April 2013 – Brad Walker

If you haven’t heard of Jason Collins before today you’re not alone. He’s kept a low profile during his 12-year career as a professional basketball player in the NBA, but today he became the first openly gay male professional athlete in a major American professional team sport.

For the professional sports community, this announcement couldn’t have come at a better time. While society becomes more accepting of equal rights and treatment for the LGBT community, there’s been a growing stigma surrounding homosexuality in professional sports. Collins broke that barrier this week, and he will go down in history as a man and player who forever changed the face of professional sports.

This amazing story of courage and strength should push the NBA to build on this narrative and strengthen their global brand with the LGBT community and its supporters. It’s a great opportunity for Collins, David Stern (NBA Commissioner) and the league to lead the conversation surrounding this controversial topic. Athletes should feel comfortable coming out during their careers and not being discriminated against for their sexuality. An NBA campaign that focuses on LGBT issues would unite players and bring together fans to create a new culture around homosexuality in the NBA. Other professional sports leagues might even be inspired to create their own campaigns and come together as people to address this issue.

Organizations try to identify worthy causes to get behind. The NBA should use Jason’s story as a way to align their brand with progressive values that are more prevalent in sports and society today.

It’s 2013, public sentiment is shifting in support of LGBT rights and equality. Strong support of Collins and the overarching issue will show the world that the NBA values authenticity, acceptance, fairness and equality. Branding aside, it’s something truly special to witness for Jason. After years in the dark, he finally gets to live an honest life and hopefully inspire other athletes to come out and embrace their sexuality.

If you’re unfamiliar with the popular social news site Reddit, here’s a short summary. Users post content — pictures, news articles, memes or gifs, then users have the option of upvoting or downvoting content based on how funny, interesting, creative or relevant each submission is. The best content gets the most upvotes and will often make it to the front page of Reddit. The site is made up of subreddits, which are communities about any topic of interest.

The subreddit, IAmA, or Ask me Anything, give Redditors the opportunity to interact with celebrities, thought leaders, athletes, musicians and anyone with a great story to tell by asking them questions within the subreddit. If used correctly, the platform is a great way to gain exposure on the site and interact with fans and users.

But publicists and companies have tried to abuse this power by focusing on promotion and trying to dupe the community into believing the AMA was genuine.

AMAs with Morgan Freeman and Woody Harrelson are prime examples of this abuse by PR people who want the exposure for their client without doing any of the work. These men are two excellent actors, but the way their press people handled their AMAs was unethical, tasteless and disrespectful to the community. Each of the lazy, thoughtless responses to fan’s questions made it seem like a publicist was on the other end pumping out pre-written statements about films each actor starred in.

There is an overall lack of transparency, the first rule you should never break in PR. It ruins the integrity of the profession and makes us work even harder to fix the reputation of this industry. If we ever want to be respected and trusted as an industry, these practices need to stop. We have a code of ethics for a reason, and it needs to be followed and enforced for the long-term stability of public relations.

Month: April 2013

Jason Collins And The NBA’s Unique Branding Opportunity

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