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Hey Marketing Bestie,

Us marketers sure can learn a lot from our Marketing fore-fathers and fore-mothers.

This is a parade for the greatest marketing campaigns in memory.

Welcome to Marketing Classics 411, a new kind of ancient history.

In place of hieroglyphs, expect to decipher the campaigns of yesteryear.

Professor Millennial teaches every Tuesday (remotely), via electronic mail.

Class is now in session.

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PASTIMES PAST

On March 17, 2026, more than 10 million Americans watched a baseball game.

It wasn’t the World Series, a playoff game, or even spring training.

But it was the most-watched baseball telecast outside the World Series since the 2015 All-Star Game.

A decade earlier, the baseball obituaries were already being written.

People said baseball was too slow for modern audiences. Ratings were falling. Every October brought a new round of "historically-low World Series viewership" headlines.

Sports media had basically started writing the eulogy.

But baseball wasn't dying. It was just…invisible.

This is the story of how Major League Baseball went from punchline to 10 million viewers.

This is the story of…The World Baseball Classic.

AMERICA’S PASTIME GOES GLOBAL

It’s the early 2000s, and nearly half of MLB's minor leaguers were born outside the US. The game had gone global.

Dominican, Venezuelan, Japanese, Korean players especially were rewriting what the game looked like. Their fans LOVED the sport and, and their players that had gone on to stardom in the US. But the league’s Marketing was still almost totally American.

Meanwhile back in the States, ratings were crumbling.

Bud Selig, Major League Baseball’s commissioner at the time, had an idea:

A World Cup, for baseball.

A tournament, every four years, using national pride as a Marketing engine and a global distribution strategy all in 1.

To pull it off, Selig built eligibility rules to match the vision:

A player could represent any country where:

They were born
A parent was born (or was a citizen), OR
…Where they could obtain citizenship.

No requirement to have ever lived there. No strict nationality locks - a big difference from FIFA.

This was a deliberate Marketing play.

Selig was making sure every country had a chance of fielding genuine stars, with genuine national stakes, so the whole world had a reason to watch.

And it worked…….everywhere except in the US.

A ROCKY PR START

Sports media thought Selig’s “World Baseball Classic” idea was delusional.

Owners like George Steinbrenner liked the idea even less.

American players were focused on the regular season.

Barry Bonds skipped it. Pitcher Mariano Rivera could have played for Panama, but declined because he didn’t want to start throwing early.

But for players from OTHER baseball-loving countries? This WAS the World Cup. Stars like like Daisuke Matsuzaka and Ichiro Suzuki signed up for Japan and became national heroes (spoiler alert). David Ortiz, aka Big Papi, was all in for the Dominican Republic. Ivan Rodriguez went to Puerto Rico, Miguel Cabrera to Venezuela, just to name a FEW.

(The US still managed to field a star-studded lineup Millennial baseball fans will recognize: Derek Jeter. A-Rod. Ken Griffey Jr. Chipper Jones.)

There were also drug testing rules to fight over, geopolitical tensions, and months of negotiations with Japan's players union.

But in 2006, after years of pushing, the World Baseball Classic finally happened.

….and the U.S. immediately got knocked out in round 2, by Mexico & South Korea.

Japan went on to win the whole thing over Cuba.

The WBC worked on day 1.

Just not for the country that invented it.

For 1 very specific reason.

Ichiro Suzuki & his champion teammates, 2006, via LJWorld

GREAT PRODUCT, WRONG SHELF

Selig’s national pride distribution engine worked even better than he could have expected. Just…not in the US.

In 2013, the championship drew 843,000 American viewers. That's a million fewer than the average regular-season NBA game the same year.

It wasn't that Americans didn't care about the WBC. It was that they couldn't FIND it.

In 2013 and 2017, WBC games aired in English on MLB Network. A niche cable channel people either didn’t have or didn’t know they had. NOT casual fan friendly.

Meanwhile, for the rest of Planet Earth, this was already HUGE.

In Japan, WBC audiences rival the Super Bowl.

After the 2021 tournament was pushed to 2023 because of COVID-19, nearly 100 million Japanese viewers watched at least some of the tournament. Roughly 80% of the country.

The Mexico-Japan semifinal that year drew 29 million viewers across JUST those 2 countries.

In the Caribbean and Latin America, it's called the "Clásico Mundial" for short - like the Super Bowl, they don’t even need to name the sport.

The Puerto Rico vs. Dominican Republic matchup is appointment television. It had a 62% household viewership share in Puerto Rico in 2023.

Meanwhile, because of air rights, people in the US barely knew it was happening.

PUT IT IN PRACTICE

Distribution IS Marketing. The World Baseball Classic didn’t need a better product. They needed a better shelf.

Is your best content sitting somewhere no one is looking?

Your Homework: the shelf audit. Before your next campaign, edit the distribution BEFORE you tackle creative.

1️⃣. List every channel where you currently distribute your content, product, or campaigns. Include the ones you've been "maintaining" for years without results.

2️⃣. Ask: are our core channels the right match for our audience? List out the places your ICP spends their actual time - the platforms, communities, the inboxes, the feeds.

3️⃣. Circle anything on list 2 that doesn't appear on list 1. That gap is your MLB Network problem.

4️⃣ Pick 1 channel from that gap and ship 1 thing there this month. Don’t bother with a full strategy, just run a test on a shelf you haven’t explored.

THE CONVERGENCE

Then, a bunch of strategic fixes (the good kind, not the illegal kind) happened at basically the same time:

📺 TV fix. In late 2022, MLB moved the 2023 WBC to Fox Sports. All 47 games could be seen there, across FOX broadcast, FS1, FS2, Fox Deportes, Tubi, and the Fox Sports app. A completely different reach than "MLB Network and ESPN2."

⏱️ The pitch clock fix. In late 2023, the league added a countdown clock between pitches. Average game time dropped 24 minutes from the year before. Games averaged under 3 hours for the first time in a decade.

📣 The brand fix. MLB partnered with Wieden+Kennedy and immediately launched a brand campaign before the 2023 season called "Baseball is Something Else.” It aimed to sell the FEELING of baseball: the food, the summer ritual, the smell of the park. Emotional first.

(P.S. did you see W+K’s Japanese commercial this year??)

🎽 The fan merch fix. Nike x MLB created “City Connect” jerseys, where every team got a uniform tied to their city's identity. The Red Sox got yellow jerseys tied to the Boston Marathon. The Marlins got 1 celebrating Miami's Cubanos, with a red uniform inspired by a Triple-A team that played out of Havana. The MLB's Chief Revenue Officer said the City Connect Series became "the most successful consumer product initiative we've ever had.”

Kinda jealous of the Diamondbacks SERPIENTES jerseys, though.

Some of this was coordinated. Some of it was just luck.

But luck hits harder when the infrastructure is ready.

All the pieces were aligned for the 2023 World Baseball Classic.

THE UNSCRIPTABLE MOMENT

In the years since the first WBC, Team USA had made a comeback.

They made it farther, took coaching and team-building more seriously, and even won the whole thing in 2017.

In 2023, they made the championship again - this time against the kings of the WBC: Japan.

By the 9th inning, Japan was up 1 run. To win the whole thing, they needed 1 more out.

The pitcher: Shohei Ohtani, already the best player in the sport.

The batter: Mike Trout, Team USA's captain…and Ohtani's teammate during the regular season.

The count went full. Then…Ohtani struck him out.

Shohei Ohtani right before his team tackled him

In the last 15 minutes, viewership peaked at 6.5 million.

It’s a moment no Marketer could buy. But Marketers made it possible - because they finally had the distribution there to catch the energy.

If this had happened in 2017, it woulda been a footnote.

On FOX broadcast in 2023? It became 1 of the most-shared sports moments of the year. Just listen to the announcers losing their minds.

PROOF OF CONCEPT PAYOFF

This year, 3 years after that Ohtani-Trout showdown, the WBC came back.

And the numbers kept climbing:

More than 1.6 million fans attended tournament games in person, up 24% from 2023.
The US-Mexico pool play game drew 5 million viewers, already bigger than the 2023 championship - before the knockout rounds even started.
The US-Dominican Republic semifinal drew 7.37 million on FS1, that network's biggest audience in 7 years.
The final, Venezuela vs. Team USA, drew 10.78 million. More than double the 2023 record.

5 of the 6 most-watched WBC games in its 20-year history happened this year.

The numbers tell one story. The atmosphere tells another. Venezuela's dugout had a drum. They danced before every game and carried that energy to the trophy.

Italy was ripping espresso shots and cheek kisses after every home run.

Most Italian home run celly ever. 🤌

Korea did the airplane around the bases.

None of that looks like the regular season. People couldn't stop watching. Americans included.

The US lost the final 3-2. Bryce Harper hit a tying home run in the 8th inning with over 12 million people watching, but Venezuela answered.

Harper's reaction after the loss: "I thought baseball won."

Millennials: check the name on this photo credit tho

There’s a Marketing epilogue here: While the US audience was gearing up to break viewing records, a very different distro call was happening on the other side of the world.

For 2026, Netflix paid roughly $100M for exclusive streaming rights in Japan (home of the winningest WBC team ever). This was around 3 to 5 times what the 2023 rights cost.

But

It was rocky. In a way a lot of Marketers who lived through the first few WBCs could have predicted.

Japan had always watched the WBC free, on their equivalent of NBC or ABC. 100 million people watched in 2023. Putting it behind a paywall put a dent in that. A Kyodo News poll found 36.4% of Japanese respondents said they "want to watch the WBC but are not subscribing to Netflix."

We’ll see what happens next year.

Bud Selig pushed the WBC through resistance from his own owners, a fight with the players' union, and a press corps that called it a "futile attempt to replicate the World Cup."

2013: 843,000 Americans watched the championship. On a channel most of them didn't know they had.

2023: 6.5 million watched the final at-bat.

2026: 10.78 million watched Venezuela beat the United States for the country’s first title ever.

The obituaries had the diagnosis backwards.

Baseball had the right product the whole time.

It just needed the right shelf.

MARKETING CHEAT SHEET (WHAT TO LEARN FROM THIS STORY):

1️⃣ Distribution IS your Marketing. The WBC was invisible to Americans. Before you optimize creative, ask whether you're even findable. A great product on the wrong shelf is just…wasted inventory.

2️⃣ Build the lightning rod before lightning strikes. The Ohtani-Trout moment landed because every structural piece (the broadcast deal, the shorter games, the emotional brand campaign) was already in place. Great Marketing doesn't create the moment. It creates the conditions for the moment to matter.

3️⃣ Distribution is audience-specific, not universal. What worked for Americans (broadcast reach, record growth) created friction in Japan (subscription paywall, backlash). Before you move your product to a new shelf, ask whether that shelf is where your specific audience lives.

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You didn’t get into business to lose to someone with a bigger budget.

AI just made that fight a lot more fair. Here are 5 ways small business Marketers can use it to punch way above their weight class. 🥊

IN A MEME