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The NBA has had peculiar sponsors now and then. When you're not the NFL, you're sort of in the position to take whoever has the money. This isn't to say the NBA or its broadcasters lower standards -- not by any means. There's just some fairly frequent dissonance in the advertising message when juxtaposed to NBA basketball.Nowhere is that more blatant than with TNT's new in-game sponsor, World of Warcraft. WoW, as you surely know, is a massively multi-player online role-playing game. Pardon the simplification, but basically you create a midget mage or a half-cow knight and run around doing quests and killing dragons and stuff. According to a source close to this blogger, it takes a massive amount of playing time to keep up. It is an immersive undertaking, rather dominating of someone's free time.
And frankly, the target audience does not seem to match that of the NBA playoffs.
But WoW sponsors the "strategy points" offered for each team by Mike Fratello or Hubie Brown or P.J. Carlesimo. As in, WoW's maker Blizzard thinks the NBA fan community is rife with potential paladins and barbarians. I conducted several informal interviews to determine whether this is smart marketing for WoW. Do WoW fans and NBA fans share any common ground? Can we expect an influx of elven healers with names like "Chosen1LBJ" or "KOBE24KOBE"?
No. No, I don't think so. In fact, I think this sponsorship has very limited potential.
Perhaps the benefit for Blizzard comes in merely reminding noted Heroes of Azeroth Andrei Kirilenko and Channing Frye that, should their postseasons end swiftly, they will have the World of Warcraft to sweep away their troubles.
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