• by September 4, 2003

With apologies to Howard Stern, the National Football League is truly the King of All Media, a fact that will again become readily apparent when the league lifts the curtain on its 2003 season tonight. Unless you've been hiding in a cave - or, alternately, hunkering down for your fantasy football draft - you probably haven't missed the league's promo blitz for the NFL Kickoff Live 2003 festivities that begin at 8 p.m. It will be broadcast on ABC, which promises more eyeballs than last season's ESPN gala. Supported by a $35 million campaign that tapped just about every possible ad medium except skywriting, the kickoff festivities are seemingly intended to bring in the few fans who haven't already been lured by the league's shrewdly marketed product. But pundits who claim the mix of song (from Britney, Aerosmith and Mary J. Blige, among others) and ceremony (war veterans will be saluted) will overshadow the game itself are missing the point. It's not about providing the hard-core football crew with a few extra morsels - they've had September 4 circled on the calendar for months and will probably be more interested in ESPN's in-depth pre-game coverage. It's about the fans that might otherwise tune into Friends at 8 p.m. In short, it's about appealing to new and potentially lucrative audiences. And no sports league has proven savvier at drawing in new fans, whether through "Football 101" seminars for novice woman viewers or the grassroots "Play Football" program for children. Tonight's event will continue that farsighted marketing approach, with public-service components (support of the U.S. Department of the Interior's "Take Pride in America" initiative, which encourages volunteerism) and a tug at the ol' heartstrings (a salute to the Department of Defense's "Operation Tribute to Freedom," which supports active and returned troops in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts). Then there are corporate marketing partners like Pepsi, which has chipped in $2.5 million to make Pepsi Vanilla the ceremony's "presenting sponsor," and Coors Light (which will debut a new commercial spot during the event), the New York Stock Exchange, 989 Sports' "NFL GameDay 2004" video game and Reebok. To borrow some terminology from the former national pastime: the NFL has all its bases covered. As for a prediction, we're thinking Redskins 31, Jets 21. Poor Vinny won't do much against the Bailey/Smoot corner tandem, and the Jets' running game isn't strong enough to compensate.

Sometimes A Flame Is Just A Flame: Okay, we get the flickering flame metaphor in the ads popping up for Bayer's new Levitra prescription drug brand. You don't have to light a match under our feet for that one. But on closer inspection the flame at the center of these ads appears - at least to the Riff's warped sensibility - to have a more sublime message going on, one that connotes a certain anatomical imagery. Only it doesn't appear to be the correct body part for a drug designed to treat male sexual dysfunction disorders. Or maybe it is. Or, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes things are just what they seem to be.