Show the fans what’s new and what’s next. Talk with them, not at them.
As the executive responsible for ESPN’s marketing globally during a nine-year run of nonstop growth, I launched specialized channels, digital ESPN, ESPN The Magazine, ESPN Films, ESPN consumer products, ESPN Zone, and ESPN interactive games, to name a few. Most important in this role was ensuring that ESPN's brand voice remained funny and irreverent – ESPN would always take sports very seriously, but we should never take ourselves too seriously.
From the seminal “This Is SportsCenter” to the Cannes Ad Festival Gold Award winning “Without Sports…” campaign, I was privileged to have green lit hundreds of ad campaigns. What made it extraordinary creatively was that we did “marketing” that was disguised as something else entirely: an art gallery installation of original sports art made by local artists for each of the ESPN Zones, documentary films to support the TV spots that had deeper stories to tell, a music video that functioned as an ESPN ad (Nelly, Air Force Ones), a sports social network with thousands of users (pre-dating Facebook by 3 years), several TV show and a comic book.
“For the past seven years, Lee Ann Daly has been the steady hand guiding ESPN’s image, which has managed to stay irreverent and relevant to its generally youthful target. Even as ESPN grew more corporate inside, it never strayed from its positioning as “the world’s biggest sports fan.” Advertising that consistently wins awards (“This Is SportsCenter”) and brand management as strong as any inside the walls of Procter & Gamble have helped the worldwide leader in sports maintain a consistency that will last long after any television rights agreements expire.”