L.A. lawyer rented billboard to help lure LeBron to Lakers
Looking back at the swirl of free agency — anyone else feel nostalgic? — I’ve come to the conclusion that there were actually two big winners in the LeBron James Sweepstakes: the Los Angeles Lakers, of course, who signed the best player in the world, and the billboard industry.
Zealous fans rented billboards in cities like Philadelphia and Cleveland to express their adoration for James. Pro teams in such far-flung locales as New Zealand and the Philippines got in on the action, too.
The New Zealand Breakers’ pitch to him? “There’s room for another Big Kiwi.”
James — surprise, surprise — did not ultimately make the jump to Auckland, although the advertisement did earn the Breakers some free publicity on social media, which was the whole point.
Nobody, however, made a bigger splash in the LeBron billboard game than Jacob Emrani, a 46-year-old personal-injury lawyer from Beverly Hills, Calif., and self-described Lakers fanatic.
A season-ticket holder for 20 years, Emrani broke out his chequebook to buy space for 40 LeBron-themed billboards in the run-up to free agency.
If you happened to be in the Los Angeles area at any point in recent months, they were impossible to miss — mostly because of the oversize #LABron hashtags that were splashed across them.
In Emrani’s mind, the investment paid off. He is excited about the coming season. And maybe, just maybe, he played a very small role in luring James to the West Coast.
“You have to know that people want you,” Emrani told me when I called him this week. “It was some outside-the-box recruiting.”
Emrani mixed a little commerce in, too: Each billboard featured the logo of his law firm, along with its web address, CallJacob.com. Emrani said he included his site only because he wanted to make it abundantly clear that the Lakers had not paid for the billboards in violation of the National Basketball Association’s tampering rules. (But let’s be real: He runs a business.)
His passion project began in earnest in March, after he learned that fans in Cleveland and Philadelphia had rented billboards. He thought their efforts were quaint.
“I was just kind of sitting back watching,” he said. “We had Cleveland and we had Philadelphia trying to fight over the guy who should really be in LA.”
It just so happened that James, who was still employed by the Cavaliers at the time, was about to play back-to-back games against the Clippers and the Lakers in Los Angeles. So Emrani huddled with his firm’s creative team and came up with slogans for four billboards. One of them: “Forget the process, we win banners!” (“That was a straight shot at Philadelphia,” Emrani said.) Another: “Cleveland & Philly, You can’t compete with L.A.” (“Which obviously came out correct,” he said.)
It was not the most nuanced campaign in the history of marketing. Emrani strategically put one of the billboards off a busy stretch of road near UCLA, where he knew that James would practice that week. Perhaps he would see it. James apparently learned of the billboards’ existence, because when he was asked about them during a media scrum before one of the games, he said he felt flattered.
“Listen,” James told reporters, “I’m 15 years into my career, and fans in cities want me to play for their team — I think it’s pretty cool. My kids see things like that, they think it’s cool.”
For Emrani, those words meant one thing: success. His plan, he said, seemed to be working. More than anything, he wanted James to know that Lakers fans loved him. Emrani was also a realist when it came to the Lakers’ recent history — “Really,” he said, “the past five years have been a disaster” — so a bunch of billboards couldn’t hurt. Plus, he had disposable income.
“I wanted to do something that most fans would love to do,” Emrani said, “but wouldn’t be able to do.”
Those four billboards stayed up for months, until two weeks before the start of free agency, when Emrani said he heard “murmurings” that the 76ers were a real option for James.
“I just kind of said, ‘Nope, this isn’t going to happen,’” Emrani recalled.
“So I put up 40 billboards.”
All Emrani could do after that was wait. He was vacationing with his family in Hawaii when he learned that James was signing with the Lakers.
“The pool erupted,” said Emrani, who declined to say how much he had spent on all those billboards. “I don’t mean to escape it, but I’ve never wanted the price tag to take over why I did it. It was really just about me being a representative for Lakers fans.”
More recently, Emrani has put up another billboard that welcomes James to Los Angeles, along with a message — “Need Anything? Call Jacob!” — and a big photo of himself. Emrani said he was no longer quite so concerned about separating business from pleasure.
“I mean, he’s here now,” Emrani said, “so you might as well mix the two.”