Marketing Guru Steve Schanwald: The ReadJack Interview
Talking to the man who helped shape your childhood — whether you knew it or not.
My brother-in-law and I went to the Bulls-Timberwolves game two weeks ago and nearly every second from when we walked into the United Center until we left, the mark of a 90s Bulls legend was palpable.
In the concourse were games and fan zones, one with pop-a-shot setups, another with a DJ. Every stoppage of play came with an event on the court, usually involving fans. Fans were chosen to do a beach-themed treasure hunt with Benny the Bull. They were in an on-court dance video. They were on the Jumbotron. They cheered for the t-shirt gun. They cheered for the Dunkin Donut race. They cheered for the halftime Dirty Dancing dance routine. They cheered for the “make some noise!” routine. They cheered for T’Wolves players to miss both free throws for a chance to win a Portillo’s dog and booed those players when they hit those free throws. If the ball was not in play, something else was.
The passion of Bulls fans? That’s pure Chicago, and a testament to what Michael, Scottie, Phil and the gang built.
But the games, lights, intros, contests, music and everything else at the UC around the game?
That’s pure Steve Schanwald.
“A basketball game is 48 minutes of playing … yet we have people in their seats for two and a half hours,” the Bulls longtime head of marketing told me last month. “We did a really good job of thinking about how we were going to fill not just halftime but pregame and timeouts, how we were going to make sure that people were entertained and having a good time and were more participants in the game and not mere spectators.”
From his arrival in January 1987 to his retirement after the 2015 season, Steve Schanwald ran the biggest show in sports. You might not know his name. You’ve probably seen his face. But you’ve DEFINITELY experienced the fruits of his vision. In-game entertainment. The Shoot the Bull basketball tournament. Community engagement. Letting fans pay to enter the UC to watch road Finals games in 1997. Initiative after initiative, ones that rippled into the NBA at large and re-shaped the beloved league.
The executive vice president of business operations, Schanwald began his career in sports with the “We Are Family” World Series champion 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates and ended it with the last hurrah of the Derrick Rose era. In the middle, he helped shape a global phenomenon, something he discovered when he learned about Michael Jordan’s first retirement because it was front page news on the Daily Nation, the newspaper in Kenya where he was at the time.
As I always say, the Bulls equally local and global. In this edited interview, Schanwald helps explain how it happened. (All newspaper clippings from Newspapers.com.)
JACK: What are the top tier of your greatest and most enduring and most important marketing and entertainment initiatives?
Steve Schanwald: The first one is very easy. I joined them in January of ‘87, and when I first got there, we were not even close to selling out1. This was Jordan’s 3rd year and I think we were averaging about 10,000 fans a game. So the immediate goal was to get them to start selling out regularly. And we did, almost from the get-go. We began a sellout streak that lasted 610 games2.
We knew we were building a team because we drafted Pippen and traded for Cartwright and had Grant. We couldn’t quite get over the hump with the Pistons, but we knew we were building something, that we had a special player in Michael and a guy who was going to be special in Pippen.
The main challenge once we started selling out routinely, was, “How were we going to continue to sell out, keep the building full, keep the atmosphere great, keep revenues flowing and buy our basketball product the time they needed to rebuild the product and get lucky in the lottery again?”3
Obviously when you’re on top of the basketball world, everything is set up for the weak to get strong and the strong to get weak. We knew the music would stop. So my main focus was making sure we marketed ourselves as though we were a last-place team, as though we were hungry for fans, and made sure that fans knew during that era that we appreciated them, that we didn’t take them for granted and that we did everything in our power possible to prepare us for the inevitable day when we would no longer be a great team.
It’s a long-winded way to answering your question which is that the thing that I’m proudest of was that the six years after Jordan’s retirement and the end of the dynasty, we won 26% of our games, we lost 74% of our games, and we still managed to lead the league in cumulative attendance over the six years4. The maxim in our industry was always, “If you win you’ll draw, if you lose you don’t.” and that will never change in sports. If you have a great product you’ll draw fans, if you don’t you won’t.
I’m proudest of that because it shows that the things that we did during the Jordan era to show our fans that we didn’t take them for granted, that we did appreciate them, that we serviced them as if we were a last-place team and not a first-place team, paid dividends for us. It bought our basketball department the time they needed to get lucky in the lottery again, to rebuild the product, and to keep the revenue flowing in.
I saw this 1996 profile of you that said you were the leader of a 35-person team. Tell me about your team at its height, and just an overview of what you all did and how you worked.
We wrote a marketing plan every year. And every department head was responsible for writing their section of the plan, which would be reviewed by me and approved or commented upon and adjusted.
In the plan they would write a review of the prior year, state clearly our goals and objectives for the coming year and state in a step by step way how we would achieve our goals and objectives. Our marketing plan was 7 or 800 pages long. They encompassed the following areas, and I’ll try to remember them all.
First of all, we were the first NBA team to have a community relations department, a department devoted entirely to building goodwill in the community. Even though, again, we had the greatest player who ever lived and a rising team and eventually a championship team, we worked hard to build relationships and do good neighborly things in the community. So community relations wrote their plan. Game entertainment wrote their plan. Corporate sponsorships wrote their plan. Broadcasting had a plan. Advertising had a plan. Ticket sales, broken down into group, season and individual ticket sales. And media relations as well.
We might have only had 16 people on our marketing team when I got there in ‘87, and by the time I left we had over 80. Eventually that would include digital marketing and analytics and things of that sort. But when we started, they were a group of departments that I mentioned to you. Those were the basics.
So we wrote our plan and executed our plan and the proof was in the pudding when, again, we were horrible in the six years following Jordan and we continued to lead the league in attendance.
You’ve talked about how people come to a game and they should have entertainment all the way through. What was your game day like?
Game entertainment is extremely important because no matter what kind of team you have, you don’t know if the game is going to be entertaining. You get 41 of those, plus preseason games, plus postseason games, and you don’t know how entertaining they are going to be. Is it going to be a close game? Is it going to be a blowout game? We were a pretty good team so there were a lot of blowouts eventually.
Then of course as we got more and more popular we started charging more and more money for our tickets. It became a not insignificant expense for people to have two or four or six season tickets to attend our games. So it was our job to ensure that win or lose, good game or bad game, blowout or not, that people came to the game and felt like they got their money’s worth in terms of entertainment. They had some light moments. They laughed. They were moved emotionally in some way.
We also recognized that a basketball game is 48 minutes of playing — four 12-minute quarters — and yet we have people in their seats for two and a half hours. There’s an hour and 45 minutes where there is absolutely nothing going on. So I think we did a really good job of thinking about how we were going to fill not just halftime but pregame and timeouts, how we were going to make sure that people were entertained and having a good time and were more participants in the game and not mere spectators.
It applied not just in the arena but in our concourses. Gates would usually open an hour and a half before the game and people were looking for things to do. We wanted to make sure they were entertained from the moment they walked in to the moment they left. We even got to the point where at the end of games, we would make sure that our ushers would thank people for coming on the way out and hand them a mint, an idea I got from a movie theater. Our ushers would say, “Thanks for coming, drive home safely,” and hand them a mint. Just do those little extra things that we didn’t have to do.
We made sure that our season ticket holders got all of the giveaway items so that they felt appreciated. We didn’t want them to feel that they had to get to the game real early. We wanted to make sure that they got a package every couple of months with our giveaway items: something a little extra with the Bulls logo and the name of the sponsor.
In terms of my activities, I was like an orchestra leader, but I didn’t conduct a string section, a woodwind section, a brass section, a percussion section. The sections that I conducted were named ticket sales and corporate sponsorships and media relations and community relations and broadcasting and advertising and eventually digital marketing and creative services — those kinds of things.
Our job was to maximize the sales potential of whatever product we had in any given year, and to maximize the entertainment potential of our product regardless what kind of a game we had on any given night.
What was the list of regular in-game entertainers? The Bulls Brothers, the Jesse White Tumblers. I don’t know if the Luvabulls count. Other specific ones?
The Bulls Brothers were there every game, and an interesting story about them is that they didn’t want to be paid. They just wanted a case of beer after every game. (Laughs.) They were the best guys. I loved those guys. Luvabulls of course, Cathy Core led them for years even before we got there. And of course we had certain acts we would bring in every year. The Red Panda Acrobats. Remember the gal who would ride on the unicycle and put bowls on top of her head?
We used to have an Elvis night where Fat Elvis and Young Elvis and all kinds of different Elvises would play basketball against each other. We used to have a mascot game where the mascots of our various sponsors would play against each other. Ronald McDonald would dominate because he was like the only guy who could dribble.
JACK: And the Jesse White Tumblers.
Jesse White Tumblers of course were habitual but they weren’t every day. We had a gal, Barbara Cohen5, who I put in charge of the entertainment of the concourse for before every game. She had a budget: string ensembles playing, jugglers, caricature artists — all kinds of things.
Of course the scoreboard was a very important factor in our entertainment. The introductions were iconic. There’s just no way that we can do a Bulls game at any point with those introductions since we started that doesn’t include “Sirius” and “Eye In the Sky” and the Alan Parsons Project.6
Tell me about Shoot The Bull. It started in 1989. I know that was your brainchild.
We wanted to have a basketball festival, so we were able to set up 200 basketball courts and shut down Grant Park for a weekend. It was really challenging logistically, but we did it. The only reason we stopped doing it was because we lost our media sponsor who I believe was the Chicago Sun-Times who was giving us all sorts of free media space to promote it.
I had a philosophy, Jack, that I wanted to do everything I could in the summer to keep the Bulls out there at a time when the Cubs and the Sox were dominating and the Bears were starting up camp. So the vast majority if not all of our advertising dollars was spent in the summer months. I didn’t feel that I had to spend anything during the season because during the season I had 82 basketball games that were two-and-a-half-hour commercials for our product that were going out free of charge to the entire Chicagoland area. I was reaching all of our fans that way. We had finite financial resources and I wanted to spend those during the summer months. That’s when you would see billboards and our TV and radio commercials.
Shoot the Bull was just another initiative to make sure we kept our name out there and alive during the summer months. We had over 200 courts. I think we had over 10,000 players. And it was very challenging logistically especially that very first year, but eventually it became really quite the thing. It was kind of a basketball version of Taste of Chicago.
What was your first “Holy Moly, I’m with the Chicago Bulls” moment? For players, it’s easy. They go somewhere. What comes to mind for you? Because you’re steering the thing but you’re also of the thing.
What an awesome question. How can I pinpoint one day? I became cognizant that we were the center of the sports universe, not just the NBA universe or the American sports universe, but the center of the sports universe, when the NBA started taking its games overseas. David Stern would be trying to build an international brand for the NBA wherever he went. I kept hearing stories from people who were traveling to far away places, like Israel, and seeing the Bulls logo written in Hebrew with the Bulls logo on a non-licensed cap.
I remember going to Kenya. Now this blew my mind. I went to Kenya with Mrs. Jordan — Michael’s mother — and took a bunch of underprivileged kids to Kenya and went on a safari. We were winding up the trip and went to Nairobi, and the main newspaper in Kenya is called the Daily Nation. The bus that we got on coincidentally was painted in all Bulls iconic lettering, our font style, and the Bulls logo. I saw the Bulls logo everywhere in Kenya. In Kenya!
We got on the bus. The bus driver was reading the Daily Nation and the front page of the Daily Nation said, “Michael Jordan retires.” I walked to the back of the bus and said to Mrs. Jordan: “Mrs. J, did you know that Michael just retired?” She looked at me and said, “He did?!” — quizzically. I said “Yes” and I sat down, stunned about what I had missed while I was in Kenya. I saw my career pass before my eyes. So that was one thing.
But it was mostly just hearing about the interest in the Chicago Bulls. David Stern came back from China and said, “Steve, you won’t believe what is going on with the Bulls in China. But they don’t call them the Bulls.” “What do they call them?” He said, “The Red Oxen.”
And the final thing I’ll tell you about that, when I realized we were the center of the sports universe, was when I would get reports of how much Bulls merchandise was being sold versus other NBA teams. At our peak, 45% of all licensed NBA merchandise sold had a Bulls logo on it. That told me pretty much everything I needed to know, along with our TV ratings which, locally and nationally, were through the roof. Even now when you travel overseas and mention you’re from Chicago, they no longer mention Al Capone, they mention Michael Jordan. That started in the early 90s.
My wife and I went on safari for our honeymoon in Tanzania and we saw Bulls jerseys in Zanzibar.
Even now, right?
The other thing I’ll mention about the Jordan era is that the Bulls continue to this day to reap the benefits of an iconic player like Jordan. It was because we had Michael Jordan that we were able to build the United Center, $180 million back in the early 90s when $180 million was really $180 million, and pay it off in five and a half years, free and clear. And sell all the suites that paid for it. Sell the naming rights to United Airlines that paid for it. And of course continue to sell tickets.
To this very day, I believe that the Chicago Bulls are reaping the benefits that a once-in-a-lifetime iconic player like Michael Jordan brings to it.
Something I’ve loved hearing about is the view of Grant Park from the stage during the championship rallies. Where would you be during those rallies?
There was one where if you look at The Last Dance, I was right behind Steve Kerr when he told that story —
Oh yes, of course.
But for the most part I would be off to the side, just observing. On the stage, off to the side.
What was that like for that first one?
It was mind-blowing. People often ask me, what did I like most about my job? I always mention three things. One was helping people climb the ladder and seeing people stand on top of the mountain who I had some small role in helping get there. Young people who we hired.
The second thing was being part of a team of people working toward a common goal. In our case, being able to contribute in our small way toward generating the revenue that would help us get players that would win us championships, and to make sure we were successful in the years following the dynasty and Jordan.
Basketball was deemed a basketball graveyard in Chicago because it had failed three prior times prior to the Bulls7. And it was failing, honestly, until a combination of things came together, not the least of which was David Stern and Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, and then Michael Jordan coming and then us surrounding Michael with great talent.
But the third thing that I loved about my job was being part of an entity that was the focal point of the community. Other than the Bears Super Bowl game in 1986, I think you’ll find that the most viewed sporting events in Chicago history were Bulls NBA Finals games. So being a part of an entity that was the focal point of a community, that people are still talking about to this day that will live on forever, that was not only on everybody’s lips in Chicago but was on everybody’s lips around the world. Not everybody, of course, but everybody who followed sports was aware of the Chicago Bulls and aware of Michael. To be a part of that, to observe that kind of history at close range, was the honor of a lifetime.
The only negative thing about being a part of the Bulls in that era was that I knew it couldn’t last. So I remember in 1998, the Last Dance year, I really took the time to smell the roses and drink it all in so that I would indelibly etch it in my mind and my memory. If you come to my homes in Chicago or down in Florida, you’ll see that I remain surrounded by those memories and the things that I experienced and the people I met.
Dinner with Muhammad Ali and Tom Cruise and Whitney Houston. Meeting every President of the United States from Gerald Ford through, well, now Donald Trump – or Joe Biden, actually. The trips to the White House. The way we were wined and dined. I’m a golf nut and I got to play Augusta National twice just because I was with the Chicago Bulls. I don’t know if you’re a golfer but it’s really hard to get on Augusta National. I got invited everywhere. It was the honor of a lifetime.
That is incredible, and you just did my last question, so I’ll do my second to last question: big picture, what was the Bulls marketing ripple effect on the NBA?
I wish David Stern was alive so you could ask him that question, because if I say it, it sounds like bragging, and so I hesitate to say it. But I will answer your question as long as you position it in a way that doesn’t make it sound like I’m braggadocio8. I do think that we elevated game entertainment to an entirely different level than that which had been experienced prior to the 1987 Chicago Bulls. I think it upped everybody’s game. David Stern and the Board of Governors meetings would always talk about it and we always got a lot of credit. They had a lot of awards and we would win a lot of best practice awards in that area.
The second thing: I believe it’s factual to say that we were the first of the NBA teams to have a community relations department — to have an entity that was dedicated solely for trying to be a good neighbor in the community and make sure people felt good about us when we came to call. We worked very hard on community relations and I’m pretty sure now that pretty much every team in the NBA and probably every team in sports sees that as being a very important function of their overall marketing puzzle.
But I believe that in the NBA at least we were the first to have a community relations department dedicated solely to trying to be a good neighbor in our community.
It worked. We felt it. And I was a suburban kid but we felt it in a way that was different than the other teams.
Well that means a lot. And Jack, like I said, we didn’t have to do a lot of the things we did. Sending season ticket holders all of the giveaway things, making sure they got them. We called every season ticket holder every year to check in with them. We didn’t just want to be in touch with our season ticket holders at renewal time when they got a renewal letter. And we had focus groups when we didn’t have to have focus groups. And we called them to make sure everything was okay.
Because obviously when you have a ticket sales staff and you sold all your tickets, what is your ticket sales staff going to do? What they’re going to do is call every season ticket holder on a regular basis to make sure that everything is good, that they’re happy with their season tickets and see if there is anything we can do for them. And that’s what we did instead of firing people once we sold all of our tickets out for those 13 years.
After trailing 69-47 in the first half, the Bulls stormed all the way back, taking a 111-110 lead on a Coby White shot with two and a half minutes remaining, and reaching overtime at 115-all. Throughout the comeback, the fans at the U.C. never lost interest; the degree to which our focus was the result of the play on the court, our own nostalgia or the energy in the stadium cannot be known, but what is likely true is that Bulls fans staying engaged and staying IN the stadium even when Minnesota pushed the lead to 23 early in the 3rd quarter — THAT was in large part due to the fan-centric games and videos.
As the Bulls mounted their comeback, fan reaction shifted from everything around the game to the game itself. With the game tied in OT at 119, DeMar DeRozan led a 6-0 run to break the tie and lead us to a 129-123 victory.
The crowd lit up with the final horn and celebrated all the way out of the stadium. A blowout of the beloved had turned into a respectable loss, then into a nail-biter, then into a Bulls win. We had some light moments. We laughed. We were moved emotionally. We got our money’s worth in terms of entertainment.
Just what Steve Schanwald had in mind.
-
-
-
Thanks again to Steve Schanwald, and to Jake Malooley for the introduction. Thank you to Jack and Lauren for the UC trip. Thank you everyone for reading and subscribing! Much more to come.
Best,
Jack
From a Washington Post article, May 8, 1990: “Since Schanwald arrived … season-ticket sales have jumped from 4,800 to 13,000. Chicago Stadium capacity, according to the Bulls’ 1989-90 media guide, is 17,339, but that figure routinely swells to more than 18,000 with standing room.”
The Bulls opened the 1987-88 season with a win over the 76ers before an opening night Chicago Stadium record 18,688 fans. They went on the road for two wins and came back to the Stadium for a sellout win over the Nets, their first 4-0 start in franchise history. A sellout crowd against the Pacers saw the Bulls lose on a last-second winner from Chuck Person; three nights later, the Bulls beat the Bullets in front of their final non-sellout crowd until the 2000 presidential election. The sellout streak of 610 games began Nov. 20, 1987, and ended during another game against Washington, now the Wizards, on Nov. 7, 2000.
From the Hartford Courant, writer Jim Shea, Dec. 26, 1992: “The Bulls are probably the most creative and aggressive promoters. They introduce their players amid spotlights, ear-shattering music and indoor fireworks. Their musical selections often are augmented by the Luvabulls (dancers/cheerleaders) and the Bulls Brothers (not to be confused with Jake and Elwood). They are also big on contests. A particular crowd favorite right now involves a fan trying to hit a three-quarters court shot at halftime for $1 million.”
Per data from ESPN and the Association for Professional Basketball Research (APBR), the Bulls led the NBA in attendance across the whole of 1999 to 2004. The numbers from ESPN are a bit lower for most teams compared to the numbers for APBR, including the Bulls, but the differences did not change the order, so we’ll use the ESPN data. From 1999-2004, the Bulls led the NBA with 4,723,196 fans. They were ahead of the Spurs (4,682,595), Knicks (4,470,379), 76ers (4,437,266) and Trail Blazers (4,410,715). Ten teams finished in the top 5 in attendance in at least one year (incredibly, the Lakers were not among them); of those 10 teams, the Bulls’ 26% winning percentage was easily the lowest. The only other teams in the top 10 who were under .500 benefited from massive ticket draws: the Raptors with Vince Carter and the Wizards with Michael Jordan. Only three teams led the NBA in attendance in that time: the Bulls in 1999 and 2000, the Spurs in 2001 and 2002 (coming off the 1999 championship and with Tim Duncan and David Robinson), and the Pistons in 2003 and 2004, in which they reached the Eastern Conference Finals and then won the 2004 NBA Finals. The Bulls got back to the playoffs in 2005, finished 2nd in attendance after Detroit in both 2005 and 2006 and regained the top spot in 2007. Starting in 2008, for the remainder of Steve Schanwald’s tenure, the Bulls’ attendance finishes: 2nd (Pistons), 2nd (Pistons), 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st. 2015 was our final year in championship contention, yet we led the NBA in attendance in 2016, 2017 and 2018, finished 2nd in 2019, 3rd in 2020. After a big drop-off in the COVID-affected 2021, we were back to #1 in 2022 and 2023. Schanwald succeeded — and then some!
Barbara Lee Cohen passed away Jan. 26, 2020, age 82. From her Tribune obituary, March 9: “For more than 30 years, Cohen also produced entertainment programs at Chicago Bulls home games, including live musical acts performed on concourses before games at the United Center.”
For the complete story on how the Bulls’ famous introductions started, here is my guy Jake Malooley in 2018.
The American Gears of the NBL, the Stags of the BAA and NBA and then Packers/Zephyrs of the NBA. For more on Chicago’s basketball false starts, my piece on Bulls founder Dick Klein.
Just to reiterate: Steve Schanwald is one of the most humble people I’ve ever interviewed. He was definitely not bragging — just answering a journalist’s question. Thanks Steve!