I read the digital version of the Philadelphia Inquirer every morning and flip through the pages on my phone while the kids eat breakfast and complain about something. Today, the four year old didn’t want to watch Bubble Guppies, while the one year old decided to throw her drink cup across the room.

While addressing those two transgressions, I noticed a full-page Wednesday advertisement promoting the Sixers’ arena project:

Out of curiosity, I went to the Wawa and actually bought a physical copy of the paper for the first time in years, just to see if the ad was running in both versions.

Sure enough, there it is, with a portion at the bottom I couldn’t screengrab on my phone:

First things first – notice the two mentions of Market East right at the top? You can see the messaging is crafted to steer the narrative away from Chinatown. There’s been a whole lot of negative pushback from that community, which sits right on the arena border, so there’s obviously been a conscious effort to brand the arena as occupying a slice of land where the Fashion District currently sits. You will have MARKET EAST hammered into your skull over and over again, which honestly is the smart thing to do from the Sixers’ perspective.

The message itself is attributed to Gensler’s Jordan Goldstein and Maddy Crippen. Gensler is the architecture firm that the Sixers are working with. There’s a portion of the copy addressing concerns raised by Inga Saffron in a recent column, while asking rhetorical questions about how a downtown arena might benefit the city and its residents. It concedes the difficulty of logistics while essentially talking about “what could be” if the project is done the right way.

More interesting, however, are the two snippets at the bottom of the ad. These come from op-eds that were submitted to the Inquirer, but did not end up being published. In a roundabout way, former Mayor Michael Nutter’s neutral take on the arena and labor leader Ryan Boyer’s favorable take on the arena ended up being printed in the paper, this time in the form of a paid advertisement.

It’s all very fascinating to follow. The Sixers find themselves in a critical portion of the arena timeline here. There’s been a lot of pushback on the 76 Place project, be it from Chinatown neighbors worried about gentrification, parking, and other issues, and Philly sports fans at large who don’t want to go downtown, think they’re going to get murdered on the train, and/or don’t think there’s anything wrong with the Wells Fargo Center.

As we’ve laid out plenty of times before, the Sixers’ main goal here is to open their own building and no longer be a Comcast tenant, but they’ve got their work cut out for them in terms of swaying public opinion. From the Comcast/Flyers side, they feel like they’ve put a lot of money into renovating the WFC and would like to continue their partnership with the Sixers. That agreement has eight years remaining and ends in 2031.