Land of Logos
Long before professional poker players became household names, rounders like Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim Preston, and Brian “Sailor” Roberts parted Texas oil tycoons from their riches and never gave a thought to endorsement contracts or appearance fees being a part of their world.
When the 2003 World Series of Poker was first broadcast on ESPN, the poker industry changed forever – but some may have overlooked the area in which the impact will be the greatest.
Not surprisingly, the practice of using poker players as pitchmen can be traced back to a significant event and a very familiar face and name.
“One night in the summer of 2003, I was flipping channels and stumbled across the 2003 World Series of Poker on ESPN. I didn’t know the first thing about poker, but it hit me that a company could get a tremendous amount of exposure from a logo on a poker player. A week later, I spoke with Steve Lipscomb, Phil Hellmuth, and a few others; and I was convinced that poker was going to explode and there would be opportunities for a player agent,” recalls Brian Balsbaugh, who started PokerRoyalty, the first player management company dedicated entirely to poker players.
A lot has be made of how Chris Moneymaker’s WSOP victory turned every bean counter, meter maid, and air traffic controller into a wannabe professional poker player and flooded poker rooms with new players.
Throughout the event, Moneymaker wore a beige cap and a plain black polo shirt with a piece of embroidery that read “PokerStars.com.” Helping matters were ESPN commentators who continuously pushed Moneymaker’s story of turning $39 into a WSOP seat through an online poker site. Thousands of viewers flocked to PokerStars and a new era was born – the professional poker player as a product endorser.
Prior to the 2003 WSOP final table other players had worn hats and shirts endorsing online poker rooms, but none showed the immediate impact of Moneymaker, whose win garnered widespread media attention for himself and PokerStars.
Today it’s hard to find a final table on television where the players aren’t walking billboards for an online poker site. Depending on the player involved and the structure of the contract, a player could expect to make anywhere from $150,000 to $1 million per year.
Bidding wars became common as the players put one online poker room up against another in an attempt to cash in. Today, as the sport of poker continues to evolve, both the WPT and the WSOP have strict policies detailing what a player can and cannot wear as far as endorsements.
The WPT’s policy includes a strict approval process whereas any company wishing to sponsor players must first apply to the World Poker Tour and earn approval. The WPT will not approve online gaming companies, but does accept and approve the .net poker schools.
Once approved, sponsors must submit a list of their players prior to each event, and only those players are eligible to wear a logo at that event’s final table. The policy attempts to eliminate the bidding war, although there have been cases of multiple sponsors submitting the same player’s name for an event in hopes of negotiating a deal should he make the final table.
While the WPT policy limits players to a single six-square-inch logo, the WSOP introduced a policy for 2007 that allows players to wear multiple logos up to twelve square inches. The WSOP does not have an approval process, but prohibits some sponsors based on conflicts with official WSOP sponsors.
Jeffrey Pollack, WSOP Commissioner, believes it’s in the best interest of the game to make these policies as player-friendly as possible.
“I never quite understood the one-logo restriction and I didn’t think it was the most player-friendly thing to do. So we wanted to loosen things up a little as a way of being more supportive of the players,” said Pollack, who came into his role in 2006. “But the motivation was to be player-friendly. It doesn’t help or hurt our business; this is about helping the players.”
Pollack’s business background may provide a small clue as to the roots of the multilogo policy. Prior to joining Harrah’s, Pollack worked as Managing Director of Broadcasting and New Media at NASCAR for five years; and some skeptics worry that allowing more than one logo could turn Phil Hellmuth or Phil Ivey into Jeff Gordon or Dale Earnhardt Jr., with a shirt full of corporate logos.
“I’m not trying to turn the World Series of Poker into NASCAR, but I do believe strongly in players having total control over their right and ability to do business for themselves. So if the end product of this policy is a lot of players looking like NASCAR drivers, that to me would a great thing because it says that the players are being successful in finding whatever economic support they’re looking for.”
According to Steven Lipscomb, WPT founder and CEO, the more restrictive policies are in place to ensure that viewers are not forced to watch a lower quality television program than they would expect.
“We restrict somebody to a breast pocket logo so that it doesn’t become all about logo wear and take away part of what I think makes poker really interesting, and that’s individual people,” explained Lipscomb. “When you allow hats, all of a sudden you have six guys sitting around with baseball hats at the table; a short-term economic force makes that happen. It looks awful, it’s uninteresting, and besides, these people most likely don’t have the character that will actually make them a star.”
The policy probably won’t be altered with the WPT’s move to the Game Show Network for Season 6, but Lipscomb does feel there could be room to improve the policy.
“We’ll look at it and certainly find ways that we’re all involved to make that stuff make sense. But I certainly hope that whether it’s me or somebody else, that we don’t do it at the expense of what does work, interesting and compelling people who play poker presented in a way that’s interesting and compelling on television.
Online poker rooms were the first to jump on the idea of using highly visible poker pros to promote their brand. The relationship was obvious, and given the highly competitive landscape of the online poker business the last few years, it was highly profitable for the pros. While mainstream sponsors have worked with both the WSOP and WPT, they have been hesitant to work with players directly.
The two biggest factors appear to be the market itself and the single logo policy, which was the standard until the WSOP made the change for 2007.
While companies such as Budweiser, Pepsi, and General Motors certainly have a larger marketing budget than all of the online poker rooms combined, none are willing or able to match the lucrative offers from the online poker rooms.
“The online gaming sites were paying such a premium that another industry couldn’t crack in there unless you wanted to go a secondary logo, but then you couldn’t guarantee exposure,” said Balsbaugh. “One of the real struggles that we have is that a company will call and they’ll have a reasonable budget; they could get a good PGA Tour golfer’s sleeve or left chest, but they couldn’t even touch a top-tier poker player because they couldn’t afford a logo.”
With the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act coming into play in late 2006, the market changed; and many online poker companies are now spending a bulk of their marketing dollars in Europe or Asia, leaving North American-based poker pros out of the mix. While the initial impact is certainly negative as poker pros lose endorsement deals, the long-term effect may be a necessary correction of the market.
“There was just much more money for the Daniel Negreanus and every other big player by making those deals with online rooms than to make a deal with a card manufacturer or with a Pepsi or whatever,” said Lipscomb. “I think what you’ll see now is that those possibilities will open themselves up because you’ll have the market expectations come back down to earth a little bit.”
Another factor that can’t be ignored is the negative stigma that many of those outside of poker still attach to the game and its players.
“I think that it’s taking some time for Madison Avenue to get as comfortable as it probably needs to be for more sponsorship deals and more endorsement deals,” explains Pollack, who feels the deals Harrah’s has signed with WSOP sponsors such as Miller and Hershey will help the players long term. “That will be the case for a very select number of breakout and breakthrough personalities. Not every poker pro is going to be successful in striking endorsement deals. Only a handful will, but we think that they’ll be more successful as we continue to pave the ground that we’re now breaking.”
Those who feel the stigma still exists believe it can be overcome. As a point of comparison NASCAR has in the last ten years managed to transform the image of their product to become more accepted by sponsors and advertisers. Gone are the days of moonshine runners racing on weekends, and the redneck stereotype routinely applied to its fans is also fading.
“I think the way (the stigma) goes away is when a guy like Antonio Esfandiari does personal appearances for Yahoo! and their key customers and clients,” said Balsbaugh, who regularly books his clients to do private appearances for large corporations. “The executives meet him and go, ‘Wow, this guy is really unbelievable and he’s a fantastic guy. We need to have a relationship with this guy.’”
One of poker’s most prominent players believes that the easiest way to overcome the negative stigma attached to backroom hustlers and shady characters of yesteryear and attract corporate America is for the poker tours to promote the players as much as, if not more than, the tour itself.
“The closest thing we have to a legitimate poker league is the World Poker Tour. Unless the players got together and did something that’s similar to a PGA Tour model; until that happens I think corporations are going to be iffy about attaching their name to a gambler,” said Daniel Negreanu.
Balsbaugh, who signed Negreanu as PokerRoyalty’s first client, worked with PGA golfers during his stint as a golf agent and believes the potential impact of making the players the center of marketing efforts would benefit the long-term greater good of the game.
“If you look at the way to market a sport or a tour, the most successful leagues have done that by building up the players,” said Balsbaugh. “To me it feels like (WPT) tries to promote the game itself a lot more than the stars of the game; and I think that they’re missing the boat with respect to how little they promote the top pros.“
Lipscomb believes that attempting to take advantage of a market that’s not quite mature enough could be a step backwards.
“There already are a number of movements that have tried to get a foothold; it’s never easy to do that in any sports market, particularly in an emerging one,” says Lipscomb. “As the market develops and as more and more dollars come into the marketplace, there will be ways perhaps for players to really capitalize and cash in on that, and then organize around it.”
With the game of poker still growing in the United States, Lipscomb feels many of today’s stars may be overvaluing themselves and could bring harm to the earning ability of players in the future.
“The individual sponsorship opportunities for players in a market that is as young as this one is completely unprecedented. The fact that you’ve seen individuals like Daniel Negreanu on a Pepsi commercial… it’s a long-term thing,” says Lipscomb. “It’s what happens long term that allows players and leagues to build relationships that give large corporate sponsors the comfort to put in big dollars, and I think we’re maturing quickly, but not fast enough to make everybody happy.”
While getting mainstream product endorsement contracts could be considered the Holy Grail for a select few, having those same corporations sponsor major tournaments and add money to the prize pool could benefit all players.
Both the PGA Tour and NASCAR have a majority of their events sponsored by companies looking to buy exposure. Given some recent history that could be the future of professional poker, it still faces some challenges. The Professional Poker Tour (PPT), launched by the WPT in 2005, was a series of tournaments with the prize pools provided entirely by WPT.
“That’s exactly what the PPT was. The World Poker Tour put up $2.5 million and sponsored events in order to create that sort of league,” says Lipscomb.
The PPT lasted only one season before being put on hiatus, where it still is today ? but Lipscomb believes that is only temporary.
“The problem, as much as anything, was the timing. It will take a few years probably for the PPT to cycle back in.”
The WSOP, which has sponsorship arrangements with Miller Brewing, Hershey’s Chocolate, Corum Watches, and AOL, has held the Tournament of Champions the last three years. The TOC is a $2 million freeroll with the prize pool put up by those corporate sponsors.
With so many people in position to benefit from the continued growth of the game, the key to ensuring that all of those stakeholders are able to take full advantage of the success may be in staying out of each other’s way.
“I still think that when you look at the accomplishments of the entire poker community ? from the players to the casinos to the World Poker Tour and the online sites ? you can see that the poker phenomenon has been unbelievable. We’re young and if we’re smart we won’t kill each other. We’ll find ways to work together, because the future that is five to ten years out has a chance to be very bright if people can cooperate and work together,” said Lipscomb.
