Buying the Yokohama BayStars: baseball as advertising (2011)

The upshot of reading a loss-making ball club as “the most effective advertising”

The core of this decision lies in reading a loss-making ball club not as a source of losses but as advertising spend that raised the company’s name recognition and brand — an idea that swapped the backward-looking ring of the word “deficit” for the vocabulary of investment. As President Moriyasu noted, citing annual advertising and promotion outlays of just under $250.7M (¥20bn), the aim was less to advertise a product than to make up for a recognition that lagged the scale of the business, and to run recruitment and user acquisition to advantage. Measured on the same yardstick as ordinary advertising, the effect of a club’s name being reported over and over on national news made an annual loss of a little over $25.1M (¥2bn) not necessarily a costly purchase — such a calculation appears to have been at work.

That said, reading the club purchase as advertising alone cannot fully explain the turn to profit that followed. Under Jun Ikeda, DeNA rebuilt attendance, and in 2016 it acquired Yokohama Stadium to run club and ballpark as one. Reworking a club it had written off as an expense into a business that earned from both the game and the venue is what brought a utilisation rate above 90% and a move into the black five years after the acquisition. The initial “advertising” account was the doorway for stepping in while accepting the loss; the corporate effort beyond it made the difference that turned expense into asset. The 2024 Japan Series title and record attendance were a destination on the extension of that line.