Watching a typical NBA television broadcast, one realizes that almost all of the league's corporate sponsors are based outside the United States:
All of these foreign-based firms sell products to US consumers, of course, which makes the NBA, a touchstone of youth culture, an attractive marketing vehicle. While other American pro sports have signed up American companies as sponsors (a typical NFL broadcast features Brett Favre shilling for Sears, overgrown men wolfing Campbell's Chunky Soup ladled by Donovan McNabb's mother, and a few Bud Light ads), the NBA has become beholden to international patrons. This certainly fits with Commissioner David Stern's long-marching goal of bringing the league to hundreds of millions in Europe and Asia.
Things were not always thus. Reading David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, I recently learned that brands like Ford and Chevrolet were inveterate sponsors of the Association back in the 1970s. Perhaps large American consumer-focused companies no longer see NBA fans as an attractive market; are hoops-heads too poor, too pigmented, or possibly too young? (I thought a maxim of marketing is to sign up young customers while they are still forming their habits and loyalties.) Alternatively, foreign-based corporations, perhaps applying different marketing strategies due to their previous nonexistence in this country, may simply value those fans more. It could even be that these international entities can juice their reputation in their home countries by associating with the NBA.
These days, it seems that all the action in the US economy is in the digital space. By building a cool website like a Netflix, Twitter, or Groupon, an entrepreneur can scale his customer base very quickly, build a following in the zeitgeist, and attract billions in capital. Lions of the American "old economy" no longer have a need for the NBA. When will we see the Google Halftime Show or the Pandora HORSE Challenge?
