The Last Dance thrived on nostalgia. This wasn’t a documentary that was meant to give you any new perspective on Michael Jordan or the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls. The goal was to transport you back to the 90s and make you feel now the way you did then.
ESPN couldn’t rely solely on the footage compiled and edited by director Jason Hehir and his team. The network also looked internally for creative boosts wherever it could find them.
The most memorable and successful of these was a series of commercials for State Farm Insurance starring Kenny Mayne. The commercials tapped into that same sense of nostalgia in the audience, as they were designed to look like clips Mayne hosting SportsCenter in the 90s and predicting a documentary coming decades later.
“I just got a note one day that said ‘We’re gonna do some extra promotion to get this Last Dance thing off the ground and we have an idea that might fit you,’ so I looked at it,” Mayne told me in a telephone interview last week. “Honestly, all I contributed was reading it and doing it over and over and over. I threw in a few of my own lines, a couple of which they accepted. But it was someone else’s idea, not mine. I was just given the chance to fill my little role.”
Mayne’s “little role” was a huge part of the early conversations surrounding The Last Dance. So much of the Twitter conversation the night the series debuted was people admitting that until the State Farm logo was shown, they thought they were actually watching a SportsCenter clip from 1998.
Mayne was entertained by that kind of talk both on and offline. In fact, he told me that he heard from former co-anchors saying that they were fooled because it all seemed so plausible.
“So much is said at 1:45 or 3 in the morning, or whatever the hell time it is, he says. “God knows what you could make out of what we have said through the years about various subjects, but I don’t believe I predicted The Last Dance.”
The spots were short. In the grand landscape, they represent merely a blip on the radar of a ten-hour docu-series. But that doesn’t mean that the teams that developed the spots, ESPN CreativeWorks, in collaboration with Optimum Sports and Translation, didn’t put maximum effort into them.
There was writing. There were shoots. There were re-shoots.
It’s almost as if the folks at ESPN CreativeWorks and Optimum Sports and Translation knew they struck gold with the idea, and that Kenny Mayne was the perfect person to mine every last bit of it. The real problem was bringing the vision to life when dealing with the limitations of a global pandemic.
“With the crisis we’re living through now, I am coming into the studio every two weeks for like three days,” Mayne said. ESPN wouldn’t bend those rules when it was time to shoot the spots. The company’s health and safety protocols couldn’t be violated no matter what was needed or how little time it would take.
“It became a thing where we were using my iPhone, setting it up against a window, so that it would stay still. I did it once. They didn’t like the lighting. I did it a second time. They didn’t like the audio. I did it probably three or four more times.”
Wait…it was all filmed at Mayne’s home on an iPhone? It all looks so real. Does he have a full 1990s SportsCenter set in his basement? How did ESPN pull off that look using just an iPhone?
To hear Kenny Mayne tell it, ESPN really didn’t need much to make the spots work. That is why lighting and audio were so important. That wasn’t a short process. Mayne says everyone involved in the ads were still working right up until the first episodes of The Last Dance aired. When the editors finally liked what they saw, all Mayne needed was some help from his daughter Riley to get the footage to the right place.
“They were able to take just my mouth and chin and nose and grab just that. Typically, when you shoot things, the background can screw everything up, but whatever technology they were using is something I had never encountered previously. I don’t know how they did it.”
At one point, Mayne says, the creative team sent him a single frame during the editing process which he described as looking like something from the plastic surgery-themed reality show Botched. “They had drawn lines all over the place,” he says.
Knowing this, when the ad campaign was revived for the final two episodes of The Last Dance with Keith Olberman and Linda Cohn, all I could look at was their mouths. Things didn’t look as seamless when you know how the sausage is made.
Still, Kenny Mayne was wowed by the process. He told me it was both “very clever” and “very scary” to see how easy it is to manipulate video in 2020.
“There’s stuff people fall for on the internet all the time, everything from getting an email you shouldn’t open to a video that gets manipulated. I would caution everyone, if something sounds unbelievable, then look for another source. This one was just telling you to watch a documentary. I think we can all feel safe knowing it was for non-evil purposes.”
So what is the lasting impression of State Farm’s creative ad campaign? Mayne says he had no idea how they were going to be used and even he was pleasantly surprised by how perfectly they flowed back into the documentary as the last spot aired in a commercial break. The real genius of the spots is that there are so many different elements of the way The Last Dance is presented that they fit so perfectly.
In the end, Mayne uses the old adage that any publicity is good publicity and he is happy to be a part of a campaign that has generated attention. Of course, no conversation with Kenny Mayne is complete without him plainly telling you something that others aren’t willing to acknowledge.
“Basically, I carried Michael Jordan is what I’m getting at here.”
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
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