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Nostalgia is both baseball’s brand and its burden. Major League Baseball’s marketers are trying to make it more of the former and less of the latter.
In 2017, Sports Business Journal put the average age of an MLB viewer at 57. While the league has used streaming, social media and other tools to bring younger audiences to the game, Morning Consult found that just 32% of Gen Z (ages 13 to 23) identify as Major League Baseball fans—compared to 50% of U.S. adults overall. By comparison, a larger portion of that generation follows esports (35%) than professional baseball.
Baseball’s history separates it from other U.S. sports. It also imbues the sport with sepia-toned reflections of a past that young fans weren’t alive to witness and unwritten rules of conduct that turn off modern viewers.
Major League Baseball and new creative agency of record Wieden+Kennedy appraised tradition’s place in the current game and addressed it in a three-spot campaign dubbed “Baseball Is Something Else.” The campaign features a 60-second overture that serves as a love letter to the modern Opening Day, a 30-second tribute to Aaron Judge’s 62 home runs in 2022 that addresses baseball’s statisticians and superstitions, and a 30-second spin around the league’s various hot dog offerings.
To modernize the image of America’s pastime, both MLB and W+K reexamined the pillars of the game and determined which portions remained most vital throughout its history. While the league considers this campaign part of a greater season-long multiplatform effort—which already includes celebrity ads and spots about its rule changes, as well as a print manifesto later this year—this “brand equity” statement reintroduces baseball to the general public by putting its best features forward.
“When we actually looked at brand attributes, it’s not one or two things—it’s actually a handful of things that really made us unique,” Karin Timpone, CMO of Major League Baseball, told Adweek.
What is baseball?
When Timpone and her team looked at the game, there were four elements that stood out as fundamental attributes worth selling to the general public. First, there’s the charm of the game in the small elements like groundskeepers mowing the field, hot dogs on the grill or the late Zonk Lanzillo banging a drum at Texas Rangers games.