Marketing’s Future : Integration (and Maybe Robots)

The photo that accompanies this post comes from a talk I recently enjoyed given by a marketing cyborg named Repcor.

Ok, the speaker was actually a real person named Rebecca Corliss, but she said she likes to go by "Repcor," which to me sounds like a robotic supermarketer Hubspot built to save the future or something. I suppose I don’t know for certain she isn’t a replicant, but for now I’ll take her word that she’s actually a human who goes by the same mononym as her Twitter handle (@repcor).

To get back to the photo, Corliss’ talk was entitled “How to Build a World Class Marketing Team like HubSpot.” She started working (or perhaps was created in a lab) at the Boston-based company some eight years ago, and one of the reasons she loved the opportunity was the company’s fresh outlook on marketing. The slide in the photo summarizes old channels to which they believed marketers gave too much consideration:

• Advertising
• Conferences/Events
• Paid Search/PPC
• Email List Rentals
• Cold Calling

And new channels deserving of more attention:

• Blogging
• SEO
• Free Tools
• Social Media
• Opt-In Email Lists

Hubspot is still in business, so they must have hit on something here. Certainly the second list houses much of the creative work my company does. The items on the first list haven’t gone away, however. Companies still spend scads of dollars on TV advertising, often justifiably so. Hubspot itself does conferences and events worldwide, we found out from the humanoid addressing us.

What struck me is how much everything in the first list is complemented by the entries in the second column. If you do a conference, you market it with social media, the email lists you’ve cultivated, and everything else in List #2. And if you’re smart, you feed the content from that conference right back into those channels to generate more engagement.

The same goes for advertising. I would never shoot a spot without doing behind-the-scenes content for social media, and all creative these days must appeal to the user who can self-select what he or she watches.

And if you’re going to have your salespeople cold calling, you can make their jobs loads easier by priming the pump through top of the funnel content that inspires an “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of you” when your AE introduces herself.

As a creative, List B affects the choices I make in language and approach, even when I’m working on a project in List A. For others in the marketing world, I’m sure they consider choices like balancing paid search with organic and whether to buy national-network TV spots or invest in original online content (self-serving note – if you buy into one of my TV projects, you get both).

It’s a big integrated world out there. Old-school marketing can cooperate with modern techniques to the betterment of all. Until, that is, we’re all replaced by machines. Which, um, could be closer than we think.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports and corporate entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports. He is also spearheading various film and television projects.

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Football Is Different

This post originally appeared on the Blotch page at the Fort Worth Weekly. To read it on that site : http://www.fwweekly.com/2016/01/13/football-is-different/

Football is different from other sports.
The ball’s not round, certain players aren’t allowed to touch said ball, and a game can fill 100,000 seat stadiums once a week with fans wearing colors not found in nature.

Should conference alignments reflect its unique character? A basketball game last week served as a reminder of how football’s singularity affects the rest of the collegiate sports world.
In men’s hoops last Monday, the West Virginia University Mountaineers visited their non-historical rival, the Texas Christian Horned Frogs. The ‘Eers traveled roughly a thousand miles to the game, just as their baseball, swimming & diving, women’s basketball, and volleyball teams did or will do this year. A number of TCU’s teams visit Morgantown, too. Why go some 1600 kilometers to play these games? It’s because football is different.
Football always has been the alpha male in the nation’s university environment. There was once a College Football Association to negotiate big schools’ TV contracts in the sport. No such equivalent existed for golf or cross country. Teddy Roosevelt never held a summit to explore making the pole vault safer.

Football has always gotten special treatment, and it’s easy to understand why. The gridiron game is the most popular spectator sport in college athletics. Reputations, egos, and huge dollars depend on it. Those dollars, in fact, drive much of athletic departments’ decision-making. Football’s large roster size and marketing needs, among other things, make it an expensive sport in which to field a team, especially at the FBS level. Choices get made, then with an eye to maximizing the revenue the football program generates.

Certainly any purveyor of sporting contests aims to generate maximal economic returns. Football plays a unique role in college athletics, however, because it is often relied upon to create enough revenue to pay not only for its own costs but also those of sports which do not generate enough funds from sales of tickets, broadcast rights, sponsorships, and “Beat Bama” shirts, plus donor contributions, to pay for themselves. Men’s basketball and, on rare occasions, other sports at certain schools occasionally pay for themselves as well.
There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this arrangement. Fans are certainly entitled to prefer watching one sport over another. If the monies they contribute and facilitate indirectly (like sponsorship and broadcast rights sales) allow students proficient in sports besides the fans’ favored one to realize the benefits intercollegiate athletics provide, that seems a reasonably happy result.

Not all schools break even on their athletic programs, of course. The Washington Post looked the public universities (because government institutions must make the data available) in the Power Five conferences. 28 of the 48 schools they examined lost money on athletics. A USA TODAY study found that more than 200 Division I public institutions didn’t bring in enough income to cover athletic operating costs. In cases where departments don’t fund themselves, student fees tend to make up the difference.

The Post noted that proponents of intercollegiate athletics cite benefits beyond athletic budgets, including publicity that increases applications. Athletic participation certainly also provides benefits to students involved in both the sports themselves and ancillary activities like band, student radio, and valet parking for suiteholders.

It’s an inexact calculation as to whether the costs of intercollegiate athletics outweigh the benefits, and we won’t get into that debate here. But given that even the biggest football schools often don’t pay their own costs, if we could come up with a way for them to run more efficiently, we should take a look at it. That would seem especially important given that many of the institutions in question are public ones, with taxpayers ultimately on the hook for yearly cost overruns plus the infrastructure student-athletes utilize outside the athletic sphere. Given the prevalence of government student aid, that likely holds true for most private institutions as well, since those loans and grants might pay for student athletic fees that subsidize unprofitable athletic departments.

Which brings us back to TCU versus West Virginia (a 95-87 WVU win). They played each other Monday because they’re in the same conference. They’re both Big XII members in large part because of football. When the conference had openings, would either school have gotten in if they didn’t bring national football profiles? No way. Football pedigree clearly factored in the decision more than, say, traditional rivalry or geographic proximity.
So did the conference affiliation make sense from a football perspective? Perhaps so. Did it make sense from a wider perspective? To determine that, let’s look at it through two lenses : student-athlete benefit and overall effect on the state of Texas.

Student-athletes are conceivably supposed to be the most important thing about college athletics. The lessons they learn from playing are a valuable part of their preparation for life. They aim to put in enough time to get the benefits of their sport(s), but not so many hours that their commitment hurts other academic and extracurricular performances.

Football, as previously noted, is different from other sports. You play once a week, usually on Saturdays. Whether you play at WVU or Maine Tech or the Sorbonne, your travel time isn’t too different. Other sports play more frequently and often on school days. The more long road trips students endure, the more classes they miss.

Likewise, a half-dozen lengthy football road trips may not cost that much, and may well be worth the cost if you consider them vital to your gridiron success. Multiple long journeys from baseball, softball, basketball, and the rest of your department’s teams, however, quickly add much larger costs. For the unprofitable schools mentioned earlier, those costs get covered by state resources (like tuition collection, endowment depletion, property tax revenue) that could be directed elsewhere.

A pair of state schools in Texas also field teams that travel to West Virginia annually. They (and their fans) used to be able to travel the much-shorter distances to College Station, Texas for games of similar caliber. However, the public Texas A&M University made a football-related move to the Southeastern Conference and now makes its own trips to Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida.

Do these moves make sense from a student-athlete perspective? Maybe they do from a football standpoint. For the rest of the athletes, however, they miss more class and likely have fewer games their families can attend. The athletic experience they get from playing a Texas school of their caliber is no different from that gained playing one from further away. So we can conclude that football-based conference realignments may well not benefit non-football athletes.

Do the moves benefit the states in which the schools are placed? If long road trips create a lesser academic experience for student-athletes at the schools, that isn’t good. From a fiscal perspective, it seems likely they spend a lot of unnecessary money on non-football travel. The state’s residents may also be hurt economically from scheduling. Let’s face it, a Texas vs. Texas A&M game in any sport is going to be a bigger draw than A&M vs. Vanderbilt or the Longhorns vs. WVU. When the Aggies travel to TCU, Baylor, and Texas Tech, the sales tax dollars generated at local restaurants and hotels stay in-state instead of going to Mississippi or Georgia coffers.

The Aggies may make the case that they bring more TV money to Texas from their move to the SEC than they would have if they had stayed in the Big XII. Indeed, the $31.2 million distribution their conference gave them exceeded the $25.2 million Big XII schools pulled in from theirs. However, each Big XII school retains its rights to so-called third-tier games, and revenue from those might well have come very close to making up the difference. One has to also factor in losses from travel and in-state rivalries to perform a true analysis of the costs and benefits to the state as a whole.

These issues aren’t limited to Texas, either. The Rutgers to Minnesota, Miami (FL) to Boston College, and Arizona to Washington State sojourns leave a lot to be desired, too.

So what’s the solution? If the conference alignments work for football but not for other sports, perhaps the solution is to give football its own special treatment. Set up conferences for that sport that are as national in scope as you want them to be and put the other sports into conferences that make more sense geographically.

Would it work? We already have single-sport conferences in sports without universal participation, like Hockey East or the Midwestern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association, and a number of non-football Division I conferences. BYU’s and Notre Dame’s league arrangements cover most of their sports while leaving football independent. It’s not like colleges have placed any value on stability of conference membership in the last 20 years anyway. Frog fans, remember the WAC and the Mountain West? Or those car trips to Southwest Conference road games?

What would it take to blow up the conference structure? It might need to start with legislation from some budget-minded legislators (if that’s not an oxymoron) in affected states – probably large ones. Or perhaps it could result from a movement started by university presidents eager to make their bottom lines look more robust.

One of the trickiest parts would be the unraveling of current conference television deals, especially those with league-specific networks attached, like the Big Ten Network and the SEC Network. They need the non-football sports to provide enough programming for them to work. It’s possible they could transition to becoming general-interest collegiate sports networks (ESPNU 2, for instance), initially retaining the rights to the individual schools they currently serve through the incumbent system.

Men’s basketball, the second-largest revenue generator among collegiate sports derives most of its take from the March Madness TV deal. It would have to recalibrate the way it splits its money, too, since some of it gets distributed at the whim of conferences. It would take some complicated negotiation, but it could be done.

One hurdle will be stakeholders invested in the current conference system. I sympathize, because they have worked hard to build conference brands over the years. I suggest they embrace the change, because this solution would actually create more conferences. More conferences means more jobs for people like you and me.

In the long run, would a split of football into its own conferences mean more jobs for better-educated student athletes and for Texans who see more monies stay in-state? At the very least, it sounds like a good research project for some bright student-athlete Econ majors – once she gets back from that tennis trip to Morgantown, that is.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.


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Can Team Brands Suffer in RSN Disputes?

For decades, Chicago Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz clung steadfastly to the once commonly-held belief that televising home games led to decreased attendance and wasn't fair to season ticket holders.⁽¹⁾ It took winning a Stanley Cup (as well as televising a lot more games after Wirtz's death) to repair the damage to the Original Six team's brand.

Modern thinking embraces widespread television exposure and believes it does not negatively affect team revenues or ticket buyer loyalty. In fact, the extra exposure leads to additional opportunities to generate revenue and for potential fans to embrace the brand. The brand enhancement and the revenue creation usually go hand-in-hand. Some teams, however, have recently seen the two come into conflict and face some difficult decisions because of it.

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ brand has a lot going for it, including marquee players, a distinguished history, and a great chance to make this year's postseason. Their local TV deal, however, cannot be helping their brand image.

Last year, the team executed a big-money contract with Time Warner to create a new sports network with the Dodgers as its cornerstone programming. The agreement guarantees the franchise $8.35 billion over 25 years. ⁽²⁾

Such a substantial amount of money would seem difficult to turn down no matter what the circumstances. That even includes the current situation, in which carriage disputes have kept Dodgers’ games out of some 70% of the market’s homes, because $8 billion is just a lot of scratch. ⁽³⁾ When teams do a deal to create a new network, however, they may want to keep in mind a couple of things besides the immediate revenue numbers.

One is the potential long-term impact on their brand in case the network's distribution piece doesn't work out and ticked-off fans blame the team or become apathetic about it. If fans perceive your arrangement as a money-grab at their expense, that can’t be good. Businesspeople always have difficulty quantifying brand-related effects of deals. It’s a squishy science, to be sure. In the long term, does the revenue generated from the TV deal offset that lost from brand negativity? We can measure the amount of team-controlled promotional inventory running in the games that fans missed, but there’s no standard spreadsheet for calculating the broader impact.

Franchises also must consider the long-term viability of the network itself if it doesn't get distribution. Poor distribution could hurt ad sales enough that the revenue loss can’t be offset by the monies a Comcast or Time Warner bring in from subscribers switching or staying. It won't do any good to have signed a big-bucks deal with a TV outlet if the station goes out of business. A couple of teams in Houston have found themselves confronting that scenario.⁽⁴⁾

When the NFL Network launched, they did so with a sizable charge for operators but without universal distribution. It took them nearly a decade to get close to universal availability.⁽⁵⁾ MLB Network, perhaps learning from the NFL’s experience, prioritized carriage.⁽⁶⁾ They likely made that decision partly with the long-term health of the MLB brand in mind.

A team network implies team control, which should make for enhanced brand opportunities. That presumes the business side works, however. Sometimes we get YES ⁽⁷⁾ and sometimes we get Royals Sports Television Network.⁽⁸⁾ Fox Sports’ regional channels seem to have found a happy medium by adding team-centric ancillary programming and working to promote team initiatives.

The Dodgers’ disputes have climbed to a new level of contentiousness, with Time Warner calling out DirecTV.⁽⁹⁾ How does that kind of negativity affect the Dodgers’ brand? It’s difficult to quantify, of course. Perhaps we could measure it by the number of folks using the #NeedMyDodgers hashtag now showing up onscreen during Dodgers’ telecasts (presumably seen only in sports bars and on highlights shows by those affected).

The Dodgers reside in the country’s second-ranked television market. The Astros and Rockets also occupy a top-ten slot. Could these be the disputes that pop the sports rights bubble? It’s conceivable. What’s for certain is that the impasses will damage teams’ brands. Will it be enough that only championships can rebuild them? Teams should make sure they’ve evaluated the possibilities.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

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Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

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Footnotes

⁽¹⁾ Steve Nidetz “Nhl's Tv Blackout Policy Hot Topic,” Chicago Tribune.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-02-07/sports/9303176598_1_espn-officials-blackout-sportschannel-america (accessed July 25, 2014)

⁽²⁾ Joe Flint “Standoff over Dodgers games could be defining moment in sports TV,” Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-dodgers-tv-standoff-20140718-story.html#page=1 (accessed July 21, 2014)

⁽³⁾ Ibid.

⁽⁴⁾ David Barron “Judge returns Crane-McLane-Comcast lawsuit to state court,” Houston Chronicle. http://blog.chron.com/ultimateastros/2014/07/23/judge-returns-crane-mclane-comcast-lawsuit-to-state-court/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+houstonchronicle%2Ffanblogastros+(FanBlog%3A+Astros)#22102101=0 (accessed July 25, 2014)

⁽⁵⁾ Mike Reynolds “NFL Network Finally Adds TWC, Bright House to Distribution Roster,” Multichannel.com. http://multichannel.com/news/orphan-articles/nfl-network-finally-adds-twc-bright-house-distribution-roster/126037#sthash.406t6dcG.dpuf (accessed July 25, 2014)

⁽⁶⁾ “MLB Network learns lesson,” Washington Times.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/13/mlb-network-learns-from-nfls-mistakes/ (accessed July 25, 2014)

⁽⁷⁾ Bloomberg News “As TV Sports Surge, YES Network Extends Yankees Rights Through 2042,” Ad Age. http://adage.com/article/media/tv-sports-surge-extends-yankees-rights-2042/238396/ (accessed July 25, 2014)

⁽⁸⁾ The Staff “Fox Sports Midwest gets Royals TV deal,” BizofBaseball.com. http://www.bizofbaseball.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=514:fox-sports-midwest-gets-royals-tv-deal&catid=40:media-news-television-radio-internet&Itemid=52 (accessed July 25, 2014)

⁽⁹⁾ Steve Dilbeck “Time Warner ad campaign may signal movement in Dodgers' TV impasse,” Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/sports/dodgers/dodgersnow/la-sp-dn-dodgers-tv-impasse-20140724-story.html (accessed July 25, 2014)