The New York Mets are going all in to win a championship, but it’s also about building the Mets overall brand. The more the team can win, the more publicity they’ll receive. The more publicity they receive, the bigger brand they can become across the United States and beyond. Effectively, they want to challenge the New York Yankees as the brand for the Big Apple.
The organization has decided to purchase a Super Bowl commercial in their continued efforts to build the brand. Let’s be clear, it is not a national commercial that all of America will see. Instead, they have bought ad time in the local New York City media market. The commercial time will cost less, but still get in front of the most important market for the Mets.
A regular 30-second Super Bowl ad that airs nationwide is running for as much as $7 million, according to one report. An executive at an ad agency not involved in the process told The Athletic that, “air time during the [Super Bowl] in the New York designated market area was going for $276,000.” The Mets reportedly purchased “a package of ads” that went beyond just the game and the total value of that inventory is worth $1.5 million.
The Mets’ Chief Marketing Officer spoke to the philosophy of owner Steve Cohen in wanting to building the brand.
“It had to do with Steve’s philosophy of ‘Yes, and,’” Goldberg said. “‘Bring me ideas that you think are going to grow the brand, that are going to set the Mets apart, that are not just going to be running a team as a normal team.’ He wants to grow this into the Mets brand, not just the Mets baseball team. … This is the first flag planted in a fundamentally core direction that we want to go in.
“You go around the world, and you see people and they’re wearing Yankee hats. They’re not wearing Yankee hats because they’re Yankee fans, just to be clear. They’re wearing Yankee hats because it’s an ‘NY,’ and New York is cool, right? I want that to be a Met hat, 100 percent.”
Steve is worth north of $12 billion, depending on who you ask. For comparison’s sake, a $1.5 million purchase for someone worth $12 billion is the equivalent of a $6.25 purchase for someone worth $50,000. It’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, but it gives you an idea of why Cohen would do this. It’s cheap brand-building that could be sufficiently far-reaching.