How marketing changed

Sports marketing has changed drastically over the years and has evolved from simple marketing like photographs to up to the second updates. The roots of Sports Marketing can be traced back to the 1860's when many businesses, recognizing the popularity of the new sport of baseball, began using photographs of the teams to help sell their products and services. Since the time of those first baseball cards sports marketing has become a more than $200 billion dollar a year industry. It now includes such diverse revenue streams as sports equipment manufacturing, advertising, ticket and concession income, athlete endorsements and product merchandising.

In 1919 the recording of sound was developed and the press were able to record their voice in a conversation with an athlete so that it could be put in the news paper each day. Before this new technology the only sports news they had in the papers were the scores from the previous day. The only problem with newspapers as your main source of advertising was that you had to wait till the next day to hear the scores or your would have to go to the game or talk to someone who went to the game.

Then in 1920 the first commercial was made and was broadcast on the radio which was important because sometimes if you hear someone else say how good a product is then that might make you want to believe that the product is good.

Another essential step to making sports marketing what it is today is the first motion picture television was created so this made it some what easier to hear the news happening in the sports world. By 1948 televisions were in one million homes across America which meant almost everyone was watching.

A large leap in sports marketing is that Rich Foods becomes the first company to pay for the right to have their name on a venue. Rich Foods agreed to pay $60,000/year for the naming rights to the Buffalo Bills football stadium. If you put an athlete on the cover of your magazine, stadium or logo it is more likely to draw attention and your product will be worth so much more.

The creation of ESPN was a giant step for sports marketing. There was nothing else like it out there and there still isn't. ESPN (originally an abbreviation for the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American cable television networkdedicated to broadcasting and producing sports-related programming 24 hours a day. ESPN's signature telecast, Sportscenter, debuted with the network and aired its 30,000th episode on February 11, 2007. Though ESPN today you can get up to the minutes news and injury updates on your favorite teams and player through text messages.

Also the first HDTV was a stepping stone t where we are today. High-definition television is a digital television broadcasting system with higher resolution than traditional television systems standard-definition TV. HDTV is digitally broadcast; the earliest implementations used analog broadcasting, but today digital signals are used. HDTV technology was introduced in the United States in the 1990s. HDTV made it so that broadcasting looked extremely realistic and made it look like you are at the game. So now that ticket prices are rising most people just buy an HDTV and are at the game.