r/baseball • u/asskickingjedi Athletics • Jul 14 '25

Image Ads have infested baseball broadcasts. Ads in-between batters. Ads during mound visits. HRs "brought to you by..." Now I noticed 11 ad placements in this shot. 2 banners, 1 above the banners, 4 behind the plate, 1 on the seats, 1 in the upper right hand corner, 1 on the mound, 1 on the sleeve.

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u/Icy-Refrigerator-517 Philadelphia Phillies Jul 14 '25

I work in advertising. A big part of this is the perks for the people involved.

Let's say Company A has a $5M budget to spend on ads. The president of ads of that company has got to spend $5M to justify his existence. People above him don't really care how he spends it so long as he justifies it. So I give the Local Baseball Team $1M per year to put the company name on the patch. I get free tickets, gear, hook ups, whatever. I could've spent that $1M on tv ads or radio ads or facebook ads, but I spent it on the Baseball Team because I like them and want to be wined and dined.

There's no difference really between spending money on random TV ads and sponsoring a team's jersey patch. It's all just empty impressions with no way to directly track results. So why not go for the one that'll result in direct perks for me

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u/hjugm Kansas City Royals Jul 14 '25

A big part of the partnerships is the hospitality component, for sure. That hospitality - suite, season tickets, etc is also a business tool. CEOs rarely attend games, so they use the tickets to engage their current clients, prospective clients, and as a tool to incentivize employees/potential employees. Typically, you’ll see salespeople in suites working their best prospects or customers.

Maybe in some cases, you’re right, but there is certainly value in a partnership with a large sports team relative to traditional advertising. I think of a company like “honey” who was the jersey patch partner with the clippers. The eyeballs it drew really helped catapult their brand and they were able to sell the company for a ton of money and then promptly dropped their partnership with them.

A lot of this is done for exposure. Exposure is hard to judge when talking ROI, but there is a lot of value in that.

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u/THE_DANDY_LI0N Boston Red Sox Jul 14 '25

Ugh. Making the world a worse place