Epic Fail
By: katypolansky | Category: Miscellaneous
On June 16th I blogged about my excitement over the upcoming World Basketball Festival that Nike was putting on in NYC. The highlight event was going to be a free scrimmage contested in Time Square. The sheer awesomeness of that idea caused word to spread like wildfire about the WBF. Low and behold two weeks before the event was set to take place Nike put out a quiet announcement that the free scrimmage and musical performance set to take place in Time Square were being moved to Radio City Musical Hall. Three days before the event it was made known that the event was no longer going to be free or even open to the public, it was now invitation only. “A few” invitations were going to be given away through Twitter games by Nike Basketball. In the end I believe Nike gave away roughly 20 tickets to fans in a venue that seats nearly 6000 people. Chatter on Facebook, Twitter and in the blogosphere showed much displeasure on the part of the every day fan that had made plans to attend a free event that was not only no longer free, but that he couldn’t even buy access to. I would love to know Nike’s thinking behind this. Was it going with the theory that all publicity is good publicity? In the end, the most confounding part to me was that come show time, the venue was nowhere near full as seen in the picture below. Hopefully next time Nike promotes an insanely awesome idea to build a basketball court in one of the world’s most recognizable places it will have the ability to actually get it done.
