Five historical events that shaped modern sports marketing

¶ … Sports Marketing History

There have been many important instances in the modern era in the sports world that have shaped the industry of sports marketing to a huge degree. Athletes in certain sports -- especially boxing and, centuries prior to that, jousting/sword fighting -- had long been popular, built was not until mass media and massive sports leagues formed that modern sports marketing could have evolved. Without a doubt, one of the most important events in the history of sports that created the need for modern sports marketing was the beginning of the modern Olympics at the very end of the nineteenth century. This was the first major international sporting event, combining multiple sports, athletes of both genders, and by 1912 athletes from every populated continent -- and of course the number of participating nations has only grown since (TOM 2007). These games helped to capture the world's attentions in relation to team competitive sports from all over, and solidified athleticism as a marketable trait.

Even before this, however, the invention of baseball cards in the 1860s could probably be suggested as the start of modern sentiments in sports marketing. The first commercially sold baseball cards were used to advertise other products, and of course were only really useful locally as only locals would know the players and teams depicted, and the products were generally sold at retail stores visited in-person (Ccyleback 2010). It is important to note what enabled the very production of baseball cards in the first place, too: the camera. It was the ability to take photographs that made sports figures truly memorable and suddenly collectible as a commodity, rather than simply worshipped from afar (Cycleback 2010).

This shows how important technology was in the development of sports marketing, and this trend only increased as the twentieth century got under way. Radio was actually in existence in a limited way during the first Olympics, but results from these games would have been carried by telegraph wire and even by land and sea shipping to other countries; it was not until the 1920s when radio station WWJ in Detroit broadcast first the fight between Jack Dempsey and Billy Miske and subsequently the World Series in baseball that radio truly demonstrated its power in the sports marketing world (Covil 2010). The invention of radio, and ultimately its use as a sports broadcasting tool in 1920, serve as one of the most pivotal and influential moments in the history of sports marketing, pointing its trajectory towards today's industry.

The next obvious milestone after radio is, of course, the advent of television in the broadcasting of sports. This brought together the elements of the photograph and the radio, enabling the live following of sports and the actual seeing and identification of players and teams from anywhere in the nation, and in fact decisions to broadcast sporting events -- such as NBC's first broadcast of the World Series in 1947 -- were directly linked to spikes in the number of television sets sold (MBC 2010). There was an obvious thirst for sports, and the television was the piece of technology best equipped to quench that thirst -- and to provide advertising space along with it (MBC 2010). It has even been suggested that without the decision to broadcast sports on television, the medium would have had a much slower and uncertain beginning, and radio would have remained more popular (MBC 2010).