ESPN

Sponsorships are worth nothing to companies if they can’t activate in ways that engage fans. Thursday, the NBA’s official quick service restaurant, Taco Bell, is launching the NBA Big Box. There are six boxes in total, three from the Eastern Conference and three from the Western Conference, and 42 players are featured in total (including Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, Dwayne Wade and Carmelo Anthony).

These boxes are more than just a handy way to package your food, however. After you’re done eating, you can tear the box across its perforated edges and make it into a half court -- or better yet, combine it with a friend and make a full court. Stick your cup in the dedicated hole, wad up your wrapper and it’s game on.

“We did a similar box program with them a couple of years ago, and they had tremendous results,” said Emilio Collins, senior vice president of global marketing partnerships with the NBA. “We’ve been having dialog about how to bring it back and bring it back in a bigger way during the playoffs. What’s especially cool is they’re making this offer very interactive. It’s literally physically interactive. After you consume it, you can turn the box into a mini court and hoop.”

It’s not enough simply to have fans interacting with the box inside the confines of their local Taco Bell, however.

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Michael Jordan is in a bind. His team has lost seven out of every 10 games since he became the majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats in March 2010.

On an average night, reported attendance reveals an arena that is 20 percent empty, while actual attendance is worse.

The sad part is that dressing the team up in the Charlotte Hornets teal of old, as Jordan is expected to announce Tuesday, won't help much.

Lipstick, meet pig.

It likely won't bring a significant number of people to the arena. It won't even bring in much-needed revenue.

If it's money Jordan is seeking, he'll make much more by winning. That, or by continuing to lose and getting revenue-sharing money that will scale up to unprecedented heights next season as part of the collective bargaining agreement.

Charlotte, which led the league in attendance in eight of its first 10 seasons, has seen its attendance plummet. The decline can be blamed mostly on the city's falling-out with then-owner George Shinn, who was tied to a sexual assault scandal and extramarital affairs, and the subsequent departure of the team to New Orleans.

But like many cities that are not afforded a huge tradition, it turns out Charlotte, which got its NBA team in 1988, just doesn't support a losing team.

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It’s not too late for Cam Newton to become a big marketing star, but he’ll need a little help from his friends -- or, in this case, his teammates.

“The main thing for Cam Newton when it comes to his marketability is, first and foremost, winning,” said Doug Shabelman, president of Burns Entertainment & Sports Marketing. “If they win and he does well, it’s going to come, and he will be back as one of the most-discussed and sought-after players in the league because his game is exciting, he has a winning smile and he has a good personality.”

In fact, Shabelman says Newton doesn’t have to necessarily post stellar numbers as long as the team is winning.

“Winning and being in the playoffs matters more than anything else," Shabelman said. "He could be doing average, and if his team is in the playoffs, people will still be talking about him because he’s the quarterback.”

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Six years ago, Matt White was the story of the Dodgers' spring training camp. But no one was talking about his pitching. They wanted to know how he won the geological lottery.

You might remember it. White bought 45 acres in his home state of Massachusetts from an aunt for $50,000. When the land proved to be too hard to build on, a surveyor told White that he had approximately 24 million tons of mica schist rock on the property. After learning this stone was worth about $100 per ton, an MLB.com reporter did the math: Matt White's new nickname became "The Billionaire."

National newspapers and TV programs ran with the hard-to-believe story. Dodgers manager Grady Little joked that White could buy his spot on the rotation.

"It sounds bogus even saying those numbers," White said at the time. "I'm just a small-town guy trying to get to the big leagues."

White cautioned that the rock wasn't free money because it had to be excavated and processed. Not many listened. It was less sexy with that information.

But today you can find Matt White on his land doing the hard labor. After giving up his baseball career two years ago, White is working hard to pull the stone that was formed some 400 million years ago from the earth.

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PGA TourThe PGA's many Executive Women's Day events allow high-level businesswomen to network.
Although you might know where Tiger Woods or Rory McIlroy are on the leaderboard at The Players Championship, you probably don’t know about everything going on behind the scenes at TPC Sawgrass. For example, on Monday, while the golfers were out playing practice rounds, 250 women were attending Executive Women’s Day in the clubhouse. The day included breakfast, lunch, a variety of speakers and networking opportunities.

I had the pleasure of attending Executive Women’s Day at The Players and met high-level executives in pharmaceuticals, real estate, banking and virtually every other industry I could imagine. Speakers similarly represented a diverse group of female executives, from Julie Fasone Holder, a former senior vice president with Dow Chemical Company, who discussed leadership; to Lesley Visser, a CBS sportscaster who spoke of her career in journalism.

Pam Buford, director of consumer marketing at research-based pharmaceutical company Astellas and the presenting sponsor of Executive Women’s Day around the PGA Tour, says there’s a little bit of a surprise factor in holding a women’s event at a golf tournament.

“We were trying to connect with women in a different way,” Buford said. “There’s a growing and engaged audience with the PGA Tour in general.”

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With the second round of the NBA playoffs now underway, betting network Favourit analyzed the action on basketball's postseason, and shared the results with Playbook.

Those results: Through one round, bettors like the Miami Heat to repeat as champions, beating the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals. They also view regular-season top player LeBron James as the most likely Finals MVP, ahead of the Oklahoma City Thunder's Kevin Durant.

Not pictured: A big shift from the first round's bets, which showed OKC getting out of the Western Conference before losing to Miami. As expected, bettors viewed the Thunder's loss of Russell Westbrook as a tough one to overcome.

Check out the full graphic:

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Technology has caught up to almost everything we do and use today, and that's why it's not surprising that one of the last old ways of doing things in sports recovery appears to be coming to an end.

It was a question that surfaced while looking at body surfers in Laguna Beach three years ago. Anthony Katz asked himself: Why isn't there a better ice bag for players to ice down with after games?

Katz thought of this while looking at the wet suits they were all wearing, thinking there had to be a better material than that plastic bag to hold the melting ice.

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The SEC Network will become the fourth conference network to launch when it goes on air in August 2014. With it will come the fourth model for creating a conference network on cable television.

The first conference network to launch on cable television was The Mtn., the now defunct channel for the Mountain West Conference, in 2006. The channel began as a seven-year deal between the conference and CSTV for the league’s television rights. Shortly after the announcement that the Mountain West would move from ESPN to CSTV, The Mtn. was born, with a plan to carry as many as 40 conference football games and up to 120 men’s and women’s basketball games per year. Between CSTV and The Mtn., virtually every conference football and basketball game would be televised.

The only problem was limited distribution. When the CSTV deal was announced, the network had only 8 million satellite and cable subscribers. The hope was to have over 40 million by the time the deal began in 2006. Comcast acquired a 50 percent stake in CSTV prior to the launch of The Mtn., which meant initial distribution increased into parts of Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, where the conference had members, but not in San Diego or Las Vegas.

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If there's one drink you have to have at one sporting event, it's the mint julep at the Kentucky Derby. And luckily for the folks at Churchill Downs, the margins on the drink are tremendous.

After having a couple of these things over the years (I'm not a fan), I wanted to see if I could figure out exactly how much of a mint the track was making off this one drink.

The folks at Churchill won't talk about the actual calculations, so I decided to take my best educated shot. What did I find out? The alcohol isn't the most costly ingredient in the drink. It's actually the mint.

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For years, Andy Krafsur has been going against the establishment, pushing his Spira running shoes in nontraditional ways.

In 2005, he boldly proclaimed that using his company's shoes in a sanctioned race would be cheating. Technically he was right. Spira shoes have springs in them, which governing bodies had determined gave an unfair advantage to competitors.

In 2007, he outfitted top runners without shoe deals for the Boston Marathon. His runners didn't win the elite race, but they appeared in enough of the television broadcast, in bright yellow shoes, to intrigue other runners.

As the running-shoe business has grown, Krafsur has been challenged to grow his business against the big money of Nike and the smaller running shoe brands such as New Balance, Brooks and Saucony that have a strong presence among the running community.

But a great marketer never gives up. Wednesday, Spira launched a contest that will bet on you if you buy the company’s shoes. After buying the shoes, consumers can go to SpiraChallenge.com, select a sanctioned chip-timed race in May, and if they don't beat their personal record, Spira will pay them back for the price of their shoes.

"This really changes the participatory nature of sports," Krafsur said. "We are guaranteeing that you will beat your personal record."

The Spira Challenge is a partnership with a recent start-up called HealthWagers. The platform allows a runner to pick a race and place a bet that he will beat his predicted finish time, which is determined by HealthWagers through a database of each runner's past results. Not only can beating a personal record now be gratifying, it could also be lucrative. Betting losers pay betting winners, and HealthWagers takes a cut.

Krafsur says that in addition to being chip timed, those who want to participate in the Spira Challenge have to run a race of 10K or longer.

The odds of owning a horse who races in the Kentucky Derby are pretty slim. All Derby horses are 3-year-olds, meaning each horse has just one chance in its lifetime to race the Kentucky Derby. According to the Churchill Downs communications department, approximately 26,000 thoroughbreds were foaled in the United States in 2010. Just 1.4 percent (369) of those horses were nominated to the Triple Crown, and only 20 will race on Saturday in the 139th Kentucky Derby.

If those odds don’t scare you off, and you still think it might be fun to attempt to raise a Derby contender, consider the cost.

First, you’ll have to purchase a horse at auction or breed. At an auction, be prepared to spend anywhere from the low six figures to the low seven figures. Fusaichi Pegasus, the 2000 winner of the Kentucky Derby, was the most expensive winner ever purchased at $4 million as a then-yearling.

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The year-and-a-half fight for Rick Lentini ended Tuesday when he found out that the World Anti-Doping Agency had dropped deer-antler velvet from its prohibited substances list.

Lentini, CEO of a company called Nutronics Labs, which says it produces more deer-antler velvet than anyone in the world, had been fighting the perception that the product was closely connected to steroids.

"I feel vindicated," Lentini said. "It was the right decision."

Deer-antler velvet, which is a coating that aids growth on a deer's antlers, has been used in Chinese medicine for centuries. It contains IGF-1, which is considered a precursor to human growth hormone. Like HGH, it is not detectable in urine drug tests.

Several athletes who had used it professed to feeling the difference in aiding their recovery. Deer-antler velvet has been said to help everything from heart function to muscle recovery though independent studies to determine the veracity of such claims has been few and far between.

It exploded onto the scene in the U.S. two years ago when stories of its worth and stealth emerged, but then the market got crushed.

In the summer of 2011, St. Louis Rams linebacker David Vobora won a $5.4 million settlement with a company called S.W.A.T.S., which sold a deer-antler velvet spray that Vobora said led to his testing positive for methyltestosterone. Although it was never proved that the product itself originally tested positive for the substance, and subsequent independent tests proved it did not contain the banned steroid, the Major League Baseball Players Association warned players that taking deer-antler velvet could result in a positive test of methyltestosterone.

After word of the letter got out, and it was recounted in publication after publication, Lentini filed a libel lawsuit against the union, but once the union said it would defend itself, Lentini's small company had to give in last month and drop the case. Although some performance-enhancers garner more business when they are banned, Lentini says that, after the initial pop, his business declined by 40 percent.

"We kept telling people that it was steroid-free, but they had a hard time believing us," Lentini said. "They kept asking us why we were banned."

Then came the big break. After golfer Vijay Singh admitted to using deer-antler velvet, the PGA Tour followed up with the World Anti-Doping Agency, which told the tour that it no longer considered deer-antler velvet and IGF-1 a prohibited substance. On Tuesday, when the PGA Tour released its findings that Singh would indeed not be suspended, it revealed for the first time that deer-antler velvet had been taken off the list.

That's how Lentini found out.

"I'm elated for Vijay," said Lentini, who says he wrote a letter to the PGA Tour on Singh's behalf.

He's also happy for his own company, hoping that the damage done is a thing of the past. Not surprisingly, orders were up Tuesday afternoon.

In the past couple of days, Jason Collins has gone from an NBA afterthought to a person who might be quite marketable if he signs with a team and becomes the first openly gay man to play in a major professional team sport in the U.S.

When I first heard of Collins going public Monday, there was only one guy I wanted to talk to, and that was Golden State Warriors president Rick Welts. First of all, Rick is one of the smartest marketers in the game. Secondly, Rick is the most high-profile current sports executive to have publicly revealed that he is gay; he came out in an article in The New York Times less than two years ago.

Before Tuesday night's game against the Nuggets, I asked Rick some questions about Collins' marketing potential.

Rovell: How much more marketable is Jason Collins now versus last week?

Welts: Well, I think it’s a different kind of marketability. I think what will be his experience; there is going to be a lot of thought both by companies that might be looking at him as well as Jason himself because anybody who is going to get involved with him at this point, their message is going to be message-oriented instead of product-oriented. It is not just a player selling a product, this is going to be a message that will go behind that that will make a statement behind this company and making a statement that Jason wants to make.

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Tim Tebow finds himself in a very different place today than this time last year. He is no longer playing in New York, and he occupies a very different place in the marketing landscape.

Just 12 short months ago, Tebow was coming off a season with the Broncos that saw him start 13 games, including two playoff games. Now he’s looking back on a season with no starts and only 77 snaps at quarterback for the Jets.

What a difference a year can make.

Last year, Tebow’s positive Q Score, a measurement of how many respondents viewed him in a positive light, was 22 among sports fans, well above the league average of 16. The latest results from Q Scores, which the company released in early April, show that his positive Q Score has fallen to exactly the league average in just 12 months.

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Lost in the chatter about the new uniforms adidas created for some of its partner schools during March Madness: the fact that 17 schools terminated or suspended their contracts with the apparel giant.

What did adidas do to raise the ire of so many schools?

The issue revolves around the closure of PT Kizone, a factory in Indonesia with which adidas, along with Nike and the Dallas Cowboys, had contracts for the manufacture of goods. According to a report produced by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), violations at PT Kizone began in September 2010 when it failed to make mandatory terminal compensation payments to employees who left the factory. In December 2010, the factory failed to make regularly scheduled payments to current employees. The owner of the factory then fled Indonesia in January 2011. Thereafter, the buying agent, Green Textile, ran the factory and paid workers through March 2011. In April 2011, PT Kizone was declared bankrupt and closed.

The WRC, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and other worker rights advocacy groups claimed adidas was refusing to pay $1.8 million in legally mandated severance owed to the 2,800 workers of PT Kizone. Total severance and other pay due under Indonesian law to the workers, who had no advance notice of the factory’s closure, totaled $3.3 million. Both Nike and the Dallas Cowboys contributed partial severance, but for nearly two years, adidas has maintained it does not owe any of the monies.

Beginning last fall, Cornell, Rutgers, Washington, Georgetown, University of Montana, Santa Clara University, College of William and Mary, Northeastern University, Temple University and Washington State terminated contracts with adidas. In addition, administrators at Oregon State told USAS they sent a termination letter on April 16. Oberlin and three University of Minnesota system campuses (Twin Cities, Crookston and Morris) advised adidas that they would not renew when their current athletics apparel contract are completed. Wisconsin has sued adidas, with the assistance of the Wisconsin attorney general, and in mid-March, Penn State suspended its contract, giving adidas 60 days to rectify the situation.

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