Ads on Sports Jerseys: The Seventy Stubbers

Let's Just Call Them The Stubs

This Monday, the Philadelphia 76ers became the first team in the four major U.S. team sports to sell an ad on a jersey. StubHub will pay $5 million a year for three seasons to get a 2-inch patch on the top left of the basketball team's game day duds, in what may be the first step to an inevitable rush to revenue.

Some background... Philadelphia, the team I've rooted for my whole life (can't say it's been a very good ride, though it's had its moments), hasn't been trying very hard to win games for years now. Under the leadership of a new management and ownership group that comes from the world of corporate takeovers and tear downs, they've played the youngest roster in the league, haven't signed any significant free agents, and traded assets in the here and now for the potential of picks in the somewhere else and later. They've also run into some bad luck, drafted some injury risks, and also invested in players in foreign leagues who might come over later.

They've been so blatant about not winning games (and, of course, paying the lowest possible salary that the league will allow) that the rest of the league has complained bitterly about them, because they can't sell tickets to see this team. When the team has shown signs of competence, they've doubled down on the strategy and traded even more players for picks. It's been controversial, and now that the team is finally ready to transition away to try to win games again... well, this.

Typically as a marketing and advertising consultant, I'd applaud a client for a willingness to innovate in an attempt to increase revenue streams. But a pro sports team isn't a traditional business. It's a participant in an artificial monopoly, where competition is limited to a set number of partners, who get to share in mutual revenue regardless of competence. No matter how badly the Sixers have played basketball in the past three years -- and last year's team barely avoided winning the fewest number of games in a regular season in the league's history -- they have gotten to stay in the league. Last night, they even won the draft lottery, and get to pick first in the upcoming next influx of talent. If this strategy comes to full fruition and lays the ground work for a championship team, it really could threaten the nature of how leagues operate.

Which brings us back to the jersey move. Given where the franchise is from a PR standpoint, this is the literal floor for what a jersey sale will bring in... but it will also possibly stigmatize the practice, and may make it even harder for the team to bring in free agents. The money is basically pocket change in something like the NBA, and won't do anything more than cover some missed ticket sales. And while it's easy to imagine that sports fans will just learn to accept the ads, the same way that they have for teams and sports in other countries, it's also possible that this does brand damage, and maybe even cultivate a backlash. (To wit: an NBA tank top isn't exactly the most flattering piece of apparel for non-athletic bodies. And it's hard to imagine the Sixers have sold many commemorative jerseys recently.)

Finally, on the off chance that this just seems like a sports fan wanting things to stay the same... well, sure, there's some of that. But not all change is good, and at some point, the camel's back of revenue from a fan base has to break... especially when it's placed in front of a younger fan base that spends much of its time blocking ads, questioning corporate interests, and wondering if, say, they need to have a full cable package (which subsidizes pro sports teams to a shocking degree), vote for new stadiums in local elections (increasingly unpopular), or go to live games at all (graying audiences, especially in baseball).

Because that's the problem with diluting your brand with sponsorships. Once you break it, it stays broken.

And maybe leads to two logos, or five...

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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.

Short Term Or Short Sighted

One of the things that I do at my day job is read white papers and take in Webinars on trends in my industry. And what you see, over and over, is the move from mass adtech moves, and spray and pray distribution, to custom work, dynamic generation for personal relevance, and a concierge level of service.

There's a simple reason to this: custom work is a service, instead of a commodity, and making money from commodities isn't fun or sexy or what venture capital likes to see from adtech start ups. Commodities are always subject to third-world offsourcing and your revenue model getting hacked, because, well, hey, commodity. As an old manager told me once, you don't want to be the guy putting sugar in packets; you want to be the guy putting some zero calorie sweetener in packets, because that's going to get you a margin premium. (I have no idea if he was right on the sugar, by the way, but the point is still valid.)

And all of this seems fine and inevitable and sensible, especially when you've got consumer segments that are lucrative and small... but this also runs straight into the wall that is scalability, while also taking some serious damage from the possibilities of cybercreep and privacy actions.

Having worked on the front lines at a number of places where the tech allowed us to do wildly targeted tactics, what I can tell you from personal experience is this... abusing the potentials does not pay off. What winds up happening is that a sizable percentage of the group gets spooked by your messaging, and quickly takes steps to make sure that you lose this kind of access. Also, to let others know about the practice.

But in the short term, it works, but only if you look at things from surface and immediate metrics. And you get to look proactive about driving better rates, especially if your goal is short-term success that will prove you should be around for the long run.

Unfortunately, what inevitable winds up happening is that you eventually get to a better metric: return on investment, or ROI. That's not always a great moment for marketers, especially if the new customer acquisition turns out to be, well, a very unprofitable kind of customer. To wit; if you have only ever conditioned them to buy on price, to expect a deal if they don't buy right away, to never pay for shipping or without a coupon code... well, how good does that boost in short-term rates look now?

The better way to run your business, in my opinion, is to get to the metrics that matter as soon as possible, and to get buy-in from your management on a more holistic and long-term approach.

With the obvious caveat that, well, you need good management to get to this better place.

But if you aren't working for good management in the first place, I have one piece of advice for you... hit the short-term goal.

And make sure you're looking for your next gig, and getting paid as soon as possible for this one.

Because bad management can end more than your marketing gig, if you catch my drift...

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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.

Love Your Outliers

Go Right, Young Marketer

Today in the column, I'm going to do something odd: direct you to a long-form piece that has nothing to do with marketing and advertising. So go read about "The Lazarus Effect" in the New York Times Magazine, then come on back. (Oh, and if you refuse to click, the story covers what cancer researchers use to refer to the phenomenon of a drug having an unexpectedly great outcome for a patient, which isn't predicted based on past performance in the sample group. That's where the phrase of "extraordinary responders" comes in. It turns out that part of the massive undertaking in curing cancer is that each person's fight has aspects of unique genetic coding, and we just don't know enough yet, but are learning more than we ever have before, partly through, well, studying the outliers. This isn't meant to give false hope for a cure, because the awful nature of cancer progression is that all of the great aspects of evolution are at work in reverse, but yeah, it's OK to be hopeful anyway.)

This week at my gig, a marketing program brought in a startlingly high response rate, about 2X more than predicted, for a very mature program. The amount was statistically significant, in a reporting system that's stable, and possibly explained due to creative and tactical choices. Needless to say, I'm thrilled by the performance, and staring it down to see if I can replicate it with other programs. But in and of itself, it's just one campaign, just one data point in an ever-growing sea of numbers, and might not be a breakthrough.

Now, the other side of the street. I also performed a post-mortem on a challenged campaign, where the client tried something very different from our usual practices, and wound up producing numbers that were substantially below our medians. A co-worker who is new to this sort of analysis called the result terrible, and while I don't disagree, I had to bring in my perspective... which is that no data is terrible, especially because we didn't know what metrics the client was anticipating. While the set of numbers we got in this instance looked like underperformance, we will only really know that later, once these metrics prove out as ordinary, or give us an outlier.

So if your marketing programs are delivering consistency and certainty and a narrow performance array, shake it up. Push your levers, either creative or tactical, more to the margins (in, of course, a test cell). Even if this means that you leave some money on the table from something that you'll later think "Well, of course that didn't work," it's still got crazy value, because it puts a number on the practice, and lets you counsel clients later away from trouble.

Because if you are in this for the long-term benefit of your client and career, you quickly learn that the outliers drive the learning... and that any marketer or advertiser that isn't learning isn't, well, likely to make a career of this.

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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.