I have to write things down here or I'll forget them.
I’ve been meaning to bring this up for awhile. I don’t know who really is better in this Verizon vs AT&T 3G face-off, but I love that ad agencies and marketing firms can go to war with each other so quickly. What I love more, is that people get to go to the YouTube Comments Boards to fight it out as well…
I’m not sure what this has to do with Christmas, but it’s funny. I like that a sports star and famous actress are using YouTube for something they’re definitely not getting paid for.
Yes, I’ve succumbed to the Tiger Woods scandal. I think there are a few items of this story that make it different than the ordinary tabloid affair.
1) The effect this will have on golf: Golfers didn’t become multi-millionaires for consistently finishing 13th until Tiger got to town. A huge percentage of golf fans are simply Tiger fans. Phil vs Tiger is completely different than Phil vs “That other guy.” Sponsors were paying big money for Tiger, which meant TV networks could charge more money to Golf advertisers, which more money was going into the Prize Pool of each tournament. Companies are already having to trim marketing costs. This is a great excuse for companies to pull money out of Golf. If you were the 45th ranked player in the world, you may have found this funny when the story broke, but your check for finishing 13th just got smaller.
2) Why the Tabloid Web sites are crushing the Sports sites: I can’t think of a better example of the power of search driving news consumption. For the reasons listed in Section 1, the sports sites like ESPN.com have been loathe to dig too deeply into the story. There’s a lot of hand waving and things like, “Yeah, Tiger’s in some controversy over there, but let us tell you all about the upcoming Alabama vs Texas game.” ESPN needs this to go away, so they can get back to the business of reporting on Golf and Tiger’s domination in the sport. To the sports sites, Tiger taking time out of competing in Golf is comparable to the New York Yankees deciding to sit out one season. Or having the the entire rosters of both 2009 NBA All-Star teams take a year off to travel the globe. But, ESPN’s decision to pretend it’s not a “big deal” is not fooling anyone. People are just going to their favorite search engine, typing in “Tiger Woods,” and getting the juicy stories from other sources, like TMZ. It’s another example of why in the news aggregation business, we really need to ensure all web sites get a level playing field to broadcast across. You can’t trust news sources if they are in the pockets of the people paying the bills.
3) Seeing the Inside Mechanics of Tiger’s Spin Machine: I don’t know about you, but I’ve been shocked at what seems to be near PR incompetence from Team Tiger. Now, it’s possible that his transgressions are so monumental that cutting them down to 2 porn stars, a pseudo-madame, a reality show wanna-be and a few other random floozies, is actually a big win because they’ve managed to keep the other 90 quiet. If that’s the case, then all of Team Tiger should be ashamed for not reigning him in earlier. It’s also possible that their whole strategy of keeping him away from cameras for the last 10 years was specifically designed because they knew he’s been an eventual PR nightmare ready to explode. But it does seem like all of the companies with money invested in Tiger should have been able to assemble a PR “Dream Team” to handle this better.
4) The Unfortunate Duck and Cover Strategy: With some regard to number 3 above, I think it’s incredibly sad that Team Tiger’s best exit plan is to throw Elin under the bus. According to some web sites, there’s a claim that Elin is demanding, “Your family or your golf.” This would be a convenient excuse for Tiger to disappear to Dubai for 12 months and avoid having to discuss this issue with anyone. The public perception would be that he “loves his family so much,” that he’s giving up golf to make it right by them. The reality would be that the wife would be placed in the position of “Bad Guy” to anyone who watches golf. Plus, sponsors, other golfers, advertisers and golf fans would all be cheated by having a year without the best player in the world. The great thing about team sports, is that no matter what mess you find yourself in, you have an obligation to the rest of your team. Alex Rodriguez couldn’t take a year off. He had to go out every day and get heckled by fans, because he was ONE of 25 New York Yankees. Kobe Bryant was ONE of 12 LA Lakers. Those guys had to stick their pride in their back pockets and still compete against the best athletes in the world. It would be sad if Tiger used the excuse of “My wife doesn’t want me to play” as a way to duck the criticism he deserves.
Those are the thoughts of the top of my head.
It may be funny to think that a technology that didn’t even exist in 1989 could do a nice job of commemorating the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But http://www.berlintwitterwall.com is a pretty cool mashup of Twitter feeds from around the world. You don’t need to be a Social Media wonk, or even have a Twitter account to enjoy it.
(Finally something somewhat social media related.)
Here’s a fun little ticker from a guy named Gary Hayes and his blog Personalize Media. Who knows if the data is accurate, but it’s fun to watch numbers go up…
To the faithful 49 of you, my apologies for my week away. I headed out to New York for “Ad Week” and a bunch of interesting meetings and assorted merriment. Anyway, I read an article a few weeks or months ago about some poor guy who told everyone on his blog that he was leaving town for a 2 week vacation, only to to return to a house devoid of all his valuables. So until I get a Doberman, I think talking about leaving town, or alerting people to when I’m out fo town, is a bad idea.
Now, I’m no prolific blogger who is going to give you a play by play from all the evnts at Ad Week in New York. Clay and I hung near the more social media related events and seminars, and here are a couple of things I took from the week.
1) I’m not sure where all the unemployed people are in New York, because every good restaurant in that town is still hard to get seated in, even at 10:00pm on a Monday night.
2) At the risk of annoying all my friends and partners in the Ad World, I posit this theory. It’s possible that the explosion of Social Media is a direct result of consumer backlash against advertising. People (aka Consumers) got tired of a one way communication channel. Then things like blogs, facebook and Twitter appeared, and suddenly everyone had a way to talk to each other and ignore the advertising. Only after the social media attack on advertising did the agencies decide to embrace Social Media. In fact, the agencies did everything they could to dismiss it as a passing fad. And so now, to hear all the agencies on stage talking about the power of Social Media and how they are integrating it into client strategy, is kind of funny to me. It’s kind of like a coal or oil company suddenly recommending what solar panels you should buy. It’s just my theory.
3) A quick note to all panelists and keynoters: Please dial down the hyperbole about “Social Media Revolutions” or “The Incredible Power of Social Media.” The reality is that consumers have always wanted to tell companies what they think of them. They’ve always wanted to tell the Slurpee Product Manager that Banana sucks and to quick wasting a spigot on such a dumb flavor. Or that the battery life of their laptop needs to be as long as a movie, otherwise it’s worthless. People have had these opinions forever. And now they have a megaphone, and their friends have megaphones. It shouldn’t be a gigantic revelation to think that people who spend money on a product they like would want to have interaction with that product and provide ways the company could make the consuming experience more enjoyable and effective. I’m not saying your keynotes are wrong, you can just dial down the rhetoric a little.
4) Before I get accused of being negative, I want to add that I think it’s great that the agencies are now going full steam into figuring out how to build creative campaigns for customer engagement. I’ve always believed the creative teams at the big agencies are more representative of Joe Consumer than Malcolm Corporation III. And now instead of using their creative powers of good in a way that cost them part of their soul, they’ll be able to unleash themselves in ways that develop connection and goodness. So I think we’re going to see some really cool experiments in the next 12 months.
5) I’m not sure what to make of the fact that Ad week was going on the same day of the UN sessions where Khadaffi (sp?) and the Iranian President (whose name I won’t even attempt Spellcheck to fight with) went off on crazy soliloquies.
Overall, we had a great time chatting with partners, clients, friends and colleagues. Lots of neat announcements and fun times. Thanks to everyone who made it a good, fun and productive week.
If you’ve read this blog a few times, you know that I have unabashedly praised the management of Sounders FC since Day 1. I admit I’m a little biased due to my previous professional relationship with a person in a high level of management there, plus my overall interest in soccer. But I have objective arguments for how much I admire their work.
That being said, I’m not going to shy away from saying that tonight’s match with FC Barcelona left me underwhelmed for the first time out of the 11 or 12 games I’ve attended so far. On one hand, maybe my expectations were too high. The best team in the world comes to town, I want to see magic. And in the first half, I saw some really cool things from Messi, Xavi, Henry, etc..
Then a funny thing happenned at halftime. The Sounders decided that this was indeed a friendly, and they didn’t need to play any regulars for the second 45 minutes. After all, the team is 2/3 of the way through their season, in a playoff hunt and coming off their worst loss of the year. It made tactical sense to rest the starters.
And so for the first time all year, they forgot who they were. They confused themselves with the Seahawks and 1996-2003 Mariners. They forgot that out of the 65,000+ who came to the game tonight, 25-30,000 of them had never been to a Sounders game before. They forgot that the MLS is the MLS. And for the first time all year, they forgot to put on a show.
The result was 45 minutes of second half football that resembled 2 people kicking a ball of yarn away from a cat. The Barcelona second team seemed to be under strict orders not to attack the goal until at least 10 passes had been completed. (And yes, we were counting as they passed the ball easily from one side of the field to another.) The Sounders first team is a very competitive MLS team.. With all due respect, the Sounders second team is made up of guys who can’t play on a first team in Norway or Sweden. I don’t say this with contempt. I’m just saying when I fire up my Xbox 360 and play Fifa 09, a game with about 1.2 gajillion players in its database, the guys on the Sounders reserve squad are not in that database.
So, imagine you are the Sounders management. Your immediate response is, “Andy, what do you want? I brought you Chelsea and Barcelona. Oh, and we’re in 2nd place. Oh, and we made it to the US Open Cup Final. So take your blog and smoke it.”
And that is an argument I can totally agree with. So maybe next year, bring me one of Chelsea and Barcelona. And maybe bring me someone else not so good that we can actually compete with. Maybe AC Milan and Watford. Or Tottenham and PSV. Or maybe the MLS needs to give the teams a week off o they can book friendlies and not get screwed by the schedule.
My rambling point, is that the MLS lost out tonight when Barcelona’s subs playes Seattle’s subs for 45 minutes on front of 65,000 people that paid full price to see at least one of the teams play starters all night long. Or if you were going to sub everyone out, at least do it at the 50 minute mark and pull them off the field to a standing ovation. Instead, we got one half of fun soccer, then the teams sneaking the players off the field at halftime, with a level of play in the second half that simply confirmed for soccer haters why they dislike the sport. Blame it on the MLS, blame it on Barcelona, or blame it on the Sounders. But I think for the first time, they allowed a crowd to leave the stadium saying, “I don’t get what the excitement is all about.”
Ok, this is whay I deserve for watching Fox Soccer Channel on a Saturday evening.
Channel 401 is awesome if you want to see some of the most random commercials from companies who can’t afford stations that receive am actual rating point. But this one takes the cake.
Imagine a young 19 year old girl standing in her lingerie. Starting with some line like, “Guys, don;t you wish you were out of your pajamas right now?” And then she goes on to tell us how important it is to get an education, and since watching soccer on a Saturday night obviously makes us uneducated, we should get an online degree.
You might think they’d spend the 60 seconds talking about a brand we could Google or Bing (heretofore to be simply called “Bingle”) later. But instead they have bought a bunch of urls to test their ad effectiveness, and thus drive the unique url the whole time. So they own http://10connect.com, http://20connect.com, http://30connect.com etc all the way up to 100. (Trust me if you don’t believe me.)
Anyway, I’d love to understand more about this campaign. Do lingerie-clad teenagers really drive signups for online education? Weird.
With the Sounders selling out their entire season, it’s easy to forget that the rest of the MLS is not sharing the same attendance success.
BigSoccer.com has a good article about how Frisco, TX (suburn of Dallas), used their MLS squad as a way to get an entire community complex developed, and how everything works together in a nice synergy. Perhaps there’s a way to do something similar with a basketball/hockey/concert arena type complex in Seattle?
In the last few months, thanks mainly to my association with the UW Foster School of Business, I’ve been able to meet with a number of top flight students and recent graduates hunting for jobs in Advertising or Marketing.
I keep seeing a few common themes. There aren’t that many new marketing jobs out there, many firms who have marketing jobs are cutting people, and many people who currently have these jobs are reinventing themselves so they can keep getting their paychecks. This does not lead to a simple path to employment for a rookie.
So, as a person at a company who is hiring, not firing, at the current moment, here are a few things from my personal perspective that I think can help you. (Please note: this point of view is not necessarily endorsed by my company and will not necessarily help your resume get through our screeners. It’s simply my opinion.)
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