 years ago, “What do I want to be when I grow up?”  

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Welcome to Marketing Morsels, a menu of delightful news items from the past week. Enjoy the assortment, from a Ryan Reynolds Mint Mobile stunt to a new beverage from Red Bull.