Watching NFL Football in China — Brought to You By the US Treasury

Watching the NFL playoffs this weekend on Chinese internet TV channel PP Live, I saw something I never imagined. No, not a live broadcast in China of American football. The NFL has a great thing going here in China. While not a big-time success yet like the NBA in China, the NFL is quietly making fans out of a meaningful slice of the country’s most gold-plated demographic: males with advanced degrees and senior management positions.

No, what surprised me while watching the game was the frequent commercials paid for in part by money from the US Department of Treasury. Yes, Uncle Sam is now involved in buying advertising time during NFL games on Chinese tv. Never quite thought I’d live to see the day.

The ads are to promote tourism to the US. There are snapshots of American scenery, a catchy little song playing in the background, and then this splash screen comes up at the end:

Follow that www.gousa.cn link and one eventually learns the group behind the ads is something called “Brand USA”, a body describing itself as a “public private partnership”. That’s generally code for some kind of organization where the US Treasury picks up some or all of the tab, but whose purpose is to help private companies make money. Sure enough. Last month, President Obama signed legislation that keeps the government money flowing to Brand USA at least through 2020, long after he’s out of office. The budget for fiscal year 2014 was $125 million.

The board of Brand USA includes top executives from hotel group Marriott International, Disney’s travel arm, the air reservation system Sabre Corporation as well as the top bureacrats in the tourist promotion office in the states of California and Minnesota. Brand USA’s chairman is president of a company I never heard of called Jackmont Hospitality, whose website says it is “a minority-owned, comprehensive foodservice management company and one of the fastest growing TGI FRIDAYS^® franchisees.”

The intent of the commercial is, of course, to get more Chinese to travel to the US as tourists. A laudable goal, and one that became much easier at the end of last year when Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed a new bilateral visa regime which gives citizens of each country ten-year multi-entry visas. Chinese tourism in the US is growing, with 1.8 million visiting last year, fifth most among all countries sending tourists to the US, but still about half the number of British tourists each year.

What they lack in numbers Chinese tourists make up for in extravagance. They spend $7,200 per visit compared to $4,500 by the average foreign tourist, according to the US Travel Association.

Like a lot my government does, the commercials running during football timeouts don’t display a particularly keen knowledge of consumer marketing.  The jingle is sung in English, so not likely to be understood by a lot of Chinese viewers. The places featured don’t seem likely destinations for Chinese tourists. No Times Square or Fifth Avenue Apple Store in Manhattan. No Disneyland, no Harvard Yard and no Las Vegas.

So where is the US government pushing Chinese to visit?  Price Lake. I never heard of it either, but according to Wikipedia it’s in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, about 200 miles from the nearest major airport, Raleigh-Durham. It’s said to host the largest annual gathering of lumberjacks each year. If China has a large contingent of passport-holding lumberjacks it’s news to me.

While Brand USA hasn’t been around long, it’s already attracted a fair bit of criticism, led by Republican members of Congress, who launched a formal investigation into what is called a “history of questionable expenditures and lavish spending” at the organization. The report they issued says all Board members, though officially appointed by the US Secretary of Commerce, were in fact chosen by an Obama aide from among those who “have donated to Democrats and Democratic organizations almost exclusively.”

The private sector is supposed to donate funds which the US government matches by dipping into a pool of money raised through a $10 fee charged to all tourists arriving in the US under what’s called the Visa Waiver Program. Brand USA board members have claimed the amount they spend on travel should be considered by Uncle Sam as a “donation”, including first class air fares and hotel rooms paid for by their companies. Among the claims was one for $94.87 for a two mile taxi ride in Washington DC that the report points out should cost no more than about $15 including tip. The report’s conclusion is that the Brand USA documents and expense accounts “paint a picture of mismanagement, waste, and cronyism.”

No word on what Brand USA are paying for the ads during the NFL games on PP Live. Let’s hope they drive a tough bargain. Other than the Brand USA spot, repeated over and over, I saw no other ads during the second half of the game. During many of the commercial breaks, the Chinese broadcast stays with a live feed from the stadium of the players waiting around for the timeouts to end, something one rarely gets to see while watching football in the US.

The NFL games are broadcast in China with Chinese commentary only, once an annoyance but now a source of almost infinite delight for me. In case you’re wondering, the name for football in Chinese translates as “olive ball”.

Chinese who like the sport and are persuaded by the ads to visit the US would do well to read up first on Brand USA and its public/private affairs. It’s an excellent primer on how politics and spending sometimes operate in my nation’s capitol — and so why the US has this chronic reliance on China to finance our deficits by buying US Treasuries.