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?
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.