Monday, October 31, 2016

What's Wrong With The NFL?

Roger Is Not Helping
Ratings for the nation's most popular television programs are off by significant percentages this year, which has raised alarm bells in various sectors of the marketing and advertising media. As I have a foot in both worlds, I'd like to dig into the reasons why this is happening. But first, some ground rules.

1) Before anyone throws my opinion out as being clearly in the tank for some other sport, or being anti-NFL in some way, my bona fides. I run a fantasy football league, play in another, write about it for a blog, take my mom to a road game every year, and watch way, way, too much of this stuff. I'm a lifer. I like the game. I'm not against it.

2) I'm going to try to keep this to new factors, since the ratings decline is also new. It's not as if people are suddenly discovering that the game is violent, that women on the sidelines are objectified, and that commissioner Roger Goodell is cartoonishly corrupt. Those are all known quantities coming in.

So, what's new?

Well, the most obvious point of order is that one of the more remarkable Presidential campaigns in the history of the nation has been taking up all of the oxygen in the room, but it's not as if these audiences are really the same. In any event, the debates haven't ran into football games very often, and the ratings haven't grown now that those events are over. So while this might be a factor in just limiting overall coverage, it's not likely to be a massive point.

The next factor has actually been addressed during the campaign, with one of the contenders (you can guess which one, right? Sure you can) taking issue with the new concussion protocols as somehow being too restrictive. I think there's actually a bit of a point here; if you were weaned on more thrilling displays of violence, maybe the weaker tea that the NFL is serving up now as a middle ground between player safety and viewer appeal just doesn't cut it for you. If this is a major factor, then the NFL's decline could be seen as a purposeful long-term controlled descent, as part of a more sustainable economy. But while long-time fans might grumble about these new rules, I kind of doubt that anyone is really not watching because of them.

Another possible factor is San Francisco 49er QB Colin Kaepernick's continuing symbolic protest against the national anthem, which seems to (a) really rankle some in the audience by its seeming intrusion of politics into sport, and (b) prove the point that if you really want people to pay attention to your political point, you really need to put it into non-political areas of society. Kaepernick's exploding popularity in jersey sales makes me think that the controversy probably isn't that much of a net negative for the league.

Now, I'd like to pivot this into factors that I think are at play here. The first is the seemingly constant deterioration of the officiating, and the murky nature of the league's rules. Things that should be as cut and dried as humanly possible -- what is a catch? what does a player have to do to demonstrate possession of the ball? -- are a constant source of shrug, wait for replay, and we're into the realm of conspiracy theory and random chance. Any time a game can have its integrity questioned, it's not exactly a win for the league's broad appeal, especially to more casual fans.

Which leads me to the next point -- the NFL's declines are, in all likelihood, entirely in the realm of casual fans. Lifers are hooked on the stuff; it's the bigger crowds that gravitate in for night games and playoffs that generate growth in a mature market. Which is a major issue for the league, since two of three night telecasts seem to show the league at its worst, rather than at its most appealing. Games on Thursday are much more likely to show random or lesser teams, with blowouts more common due to the odd schedule, especially when one team comes in with more rest. Those games also get the coverage of Phil Simms, who might be the most irritating announcer on broadcast TV now, if my social media feed is any judge of it. The Monday Night Game has more of the Thursday feel to it, with Jon Gruden matching Simms' obsessions with quarterback minutiae and self-branding. I get that this isn't exactly new styles for either man, but with each passing year, the tendency seems to be getting stronger.

Before we move off the schedule, a further point about this: why is the league so skewed away from 4pm EST Sunday games? This week, we had 7 in the 1pm slot, and 2 in the 4pm; if the Falcons-Packers game hadn't been close, that entire block of time would have been must-skip TV. Combined with the increasing presence of games from London in the morning (can't imagine those are terribly popular with West Coast audiences at 7am local time), and nearly half of the league's games this weekend were viewable on broadcast, spread over a half dozen time slots. Maybe more, if you live in a media market with bleed over coverage fields. There's not much in the way of mystery anymore, and the timesink just keeps growing.

Speaking of the mystery draining out, let's look at fantasy football... which has likely crested in popularity, especially with the boom/bust nature of daily fantasy sites for an expansion of gambling opportunities. With the exercise growing further and further away from something a hobbyist could do without a major time commitment, we're going to a place where only hardcore nerds and fast twitch waiver wire obsessives need apply. More and more people seem to be cutting back on the number of leagues they play, and the demographic group of these leagues also looks to be graying. Not exactly a great trend for marketing pros.

A quick word about the compelling year and World Series that baseball is enjoying, and that's this: there's no strong likelihood of MLB really poaching much of the NFL's market. In its heyday, the NFL would just rollover any contenders to their time slot.

Here's another factor that I think people miss out on... the NFL's probably on the wrong side of momentum with women now. The annual October "pinkwashing" isn't without controversy or detractors now, and the league's sadly erratic history with cutting ties with domestic abuse perpetrators can't be doing much to help its chances. More and more moms and dads are keeping their kids away from the game for safety concerns, which also can't be helping.

Finally, this -- the NFL underserves its market through artificial shortages, by only playing at one time of the year, and not expanding into more regional markets that are currently dominated by high school and college games. As an aside, more and more folks in my network seem to be growing more interested in the college game, especially when it comes to casual betting. If nothing else, the announcing teams seem better.

No, the more you think about it, the more you might be inclined to think that we haven't seen the end of soft ratings for the NFL.

The bigger question is... have we hit the bottom yet, and if not, what does the bottom look like? (My guess is a Thursday night game between Tennessee and Jacksonville. But your mileage may vary.)

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

You'll Pay To Know What, And When, To Really Think

Via tech
Here's a small but highly recommended way to seem smarter than you actually are... listen to podcasts. I cycle through a bunch, mostly in a constant effort to find new ways to think about my various projects. Which is how the grist for this week's column came about, which is a new way to think about the next wave of wearable technology.

(Don't worry, I'll bring it around to marketing and advertising eventually.)

Here's the germ of the idea. A research team that was conducting MRI scans of healthy subjects for a baseline study found that, well, it's hard to ask people to just lie still for a long time. Especially in an environment that many people find to be claustrophobic.

So they experimented with a variety of audio programs on headphones during the scan, and found that while music was good, podcasts -- particularly ones that told an engaging story -- were better still.

This probably doesn't come as a striking revelation. From your own day to day, I'm sure you find that when someone is telling you an engaging story, you are more apt to stay still and listen. But what's more telling and interesting is that the actual thought process of listening and learning shows up on the MRI as well.

Here's where I'm going to make two small but defensible leaps of logic. I'm going to presume that the brain is a muscle, and that it does better with routine exercise. And maybe not just the kind that involves sweating, but also the mental kind.

This is, of course, the entire raison d'etre of Lumosity, the "brain games" start up that is, not coincidentally, a frequent buyer of advertising space during, well, podcasts. So it's not exactly a big leap of faith to imagine that properly timed and individually prescribed mental exercises will also help cognitive performance. Also, that we can prove that it's worth doing.

Which brings us to the second leap of logic. A future version of wearables will monitor brain activity, and provide alerts to the user based on various mental conditions.

If you are predisposed to negative potential, you might go immediately to a dark place from this, with thoughts of mind control, exceptional privacy violations, censorship, and so forth. But my inclination is to stay with the personal and the positive, and imagine a scenario in which people struggling with depression are given, well, content at the time when it does them the most good. Or aging patients at risk of mental deterioration are given small puzzles that help them retain and improve. The potential could extend to patients with OCD, postpartum depression, drivers with readings that seem to indicate episodes of micro-sleeping, and so on, and so on.

Imagine, for a moment, just how much untapped human potential would reach the world from people who achieve some measure of additional relief from these conditions. Consider the possibility of lives saved from fleeting thoughts that lead to suicide, moments of regression in fights against addiction, or the more mundane aspects of better awareness and coping mechanisms for stress, and so on. How much more could we achieve as a species, if technology gives us the ability to act without these limits?

Let's bring this back to our bread and butter. So while you are considering all of these possibilities, let's also think about narrow-casting our messaging to people when they might be most interested in buying a product, or most receptive to hearing an advertising message / willing to be distracted from their current task.

After all, a dramatically better human experience?

Still has bills to pay.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

My Trump Media Conspiracy Theory

Preach, H.L, Preach
I'm going to step away from the usual beat (marketing and advertising), because I feel the following point is being missed, and needs to be addressed before it gets wiped away on the whiteboard that is modern history. And for the record, I'd like to think that I'd hold this opinion regardless of my partisan position, but as it's probably going to be pretty apparent to you which way I lean, I'm not going to apologize or hide that.

In the last week of the presidential race, there has been two interpretations of the rhetoric coming from the Trump campaign.

1) That he's speaking truth to power, calling out the timing as well as the veracity of various news stories as suspect, and daring to speak of vast interconnectedness at the highest levels of finance, media, and political influence.

2) He's grasping at straws to spread the blame for a failing campaign, and setting up a future delegitimization of a Hillary Clinton presidency, which will help when he sets up a new media network for those in his influence. This is where Roger Ailes' role in the Trump campaign comes into play. Trump TV as an exit strategy has been more than a persistent rumor.

Now, I'm not going to convince anyone of the merits of either of these theories. We live in a time where convincing anyone about anything requires great tact, data, and expertise, as well as a background where you trust the proprietor of the opinion for past work.

But what I can assert, and maybe even reach some minds across the aisle from mine, is that there is some suspicion in the timing, but it's not necessarily due to a favoritism towards Clinton, or away from Trump. Rather, it's toward, well, profits. Ratings. Also, that a democracy that serves these needs in front of informing the populace seems more than a little dangerous.

There has been ample time in this campaign (we're going on what, the second or third year of it?) to vet the candidate from all of his various issues, without anything new coming out in the last few weeks. The bus tape that started the latest avalanche is over a decade old, and many of the women who have come forward with allegations could have been published some time ago. Sure, some of the client's own statements may have caused some to move forward, but a persistent journalist or staff could have, perhaps, gotten some of this out earlier in the calendar year. The graphic and easily understood nature of the tape gives it more red meat than, say, the Trump University issues, or some of the more racier stories about overtones of organized crime in the Atlantic City days, or past instances of adultery, but that's not what concerns me here.

Rather, what seems to be the case is that the media wasn't as dogged in pursuing those stories during the Republican primary, not when there was such a fountain of ratings and takedowns of various candidates to fill the news hole and bring in casual viewers. Some blame must also go to Trump's primary rivals, who clearly didn't do the same level of opposition research (witness Alicia Machado) that the Clinton team did. While it's clear that any single Republican rival that went that strongly against Trump in the primary would have suffered a direct counter-attack, it's also clear that the entire field would have been more likely to end the insurgency had all of the countering forces come out earlier, when support for him wasn't as entrenched.

Much about this campaign has seemed unprecedented, unique, and straight out of an over-ripe screenplay. But what it's also been is highly lucrative for a media industry that has done as little as possible to talk about differences in issues or policy, and has profited mightily from lowest common denominator news stories.

While we can hope that lessons have been learned, and this kind of phenomenon will get faster vetting in the future, it's hard to argue with money. Perhaps even more depressingly, that this is the new normal, where scandal and malfeasance is what will rule the day, now and forever more.

Also, the eternal, true and depressing adage that you learn very early in political science class, which you can also call out for the ratings being so high...

The people get the government they deserve.

And in the words of the late great H.L. Mencken, they'll get it good and hard.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Even The Losers

More Losing Might Be In Order
Last weekend, I took my mom, a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan (OK, I am too) to a road game for our annual birthday tradition. So far, we've been to Cleveland, Indianapolis, Chicago, Tampa, Green Bay, St. Louis, and now Detroit. (We're 4-4, and my beloved team lost this last one by a point. We had a good time, because we always do, but it could have been better. Alas. Moving on.)

On the way to our parking spot, I saw the following PSA, which just made my day on many levels. Let's dive into it, shall we?

1) As a fan of a team that is nearly as futile as the Lions in terms of time between championships (1957 for them, 1960 for my laundry), I kind of like that this headline is a few blocks from the stadium. I'd like it more if it were close to Dallas, Washington, New England and New York, but you take what you can for smart aleck snarking moments.

2) On first blush, the ad pops and makes sense... but if you look at it more than five seconds, you'll catch a rather, um, glaring mistake. (I apologize for the image, but we were in the car and I had to rely on Google Earth for the grab.) Take a second look. See it yet?

Namely, um...

If you are losing, dude in the hoodie with the hands up in obvious distress...

Why do you have the mountains and mountains of chips?

Which you clearly have not lost, or at least, not yet?

Look, I get that outdoor ads are hard. You can't go for any concept that takes more than three seconds, the copy has to be pretty much header online, and you need obvious graphic relevance and stopping power. They cost real money and take significant industry, and even PSAs get real attention in the community.

But, um, how hard would it have been to show the chips being raked away, to back up the whole idea of Losing?

Or just not show the chips at all, since the hoodie, green felt and copy might have gotten the point across?

Which leads me to the following and final point about any marketing and advertising project like this one...

Maybe run it past someone who is actually in the target demographic of, well, actually having gambled in their lifetime? Before you put the damned thing up?

Play me out, Tom Petty...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Monday, October 3, 2016

Dad's Favorite (Only?) Game

Sing It, Fry
This past Saturday saw another college trip for the eldest -- the third this month, and the seventh of her process so far. She's getting serious about this, on a lot of levels, and it's honestly great to see. But the nuts and bolts of that isn't what I'm going to get into here. Instead, I'll use the experience to answer an age-old question for some casual observers of marketing and advertising, which is why the vast majority of pitches in our world are geared to dramatically younger audiences. But first, back to the college visit.

The trip this time was a 3-hour drive to a state with dramatically higher costs for gasoline, as well as a toll road to get there if you want to save about 15 to 20 minutes of time. As we were late getting out in the morning and had a hard stop of when we needed to get back, this was all part of my consideration set, because, well, every dollar we save is a dollar we've got to help with the college costs in a couple of years. And at this stage in my life, I just enjoy finding new ways to save money. It's a Dad Game, to be sure, but a game all the same.

Which meant that I bought just enough gas in the neighboring state to get back. Also, that we left in time on the trip back to take non-toll highways, which also allowed me to drive at more mileage-friendly speeds. When we did get back, I filled up at my local warehouse store, where the gas is a few cents cheaper and still good quality. That also gave me the chance to grab a handful of groceries that were also a deal. While also using the cashback credit card, which doesn't carry a balance, because, well, we're avoiding the finance charges. The warehouse store also has a cashback bonus, so we're kind of double-dipping on that. And so on, and so on. I stretch dollars now in ways that I never did when I was younger.

Which leads me to the point I wanted to make, and the one that has been an abiding mystery in many marketing and advertising circles. Namely, why is so much marketing fixated on younger and less demographically advantaged users, when the older folks are the ones, well, with the money?

In automotive advertising, it's particularly striking. The average new car buyer is in their early '40s. Up to then, most buy used or increasingly just avoid the expense. (Personally, I didn't buy a new car until that age as well.) So when you see ads for cars that are filled with millenials, it's something of a miss, but understandable from the standpoint of the prospects wanting to appear younger than they are, or building brand for the long term.

If you want to tell a nice story about this, it's because younger buyers are presumed to be highly impressionable, and you can more easily change their buying patterns. The not so nice story is that older consumers are, well, cheap, and aren't likely to adjust well to the new price levels for things; consider the not overwhelming cash you might have gotten in cards from your older relatives back in the day.

But for me, what it really comes down to is being able to say no to myself pretty easily, whether it's for drinking free office coffee over premium stuff, shifting to store brands over premiums, doing my due diligence for price checks, and so on, and so on.

Saying no to the kid, especially if she gets into a school that could have a dramatic impact on her future life and earning potential?

Well, being Dad means you can't always play the game you'd like to play...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.