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Incumbent Invisibility

October 20, 2010 /

I’m not a big fan of paper.  I don’t like direct mail, flyers, and god forbid a company puts something on my windshield.

So, as I walked to my front door the other day, I was startled to see the 3 – count ’em 3 – flyers placed at eye level, shoved into the crack of my front door.  Was it from another overzealous landscaper? Perhaps a local neighborhood insurance guy?

No, I was blessed with three new pieces of literature from Patty Murray.

Now, I’m no Patty Murray hater.  And I know it’s election season and the “book” says to canvas liberal neighborhoods like Wallingford and make sure each one of the residents has talking points and material to share in the office.  I get the whole thing.  And there’s nothing wrong with candidates employing 1984 marketing tactics.  Most of these folks, including Murray, are politicians not business majors.

From the headline of the collateral, which was the only thing I read, I learned that these flyers were going to tell me about all of the reasons to vote for Murray.  But something suddenly sprang to mind in my head.  

After 18 years in the Senate, shouldn’t everyone in Washington be able to name 18 things Patty Murray has done?  Heck, let’s say she accomplished ONE thing every TWO years.  Shouldn’t I be able to name 9 things?  5? I’m pretty well educated, I listen to KIRO 97.3 and both the right wing and left wing AM stations.  I should be able to rattle off a litany of things she’s done, right? After all, I can tell you 10 things Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln have done, so why not Murray? 

It suddenly made the idea of Incumbent Marketing so ludicrous.  Think about other product purchases you might make every 2-6 years: cars, vacations, furniture, computers, etc… Each time, you can explain in pretty uncertain terms the benefits and weaknesses of the product you chose.  Shouldn’t it be the same with politicians?  Isn’t an incumbent’s NEED to market with door spam a pretty telling story about how much she grabbed my attention the other 17.9 years she’s been in business?  It just made me wonder.

Pics of Nick Foles Injury

October 18, 2010 /

I happened to be shooting pics at the UA/WSU game this weekend, on the exact play Nick Foles had his knee rolled over. When you zoom in on them, you see it unfold frame by frame.

Watch the left side of the defensive line. One of the lineman loses balance, and then seems to dive and roll directly into the knee. You can see Arizona’s #6 start on top and cut across the field making the pass reception. He’s already turning to run upfield by the time Foles gets hit.

Rich Barton Explains Online Marketing in 3 Sentences

October 14, 2010 /

So, my friends and colleagues have been working in the online space for a long time.  Going back to driving downloads and pushing POS items, all the way now to Facebook Apps and QR codes.  We’ve seen a ton of fads and fixtures.  I bet I’ve signed up and tried out hundreds of programs.

Last night Rich Barton spoke to a group of alumni from the UW CIE.  He ran us through a list of his new projects, and a history of Zillow.  But he framed all of his companies under 3 simple tenets, which pretty much sums up the entire history of the internet, no and forever.

  1. If it can be found, it will be found.
  2. If it can be rated, it will be rated.
  3. If it can be free, it will be free.

Find me a company that has been able to break this.  Anyone?

Commitment to Content

October 14, 2010 /

I have a confession for my few loyal readers who I’ve been neglecting lately.  In the spirit of true transparency, I have an admission…….. I have been cheating on you with another blog.

Yes, it’s true.  

I did a little test last month.  In addition to the places I write for professional purposes, I developed a side project as a psychological experiment.  There were a number of reasons for the exercise, but one of them included measuring how much content I could produce, if I was doing so in true anonymity.  And the answer is that I created quite a lot.  More than 50 posts in fact.  

There was something freeing about writing without anyone knowing who I was, on one of the simple 33 million blogs out there that will never be found.  Now that content has been hidden away, and I’ll roll it over to a new url, just to make sure I can control who sees it.

But, I learned a few things that will make this blog better.  1) Writing quick posts about everyday life is probably a good goal.  2) There’s really no way to write interesting material without at least sharing a little personal feeling and insight.  Sure, there are some ugly people out there who you don’t necessarily want to see inside your life.  But, you might as well just be transparent and honest online as offline, and just let people make their own decisions.  And there’s kind of no way to avoid it, so you might as well ignore them and say what you want.  3) It’s time for a whole new look and feel to this property.

So, I’ll make a commitment to content.  Starting 7 days from today (So starting Thursday 10/21), I’ll write one post per week for a week.  If I see 25% growth in traffic that week over the previous one, I’ll keep it up.  If I don’t, I’ll scale back to 3x per week.  We’ll see what kind of community develops.

Start your morning with Paper.li

October 4, 2010 /


There are a lot of semi-useless social media tools out there.  One that I am liking more and more is Paper.li.  

In a nutshell, it takes your Twitter feed, and distills it into a front page of a newspaper, so you can scan all the important topics you care about in one shot.  It even splits them into categories like Sports, Media, Politics, Technolgy, etc….

Now, it only grabs feeds from the people you follow, so if you are one of those “uber important” types that only gets followed themselves, then it’s not going to be much good.  And if you follow a bunch of people that tell you about their sandwich, then you’ll have a boring paper.li as well. 

Here’s part of the Monday morning grab from http://paper.li/aboyer

2010 Sounders – The Power of Scarcity and Supply & Demand

September 30, 2010 /

Remember back to just before the 2009 MLS season started.  There was a buzz around the Sounders.  At first we weren’t sure what to expect.  A sold out Thursday night opening match was electric.  More games sold out.  Tickets were impossible to come by.  More seats opened up.  More sell outs.  Barcelona, Chelsea and the MLS Cup brought record crowds. It seemed that the team could do no wrong.

It was the perfect storm.  A soccer enthusiastic public desired something positive to come from their city’s roster of not just losing, but atrocious, sports teams.  That pent up demand, combined with a short supply of tickets, drove incredible buzz and success.

But perfect storms don’t last forever, and now the Sounders have to accept the bad that comes with the good of success.  2010 has been an interesting years for the guys in rave green.  It’s a pretty interesting litany of environmental demand issues:

  • Key injuries got the team off to a slow start.  
  • Spring optimism (which turned out to be very misguided) made the Mariners relevant for a brief period of time.
  • The Barcelona and Chelsea games were replaced with Celtic and River Plate.
  • The team’s European superstar was either whining, moping, in trouble with the front office, or hurt.  We never really knew what it was – except he wasn’t drawing fans

So naturally demand fell.  And that may have been fixable.  But then at the same time, the Sounders faced a problem that no other American sports league has to face.  

Supply rose.

The Sounders qualified for what’s called the Concacaf Champions League. Now this as marketed as the marquee invitation for North American and Central American teams.  It’s a chance to compete in real matches against top talent from Mexico, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, etc….But in reality, it’s a kind of weir tournament for anyone to get too attached to.  You see, you qualify in 2009 to play preliminary games in 2010 to make a championship round in 2011.  You could have literally turned over your entire roster between qualifying and playing in the finals.  

But the other thing it did was add 4 new mid-week home games to the tail end of the season.  And these games weren’t part of your season ticket package.

Now, factor in that the Sounders qualified for the U.S. Open Cup Final, and are hosting it.  That adds another game, and a very exciting one at that.  That’s extra game #5.

Now, just for fun, throw in that the Sounders promised a 3rd free “Friendly” to season ticket packages.  Here comes Chivas from Mexico, to play a friendly at the most unfriendly time of the year – right before playoffs.  Imagine the Huskies scheduling a practice game with Nebraska the week before the Apple Cup.  Yeah – not much sense to it.

There are 15 games in the season, starting in Mid-March.  Most of those are on weekends, so by the time August comes around, some fans are feeling a touch of soccer fatigue.  A playoff race can reinvigorate the base and get them out to the games they bought a good 10 months ago.

But adding another 6 home games to the season – that’s 40% for you math majors – when kids are in school and youth leagues are firing up, is just an unfortunate turn of events.  And that is why you saw 11,000 people last night.  Even your most ardent supporters and look at the home calendar:

 

  • 9/29: Meaningless CCL game
  • 10/2: Important MLS game
  • 10/5: Important US Open Final
  • 10/12: Meaningless Friendly
  • 10/15: Possibly important last MLS home game
  • 10/19: Meaningless CCL game

 

So what’s the 2011 solution?  Because if they win the U.S. Open Cup, they’ll qualify again for next year.  And that schedule won’t change, so you’ll be in a similar bind.  Here’s what I’d do:

  • End the pre-season with a match vs Portland as a free ticket to season ticket holders.
  • Reduce down to 1 mid-season friendly, but make it a good one.
  • Let season ticket holders buy all 4 CCL matches for the cost of one game.

Now, there’s an economic issue with the CCL thing, in which the Sounders probably have to pay the CCL on every fan that enters the stadium.  So, a 4 for 1 deal is going to cost them money.  So they’d have to renegotiate some part of the concessions deal to make the money back.  It’s not a perfect plan.

But the overall lesson is one of supply and demand.  And once you lose scarcity, it’s hard to get it back.  And the same people who wanted to go to the game they couldn’t go to, don’t want to go to the game that no one wants to go to.  It’s a delicate balance.  Interesting to see how they solve everything, now that a few land mines got thrown in their path.

 

 

14

September 20, 2010 /

From ESPN.com: 

Arizona is coming off one of its biggest wins in recent seasons, 34-27 against No. 9 Iowa.

The Wildcats were ranked for a few weeks last season, but before that it had been since 2000 that they last made the Top 25.

The last time they were ranked this highly in the regular season was 1998. Arizona finished that season No. 4 in the nation and was in the top 10 for the final six weeks of the season. 

From Arizona Daily Star

“Those are character-building drives,” UA coach Mike Stoops said late Saturday night. “Those are perception drives. Those are program drives.”

Bug Wright caught a 4-yard touchdown pass from Nick Foles with 3 minutes 57 seconds remaining to give No. 24 UA a wild victory.

The Foles-to-Wright connection capped a 9-play, 72-yard drive and put an exclamation point on a game that included a blocked punt, a blocked extra-point attempt, a 100-yard kickoff return and two interceptions returned for touchdowns. 

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