Might as well say, “NFL Charges $10,000 to promote Beats headphones. Beats gets the best deal ever in advertising”: http://ftw.usatoday.com/2014/10/colin-kaepernick-nfl-beats-by-dre

So the NFL has a deal with Bose that all NFL athletes are banned from promoting competing products within 90 minutes of a game. Well, what’s the punishment if one does promote other brands? In this case it was $10,000.

Beats will pay the $10,000 without even flinching. They will probably pay $100,000 or more if they can get this kind of coverage over and over. Look at the amount of publicity they got all over websites and news sites, from ESPN, Washington Post, NY Daily News, USA Today, CBSNews Sports, to Mercury News for goodness sakes, to sites like WebProNews, which have nothing to do with sports or music. Even NFL.com wrote about this promoting it further.

Lesson in Marketing and Advertising

In my opinion, a warning, followed by a game ban would do a whole lot more in enforcing this policy than a $10,000 fine. What’s $10,000 in the world of marketing and advertising? They got so much publicity out of this that I am sure Bose is reconsidering how this policy is enforced. As a matter of fact, if I were at Bose, I would be contacting the NFL, getting the story off of NFL.com and ask them to contact Bose before doing anything like this. Also have the NFL contact the Marketing officer first and get a clearance, not the legal department.

When I was an Engineering student, I would have been excused for making stupid decisions like that in marketing, it was not my field. But when I did my MBA, I learned that you could manipulate the system by doing unconventional things like this to achieve more powerful results. I’m not sure that this was not a calculated move, a genius at work! More power to you Beats by Dr. Dre, heck, even I am writing about this and adding another pin your basket.