Posts Tagged ‘Sports’

Don’t Fear Da Beard T-shirt, MLB

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

“It was really great until they shut our little operation down.”

That’s what a friend of mine said on Facebook after he and a buddy were told to pack up the t-shirts they made and were selling outside of AT&T Park where the San Francisco Giants were about to start playing in the World Series last week.  He was one of a few dozen people selling unofficial shirts using the team logo. It was a letdown for their business hopes, as well as for the throngs of people who loved their fun, original shirts. And it really didn’t have to happen that way.

For years there have been unofficial merchandise sales around big sports teams and events. I remember camping out for basketball games at Duke in the early 1990s and having guys carrying big bags duck their heads into our tent to ask if we wanted to buy the latest anti-UNC t-shirt that somebody pressed in their dorm room. But today it’s getting much easier to brew your own, thanks to online design and printing businesses such as CafePress and Zazzle.  Come up with an idea and within minutes you can bring it to life, buy it, and create a virtual store where other people can discover and buy it–with a percentage of the sale going to you.

But the times are a changin’ for trademark enforcement, too.  At the Giants game, plainclothes Major League Baseball officials walked around town with federal agents and inspected hawkers’ merchandise. Anyone using the name “San Francisco Giants,” the interlocking “SF,” and even the words “World Series” was told to pack up.  My buddy’s stash of shirts was confiscated and his name was taken down. He was warned that, despite it being a felony to use the team’s logo without permission, “it won’t go on your criminal record this time.”  The MLB warns that it must police its trademarks to maintain them, and protect the official sponsors and vendors who have spent millions of dollars for the right to be the real thing.

I fear that the San Francisco Giants and scores of other professional and college teams are missing an opportunity to build their brands and fan bases by automatically cracking down on such efforts. Fans love shirts like this because they are the product of creative thinking and fast timing. The “official” merchandise is designed months in advance and takes a slow boat from China.  The shirts are boring and generic in order to appeal to the widest fan base and limit unsold inventory.  But clever designers and rapid printing tools allow for much more timely, relevant, and fun shirts than what the official process allows for. Fans love the chance to buy “game day” shirts like this, and it gives them a pleasant memory that a simple “Official World Series” shirt doesn’t always allow for.

I think there may be a solution that keeps everyone happy: Why not create an “official” partnership with an online t-shirt store such as Cafe Press to encourage these shirts, ensure that some taste level is retained, and share the profits? Teams could allow people to create their own shirts, even providing people with team graphics and colors.  There could be a “license fee” of something like $5 per shirt, and there are quick and simple ways to make sure the shirts are not offensive. Designers and entrepreneurs get the chance to see if their idea will take off, and the teams get a flood of original equipment with none of the inventory costs.

A store such as Cafe Press could even encourage the success of such an effort by shipping in bulk directly to stadium parking lots, and even putting a truck-sized printing press on location for last-minute surges.  Teams could even take this idea to the next level by, say, holding a contest for the best fan-created shirt.  The best sellers could be made into shirts that are sold in stadium stores, essentially letting the marketplace decide which shirt designs are best.

Overall, I believe that sports teams continue to lag behind their fans in terms of adapting to new technology and social media.  They fine players for using Twitter and black out home games on local television when a sell-out isn’t reached. While sports often have a special place in our hearts, the competition for fans’ attention is only increasing–and many sports are experiencing falling TV ratings (including this year’s World Series). Sports teams should not leap to fearing new technology and its use by fans to adapt the game to their liking. Instead, sports brands–and all brands for that matter–should leap to cherish any time fans make the brand their own, and find ways to create new win-wins in the marketplace.

Tags: ,
Posted in Events, Sports | 1 Comment »

NASCAR Marketing Dept: Be Careful What You Wish For

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

rpm_a_keselowski_600

A few months ago I was watching ESPN’s SportsCenter in the morning while getting ready for the day and stopped in my tracks when I heard NASCAR CEO and Chairman Brian France tell a group of reporters at a press conference that the circuit would be changing its rules to allow more “bump drafting” during its races in the year ahead. To quote France directly:

“NASCAR is a contact sport—our history is based on banging fenders.”

In fact, after France’s rule-change announcement another NASCAR executive, Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s vice president of competition, said, “Boys, have at it….” My first reaction: Uh-oh.

It’s the same reaction I experienced yesterday when tuning into the highlights of Sunday’s race in Atlanta, where star driver Carl Edwards took revenge on fellow racer Brad Keselowski for something the latter did earlier in the race. The Edwards bump caused Keselowski’s car to flip over in midair at nearly 200 miles per hour and sent him to the hospital for observation. The car careened into the “catch fence” that prevents metal from flying into the crowd—but has been known to allow killer debris through in the past. Contact sport indeed—and potentially an example in which the marketing minds behind a violent sport should have kept their mouths shut.

I’m sure most people would at least agree that this was a poor choice of words by NASCAR’s most-senior management, but is a rule change to allow faster, more aggressive racing “Marketing with Meaning”?

Since its inception, NASCAR fans and outsiders alike have claimed that people watch the sport just to see the wrecks, and by encouraging its drivers to “bang fenders” an incident like this was only a matter of time in coming. It’s the easy knee-jerk reaction by the leaders of a sport who are experiencing their first business decline in several years. Television ratings are down, seats are increasingly empty, and many sponsors and teams have called it quits due to economic pressure.

But I believe that this knee-jerk reaction by NASCAR officials is a poor decision and one that might even worsen ratings and fan engagement if and when this “contact sport” next claims a driver’s life. I’ve seen my fair share of NASCAR races and I actually enjoy and follow the sport. I first got into it back when I worked on the Tide brand at P&G and we had a car. I had the chance to see our drivers race in Indianapolis, Phoenix, Charlotte, and Daytona. I sat in the stands, hung out in the pits, and even got to know our driver, Ricky Craven’s, family. I came to see NASCAR as a sport with fierce competition and passionate people. They fight hard for the checkered flag every Sunday, but they also live together on the road for much of the year, and drivers’ families say prayers at the start of each race that their loved ones make it back alive.

NASCAR rose to greater ratings because it found a spot as a family sport in many American homes. In fact, it was female fans who first started the ratings to rise about a decade ago. In 2004, 42% of NASCAR viewers were female—up from 35% in 1995—and there were more female viewers of these races than for the NFL. That was a big reason why brands such as Tide, Clorox, and M&Ms got into car-sponsorship deals. So any effort to make the sport more violent will likely risk alienating mothers and children from embracing the sport as before.

What can NASCAR do to add meaning to its marketing? Well, for starters, I would find ways to make the sport more interesting and exciting for fans to watch with a cell phone or laptop in the living room. One of the exciting differentiators of NASCAR is that the action is constantly intense and data about everything from speed to tire pressure is created continuously. Fans love the information, but NASCAR has frequently chosen to exact extra fees for access to additional information. I would start by making the in-car audio feeds and track data that it currently charges $30 to $80 a year for free to all. This is something that other sports cannot offer, and I doubt there are many takers of this pricey service.

NASCAR should do something immediately to show its drivers and fans that it is not hoping to encourage more danger in an already intense event—and look for ways to add value for the entire family.

Tags: ,
Posted in Entertainment, Sports | No Comments »

Olympics a Meaningful Marketing Windfall for NHL

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Vancouver Olympics Ice Hockey

One of the interesting industries to cover from a marketing perspective is that of major sports leagues. The product (games) and brands (teams) receive tremendous attention and attract rabid, lifelong fans. But most of the marketing of these leagues gets little attention. We see constant SportsCenter coverage, hear that rules changes are made to the game, and might see 30-second ads to hype the leagues’ stars, but overall the marketing staff sits far down on the bench. As these leagues fight for fans in a fragmenting media market, good marketing is more important than ever. League commissioners and team owners had better wake up to this reality and invest in giving fans what they want. The National Hockey League’s (NHL) tenuous participation in the Winter Olympics is one example of where a new mentality is needed.

The NHL first took an official two-week break during the Olympics so that their stars could play for their home countries in 1998, which was 10 years after professionals were first allowed into the games. But every four years since then the NHL has warned that it might not continue this way in the future. This year, for example, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was unenthusiastic about this year’s games in Vancouver—and he casts doubt on whether he will allow players to attend the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia. He claims that the break slows down momentum of the sport, and interest in games at odd hours in Russia won’t get much interest anyway.

But what Bettman completely misses is the reality that the NHL is not as popular as it has been (or could be) and the Olympics are perhaps the league’s greatest marketing asset. The Olympics bring the attention of the world, and hockey is one of the marquee events that gets the highest buzz. This translates to ratings that are significantly higher than even the NHL Finals.

For example, the USA versus Canada matchup in the preliminary round brought 8.2 million views to MSNBC. That’s the most viewers for MSNBC since the presidential election night, and the most people in the U.S. to watch a hockey game since the 1973 Stanley Cup!  And for the Gold Medal rematch game, half of all Canadians tuned in along with 27 million Americans.  That’s more U.S. viewers than any World Series game since 2004 and more than any NCAA basketball Final Four since 1998.

Olympic hockey is a great example of Marketing with Meaning. It exposes the world to the sport, showcases the best players and personalities (who play in the NHL), and wraps it up in the flag of national pride and Olympic glory. It is the equivalent of the annual All-Star break, but means so much more for those looking on.

Ironically, the NHL has had some success in recent years by bending its rules and embracing change. In my book I share the example of how the NHL began a new traditional called The Winter Classic, in which a regular-season game is played between two teams in an outdoor stadium on New Year’s Day. The first game in 2008 drew more than 70,000 paying fans and outstanding TV ratings.

So why would Gary Bettman downplay the Olympics when they are renewing passion about the sport and likely boosting ratings for the second half of the season? At least one sports analyst claims that it comes down to money. Bettman and his owners don’t like their stadiums shut down and their players boosting the Olympics’ business for two weeks. But that’s incredibly shortsided. It reminds me of how the NFL penalizes cities that cannot afford to fill their stadiums by blacking out games from regular fans.

I believe that sports owners and league commissioners hurt themselves and their fans repeatedly because of a combination of hubris and a lack of marketing understanding. The hubris comes from owners’ typically large bank accounts and the fact that cities identify with their teams so closely. As evidence of the latter point, Forbes created a list of “America’s 20 Most Miserable Cities,” and frequently cited poor sports team performance as a key misery maker.

But it is ignorance of marketing fundamentals that truly hurts these franchises and the fans. Here’s hoping that the NHL and other sports leagues remember that they exist for the enjoyment of the fans, not short-term maximums in ticket sales and other fees. If you take care of fans over the long term, they will take care of you. It’s a lesson for those in the sports business, and in any business for that matter.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Entertainment, Sports | 1 Comment »

NFL Commits Marketing Fumble by Blacking Out Fans

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

sad NFL fan

In the past few months there have been many examples of businesses that realize the economy is tough and react by doing the right thing for sales and human decency. Hyundai created its Assurance Guarantee to protect car buyers who feared losing their jobs. JetBlue, Walgreens, and Virgin Mobile have provided similar coverage. Even sports teams are offering more protection and value for their fans. Last summer the minor-league baseball Birmingham Barons sold tickets for the price of a gallon of gas, the NHL’s St. Louis Blues offered a promotion that would pay your mortgage for a month, and the NBA’s New Jersey Nets offered free tickets for unemployed fans. But one sports business is able to ignore the pleas of financially ravaged fans: The NFL is moving forward on its plans to black out TV coverage of games in cities that fail to sell out their stadiums. It’s a brazen move for these times, which I strongly believe will put the country’s most popular spectator sport on a slippery slope downhill.

Yesterday the sports talk shows were abuzz about the news that as many as 12 NFL teams might not be able to sell out their home games within 72 hours, meaning that the league will choose to black out the games’ local television coverage. It goes without saying that the economy is the main reason for the lack of sellouts. The Jacksonville Jaguars and San Diego Chargers have been particularly hard hit, and both are suffering greatly from the housing bubble. My own Cincinnati Bengals say it is “too early to tell” if games will be blacked out after 44 straight sellouts.  Only 3 teams suffered any blackouts in all of last season.

While unsold tickets are an economic reality, the decision to prevent local fans from cheering their team on TV is entirely the NFL’s fault, and it is just plain poor marketing. Look, there is a clear difference between the audience for game attendance and TV viewership. Let’s start with the price. It costs more than $100 per person to attend an NFL game, including tickets, parking, and snacks, which compares to $0 for sitting at home in front of the television. Fans who can’t see the game at home are not going to rush off in their cars to the game Sunday afternoon. Some will spend $100-plus for NFL Sunday Ticket, the pay-per-view TV option, but those are actually the people with higher incomes who are more likely to go to a game in person.

Offering “free” viewership at minimum should be considered the most meaningful marketing investment by the league, as it feeds fan frenzy and loyalty. You could even consider it a free sample that helps excite people enough to eventually buy a ticket, and maybe even season tickets when their incomes rise over time. This “free sample” also leads to huge advertising revenues and sales of sports merchandise at huge margins. Why cut off the fans who feed you?  Why cut off the most powerful form of marketing you have when you need it the most?

It’s not only bad for business, but it is a dishonorable way to treat its customers. People grow up in these cities and entire families rally around the home team. Fathers and sons sit on the couch and cheer for the local hero in a rite of passage, maybe hoping to attend one game per year. This freezes out the poor and middle-class households, who, quite frankly, could use a little entertainment. What’s worse, many of these cities have put up hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars for brand-new stadiums that sit idle for all but eight days of the year (only $500 million for the stadium across from our office in downtown Cincinnati). Now the tax bill can’t even get you a free picture on the local TV network.

For years now the NFL has been called the “No Fun League” for its many rules that seem to make the game less interesting for fans and players alike. It has banned hard hits and end-zone celebrations. Most recently it banned players from Twittering during games. The league even banned cheerleaders from stretching near opposing benches. And tailgating has been banned at the Super Bowl. This time it might be facing a “perfect storm”: Consumers are angrier at businesses than ever, and they dislike seeing high ticket prices and highly paid athletes behaving badly. They also have many more media options to keep them busy, and college football is just as exciting with the added plus of being a little more pure and innocent. And before the beginning of the 2011 season, the NFL and Players Association will have to come up with a new collective bargaining agreement. Many say a lockout or strike is a strong possibility. Together these negatives could add up to strip away decades of fan passion, and revenues and more blackouts will surely follow. Just ask Major League Baseball how it feels.

The lesson here is that businesses must recognize that they exist for more than short-term revenue maximization, especially when they are extremely successful and powerful like the NFL is today. Because the customers whom you take advantage of when you are strong won’t be around when times inevitably get tougher. I’ll be switching to the NCAA on Saturdays. What about you?

UPDATE: the NFL has caved a wee bit by putting up delayed broadcasts of its games up on NFL.com.  Still, it’s far from the experience that their customers want, and it frankly doesn’t make sense to the masses.  If anything, it looks like the NFL is using this build up an online audience at the expensive of TV networks and their local affiliates (and advertisers).

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Entertainment, Marketing Without Meaning, Sports | 6 Comments »

An Offensive ESPN Ad Unit

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

This is my favorite month of the year: March Madness. As a Duke grad (hopefully that didn’t lose me too many readers), basketball is in my blood. And when I have spare minutes I am constantly checking out the latest and greatest news and analysis as my Blue Devils prepare for their next game in the NCAA tourney. Like many sports fans, I choose ESPN.com as my go-to website. But I was shocked and angered recently to see that ESPN is hosting advertising that uses the names and IQs of student-athletes. This is an offensive and likely illegal practice that must be stopped immediately.

I took the screen grab above from the bottom of an article about Duke’s basketball team. Note that one of the Duke players, Kyle Singler, is specifically mentioned in the ad. Further, his IQ is claimed. There are so many problems with this ad, but let’s focus on the main two: (1) an amateur student-athlete’s name is mentioned as part of an advertisement; and (2) the ad claims to know his IQ score, a very personal number that I guarantee Singler never provided to this company.

The ad comes from a program ESPN is running called “Quigo Ads.” It’s a copy of the Google AdWords model in that you can quickly create and place small ads according to keywords and only pay when they are clicked. As this Kyle Singler ad proves, the restrictions on content are very limited.

Shame on ESPN for allowing this reprehensible form of advertising to exist on its website, and for what? I can’t imagine that these tiny, hidden, idiotic ads get more than a few bucks per week, likely a rounding error in the billions of dollars that ESPN rakes in each year from legitimate marketers.

I believe that publishers must take 100 percent responsibility for the advertising that is displayed on their pages. The national TV networks force advertisers to share proof of claims data before approving commercial runs. Even Google closely monitors legal regulations around the world and screens out ads that do not meet the standards.

ESPN is hurting the image of the very athletes that fuel its core business, including college athletes who don’t make a dime from the billions that they help churn out for ESPN each year. I will be writing to ESPN to register my unhappiness and I suggest you do as well.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Marketing Without Meaning | No Comments »

Meaningless Sports Promotions – UPDATED

Sunday, July 27th, 2008

Seth Godin interrupted my weekend by forcing me to get an entry up about his brilliant lesson on sports marketing: Much of it is completely meaningless and unrelated to the brand, product, or service that sponsors it.

Godin specifically takes aim at State Farm and its sponsorship of Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby. He makes the brilliant point that you could swap State Farm with Allstate and see no difference. Well, Allstate at least sounds better with “All Star,” but neither likely have an impact on anything other than general brand awareness. In other words, State Farm is admitting that its insurance is the same as everyone else’s – so it’s best to just make people think of State Farm first.

On the other hand, look what Nationwide insurance is doing. It created a marketing campaign called “Have the Talk” in which the brand is encouraging families to have difficult discussions in life. Examples include tough talks with teens and speaking with older parents about their living situation. At havethetalk.com, visitors can get coaching on breaking the ice and tackling tough issues. The consumer benefit is not explicitly tied to insurance. But Nationwide knows that a business issue with insurance is that many people who really should think about insurance are not doing so. By starting these conversations, Nationwide is kick-starting discussions that might help drive category growth, and drive brand affinity for Nationwide (rather than just boosting general brand name awareness).

Seth goes on to take a shot at one of the oft-ignored but real reasons that we marketers embrace sports sponsorships: We marketers love to personally be a part of them. He proposes a pretty tough test:

Here’s my number one fiduciary rule for big brand marketers: The executives involved in approving a sports or entertainment promotion should not be permitted to attend the event.”

I think this might be a little extreme, but it is something marketers should willingly confront. I’ll admit to being attracted to NASCAR sponsorships as a Brand Manager at P&G, and I gravitated to racing when I had a chance to market Mr. Clean AutoDry Car Wash (for the record, it worked, and we won a race). I’ve seen fellow marketers and clients fall much further under the spell of sports events. I’d rather not give examples – to protect the guilty.

At the end of the day, sports sponsorships can come to life in a meaningful way. One current example is what Visa is doing to stoke the passion of the Olympics. The brand is also adding value to visitors with an ATM locater and a downloadable tip guide. Further, Visa connects its brand emotionally through its sponsorship of the Paralympics in addition to the main show.

So the moral of the story is to make sure that your sports sponsorships are as meaningful to your consumer as they are to you….

UPDATE: Brandweek recently interviewed several marketers with MLB All-Star sponsorships.  Mark Gibson, Assistant VP of Advertising at State Farm spoke a great deal about how sports sponsorships help his company “break through the in the most media-congested marketplace that there is.”  He later praised sports sponsorships “because it is Tivo-proof.”  Net, Gibson and Allstate continue to seek eyeballs rather than provide meaningful marketing for their customers.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Entertainment, Marketing Without Meaning, Sports | 3 Comments »