Category Archives: Seattle

Fan Friendly Ticketing

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Personal, Seattle, Sports

I promise, if the Seattle Sounders do something like try to move to Oklahoma City, or spend $117 million on players I wouldn’t add to a Fantasy baseball team, I’ll complain about it.  But as long as they keep doing things that impress me as a marketing professional, I’m going to keep sharing how impressed I am.

sounders.jpgThis week, I went through the pleasurable and fun process of selecting my 2009 season ticket package.  In comparison, I’ve completely given up on using Ticketmaster.com due to its inflexibility and 75% Convenience charge.  It’s amazing that you can’t choose your seats on that site, but instead are held hostage to a weak algorithm that supposedly gives you "Best Available" in a certain section.  Plus, I honestly don’t understand how I can order 5 books from Amazon Marketplace from 5 different people and pay like $15.00 total in shipping, but if I try to use Ticketmaster to buy 4 concert tickets, they want to charge something like $50 just to print out a couple of ducats and stick them at will call.  Why?  Are my tickets taking a limo from TM HQ to the arena? Is the paper laced with gold?  What could command $50 in service charges?  Anyway, now I just take the time to go to the stadium, pick out seats I want and leave happy.

But I digress.

The Sounders experience was as close to "Anti-Ticketmaster" as I can find.  Even if you don’t care about soccer, I encourage you to go through the process at http://tickets.soundersfc.com/   .  Choose whether you want to sit or stand during the game.  Or if you want to be in a section that sings or not.  Take a virtual tour of every row in every section.  It’s a very fan friendly experience, and trust me, the fans appreciate it. 

Let me know if you have found any other ticket places with convenient tools such as this. 

 

5 (or so) Reasons Everyone Should Attend Monday’s Sonics Rally

Posted by Andy Boyer in Politics, Seattle, Sports

This Monday at 4:30pm, the Save Our Sonics Organization is hosting a rally on the courthouse steps  (700 Stewart St., Seattle). Sonics legends Gary Payton and Xavier McDaniel are confirmed to attend and speak at 4:30 pm. Other Sonics Legends have been invited and are expected to appear.

Now whether you are a die-hard fan, casual observer or don’t even care and just live and work in Seattle, here are 5 (or 7) reasons you should show support.

  1. For the first time ever, a city and state did not bow down to a league that demanded a new tax-payer funded stadium.  You should show that a league should not punish a city for this appropriate action.
  2. Over 41 years, more than 20,000,000 people have watched Sonics games in person.  That’s a piece of history that should stay – and I bet it’s more than have watched the symphony, opera and ballet combined.
  3. You cannot idly sit by and watch an Oklahoma Oil Baron (who is also a Republican) come rob the eco-friendly Pacific Northwest of one of its assets.
  4. At least some of your friends care about this, so you should support them.  They contribute to your Sierra Club, Humane Society and kid’s school’s auctions.  This doesn’t even cost you anything.
  5. It’s happy hour in Seattle – what an excuse to kill an hour off your work day on a Monday?  
  6. David Stern is proving to be an arrogant, very bad man.  Don’t let him get away with this without Seattle making some noise.
  7. There’s about a 1% chance the team survives.  If that miracle occurs, 34 years from now on the Sonics 75th anniversary, don’t you want to tell your grand-kids, "I was at the rally that proved to be the turning point."

 Get there – do your part.  Make it a huge rally that gets on the national news. 

Should We Revisit the Seattle Monorail

Posted by Andy Boyer in Politics, Seattle

A few years ago, we had this crazy idea to build a monorail, that would start in downtown and brtanch out to two of Seattle’s far flung neighborhoods, Ballard and Seattle.

By most accounts, the whole plan was run by the guys who drive clown cars, and the money guys needed an abacus to count sea shells on the beach.  It was the little engine that couldn’t even though all of us have spent about $1500 in taxes for the train that never ran.

But is it time to dust off the powerpoint, and re-run the Excel spreadsheet with new numbers?  Interest rates have never been lower, so the money would be cheaper.  Gas prices have never been hire, but will be tomorrow (and the day after, and the day after that, etc…), so you can assume ridership will skyrocket.   And now we have a real crisis, and you see how civic leaders (i.e. Steve Ballmer) suddenly appear in times of crisis.

Sometimes great ideas have terrible execution, or poor timing, and all it takes is a different team on a diferent day to turn a dud into nirvana.  Think the Smarte Car, which 25 years ago was a dog called the Yugo.  Or the iPod, which in 1997 was a dorky thing called Diamond Rio.  The Newton never made it, but pieces of it came back into every PDA sold from 2003-2007. 

So, what do you think?  Why not revisit this whole monorail thing, with a new team driving the project? 

 

Watch Great Soccer – Support Seattle’s All Nations Cup

Posted by Andy Boyer in Personal, Seattle, Sports

2008%20ANC%20Poster%20Final%20Web.jpgIf you have not booked out every  Saturday or Sunday for the next 3 weeks, try to book some time to check out the All Nations Cup 2008. This is truly one of the most unique events in Seattle, and a great example of what makes the city a pretty cool place to live.

The All Nations Cup is an amateur soccer tournament where every player competes for their home country.  It’s like the World Cup, but for amateurs.  (This weekend’s schedule here.)

I’ve been sporadically over the last few years, and the soccer is always of high quality.  But the real fun is seeing the fans.  You have these small communities of people from Ethiopia, Bosnia, Gambia, etc….There may only be a few hundred in the whole city, but most of them come out to support this group of amateur players.  Everyone has their flags, songs, drums, etc…

All games are at Starfire down in Tukwila and it’s like $10 or $15 or something per day.   With 4 games going on at once, you can shift from field to field and see some pretty strong players.

If you get down there, let me know. 

Sounders Show Off New Microsoft Uniforms

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Media, Seattle, Sports

sounders.jpgThere will be no jokes about the Sounders having to restart the game every 30 minutes to reboot.  Nor will anyone talk about them having a bloated team of 476 players.  And certainly no one will complain that every MLS team must have 10 players from the Sounders roster included with every installation.

No, we won’t make those jokes because despite getting Microsoft money, the Sounders now have the coolest sponsor in the MLS and the best uniforms in the league.

In fact, I may go as far as to say that the MLS has the coolest sponsor in all of Professional soccer, with the announcement of Xbox 360 deciding to be the face (or chest as it were) of Seattle soccer.

Think about the great teams in Euro soccer and then think about their sponsors:

  • Manchester United: AIG Insurance (On a scale of 1 to 100, they score 130 on the boring meter)
  • Arsenal: Emirates Air (borrrrring)
  • Chelsea: Samsung (boring, but at least they are technology)
  • RealMadrid:  BenQ Siemens (more technology, but from Taiwan)
  • Bayern Munich: T-Mobile (yawn)
  • Inter Milan: Pirelli Tires (ok, that’s pretty cool I guess.)
  • AC Milan: Bwin.com (online betting is pretty cool too I suppose)

But until I see Sony, Gucci, Rolex, Ferrari, Gulfstream, Prada, or BMW on the front of a jersey, I’ll take Xbox 360 as the coolest sponsor in soccer.  (How does Apple not get that they need to do this…) 

Even better, the sponsorship and company are here in Seattle.  And tell me it’s not a great looking jersey.  Just tell me how to order and I’m in.

(This photo was taken by Courtney Blethen of the Seattle Times, and I grabbed it from this article. Seattle Times: If you need me to take it down, please just let me know.)   

We Interrupt This Week For…..Jury Duty

Posted by Andy Boyer in Seattle

There’s nothing quite like digging out from a week or two on the road. Catching up on work, catching up with people, catching up with laundry…it’s all just one week of catchup. And nothing can throw a wrench into those catchup plans quite like being called to jury duty.

Now I know it’s important. I know if I ever get hauled off to court I would hope to have a jury of my peers there to decide my fate. But maybe at some point we need to look at the logistics of the current process.

Today I sit up on the 12th floor of the Seattle Court Building, with about 60 fellow strangers. To make the math really easy, let’s say the average salary in the room is $52,000 a year, so everyone makes $1000 a week or $200 a day. So, on average, the Tuesday to Thursday interruption would cost everyone about $600. For 60 people, we’re talking about $36,000 in wages being used for the process.

Now consider these cases are misdemeanors. No case will be more than a few hundred or maybe even a few thousand dollars. We’re taking $36,000 in wages to settle cases worth 10% of that total.

Not only that, but consider the juror who works for himself or is not paid by his employer to go to jury duty. If a guy is suing for $600, it would actually make more sense for the jurors to each chip in $100 to simply settle the case so they can go back to work.

Does this seem like the best way to handle this? This scenario didn’t even take into account the salaries of the lawyers, bailiffs, security, judges, or any other cost associated with a trial.

So if you have not been privileged with this process, here’s how it works. You show up at 8:30am and watch a pretty ironic video explaining how important your role in the process is. You get put up in a giant room which supposedly has wi-fi access (down at the time of this writing), some soda machines, coffee, magazines, etc…And you just wait. At some point they are going to come and call a bunch of people for a case.

Apparently there are 5 jury rooms, so I expect they will call 12 people at a time, with 6 people becoming actual jurors. It’s unclear whether you get bounced back to the juror pool if you don’t make the cut from 12 to 6.

Big News—-Now at 10:30, we are getting word that people are getting called. Here are the names – Judy, Earl, Sarah, Ron, Jerry, Wendy, Theodore, Anthony, Albert, Thomas, Beverly, Kirsten, Elmer, Malia, and Rob. So I don’t get picked. I get to stay in the lobby here and keep working I suppose.

14 names. Maybe there are 70 of us in here. Ok, change all the calculations up above.

I guess the rest of us sit around until the next case is ready to go to court. Maybe everyone else will settle and we all get to leave. Would that we could be so lucky.

Now if the wi-fi was working, this whole thing wouldn’t be much more than a minor inconvenience. I’d get some work done, and all that would be different would be the view. But I’m not sure why I’d expect the IT department for the City to be able to keep a wireless router running. Apparently they are assembling all the best and brightest minds down there to figure out which cord to plug back in. I can barely contain my optimism that we’ll have access anytime in the near future.

In the meantime, it appears the other computers are up and running, so as soon as the selected jurors head to court, I should be able to sneak in and siphon off an Ethernet connection to broadcast more riveting jury duty play by play, and more importantly, get some work done.

Update:  2:30pm. 

We’ve been sitting in a room all day, and only 16 of the group have been called.  Not sure what the rest of us our here for.  They let us all go to lunch from 12-1:30, so now we’re back in the room like we are doing homework in detention.  It’s werid, we’re all working or doing stuff we’d be doing anyway, but we’re annoyed because we are stuck in this building.

We hear another announcement for a cattle call:  Here come the names: gail, laura, geoffrey, guy, chris, dwayne, laura, william, berthold, teresa, edith, kay, eve, william, debra.

No Andy on that list.  I’ve been spared again.   

 

Report from the UW Business Plan Competition

Posted by Andy Boyer in Entrepreneurism, Marketing, Seattle

One of my favorite things over the past four years has been the UW Business Plan Competition.  As a grad student, in 2005, I had two ideas and we went nowhere.  In 2006, I jumped on another student team and we won "Best Consumer Product."  Last year, I was a first round judge and merely observed the rest.  And this year, thanks to the kindness of some of my favorite people, I was invited to judge the tradeshow round.

Quick moment of clarification for those who don’t know anything about this.  Every year, about 60-80 teams submit a business plan.  Some teams are made up of 4 students, some teams are established companies with a student consultant.  It’s a broad range, so you see a lot of neat ideas.  These 60-80 teams are whittled down to 32, who then fill a room and pitch their idea to about 100 judges in a tradeshow type setting.  That list gets cut down to 16, then down to 4, and a winner is chosen.  So, Wednesday, we had the tradeshow round of 32, and our job as judges was to "invest" 1000 fake dollars into at least 5 companies.  You are free to split that 1000 however you like, as long as 5 or more companies are given money.  The 16 teams who receive the most money move on to the next round.

Now, my favorite part about this whole competition is that since most of the people you talk to are undergrad, MBA or PhD students, they still have this sense of optimism and naivety.  For example, you ask an undergrad with a dream, "What’s your exit strategy?" and his response is pure and good.  He says, "Exit?  We’re going to make this a profitable business.  I don’t want to sell it.  This is my idea, and it’s going to work."  Wow, as a human being, you love hearing that.  But then you have to crush his hopes and dreams, and invite him to join the real world.  You have to tell him, "Well, here’s the thing.  If I’m a VC, and I put money in, there better damn sure be an exit.  Because I’m not really in the business of giving you a bunch of coin so you can build a company that doesn’t make me rich.  You will sell, and you will sell when I tell you to."

Anyway, the whole thing is great.  Wide eyed, naive students getting creative and coming up with some crazy cool ideas.  It’s the kind of place that you walk out of wishing they all would get the money they need to build the product they want to build.  Sure, there were some plain dumb ideas – but only dumb from the standpoint that they were unfundable.  Every idea itself had merit.  Even the ideas with terrible business plans and execution were at least interesting ideas.     

I’m being lazy and not going through the whole list of companies.  But here were some ideas that stood out for me.  I’m not saying all their business plans were great, but the ideas stuck in my head

  • A way to deliver medicine through the nose to the brain, to get cancer medicine pas the blood brain barrier.
  • A company who developed a new strain of algae that they could farm for oil.
  • An exercise device specifically tailored for people in retirement homes.  A kind of "soloflex" for people in wheelchairs.
  • A system for capturing excess carbon from buildings to decrease heating costs.
  • A career web site specifically tailored to kids right out of school.
  • A "match.com" for tradeshow attendees, where you fill out a profile, and the site suggests other people attending the show you should meet with.
  • A company that produces organic clothing.
  • A sunflower village in Kenya so villagers can earn money.
  • A Web site for coaches to help them manage their teams.
  • And other cool ideas….

Congrats to all the teams who made it to the next round.   And I hope those teams that didnt make it, continue to tweak their plans and shoot for success.

 

An Email from Mark Cuban to David Stern

Posted by Andy Boyer in Creative Writing, Personal, Seattle, Sports

So, here’s the email I’d love to see from Mark Cuban to David Stern…..

To: kingdavid@nba.com
From: mark.cuban@dallsmavs.com
Subject: WTF?

David:

Hey long time no talk.  I really miss our meetings in New York where we talk fines.  It’s my fault – I’ve been busy with the kid and all.  Hopefully I’ll be more feisty in 2009 and get to see you a little more.  

But anyway, quick question for you.  We’re in the middle of the most fascinating "End of season" in NBA History, at least in the West.  We could have NINE 50-win teams out here this year.  It should be the golden age of NBA Basketball West of the Mississippi River.  But when I opened ESPN.com this morning, the lead NBA Story was "E-mails suggest Sonics were thinking OKC in ’07."

Now, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but………………….. WTF?!?!?!? 

Ok, look, I know Clay Bennett is an oil guy and oil is like $2000 a barrel right now.  And I can’t disagree that having some oil money would be good for the league.  Look how well it worked for the English Premier League when they got that Russian Oil Baron, Abromovich.  Now Chelsea’s payroll makes the Yankees look like the Devil Rays.  Win-win all around, except for all the former KGB agents walking around Stamford Bridge these days and that goofy radiation murder.

But I digress.

I need to have a heart-to-heart with you about part of this whole Sonics hijacking.  I mean, let’s look at this on its surface.

  • We lose market #12 for market #50
  • We leave the entire Pacific NW to Portland
  • Our Northwest Division now has a team whose natural rival is Dallas.
  • We could be embroiled in a 3 year lame duck situation, where attendance falls to 254 people a game.
  • We gut a team with a 41 year tradition.
  • We have to induct Gary Payton into the Hall of Fame in a Miami Heat jersey.

I could go on and on. But I think you get the point.

EXCEPT……….this whole thing now has you in an awkward situation.  You see, dear Mr. Bennett has forced you into a corner.  I read all of those emails the Seattle Times and  ESPN published.  Not pretty.

So, from what I gather, one of two things happened: 

1) Clay-Clay and you have some kind of buddy-buddy thing going on, where you and he basically lie through your teeth all day long.  Which makes of you guys both liars, and I’m not sure how I feel about paying big fines to a liar.  Plus, you would be willingly letting a dishonest ownership group into our little clique.  I’m not sure how I feel about guys with more money than me looking for ways to screw me over.  Especially when they are under the watch of another guy who wants to screw me over.

2) OR – Clay-Clay lied to you about this whole Seattle stadium situation.  I know from experience, you don’t screw with King David.  So, I would expect you to fine or punish Clay-Clay the same way you would if any of us tried to pull something.  I mean, you went ballistic over the Kevin McHale / Joe Smith deal, and he was lying to make his team BETTER (at least he thought he was.)  If Clay-Clay really lied to you, well, you better nail him to the wall, because there are 31 other sneaky owners in this league, and we can smell weakness.  Wait till my spin machine gets going if I find out lying to David Stern is not a capital offense, but one that is remedied with a simple apology.

BTW, that wasn’t a threat.  The point is, we have a problem.  Either you and Bennett are be the slimiest people alive, which makes me question my investment in the NBA.  Or Bennett is a liar that is going to go unpunished, which makes me wonder why I get so skewered by you.  I mean, I’ve said a lot of inflammatory things, but they are all TRUE! I questioned the integrity of your refs, you fined me, and your ref ended up in jail for fixing games.  Shouldn’t I get my money back?  I mean, you fined me for being right!  And now we have this Oklahoma yahoo running around telling you lies.  If he doesn’t get punished, well, then I just have to wonder about this whole thing.

Maybe I’m just bitter about Dirk’s injury, but I am really concerned about this whole situation.  I haven’t even asked about how you could possibly ignore the desire of Steve Freaking Ballmer to join the NBA.  Good god!  He’s like the 6th richest guy in the world.  Why the hell wouldn’t we BEG for Steve to join our club?  A guy with lots of money who knows nothing about sports.  HELLO!?!?!? It’s like letting a blind samaratan sit down at a poker table.  C’mon man…This is the kind of money the NBA needs.  Clean, technology money from a global titan.  You want to expand internationally?  I think Steve might know one or two heads of state.  This guy is going to be CEO of Microsoft in 4 months.  The man has some pull.

In conclusion, I hope I haven’t said anything that will cost me another check.  But really, we need to talk about this before we look any stupider as a league.  I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but oil guys are only slightly ahead of steroid dealers and Iranian prime ministers in popularity contests right now.  And the country is in a recession.  Is this really the time to bully a bunch of unemployed people who just lost their houses, to buy a stadium for an oil tycoon while 50% of their kids aren’t graduating high school? Maybe we need to look around and pay attention to what is happening around the rest of the country….I’m just saying….maybe we can think of a way to show why we’re such a smart league, and not a bunch of billionaire morons.

Regards,

Mark Cuban 

 

Are Seattleites Unfriendly?

Posted by Andy Boyer in Human Behavior, Seattle

A close friend of mine who goes all the way back with me to our days in New Orleans, pointed out this blog posting from one of his wife’s regular reads, Misadventures in Malawi and Beyond. Here’s a quote:

"Maybe it’s the weather

One of the things that has been strange for us, but particularly hard for Jorge, is how strangers in Seattle aren’t very friendly. We don’t get out a lot, but when we do, we’re always surprised that people can walk straight past us, in our own neighborhood, and act as though they haven’t even noticed our existence.

At first I thought Jorge was just making this phenomena up, but I’ve been testing it out lately. For the last two days, I’ve gone for a walk in a nearby park. I pass dozens of people, and I make a point of looking them in the eye and smiling as they pass by, and only about one in ten will smile back. Sometimes I get a curt nod. Mostly they pretend they haven’t seen me and continue walking."

I think it’s an interesting sentiment, and one that backs up a reputation that Seattleites are "nice and polite, but not friendly." I don’t think we mean to be rude, but as a transplant from the south myself, I have always noticed that Seattle natives will tell you the exact restaurant you should go to, which park is best on Sundays, and what club to hit if you love live music, but they rarely say,"Come with us, we’re going out this weekend."  It’s a subtle but important difference between being nice and helpful, and showing real hospitality.

Anyway, the point isn’t to bag on Seattle, but to maybe provide some reasons why this might be the case.  Here are the best defenses I can think of.

1) We’re stuck up here in the top left corner of the country, and so the original settlers of Seattle really really really wanted to get away from everyone.  In fact, they went as far as they could go to get away.  So, I don’t think "social" is a real dominant gene in many of Seattle’s forefathers.

2) This is a pretty nice area, so there are a lot of natives here that simply never leave.  This causes a ton of 3rd and 4th generation families, and folks who go to high school and college here, and who build careers off of family connections.  They all have established treasured friends and relationships, and it’s hard to come up with a reason to reach out to someone passing through town for a few years.

3) A lot of the social activities up here are done best by yourself, or with a person you are close to.  Running, hiking, kayaking, camping, skiing, mountain climbing, etc…It’s hard to meet a neighbor for the first time and say, "I’m going to climb Rainier this weekend, want to come?"

4) We have a ton of technology firms up here.  Developers and Programmers are brilliant, but might not exactly be the most socially adept folks.

Of course, to the author’s point, it might just be the weather.  45 and raining is not the time to start up a conversation with a stranger in the park….Anyway, speak up Seattle.  Any other reasons that we shun strangers?