The Comic Triumph of 'This Is SportsCenter,' a Campaign Years Ahead of Its Time

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Advertisers today like to jump into the fray in social media with pithy insights and gags about current events. But ESPN has been doing that for decades, on television, long before Twitter or Facebook existed.

The cable sports network’s “This is SportsCenter” campaign, dreamed up by Wieden + Kennedy in the mid-1990s, has set the bar for topical comedy over the years with its droll set pieces inside a fantasy world where athletes and mascots live and work together with anchors and journalists at ESPN headquarters.

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