Live show kicks off NFL year

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The NFL lacks for very little these days, but subtlety can be counted among its shortcomings.

America's most dominant sports league will open its 2003 regular season tonight with a glitzy concert extravaganza on the Mall before an expected crowd of nearly 300,000.

The $10 million event, backed by another $35million worth of marketing muscle, will showcase Aerosmith, Britney Spears and Aretha Franklin, pay tribute to U.S. military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and herald in near-bombastic fashion the return of the true national pastime.

The event, shown live on ABC (WJLA, Channel7), will occur before the Washington Redskins-New York Jets game at FedEx Field.

Not surprisingly, the league's internal goals with its "NFL Kickoff Live" are similarly widespread and ambitious. Even though the NFL enjoys unrivaled strength among U.S. sports fans, the league is still trying to broaden its overall brand awareness, win new fans among women, children and teenagers, and keep TV ratings from suffering the marked erosion afflicting nearly every other major sport.

Last year's debut installment of "NFL Kickoff Live," a concert in New York's Times Square before 500,000 people, helped boost the league's opening week TV ratings 11 percent compared to the opening slate of games in 2001. And that one-week bump in TV ratings provided the primary fuel for a 5.5 percent improvement in average per-game viewership for the season.

"Our hard-core fans know our season is starting, and lot of general fans know our season is starting," said John Collins, NFL senior vice president of marketing and sales. "But we want to create an additional layer of awareness to our product and hit a much broader demographic.

"We want to start our season as big as we end it [with the Super Bowl]. The NFL is a premier entertainment brand, and not just about sports. We can and want to serve a lot of different interests and this [concert] is certainly a big part of that," Collins said.

Also performing at tonight's concert will be R&B star Mary J. Blige and rock band Good Charlotte, the latter from Waldorf, Md. The concert additionally serves as the finale of a four-day football festival on the Mall which has included interactive games, autograph signings by NFL legends, youth football clinics and charity events.