The secret sauce behind the Spurs H-E-B commercials

by Andrew McNeill

Chris Smith knew they struck a chord when he began to see his creative team’s phrases and one-liners on fan-made signs at Spurs games. Suddenly, a vocabulary test word like ‘indubitably’ was inextricably linked with Spurs fandom.

“That was when we said, ‘Alright, we’ve really tapped into something here.’ And the pressure was on to keep it at that level,” Smith admitted over the phone. “So that’s been fun.”

Smith, Brand Creative Group Head at the branding and advertising agency the Richards Group in Dallas, led the team in charge of writing scripts for the H-E-B commercials starring San Antonio Spurs stars like Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker. The long-running commercial spots, now in their 11th year with this season’s batch of six ads (five English language commercials and one in Spanish), have become an annual tradition for Spurs fans. Though it wasn’t until recently they became ingrained as a part of Spurs pop culture.

“To be totally honest, our ads were not very good for the first five years of doing them,” said Cory Basso, the Group Vice President of Marketing and Advertising at H-E-B. “It’s taken a long time to get us here.”

So much of today’s entertainment technology exists in large part to help you avoid commercials. From DVR boxes provided by cable companies to streaming services like Netflix, it’s not difficult to cut the traditional television commercial out of your viewing life these days.

But sports fans don’t want to watch their teams after the fact. Timeshifting has yet to make a huge impact on sports and, as a result, live sports is one of the remaining sanctuaries for advertisers.

So how valuable is it for a company like H-E-B with products to sell to not only put out commercials that people watch, but are downright loved? And how the hell do you manage to make that happen?

“I’ve been doing advertising for 30 years for brands all over the world,” Basso said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”

 

The History

The run of these now-famous commercials began in 2004 when Basso joined H-E-B. “My view of sponsorships was to go way beyond just a sign or banner in the stadium,” he said. The first batch of spots featured Tim Duncan as the lone Spur teaching a “Cooking with Tim” lesson, a bit that was briefly referenced in this season’s “Cooking Class” commercial.

“Eleven years ago we started doing these commercials with Tim Duncan — and that was actually when we won our first creative award, all the way back then — and the commercials, to be honest, weren’t even that good,” Basso said. “But we found a way to keep growing participation in players. We started with one and then we added Manu and Tony, then we added Bruce Bowen, Brent Barry — Matt Bonner was in them — now we have seven players.”

As the H-E-B roster has expanded, it’s become a who’s who of Spurs stars appearing in the spots. In addition to Duncan, Parker, Ginobili, Bowen, Barry and Bonner pushing H-E-B products on camera over the years, Patty Mills, Kawhi Leonard, LaMarcus Aldridge and Danny Green have joined the cast. Even Gregg Popovich can be seen from time to time.

“There have been times we’ve wanted to use Coach Popovich and he has said no,” Smith said. “We’ve used him once or twice and it’s always been sort of a long-shot anyway, that really just depends on how he’s feeling.

“So we never do anything that depends on him, because we know he’s not always a guarantee to do it.”

As the spots grew to prominence in Spurs culture, they’ve become important not only to the fans, but the players as well. Making his first appearance in the commercials this season, Green told Spurs.com, “I finally made the cut.”

“He’s wanted to be in the commercials for a couple years. I don’t know why we didn’t do it,” Basso said. “We did it this year and if you look at some of the social media comments a lot of them are saying Finally, Danny Green. Which they’re right, I told Danny’s agent that we waited too long.”

After more than a decade of commercials and so many of the Spurs most important personalities joining the cast, the critical acclaim is there, but the magic doesn’t happen overnight.

 

The Process

Just a couple of weeks before Gregg Popovich and his staff ventured 1500 miles away in Los Angeles to recruit LaMarcus Aldridge to become the biggest free agent signing in San Antonio history, Basso and the folks at H-E-B were back in the Alamo City tossing around which products they wanted to use in the upcoming season’s commercials with the Spurs.

Hard as it may be to believe seeing Manu Ginobili sporting a fu manchu, these commercials aren’t just for kicks. There is, in fact, a business purpose for the ads.

“What we would try to use is some of the key products that we’re trying to promote,” Basso said. “The association we get with them and our products always comes through in the research. Customers actually remember the products the Spurs are associated with. We can’t tie anything directly back to sales because there are so many other factors, but we know the awareness generated by their involvement and by their endorsement of a product is certainly helping, or we wouldn’t do it. We don’t do ads just for fun.”

When the products to feature in the spots were decided upon, Smith and his team at the Richards Group went to work coming up with script ideas.

“What I do is sort of split it up,” Smith said. ”OK, you guys are going to throw ideas against the natural chicken. You guys are going to throw ideas against Primo Picks. You guys are going to throw ideas against whatever.

“Then we have a big meeting — we call it a creative internal — where everybody brings their ideas and we kind of decide, ‘Yeah, that’s funny. That needs work. I don’t like that one as much.’“

Throughout the process, Smith and the Richards Group worked with H-E-B to fine-tune the ideas. An initial batch of about 50 scripts was written and eventually whittled down to around ten. As they got closer to single digits and once H-E-B was pleased with the concepts, the Richards Group involved the players’ agents, where they were able to make notes on behalf of their clients. After that hurdle was cleared, H-E-B sought the approval of both the Spurs and the NBA league office on the scripts. From there, the Richards Group and H-E-B worked with the players to finish up the scripts before shooting began.

“A lot of the work that has to happen is: Will the players do it? Are they allowed? Are we legally allowed to do this, that, or the other thing?” Smith said. “There’s a lot of people down at H-E-B that weigh in. It’s a long approval process and things get tweaked and changed.

“Sometime products change at the last minute, then we gotta scramble and come up with a new idea.”

Once everything was approved and scripts were finalized, the circus headed to Spurs Lane in northwest San Antonio. Well, a very nicely planned and expertly organized circus. Shooting for the Spurs H-E-B commercials usually occurs during the first week of training camp, following a morning of workout session at the practice facility. With typical Spurs-like efficiency, the players and production crew knocked out all of the commercial spots for that H-E-B season in about six hours, going from one set to the next.

“When we show up at the practice facility on the shoot day, all the sets are built, everything’s ready to go,” Smith said. “We set it all up and we go from set to set — boom, boom, boom — and knock it out as fast as we can.

“To put it in perspective, the last 30-second spot I did for another client, the shooting took three days for one 30-second spot.”

The goal, Basso said, is normally to shoot four commercials and hope they get three of them, but this year they were able to knock out six spots thanks to the years of repetitions behind them.

“It’s incredibly fast, it’s fun but it’s sort of hair on fire — go, go, go — and the reason we can do that is these guys are so good, honestly. These guys get their lines pretty quickly so you don’t need to do 20 takes,” Smith said.

After the shoot, the editing process began. For the first time this year, once the commercials were finished there was a big push to promote and tease the spots ahead of their release.

“Over the years we continue to be amazed at how much these commercials have become a part of the pop culture of the Spurs in San Antonio,” said Jeanne Garza, Director of Corporate Partnerships at Spurs Sports & Entertainment. “Our fan base looks forward to them, and coming off of last year there was just a lot of outside media attention, (so much so) that we partnered with H-E-B and said, ‘Hey, let’s work together to make a bigger deal out of the release of these commercials.’”

Imagine that, teasing the release of advertisements, but such is the appetite and affection Spurs fans have developed for the spots. However, producing a well-made commercial is the easy part. Making a commercial spot consumers will love is much harder to do and difficult to explain.

 

The Secret Sauce

It’s immediate when watching one of the recent H-E-B commercials featuring the Spurs that, much like during a game, everybody except LaMarcus Aldridge is comfortable with their role. As Basso, Smith and their teams have worked with the players from year to year, they’ve grown accustomed to each player’s personality and fit them into scripts that highlight those characteristics. You won’t find anything resembling an awkward Gary Neal and Tiago Splitter trading lines at a Northside Ford here.

“You’re taking grown men with zero performance experience and you’re giving them these very sort of silly, childish scripts, and they’re all clearly having a good time with it,” comedian and Spurs fan Will Weldon said. “It’s like when your teachers in grade school would do ‘skits,’ they’re just having so much goddamn fun.”

The results are scenes that feel natural, or as natural as seven-footers hanging around their practice facility in their game uniforms can look.

“What’s happened is over the years we’ve learned as we work with these players more and more, we know who’s good at what,” Smith said. “So Tim is like the perfect straight man, where he delivers the sort of low-key lines. Tony and Manu have a really funny sense of humor, so you can make them do sort of the sillier stuff. Kawhi is perfect for the one-word response that’s just the right word.

“We’ve really learned what sort of jokes work best with each player and also what sort of jokes work best — what makes the spots go over better.”

Said Weldon: “I mean, I can’t imagine any of these guys are Daniel Day Lewis in terms of their ability to construct a character out of whole cloth. So you’re probably pretty doomed if you’re the writer saying, ‘OK Tim, in this one, we want you to play it as a Judd Apatow-style manchild.’ But they do seem to bring some of themselves to it.”

While the scripts provide a baseline for what the Spurs are supposed to be doing in the moment, many of the players have found a comfort level in ad-libbing on set. Tim Duncan’s “What does indubitably even mean?” for instance, was uttered on the fly by the Spurs big man.

“It surprised us, because Tim started ad-libbing a bit on the set and coming up with some really funny stuff, so we just let it go,” Smith said. “And a lot of times that ends up in the spot.”

More than anything, though — more than the scripts that are written; more than the repetitions over the years; more than any ability the players may have to go off the page — the players on the Spurs like each other and that shines through in the spots.

“What I think is most appealing about them is that they play up the chemistry that exists between the players, because the Spurs have a chemistry on their team that I think is rare probably in any sports franchise,” Smith said. “They really do get along; there really does seem to be a family dynamic, and we’ve sort of captured that the way they play off of each other and I think you can see it in the finished spots.”

Duncan, as well as Ginobili and Parker, have fostered a culture with the Spurs where the players genuinely get along with each other, both on and off the floor, and that chemistry is the underlying reason why these commercials work. If you didn’t know or believe that the players were friendly, Duncan telling Kawhi Leonard he looks ridiculous in a toga wouldn’t work as well as it does on screen.

And for someone like Aldridge, for whom appearing in these commercials was one of the first things he’s done with his new teammates away from the practice floor, it can serve as a crash course in getting to know his fellow Spurs.

“I think it was Danny or Patty (who) said something that, because LaMarcus is new to the whole team, he thought it was a great way to break the ice and have all of them have fun together and be a part of this thing together,” Basso said.

As much as the fans enjoy watching the new commercials, you can tell that the players had just as much fun filming them. These guys aren’t trained actors. If they were miserable on set, it would bleed through in the finished product. Instead, you can tell they’re enjoying themselves, and that makes it fun for the viewer. How many times have you started laughing while watching someone else laugh, even if you don’t know why they’re doing it? We want to see someone enjoying themselves and these Spurs are clearly having a good time filming these spots for H-E-B.

“Most fans have finally come around to accept that they’re not, and in my opinion never were, boring in their style of play, but they’re still a bunch of dudes who seem personally boring acting in very goofy commercials,” Weldon said. “It’s the same reason anything comedic that Al Gore did was so beloved. He was a robot, and people loved seeing him goof around, probably especially because he was so clearly an amateur.”

 

The Future

2015 has been a huge year for the Spurs H-E-B commercials. There was a record number of players involved and more ads recorded than ever before. Promotion for this season’s campaign was unlike it has ever been before. A teaser for one of the commercials posted on the Spurs official Instagram account garnered over 10,000 likes. Meanwhile, during games, television play-by-play man Bill Land teased the spots heading into commercial breaks.

It seems impossible to think the commercials can continue on this sort of upward trajectory. Where could it realistically go from here?

“We’re all kind of dreading the day Tim, Manu and Tony retire because, not that the other guys that are left aren’t good, but it’s a whole new dynamic that we’re going to have to deal with,” Smith admitted.

Whatever the case may be, H-E-B and the Richards Group created a phenomenon with these commercials that have become a tradition within Spurs fan culture. Players want to be in them, supporters can’t wait to see them, and the marketers and creatives behind the ads can’t stop garnering praise.

“It’s hugely gratifying to see something you do, you work on so hard and so long, that your whole team works on, become so embraced by the people you’re presenting it to — by that I mean Spurs fans and the people of San Antonio — that’s hugely gratifying,” Smith said.

Like the years-long run the Spurs are on, the hot streak for these H-E-B commercials will eventually come to an end. It’s just hard to pinpoint when and why that will be. Things could change when Duncan, Parker and Ginobili retire. Like with many long-running television shows, the ideas could dry up and the characters become stale. Or, simply, the partnership between H-E-B and the Spurs could come to a mutual end.

Until that time, though, the spots will continue on and reappear every fall, marking the start of another basketball season in San Antonio. And, the people involved all hope, Spurs fans will relish the next batch.

 

This piece was edited by Graydon Gordian and Matthew Tynan.