ESPN Will Tackle Amazon, Twitter, Facebook in New Ad Push

ESPN’s next match-up will pit the Walt Disney-owned sports-media juggernaut against some of its newest and fiercest rivals.

A new series of ads from ESPN aims to prod viewers to choose watching ESPN live rather than streaming a movie, scanning a social-media site for friends’ birthdays or sharing pictures of food. The idea is to seed in viewers’ minds the notion that ESPN content is fresh, live and perishable, while new-media activities on smartphones and tablets can always be done later.

“If you’re not with us, you may be missing the big moment, or the breaking news you need to know,” said Sean Hanrahan, ESPN’s senior vice president of brand and marketing solutions, in an interview.

The spots, created by ad agency 72andSunny, will run across ESPN’s TV, digital and mobile properties for a few weeks, he said, and then come back for the summer. They surface after ESPN’s financial performance has come under heavier scrutiny by investors concerned that even live sports – one of the few TV programming genres to keep mass audiences – can’t keep consumers from dropping subscriptions to the network.

The commercials don’t mention the social outlets by name, but it seems clear that ESPN is tilting at Netflix, Amazon, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. “Sharing your life can wait,” one ad tells viewers, “because it’s just like everyone else’s.”