‘Powell on the Piano’ and the Toronto Raptors’ strange history with advertising

The NBA season is now officially past its midway point, and among the return of other regular season fixtures — like prematurely panicking about the Cavaliers playoff chances and gasping in terror every time Joel Embiid experiences minor discomfort — is the presence of brands’ NBA-themed marketing campaigns. Every year, companies across North America attempt to cash in on the excitement surrounding the NBA season by paying hefty sums of money for the right to bear nonsensical titles like, “the official car wash of the Milwaukee Bucks” and to solicit the endorsements of popular players for what I-can-only-imagine is limited commercial return.

Earlier this season, the popular website-hosting service, GoDaddy launched one such campaign, featuring the Toronto Raptors’ small forward, Norman Powell. According to this campaign, Norman Powell is an aspiring musician who enlisted the services of GoDaddy to build a website in order to launch his music career. The most glaring problem with this narrative, of course, is Powell is not an aspiring musician. This is made evident by the commercial’s depiction of Powell’s creative process, which evidently involves sourcing artistic feedback directly from the GoDaddy customer support line.

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This unorthodox approach to gauging music quality is perhaps the most probable explanation for why his debut song, “No Problem,” sounds like it was written by someone whose only previous exposure to music was a Kidz Bop version of the song “Where is the Love” by the Black Eyed Peas. It’s weird. Every individual element of the commercial feels awkward, from the script, to the acting, to its ham-fisted attempts to tie-in the GoDaddy brand.

As I sat in the lingering confusion produced by this commercial, I began to question the effectiveness of athlete endorsements more broadly. Without doing any detailed research, I imagine athlete endorsements are a bit like specialty sports drinks — so ubiquitous they can’t possibly be completely ineffective, but impossible to explain their value without using unconvincing buzzwords like “brand association” or “electrolytes.”  This skepticism has developed gradually over many years, as I’ve studied the various advertising opportunities awarded to players of my favorite sports franchise, the Toronto Raptors. Inspired by this incredibly strange GoDaddy advertisement featuring Powell, I decided to put together a list of some of the most ill-conceived advertisements ever starred in by players of the Toronto Raptors, past or present.

Kyle Lowry for the Bank of Montreal:

This commercial is part of a broader advertising campaign created by the Bank of Montreal, called the #BMOBallAccess campaign. It features an animated basketball named the BMO Ball-star, who has been given sentience ostensibly for the sole purpose of contriving scenarios that allow him to deliver tepid non-sequiturs and bad puns. In this particular clip, The Raptors’ point guard is mid-conversation with the Ball-star—who is pestering him like a less endearing version of Donkey from Shrek—to confirm whether he is Kyle’s “Best Ball Friend” or “BBF,” as he refers to it. As far as I can tell, this is supposed to be clever because it is a play on the term “BFF.” It’s unclear why this is meant to be funny.

If this is meant to be a joke, then it is the type of joke a robot might make after engineers are finally able to add parameters for humour into its AI. It’s a joke for people who have to stifle laughter every time they hear the word “pianist.” It’s a joke for people who think it’s clever to turn the words “all access” into “ball access.” About once a week, I find myself thinking about the brainstorming session that led to this name. I wonder if two creative executives excitedly high-fived after it was initially suggested. I wonder if “ball access” was circled on a whiteboard, written next to a bunch of other suggestions that were deemed “on the right track, but not quite there,” I wonder if one person was concerned about the clarity of the name, and timidly asked, “Do you think it will be confusing if we just call it the ‘BallAccess campaign?’ How will they know what kind of ball we’re talking about? What if they think it’s a campaign about a soccer ball?”

The most glaring problem with this commercial, however, is that I have no idea what service it’s advertising or what its call to action is. Seeking clarity on this point, I googled the name of the campaign, and came across this explanation from Jennifer Carli, a marketing executive at BMO Financial Group: “Every sports property has something about it that makes it special, every fan base has something that makes it unique. For the Raptors fans, it’s their swagger, and Ball-Star is the ambassador to leverage that.” Not to ridicule Jennifer too much, but can you imagine genuinely believing that an animated mascot from a commercial for a national bank company is the key to tapping into swagger?

Andrea Bargnani for Primo Pasta:

Andrea Bargnani came into the NBA with a lot of weight on his shoulders. Being drafted No. 1 overall is a lot of pressure for any 20-year-old kid to handle, but add the burden of being the first European to ever be drafted in this position, a slew of comparisons to Dirk Nowitzki, and a general lack of predisposition towards dedication and hard work, and it’s easy to see why the odds of success were always stacked against him. In 2010, after Chris Bosh signed with Miami, the Raptors turned the keys over to Bargnani on offense, and looked to him to contribute at a level that would befit his status as a former No. 1 draft pick.  Around this time, Bargnani must have realized things would never truly work out for him as an NBA player, so he signed this endorsement deal with Primo Pasta to milk his limited celebrity for all it was worth.

Admittedly, this last part is conjecture, but after racking my brain about it for years, I can’t figure out why else Bargnani would sell out his integrity as a native Italian to endorse Primo pasta brand. I don’t think it’s stereotyping too heavily to say Italian people take pride in the authenticity of their food, and Primo pasta brand is famously anything but authentic. In fact, to even call the canned products it sells “pasta sauce” is generous. The terms “tomato condiment” and “red fluid” are both more accurate descriptors of its character.

I imagine when Bargnani’s Italian grandmother first saw this commercial, a single tear rolled down her face, signifying her pain was so immense she was momentarily too paralyzed to sob. Or, maybe not. Maybe she saw the commercial and yelled the Italian equivalent of “GET THAT MONEY, ANDREA!” at the TV. I imagine it’s fairly easy to accept your grandson is a sellout once you’ve already seen him sell out his entire continent by representing it in the history books and then drastically underperforming expectations.

Hedo Turkoglu for Pizza Pizza:

One of the primary reasons why I’m doubtful about the value of athlete endorsements is that, generally speaking, I believe actors and models are simply better suited to be spokespeople. Actors are able to act—which, as it turns out, is the exact skill required for being good in commercials—models are able to create subconscious links between brands and otherworldly attractiveness, but athletes arrive at commercial shoots with little more to offer than their public goodwill. This is particularly true if the commercial’s script doesn’t call for them to play their sport of choice, in which case the commercial usually just ends up being confusing, like the feeling a child gets when they see their teacher at a grocery store.

If this is indeed the case, then Hedo Turkoglu’s inclusion in this Pizza Pizza commercial is completely baffling. Turkoglu was initially acquired by the Toronto Raptors in 2009 to bolster the team’s offense with his accurate shooting and creative playmaking abilities. Rather than doing anything like this, however, he evidently used his time in Toronto to go out to night clubs, quibble with management and play basketball with all the enthusiasm of a retail employee working the 5 am shift on Black Friday. To put it another way, every time he was asked to rotate on defense, he did so with the energy of a customer service representative explaining for the hundredth time that “there are no more discounted TVs being kept in the back.”

If Pizza Pizza paid Turkoglu even a minuscule sum of money to capitalize on his public goodwill, it was a huge miscalculation on their part because there was never any public goodwill to cash in on.

Vince Carter for Gatorade:

There’s a well-documented, but embarrassing piece of trivia that, in 1994, the Toronto Raptors selected their team name based on a transparent desire to capitalize on the Jurassic Park buzz that was so palpable during the early part of the decade. In the years following this decision, the excitement for this movie inevitably diminished, and the Raptors were ultimately left with a tacky and difficult-to-market team name that screamed of managerial shortsightedness. By the time 1997 rolled around, I imagine the Raptors ownership reflected on this decision and felt similar to how someone might feel now if they had gotten a tattoo on their arm in 2012 that said “Oppa Gangnam Style!”

This reputation plagued the Raptors franchise for the first few years of its existence until they famously drafted Vince Carter in 1998. As the legend goes, Carter single-handedly rebuilt the team’s image with his exciting play and prodigious dunking ability. In 1999, however, he set the franchise back a little bit by starring in this Gatorade commercial which featured him playing and losing a game of basketball against an animated dinosaur. Just as him and the Raptors were starting to accumulate respect from people around the league, this commercial subtly undermined their progress by serving as an additional reminder that the franchise’s branding had initially been conceived as a silly attempt to leverage the fleeting success of a children’s movie.

You know how Mike Tyson has worked so hard over the years to cultivate his current image as an affable public figure? Imagine, hypothetically, if he were to disregard all of this work in order to invade Evander Holyfield’s house and bite his ear off again. That’s what this commercial did for the Raptors reputation, but on a much smaller scale.

Jonas Valanciunas for GoDaddy:

A full year before Norman Powell launched his GoDaddy-sponsored music career, GoDaddy teamed up with Jonas Valanciunas on his supposed labor of love, “ittybittyballers.” Much like Powell’s campaign from this year, ittybittyballers also featured a rather offbeat premise: Jonas Valanciunas, the Raptors 7-foot center, apparently possessed a recreational hobby of carving miniature figurines of himself and selling them online. As someone who regularly watched Raptors broadcasts on television last year, I probably saw this commercial over 75 times. It was simultaneously too absurd to be taken seriously, but not absurd enough to be particularly funny or memorable. As a commercial, it was roughly the equivalent to what a low-budget Nicolas Cage movie is to film.

One particular moment that stood out to me every time I watched this commercial was when Valanciunas said “this is my real passion!” It made me wonder if he had some sort of storied history as a tortured artist, whose creativity had been stifled at all turns by his promising career as a professional basketball player. I wondered if, at 12-years-old, he sat in his bedroom—all 6-foot-4 inches of him—blissfully playing with his miniature figurines, when his mom burst into his room and frantically said, “Jonas! Put those away! Your father just came home and I don’t want him to see you playing with those again!”

Jonas hurried to hide everything, but in his rush to do so, he inadvertently spilled red paint on the floor.

“Jonas!” his dad said, angrily, “where did all this paint come from?!” Jonas hesitated one second too long to think of a lie.

“You were building the figurines again, weren’t you, Jonas?!” his dad said, “I thought we talked about this, Jonas! You have to concentrate on basketball! You’re going to make it into the NBA and make millions of dollars.”

“But, I don’t even like playing basketball!” Jonas replied, dejectedly, “The only thing I care about are my figurines!”

“Nonsense!” his dad countered, “You must like basketball! All your figurines are of yourself wearing a basketball uniform!”

“YOU’VE NEVER UNDERSTOOD MY ART!” Jonas yelled, choking back tears, “THIS IS MY WAY OF EXPRESSING THAT I’M TRAPPED IN A UNIFORM AT ALL TIMES TO PLEASE YOU.”

“How dare you raise your voice to me like this, Jonas?!” his dad said, now completely irate, “Do you know how many sacrifices I’ve had to make to send you to basketball camps?! You’re going to play basketball whether you like it or not! Stop being selfish and think about all the good you’re going to do for the family. So help me god, if I ever hear about these stupid figurine things ever again…”

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At some point, I decided to actually visit the ittybittyballers website rather than continue to envision this scenario. Upon doing so, I found out Valanciunas had no such hobby of building miniature figurines, and all of this was just a marketing ploy to get me to visit this stupid website. I suppose I should’ve known. Having watched Valanciunas try and fail to pump fake defenders his entire career, I should’ve known he doesn’t quite have the finesse for a hobby requiring attention to minute details.