Marketing Baseball- “Let the Kids Play” Ignores Other Characters in Baseball

I think the current Major League Baseball ad campaign “Let The Kids Play” is a dumb strategy.

In my opinion, that ad sucks. It’s really bad. It’s doesn’t generate any excitement, it’s poorly acted, and is just a mess. I think maybe it was trying to copy the NBA strategy of allowing player personalities to shine and clash, but wow, that is not good. I remember when I saw it for the first time and thought something was wrong with my screen.

Let The Kids Play is badly executed, but it’s also poorly conceived. It’s too narrow. Or rather, it’s an awkward attempt to squash squares, triangles, and trapezoids into round holes. There are whole set of personalities in professional sports, and baseball in particular. Trying to market your whole league with one them is just bad strategy because you force the others to play that role. And it’s unnatural when they do it. Let The Kids Play, or LTKP, works for certain types of player, the archetypal “The Kid”, but it doesn’t accommodate other personalities and narratives.

Wow Joe, what a scoop. I know–I just want to talk about narratives in sports, this isn’t a thesis. But if it was a thesis, this would be my argument- There are multiple different ‘characters’ in baseball, each of them appealing in their own way. Whole swaths of players–with marketable personalities–don’t fit into LTKP. Ignoring them is bad strategy.

So in the following series of posts, I’ll speak about players on my favorite team, The Yankees. Right now, the lineup has a variety of fan favorites and like-able personalities– each appealing and marketable characters. They are good examples of characters that I think the MLB should be playing up, beyond just “The Kid”.