It’s easy to talk a good game. But there’s proof when you point to something you did and say, "Yeah, that was me."
This link is not a new site, nor is it a new company, but it dawned on me this week that the most powerful marketing is proof of concept. So I think this is the benchmark. If your web site proves what you can do better than what the folks at Zaaz.com have proved they can do, then you have achieved something noteworthy.
This seems unbelievable, but an estimated 400 fans managed to see the end of a Major League Baseball Game Tuesday afternoon. Nationals vs Marlins in Miami.
By the way, the stadium seats 75,000.
So if you came to the game, by the end, you roughly had 200 seats between you and the closest fan. It’s like baseball’s version of Alaska.
The funny part is, if you built a marketing campaign, and told everyone not to stay until the last inning, you couldn’t get that high of a conversion rate. True, only 10,000 fans were there for the beginning, but you’re still talking about 96% of the crowd bolting.
Fine, 90 degrees, 100% humidity – but isn’t Miami like that every day? Fine, last place teams, but with teh exceptions of 2 seasons, aren’t the Marlins always last?
So let’s throw one more plug out there for the English Premier League. Granted, only 4 teams have a chance at winning it, and that’s not perfect by any means. But every year the worst 3 teams get demoted. You tell me there isn’t a reason to attend a September baseball game, if some team is going to be stuck spending 2008 playing against Tacoma, Sacramento and Fresno? Tell me Florida, Tampa Bay and Kansas City fans
wouldn’t see value in attending a Spetember game knowing it could be the last time they see Major League Baseball for awhile.
So back in the 90’s, it started becoming en vogue for Corporations to donate profits to charitable organizations. This started a very interesting debate about whether companies should simply deliver value to their shareholders, or be responsible for bettering the communities in which they belong.
An easy argument was to drop the charitable giving money into the overall Marketing budget and call it "Community Relations." If a giant bank sponsors runs for Leukemia and Breast Cancer research, then one could argue the CPM was worth the donation. It’s a pretty compelling argument that you can get a lot of community goodwill on your side, which then helps with non-tangibles such as recruiting, brand management and corporate morale.
Fast forward to 2007, and the magic bullet is in going "Green." Companies are denting their bottom line to use recycled paper, advanced heating and cooling systems, subsidizing public transportation for employees and other efforts. And shareholders seem to be ok with that.
But what about Google’s latest announcement. According to a Google release, "Google.org is committed to finding innovative transportation solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming…As part of this initiative, we are issuing a $10 million request for investment proposals (RFP). We plan to invest amounts ranging from $500,000 to $2,000,000 in selected for-profit companies whose innovative approach, team and technologies will enable widespread commercialization of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, electric vehicles and/or vehicle-to-grid solutions."
Now, you can look at this 3 ways:
1) Google makes $10 million in an hour, so it’s irrelevant to shareholders. Great PR move.
2) This is a completely for profit effort for Google, stemming from their M+A group, and Google Shareholders should benefit down the road.
3) This $10 Million is nice, but why is an online search and media company investing in Transportation, something they could not possible know anything about? Shareholders should be annoyed.
On a lighter note, what happens if Google ends up building the killer transportation app? Will everyone be commuting to the Microsoft campus on the Google Mobile?
In the most dramatic public relations turnaround one could image from a teenager, I thought Miss Teen South Carolina showed a lot of poise in her national comeback at the MTV Video Music Awards. The clip of her making fun of herself is found here at Buzznet.
I don’t see how anyone can say anythng mean about her ever again. After all, she got invited to the VMA’s, and we did not, so good for her making something positive out of a complete disaster.
I must admit I was riding an emotional high last week when I posted the video from the 8 year old, in which a classic video game was turned into stop motion animation using legos. I was temporarily fooled into thinking the U.S. Education system was on track.
Then……….this video surfaces from the Miss Teen USA pageant. The pride of South Carolina, right here. It hurts too much too look away……
So President Bush visited Seattle, or more accurately, Bellevue, this afternoon for a fundraiser for Congressman Dave Reichert. I happened to be driving by the hotel a few hours before the President’s appearance, and was surprised by the hundreds of protesters gathered on street corners around the hotel.
As I drove through this collection of people, I was struck with a thought. Just based on their appearance, I don’t know if I could ever agree with them. They were ragged, dirty and unkempt. I found myself wanting to disagree with whatever their signs said, just so I couldn’t be classified with them.
It made me wonder whether protesters could be more effective if they spent a little more time tuning their message to the mainstream, rather than preaching to the fringe. How many worthy causes are derailed by failing to observe basic tenets of marketing and public relations? Furthermore, if a protester’s goal is to sway and persuade, and their actions instead make me sympathetic to the cause they are protesting, shouldn’t the protester stop attending events? Isn’t in the protester’s best interest to evaluate the effectiveness of his campaign?
I wonder if the power of Freedom of Speech is diluted by zealots and loonies who use it to push people away. From a marketing perspective, how do you control your zealots, and make them unharmful to your cause? If you were the Prius Marketing Manager, and someone started a blog campaign asking people to send in pictures of where they get stoned in their car, how would you react? In today’s internet where everyone can be heard, how do you control your fans that can do harm to your ability to market to the mainstream?
Ok, you still don’t think you’re getting laid off when you’re 45? Well here’s what 8 year olds can do with their computer and a set of legos. What can you do?
Ok, I promise this is not going to turn into a soccer blog.
But, let’s look at football, baseball and basketball. We have all seen games in which an official makes an EGREGIOUS mistake. The players know it, the fans know it, the announcers know it. The next day the papers write about it. The bloggers can’t stop wriitng about it. Talk shows go on about it for days.
Yet the league will say nothing. And when the owner complains about it, he gets fined.
From a brand perspective, this is disastrous. By defending the official who made the error, the league is saying one of three things to the fans:
1) We told him to make a bad call.
2) We don’t care when they make bad calls.
3) Heck, we’re lucky the official didn’t make more bad calls.
Now I present you the English Premier League. A mere 30 hours ago, Liverpool played at home vs Chelsea. This is the equivalent of Colts vs Patriots, except imagine every Patriots fan has slept with the wife of every Colts fan, and the Patriots are owned by Osama Bin Laden.
Now, the ref makes a horrible horrible call to basically award Chelsea a game-tying goal, and as American soccer fans know, one goal in soccer is like 21 points in football. So imagine an NFL ref making 3 consecutive calls that award 21 points to the Patriots – and because of it, the game ends in a tie.
Fans here would be in outrage. And the NFL would sit in absolute silence, defending the integrity of the officiating crew. (If you don’t believe me, maybe you want to go back to Seahawks vs Steelers in the 2006 Super Bowl….)
But not here in the EPL. And to bring a sudden conclusion to this ramble, I will simply say that the league has BANISHED the ref for a week and the ref *gasp* admitted he made a mistake – and then apologized! This my friends is what makes the EPL great. The ref screwed up. He admitted it. He got punished. He said he was sorry. Move on to Week 4. I’m imagining Mark Cuban printing out copies of this article and bringing it to every subsequent meeting in which he gets fined.
You want to know how to build a brand – you be honest about it. End of story.
More on this at ESPN SoccerNet.
So, I finally sat down and watched the 1st half of a MLS game. It was probably because of David Beckham, and a New York vs LA game in front of 66,000 people is good in any sport. And if you were the MLS, you had to be pleased with 3 goals in about 12 minutes, with 2 of them assisted by Beckham.
The game was fun, it was ok soccer, and I recognized some names. The fans were enthusiastic and the stadium was packed. But there was still something missing for me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Then the next morning I went down to the George and Dragon for breakfast and to watch Manchester City v Manchester United. That’s when I realized what was missing from the MLS game. For all the excitement and story lines, at the end of the day, it’s just harder to watch any league in which the best players in the world aren’t taking part. That’s not a knock on the MLS – it’s a credit to the EPL. And as much as I am rooting for soccer in the U.S, I’m still unsure how to promote what is essentially a minor league.
But then I think about all these reality TV shows, where second rate singers, chefs, designers, MBA students and outdoorsmen compete for big money and a short-cut to the big time. These are people who by definition are not successes yet – minor leaguers in their professions if you will. And Americans eat it up. The chase for the dream is what drives the viewership. Americans are actually watching other people cook, yet we can’t get them to watch soccer.
So what I’m getting at, is in the case of a minor league sport, maybe we need to promote the dream aspect. It would be great if they could figure out some way that one MLS guy gets a European contract every year, based on some sort of elimination. Just a thought.
So I have to admit being very intrigued by a company called Ripple TV. You may have seen Ripple at a neighborhood Tully’s. The concept is pretty straightforward – a typical High Def TV, displaying canned news and sports information from CBS and ESPN. But the catch is, the screens are designed to run locally targeted ads that small business can create and upload themselves.
Or to put it another way, the two major pains about advertising are the creative costs and the inability to target effectively. Ripple TV solves both these problems. I get to choose which Tully’s my ad runs, and they provide me the tools to create the ad on the fly and upload it.
"Ripple has partnered with many of the World’s leading retail brands to provide a powerful in-store digital media experience that keeps their customers engaged, entertained and informed. Ripple’s user experience is customized specifically for each distribution partner, providing a truly custom experience that perfectly supports the brand, demographic, geographic and user experience requirements of each partner. Ripple keeps your customers engaged with the very latest news, financial information, sports, weather, traffic, local information and entertainment programming from the World’s leading content brands."
So, the only initial limitation, which I’m sure will be solved soon, is that they have relatively few major partners (Tully’s), and so the audience is not very diverse. But, that’s hardly a criticism. Instead, I applaud Ripple for landing such a great anchor partner. That really is quite a coup.
I don’t this affects agencies at all, because if anything the Ripple system grows the advertising pie, catering to small business owners that agencies didn’t really care about anyway. And the small business owner only needs a rudimentary sense of style and analytical skills to run a test ad for $75 in a neighborhood, so the cost to get started is minimal.
Fascinating concept, and I hope it does well.