The NFL should win every award for outstanding marketing.

This summer’s big sports story, the NFL Lockout, has ended juuuuust in time for training camps to prepare these gladiators of the gridiron. Then you’ll have four weeks of utter useless preseason football followed by weeks and weeks of games, speculation, arrests, playoffs, all leading to the greatest sporting event held every year, the Super Bowl.

And this. We get this.

Did you really think any of that was in jeopardy? Really?

It was not in jeopardy, it never was. Ever. Ever. Here’s why:

Money.

That’s it. Money. You see, the NFL is a billion-dollar industry, with a “b.” If even one game from the regular season is not played, millions of dollars go poof. Here’s a short list of members of our cultured society that would be affected by missed games:

Owners make no money.
Players don’t get paychecks.
Sponsors don’t sell products.
Networks don’t sell time during the televised football game to the sponsors that want to sell products.
Advertisers don’t get massive budgets to create the ads that run during football games.
Casinos don’t get gamblers.
EA sports can make the next version of Madden Football, season Ihavenoidea.
Employees of NFL teams won’t have jobs.
Stadium employees (ushers, concessions security) sit at home.
Civic authorities – police, fire, emergency, all lose out on overtime revenue.
The clothing manufacturers who have paid into the NFL to license their brand don’t sell products.

I’m sure I’m missing hundreds of other beneficiaries of the sport, but you get the idea.

There would be no joy in Moneyville.

Every football fan (and there are a lot of us out there) is breathing a sigh of relief. We can look forward to Sundays on the couch, stuffing our bellies with bad food and warm beer, throwing testosterone-fueled foam bricks at our $2,000 HDTVs out of frustration that our team’s quarterback called an audible on 3rd and long and threw into coverage and that crafty little cornerback snagged the interception to run it back 63 yards for a touchdown.

But that’s not the problem. The problem we – the consumers of this icon of American culture – have, is how this utterly mundane story stayed in the headlines.

Emotion.

The NFL leveraged the the emotion of fear, the fear of losing a season of America’s most popular sport to keep itself in the headlines over the summer.

Negotiations are not sexy at all. And to make matters worse, it’s a bunch of millionaire football players and mulit-millionaire owners haggling over who gets a bigger piece of the billion-dollar pie. Google for images of the word “Lockout.” Bunch of negative connotation there. Why use the word “Lockout?” Because “Negotiations” is not sexy. If you Google for “negotiation” you get handshakes.

That's not very testosteron-y, is it?

They spent the last 135 days gobbling up the headlines of every major sporting news service on the planet talking about the fear that a season could be lost if the owners and players don’t figure out how much they all get to make.

This thing kept better time than my watch.

Let’s be honest here: You don’t care at all how much money any of them make. I bet you cannot identify the salary of a single player in the NFL. The reason? You don’t care. All you want to see is some hittin’.

Because of that, the NFL used fear to keep you engaged, to keep you interested in the sport and the league. Every day we saw owners on TV talking about how tough the talks have been, and every day we read tweets from players warning us how they are getting the raw end of a million-dollar deal.

Cue the tiny violins.

By no means is this some sort of conspiracy theory, but I don’t believe that the season was in jeopardy. Neither should you. When billions of dollars are at stake, you don’t have to worry about things not getting done.

"No Mr. President. THIS is holding. It's a five-yard penalty."

Instead, worry about the fact that the NFL leveraged the fear of loss to play into the hearts of consumers for the sport. And the reason that bothers me is that companies all over have been watching this and seeing how to do it.

In the past, we have seen the “ACT NOW BEFORE THEY’RE GONE” marketing methods. Heck, all the shopping channels live and die by that method of marketing.

But the NFL, as a brand, was the discussion. Not a particular team, or division, or city, but the brand as a whole. They used the headlines to keep themselves at the forefront of every sports fan’s mind for almost the exact span of time in which there is nothing to discuss about football.

And they were wildly successful about it.

On Sunday we hug. On Monday we do the Ickey Shuffle.

What does this mean? If I were a gamblin’ man (and I didn’t have a season of football to lose money on), I would look for other companies to start leveraging the fear of loss, the fear of going without, to ensure the brand stays at the front of the minds of people. Instead of talking about the benefits that products bring into a our lives, we may hear about the benefits we’ll lose if the product isn’t there. And we’ll see news outlets climbing on the bandwagon because it’s news.

That is the current state of marketing: Create emotion, work the consumers into a frenzy, leverage every media outlet that will buy into the emotion, and milk it for every thing it gives you.

"I want YOU...."