“Open Big.”
PBR’s season-launch strategy is to bust from the gate like a raging bull. Considering parent company Endeavor’s deep roots in Hollywood, that objective makes sense.
Like blockbuster films, sports is a momentum game. It’s hard to move forward if you begin by going backwards.
For the past 13 years, PBR has launched a new season at Madison Square Garden. Playing on hallowed sports ground in the middle of Manhattan displays to the world a major league sport, while letting PBR court top press outlets and businesses in the heart of media and commerce.
From a news perspective, those optics and practical connections are important, because the league’s PR and marketing team is challenged with selling a sport most media treat indifferently.
Yet, PBR knows they have something unique and compelling – a loud sporting spectacle blending extreme athletes, rock and roll, and bawdy entertainment.
“People who have never attended a bull riding event reflexively assume the sport is not for them,” said Andrew Giangola, an Endeavor executive who oversees PR for PBR within the greater organization’s shared services set up. “If we can get them in the building, the experience never disappoints.”
That goes for media as well as fans.
PBR shared a few “PR best practices” used to generate widespread coverage for a brutal throwback sport charging into the mainstream.
Storylines reign supreme. Media are in the storytelling business. Because members of the press are often unfamiliar with bull riding, each season they’re offered a number of compelling story lines tailored for sports, business, lifestyle and fashion.
Fashion press? Yes, Vogue was at The Garden to capturing this year’s looks for the cowboys and fans in this piece.
The iteam pitched storylines including: the cowboy athletes (the grizzled vet; the prodigy; the next big star); the bovine athletes (the high-tech village at work creating a world champion bucking bull); the bull fighters (the so-called “secret service of PBR,” throwing themselves into harm’s way to protect the riders from rampaging bulls); the entertainer (Flint Rasmussen, jiving the crowd “between plays”); and a great American entrepreneurial success story (20 humble cowboys scraping up $1,000 each 26 years ago to break away from the rodeo, creating a sport now touring five countries and seen in 130 territories).
Access is media catnip. PBR aspires to give the best press access in sports. “We want every writer and photographer in the house to have the ultimate up-close insider’s experience,” Giangola said. “Get dirt kicked on you, and you’re probably coming back.”
Intimate access to the sport’s biggest star worked well for award-winning reporter Matt Crossman, who wrote a definitive piece on athlete toughness for Success in covering PBR rebel cowboy, two-time World Champion J.B. Mauney at PBR World Finals.
“It would have been a good story just interviewing J.B., because all you have to do is say ‘Hello,’ and he fills your notebook.” Crossman said. “But what made it great was the deep access I got. Not just the interview, but all the color and atmosphere from being with J.B. in the locker room, walking with him in the hotel, being a fly on the wall back in his suite. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, and we were in a bar at a casino. He wanted to buy everybody, including me, Jager bombs. I’ve never had access like that with a big time athlete, ever.”
At The Garden, portraits were shot by the Times of London, and for three days, a major international UK-based men’s magazine shadowed 2017 World Champion Jess Lockwood, who sat for a half-day photo shoot before getting on a wild, unpredictable, two-ton wrecking machine. Lockwood rode well all weekend but was absolutely rocked after making the eight on the last ride of round three on Sunday. After impersonating a human rag doll, Lockwood went through concussion protocol, passed, and came out 40 minutes later for the championship round to nail the highest-scored ride of the weekend in PBR’s version of a “walk off home run” to win the event and $118,000. The lads from London should have a pretty good story.
Plan ahead but be willing to alter the game plan. Several riders were set for an advance media tour in the Big Apple promoting one of PBR’s four seasonal “Majors.” Then, a fresh opportunity dropped into PBR’s lap. Ezekiel Mitchell, an affable Texan who is the lone African American rider at the top of the sport, won an event in the sport’s number-two Velocity Tour, generating an invite to The Garden. In addition to the scheduled media tour, which included hits like Michael Strahan riding a mechanical bull here on GMA, the PR team switched gears to land this feature in the NY Post along with AP. A Shadow League feature and other national opportunities are ahead for the promising 21 year-old rider.
Think like a reporter. Buried in Mitchell’s draft bio was a throwaway line: Mitchell learned to ride bulls on YouTube. Bingo – a lede was born, quirky and different, playing into millennials’ fascination with social media. That became the headline in this AP article. And now Ezekiel Mitchell is known as the guy who learned to ride bulls on YouTube. The spin doctors have done their part; now it’s up to the young athlete to make the eight seconds consistently to stay in the limelight.
When the facts are on your side, double down on your liabilities. Every brand and business faces perceptual challenges. For PBR, it’s misinformation around the welfare of its animals.
While some events will draw a smattering of protestors (often with leather shoes and handbags) handing out leaflets claiming animal abuse, the league says the claims are a pack of misleading lies. The bulls are not abused, shocked, or agitated in any way, according to PBR.
“These animals are bred to buck like racehorses are bred to run fast,” Giangola explained. “They live a great life, four to five times longer than the average bull sent to the hamburger factory at 3 years old. PBR bulls work 8 seconds a weekend, retire to stud on ranch, and die of old age, getting a tombstone instead of a baked potato on your dinner plate. We like to say, ‘Being a bull in the PBR is like winning the animal lottery’.”
The best defense is indeed an offense ready to dive into the two-minute drill with a few back-pocket zingers. Primed with confident bravado, PBR doubled down and gave the New York Times access to the stock contractors breeding these extraordinary bucking bulls for this widely read “Science” feature.
Seek out “fun facts” and impressive numbers. To compete a full weekend in the heart of the city, PBR pays $21,000 in tolls to truck in bulls from New Jersey. To transform the Garden into a bull-riding mecca, 40,000 pounds of plywood go over the Rangers’ ice, 130,000 pounds of steel is installed for the bucking chutes, panels, gates and posts, and 45 trucks haul in 750 tons of rented dirt from Jersey. The PBR team collect the numbers, which reporters love to use, like in Neil Best here in Newsday.
Develop a creative stunt. PBR is the only sport pitting a lightweight vs. a heavyweight. The actual mass of the competitors – cowboys tipping the scales at an average of 150 pounds trying to stay on 1,800-pound bulls for eight seconds – is immaterial to the competition. However, PBR adopted the concept of a traditional boxing “weigh in” with its bulls, weighing a bull named Lab Rat against 12 New York City police officers and one canine cop right on 31st street. Then PBR made a donation to Police Unity Tour Chapter 37 which raises awareness of the Law Enforcement Officers who have died in the line of duty. With BZA riding herd on local media, five TV affiliates and the New York Times covered the fun event.
Be calculatedly bold. Vanilla may be the world’s favorite ice cream flavor, but it’s an editor’s nemesis.
“We’re pitching media likely to not be familiar with or inherently interested in our product,” Giangola said. “We try to be colorful, bold and memorable, but not merely for the sake of grabbing someone’s lapels. There has to be substance beneath the flash, or you’ll be seen as a carnival-barking huckster and come up empty.”
PBR’s bold hook is simple, compelling and potentially high stakes: Come cover the world’s most dangerous professional sport.
The league will flat-out tell you one in 15 rides ends in injury. To not appear callous or sensational, they stress rider safety: first-rate on-site medical support, mandated rider vests and helmets for younger riders (a roll out similar helmets in the NHL), and the most stringent concussion protocol in sports, holding out any rider who fails to pass his baseline test following a serious blow to the head.
Despite these measures, when skinny men get on the back of raging bulls bred to buck, bones will be broken. Bull riding will always be a very treacherous sport.
Whereas other leagues have a bias towards avoiding discussion of injuries, “if we are confident an outlet will cover rider safety in a thoughtful, fair, balanced and substantive way, we’ll give full transparency,” Giangola said.
That includes access to Dr. Tandy Freeman, head of PBR’s Sports Medicine team. In his Wrangler’s, boots and a cowboy hat, Freeman operates a mini-trauma center in the bowels of the arena, treating injuries he says are akin the kind of car accidents that happen on icy freeways on a Saturday night. Going into MSG, PBR’s transparency resulted in this USA Today piece, “Your Favorite Athlete is Not Nearly as Tough as a Bull Rider,” a headline the league couldn’t have written any better.
The story anointed a new poster boy for tough athletes. Chase Outlaw, who broke 30 bones in his face in July, came back 74 days later, went on an epic tear, and nearly won the 2018 PBR World Finals.
Just as 2008 PBR World Champion Guilherme Marchi was dubbed “World’s Most Fit Athlete” on this cover of Men’s Fitness, PBR is marketing Outlaw as the “Toughest Athlete in Sports.”
Think visually. Chase Outlaw (his birth name that won’t need to be changed when Endeavor makes the PBR feature film now in development) released to the PR team copies of his facial X-Rays – 11 plates and 68 screws that rebuilt his face in a 12-hour surgery. Given the cyborg-like images, USA Today’s Josh Peter was all in on focusing on Outlaw.
The rider’s X-ray and CAD facial images emphasizing a nose rebuilt from skull bone are now shown to fans on arena video screens when he’s in the bucking chute getting on his bull.
Don’t over-train and over-message your athletes. NASCAR may have lost some of its rough-and-tumble charm when drivers became sponsor-plugging machines. Conversely, PBR doesn’t media train its riders; they’re encouraged to be themselves. “We don’t want to scrub the personality from quotable warriors about to do something most of us can’t fathom,” Giangola said. The league is willing to bear an unfiltered cuss word or two if it means unbridled cowboy authenticity.
PR 101 guidebooks will advise “briefing spokespeople” before any encounter with national media. PBR apparently didn’t get the memo. Here’s what happened when USA TODAY was allowed to wander into the locker room, spotting J.B. Mauney pulling on his boots with a Marlboro Red dangling from his lips.
Be Lucky. Whether or not you’re aligned with Branch Rickey on luck being the residue of design, a few things definitely went PBR’s way in launching the 2019 season. The Giants and Jets didn’t make the NFL playoffs (a fact PBR’s official entertainer Flint Rasmussen hilariously riffed on), helping free up time and space for coverage among local outlets who’d have been obsessed with football in a market desperate for January ball. Additionally, for the fifth year, on its opening day, PBR rang the morning bell at the New York Stock Exchange, this time with partner Boot Barn. The market soared 746 points. The league had a lot of fun, promptly taking credit for a renewed “Bull Market.”
Down at the NYSE and throughout the weekend, the PR team was feeding content to the league’s social media team, helping share real-time news with fans, merchandising media coverage, and creating a consistent narrative.
Merchandise your wins. Generating event coverage is one step in overall success. Sharing headlines with key constituencies is as important. For example, PBR on CBS will show press coverage of riders, whether it’s rider-turned-IMG Model Bonner Bolton making it onto Dancing with the Stars or Chase Outlaw’s toughness in the nation’s newspaper. In 2018, before every PBR event, a highlights reel of press coverage played on the arena video board.
“Most of us are in our PR jobs because we love creating news. When you see the fruits of your team’s hard work on the Jumbotron and the TV broadcast, it a rush that makes all the blood sweat, and tears completely worth it,” Giangola said.
Great way to buck the storytelling trend…even in a crowded New York marketplace.
