WHY SHOULD YOU CARE: Even when your the king you can totally mess up your show.  Sure we won’t care come the fall of 2010 but the PR/media moves Lebron made this off-season are SKEEEEETCH to say the least.  Sometimes, doing LESS is doing MORE and in this case he could have done without the ONE HOUR ESPN special (boring, lame, too-self important, next time actually SHOW ME something instead of having me watch everyone at ESPN lick your face).  We want entertainment.  Not ME-ME-ME show.  Get with the times Lebron. Enjoy the read.

When I was an Agent in Hollywood we would often try to figure out the model we could build for clients in the vein of Asthon Kutcher, Ryan Seacrest and Lebron James in the sense of – how can we turn star’s brand and persona into an entire media operation and business?

Junta42’s Joe Pulazzi explains how Lebron and his team have managed to architect a media ecosystem and has positioned his brand for future media success.

Mazel tov Lebron.

That said, I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say how disappointing his free-agency hoopla was last week.   Not only was there so much overdone hype but WME agency and ESPN figured out a way to get Lebron his one-hour of air time to announce his free-agency decision. Sure enough, there is a back-lash from the public because the TV program just plain sucked and was a whole lot of nothing.  For more on why this was a failure I encourage folks to read Ed Cotton’s post on Lebron and the problem of brand self-importance.

Media empire versus brand management.  Looks like Lebron’s pursuit for maximizing the value of his brand by leveraging an hour of television to make a career change announcement has now back fired and damaged his brand image.  We’ll all forget come fall/winter 2010 but in the meantime, everyone will have an eyebrow raised at Lebron.