Words, Numbers, And Bill James

Credit Where Due

Sometimes, I run into people in a professional context, and when they get the gist of what I do, they don't understand how it came to be. Most people have a clear concept of who and what a copywriter is -- someone who sweats over words as if people still read, or ever really liked to do that. That person is supposed to have a massive amount of books in their life, a seeming disregard for designers, and their head in the clouds as they think about Big Ideas and how words can bring them home. Close your eyes and picture this person, and you've probably got patches on the elbows, paper everywhere, and all kinds of things to spur creativity in the work space. Or whatever cliche of writer works for you.

Now, analysis. Very different person, right? Lives in spreadsheets, dreams of automating the copy with machine intelligence, would have gone into accounting but needed just a hair more excitement in their life. If they gamble, it's poker, and it's with a disturbing ability to calculate odds, to the point of making sure the game is no fun at all. The work environment is austere and severe, they are efficient to the point of obsessiveness, and so on. You might trust them to run your stock portfolio or pick your fantasy sports team, but consult on your creative? Never!

How can you get both of these people at once?

Well, more importantly, how can you not?

Creatives who don't look at the numbers -- any numbers, so long as they have statistical significance -- are flying blind, and doing that without even owning the plane. Analytics people who don't look at the art are missing the chance to diagnose the work and solve problems in ways that clients can truly appreciate, because the lessons learned are rarely something that doesn't have legs outside of the immediate project. Combine both, and you get a learning engine, and learning engines are the only way, in my opinion, that you can hope to keep getting better at your gig. (And staffing for both roles just means conflict and complication, and in the start ups where I've usually worked, isn't realistic.)

As for how you get this way... well, beyond the sheer usefulness of it all, I credit Bill James.

James, for those of you who are not afflicted with the sports problem, is a wildly influential writer and analyst who set out to learn the intricacies of baseball. Rather than just accept conventional wisdom about what kinds of players were best, James dug into the numbers, discovered all kinds of actionable learning points, and was eventually proven right, over and over again, with the sport more or less taking his work and amplifying it. If you've seen "Moneyball", you've seen the impact of James.

To me, James was just a voice in a book that told me it was OK to think about sports, rather than just watch and react to them. That in thinking about these things, it was also possible to learn things that others did not know, and that in writing about them, to bring the art back in. (James is, at his best, a flat out terrific writer, and some of his stuff has stayed with me for decades.)

Thinking about stuff that others do not can be time consuming and debilitating, but it can also be very lucrative. I recommend it.

To my fellow writers... stop being afraid of analysis, and analysts. They are here to help, and if your copy doesn't need help, you are a very, very special unicorn. To my analytical brethren, dabbling in creative is more fun than you might think, and if you can develop the knack of giving actionable feedback to creatives, they will love you forever. And invite you to wildly better parties than you would get to on your own.

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I, For One, Welcome Our RoboHon Overlord

Japan Is A Confusing Country

Meet RoboHon, soon to hit store shelves in Japan, and a gadget that's going to save the world for marketing and advertising professionals.

No, really.

You see, this cute little 7-inch robot does all the things your smartphone does -- with WiFi and LTE and a tiny little screen on his back -- but also with cameras for eyes, facial and voice recognition software and -- the game changer! -- a projector.

So the fact that it can walk, talk, sit down and dance is all kinds of adorable. It's also pretty great that a phone doesn't have to look like a phone, because, well, that just seems inevitable, really, especially in a society where customizing items to your taste seems like a Constitutional right. And while I, personally, can't imagine ever being anything but socially mortified to use him (her? Seems more like a him to me) as my always-on-me digital device, I do love this: having the ability to project mobile display, because in that single and glorious moment, I am no longer wedded to a mobile Web experience that is so frustratingly small.

Imagine, if you will, your smartphone being able to give you the same screen as your desktop monitor, whenever you wanted it, by just pushing out to a screen or wall. At some point, the wall would be replaced by holograms. And hey presto, I've gotten away from responsive design, sites that are borderline unreadable without ad blockers, and maybe more, really. I've also probably, once we've got full interconnectivity with the Internet of Things, phones that can just broadcast to any available screen with a takeover.

We are, of course, years away from all of that. But the first step is likely to seem as left field as a phone that doesn't conform to any of the usual rules of phone.

And if you can make anything, really, into a phone?

Well, I can think of plenty of other objects that could be made more intriguing with a phone, and with projection hardware hard-wired...

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The Secret to the NFL's Success: Artificial Scarcity

More Ball, Please

I'm an NFL fan. I've been to games in over a half dozen cities, haven't missed a game from my favorite laundry in decades, even when they were hopeless (and they've been hopeless far too often, really). I think I've even seen all of their preseason games, have owned multiple jerseys and other pieces of clothing, have been to the Hall of Fame, and ran my own fantasy league for the better part of a decade. (Live single round auction keeper league, if that helps to establish my nerd cred for you.) I blog about sports for fun, and have picked every game against the spread, badly, for years.

And like every NFL fan, I am spending an extraordinary amount of time, as a fan, not watching football.

Let's take the actual telecasts themselves. By the clock, a regulation game is sixty minutes long, which is spread out over a little more than three hours of actual time. This is where you might want to rail about the incessant commercial breaks, but it's more than that, of course. There are delays for instant replays, timeouts, penalties and halftime. Even if there were, somehow, no commercial breaks in a game, it would not finish in less than two hours, and we know that from, well, watching the occasional high school game. 

But let's go further. According to a number of studies, the actual time that is taken up by game action is somewhere in the range of 11 to 12 minutes. The rest of the time is taken up by huddles and dead air, which is why, if you are like me, you find yourself developing special levels of distaste for various announcing teams. With only 16 guaranteed games a year, that means a little more than three hours of actual game for the year, and even if your club goes to the Super Bowl, it's all of four hours. Compare this to MLB (over 50 hours of game play), the NBA (over 65) or NHL (over 82), and suddenly, the comparative ratings of the different leagues makes a lot more sense. Even if you don't want to go off the actual game time, just comparing the season lengths means that one NFL game is worth 5 NBA or NHL games, or 10 MLB games. Missing an NFL game is, to many fans, inconceivable. Missing an NBA, NHL or MLB game is, well, routine.

Would NFL ratings really go down if there was, say, not just more teams and a longer season, but an entire second league? Probably not, actually. The USFL, the last major rival pro league in the U.S., was shown on ESPN and ABC in the 1980s, and routinely pulled in better ratings than MLB in the spring season. College football does great ratings as well, especially when it's a playoff game. (And sure, Arena Football and the Canadian league also exists and don't rival the ratings, but the rules are different and the teams might not be local. Different world. There's even a women's league that dresses the players in, well, best not discussed.)

If pro football were a true marketplace, rather than an artificial monopoly, there would be more than one league, in more than one season. It would be more like, well, what the rest of the world calls football, with the best teams from lesser leagues moving up, and the worst teams moving down. There wouldn't be eight months a year where fans of the sport watch other sports, all the while more or less wishing they were watching football, or watching meta football events like the draft, scouting combine, or free agent signings. (NFL fans would talk about how there wouldn't be enough quarterbacks to make for watchable games, but that's a red herring. What makes bad QB play difficult to watch is the gulf between the best and the worst, which is why every non-NFL football fan is fine with their game.)

No one I know is clamoring for NFL2, ready for a second fantasy league, or would immediately flip their team allegiance for new laundry in new locations. But if the rules were the same, and franchises were promoted or relegated, they would care very, very quickly... and we'd also end the blackmail game that franchises can play against local governments for stadium concessions. 

It will probably never happen; too many NFL owners are way too happy with the way things are, and the league isn't exactly hurting for money. But I do know this: markets that profit from artificial scarcity do not get to enjoy that scarcity forever. Especially when there's this much money at stake, and television networks that are desperate for live programming that pulls in big ratings.

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Please 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.