The future is looking bright for the Cleveland Browns after they nearly finished .500 this season and watched Baker Mayfield make some incredible plays, but they have a long way to go before they can be considered a respectable franchise. If owner Jimmy Haslam wants to find ways to motivate his team, he probably should avoid asking the marketing department.
ESPN’s Seth Wickersham published an explosive piece on Thursday highlighting the dysfunction that has gone on in Cleveland since Haslam bought the team in 2012. The most entertaining tidbit of the story, by far, was what the Browns’ marketing department tried to do a few years back to show team employees and personnel how the team had become a laughing stock. What should have been a sobering display of reality somehow turned into pornographic material being broadcast on a giant wall inside the team’s facility.
Marketing executives wanted employees to see how fans were engaging with the Browns on social media, so they projected the Browns feed onto a giant wall at the facility. It was like broadcasting talk radio over the entire building, and one day in particular, it was worse than that. One of the marketing staffers entered a search for #dp — for Dawg Pound. The problem was, that hashtag carried a few different meanings, one of which triggered an array of porn to be broadcast onto a wall for the entire office to see for more than 20 minutes, until a tech employee killed the feed.
The embarrassing mistake came after former general manager Ray Farmer was suspended for the unprecedented way he was trying to micromanage his coaching staff.
There are plenty of ways you could argue that the Browns have embarrassed themselves for the past decade, but 20 minutes of porn being accidentally broadcast on a giant projector screen has to be somewhere near the top of the list.
