I just stumbled across The Sports Economist, a collection of business related sports stories.  Seemed like a good one to add to the blogroll.

http://thesportseconomist.com/ 

So, I thought I’d throw a few tips out there for any of you about to do a satellite TV interview.  This is all based on the half hour I spent yesterday, shooting at KCPQ 13 in Seattle for a interview with Orlando TV station WOFL Fox 35.

1) You might expect that they will take you to a closed door studio, where you have plenty of privacy in order to make you feel more comfortable and less nervous.  Not so much.  Plan on having a camera and a backdrop situated in the middle of a bustling newsroom, where no one is actually paying attention to you, but they all can hear every word you say.

2) I brought about 7 shirts, 4 ties and 3 jackets so that I could get advice on the best color combo.  Don’t expect much more than, "Don’t wear white," and "I like the blue one." 

3) There will be a camera pointing at you, and a monitor as well, so you will be tempted to use this monitor as a mirror, since you can see yourself.  Except, it’s not a mirror, it’s a monitor, so everything is in reverse.  If your tie is off a little to the right in the monitor, and you do the natural thing and move it to the left, all you have done is basically take your tie halfway off your neck.  So now you must start over.   

4) Most importantly, when you are there to shoot in a 15 minute "window," if it is running late, start figuring out who needs to get something fixed.  Our window got cut short because we started late due to a technical issue that each station thought the other one was fixing.  So, just be aware that 15 minutes means 15 minutes, but only if you start on time.

5) Don’t fidget.  I haven’t seen the tape yet, but apparently I slowly drifted my chair a few inches to the right every minute or so.  So by the end of the shoot I had drifted pretty significantly off center.  It probably won’t be noticed, but try to sit still.

6) It’s a little weird when you can’t see the guy asking the questions but he can see you.  But not nearly as weird as the realization that you are talking to a camera pointed at Orlando, and even though they can all hear youir answers, no one else in the Seattle newsroom klnows what you are being asked.

7) Prepare an opening answer, and nail it.  Then, no matter what the first question is, answer it with your opening statement.  That makes sure all your talking points get across.  If they need to, they’ll go back and edit the question so it sounds more relevant, but chance are they won’t even notice. 

Ok, so now I’m officially a media consultant.  I’ll fire up the WOFL-TV url when the story gets posted.  Thanks to WOFL-TV anchor and old friend Cale Ramaker for the chance to embarass myself, I mean promote MyElectionChoices.com. 

Seattle just got a Trolley.  Excellent news.  The Trolley will run down South Lake Union. And so imagine the guy painting the acronym on the side of car.  Bay Area Rapid Transit = "Bart";  South Lake Union Trolley =

Uh oh.  "Uh boss, can I ask you a quick question?"

So now we have a street car instead.  SLUSC.  Not really much better….. If it was shortened to Lake Union Street Car (LUSC), you could pronounce it "Lucy." Any other ideas?

So, once you take out porn and gambling, no Intenet industry is as profoitable as Fantasy Sports.  In fact, you can make a pretty legitimate argument that no industry was helped by the Internet more than Fantasy Sports Leagues.  I mean, people were always going to buy books, and go to garage sales, but were they really going to drop $100 on Fantasy Football?

So now all the major sports players have built established fantasy leagues, and it’s interesting how it’s evolved.  Since people play in multiple leagues with different groups of friends, and different league "commissioners" who set the whole thing up, there’s not really an easy way to establish brand loyalty.  I’m going to choose to play in whatever league my friend Matt sets up, not Yahoo or Sportsline.

But immediately, people can email friends about who i shaving a better experience.  Some sites, like Sportsline, give away everythng for free, including real time scoring.  I will happily recommend Sportsline to my friends.  But over at Yahoo, they want to charge a few bucks for everything.  The user functionality is such that my Sportsline league gets more attention.

How do you balance this as a Product Manager?  Do you chase down more transaction revenue, like Yahoo, or do you give away the store and have more ads and sponsored content areas, like Sportsline.  (I can’t remember what ESPN does.) 

So from a marketing perspective how do you decide?  Is Fantasy Sports a commodity that is simply best for generating eyeballs and sticky customers?  Or is a powerful transactional revenue driver? 

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.

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……

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.