The hope – and quite often the reality – was that the million-dollar ad buys would flow in the other. (This goes back a few years, when there was still pleasure to be had in free Jays tickets.) I remember attending one Rogers upfront on the field of the Rogers Centre in Toronto, in which hundreds of ad folk shrieked with joy when then-Rogers Media president Keith Pelley directed them to find a pair of Blue Jays tickets under each of their seats.
Time was, the booze, food and treats would flow freely in one direction. Of course, those presentations also included opportunities to rub elbows with the stars of those Los Angeles-based shows. On Monday morning, Banks kicked off what used to be known as Canada’s TV upfronts, the week in which domestic commercial broadcasters would invite the advertising community to a series of splashy sales presentations previewing their biggest shows for the fall season. (Of course, with the racist convulsions it’s experiencing these days, NASCAR doesn’t even need to put vehicles on the track to serve up its own can’t-look-away car crash.)
To be fair, there may also be a bit of a pleasure for some of us watching from the sidelines: NASCAR fans aren’t the only ones who enjoy a car crash or two. I mean, if Rogers is going to live in a world of hurt, you hope it’s at least getting some perverse pleasure out of it.
Which, in retrospect, is perhaps the perfect name for a company that decided to go all in on sports just as a microscopic pathogen decided that professional sports would, for the foreseeable future, be sitting this one out. Under new president Jordan Banks, who joined last September, Rogers Media would thereafter be known as Rogers Sports & Media. Log In Create Free AccountĪ few months ago, the folks at Rogers Media, the TV-and-radio operation which also owns the Toronto Blue Jays, a big chunk of the colossus Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment and the national rights to NHL games, quietly tweaked their name to better emphasize their increasing focus on sports.