Shifted Focus Away From Scandal at a Professional Sports League by Focusing Coverage on the League’s Business Success

Marston has represented one of America’s most popular professional sports. Our assignment was to spotlight the sport’s tremendous success in terms of ticket sales, broadcast revenue and commercial sponsorships – success that was being overshadowed by a scandal involving performance-enhancing drugs.

The Marston team was retained to help develop new strategies to generate positive national news coverage in business media, not on the traditional sports pages. The challenge was that the game itself enjoyed copious sports coverage, but the commercial achievements of the sport were not being recognized.

Marston was able to generate major news media coverage in both national business publications and on business-oriented radio and television programs that illustrated the ability of the sport to draw huge audiences and command hundreds of millions of dollars of commercial sponsorship.

It arranged feature segments on such national TV programs as NBC’s Today, CBS’ Sunday Morning and The Early Show, CNBC’s Squawk Box and Kudlow and Cramer and The Dennis Miller Show, ESPN’s Cold Pizza, CNN’s World Sports, BET’s Nightly News and on NPR’s Morning Edition. Marston also scored for its client with articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek.

The recognition Marston was able to achieve for its client not only advanced its reputation as one of the country’s most popular and successful sports, but also took the spotlight off the negative story surrounding the use of performance-enhancing drugs by players