Football In the Time of California

He's Right

I admit that "Love in the time of . . ." is a great title, up to a point. You're reading along, you're happy, it's about love. I like the way the word time comes in - a nice, nice feeling. Then the morbid Cholera appears. I was happy till then. Why not "Love in the Time of the Blue, Blue, Bluebirds"? "Love in the Time of Oozing Sores and Pustules" is probably an earlier title the author used as he was writing in a rat-infested tree house on an old Smith Corona. This writer, whoever he is, could have used a couple of weeks in Pacific Daylight Time.” - Steve Martin, "Pure Drivel"

Martin's essay is always in the back of my mind when I get the chance to appreciate living in the Bay Area, and as it was the first week of NFL football, it rang in my brain once more today. I don't have cable anymore, as I'm living in temporary housing without a television while onboarding at a new startup, but going cold turkey on my football laundry (Eagles) isn't going to happen. So I headed up and out this morning, found a place with a good enough breakfast menu and enough televisions with a satellite dish, and got to watch my team at the utterly wonderful hour of 10am, rather than 1pm.

My laundry won, which always helps, but getting the football game out of the way before late afternoon makes the entire exercise seem like so much less of a vice, honestly. I caught the later game at the gym on a treadmill, took care of my errands, and still had daylight hours to spare. Back East, this would have required an unsightly wake up early in the morning while trying not to wake the sleeping family, not to mention the preparation of getting to bed early on Saturday. Full and total pass on all of that.

I suspect the NFL is getting wise to this on their own level, what with the increasing number of games in the UK on European time, but (a) those games are almost always terrible, seeing how they involve an inordinate amount of Jacksonville Jaguars, and (b) the games will likely always be terrible, because they are in front of crowds of mostly neutral fans, with players who resent the really big dumb plane flight in the middle of their year of big dumb plane flights.

Having the game wrap up early works whether your laundry wins or loses in California. A win, you are out in the sunshine afterward, getting stuff done, feeling virtuous. A loss, you are out in the sunshine afterward, remembering that the people who are really angry and bitter about this are three thousand miles away and won't be inflicting thier negativity upon you. The last time I was in California, my laundry had the best era of its history and went to its last Super Bowl. Maybe they just need me to be away from them. It's a sacfrifice I'm willing to make.

Final point that brings this all back to stuff a marketing person might want to think about: dayparting matters, and also shouldn't be a single set point. Something to keep in mind for the email professionals, as well as media planners who are resolute enough to price their banner buys on a clock basis. (Hint: you really should price your banner buys on a clock basis. If only because they work very differently, and to very different people, depending on the hour of the day.)

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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.

Scale For Some

Unvisited Book

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” - George Eliot

My first gig in marketing was with a physical manufacturer of products, and by the end of my time there, something terrible happened: the marketing worked too well. We were up by a lot more than our people could handle, no one could take vacation time, and the challenge from a management perspective came from trying to find qualified personnel who would work second and third shift hours to try to keep up wih the demand. Rumors started of how we would cut the marketing budget for the upcoming year to try to throttle down the growth, and my belief in the long-term viability of the business, coupled with concerns about how I was valued by higher levels of management, made me very anxious. You don't do your best work when you're anxious. So when another company made me an offer, I gave notice and relocated.

That was nearly twenty years ago, and I don't regret the move in the least. I've learned a ton in the time since, and it's all led to the current gig, where I get to work with and shape the marketing of tools that pretty much fix every problem I've ever ran into as a marketing and advertising pro. Notably, also, this: none of the companies that I've worked at since gave as many people jobs as that first employer, mostly because I've never taken a gig since that didn't scale.

There's a significant article in the NY Times this week that has made me start to wonder if that stance didn't come with some costs, though. The article compares the impact of Apple to its home city (Cupertino, CA) to Kodak with its (Rochester, NY). The entire article is worth a read, but the gist of it is that by creating a contractor class to take care of aspects of the business that aren't seen as core competency (janitorial is the focus, but the movement also extends to security guards, food production, and so on), Apple has created more shareholder value at the cost of blue collar jobs. So while Rochester has traces of Kodak's benevolence striped through the community, Apple is a global company, with those dollars either on campus, or spread to the bank accounts of shareholders all over the world.

There's nothing particularly evil or unique about this, and had Kodak's management thought of it first (or, for that matter, how film was going to go away due to changing technology), perhaps they would have made different choices. But the end result is the same, and that's a marketplace where many workers, especially if they didn't start from a position of priviledge, have to pinball from company to company to reach economic goals, rather than work their way up.

That toothpaste is long gone from the tube, of course. Emulating Apple, one of the most successful companies in the world, is what will happen for decades to come. Innovation at the top levels drove their profit margins, rather than squeezing custodians. But I can't help but feel that this reading of the market isn't entirely accurate.

There's damage done when only the current highest achievers can get ahead. There's social stratification that happens when people can't work their way up, ambitions thwarted, motivations dulled. From the unpaid internships with amazing social networking opportunities that only young adults of priviledge can take, to the gig on top of gig economies that the working poor gravitate to, we create skepticism about capitalism itself... and when that occurs, the engine that creates people who can buy these wonderful goods and services dries up, becomes ripe for piracy, and accelerates income inequality to the point where a civil society is no longer a given.

The company that I left twenty years ago is still in business. It can't have been an easy ride for them, but they are privately held, and ownership always took pride in giving people jobs, rather than maximizing their own revenue. If every company were like them, we'd probably have more people working, a more stable economy, maybe even less extremism in our political climate. But we also might not have the tech and innovation that no one wants to live without.

I live in the Bay Area now, perhaps the least accomodating philosophical market for unvisited tombs. It's a great place to be, filled to bursting with ambitious and disruptive people, and to live here generally means you chose it, because so many people aren't native to the area.

If every area in America tried to be like this, we'd have astonishing problems. Probably even worse than what we have now.

But if you are faced with, as I was twenty years ago, no better option?

You make the change.

And deal with the ensuing challengs to the best of your ability.

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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.

The Jet Blue Way

Jet Blue HQ

This past weekend, I flew cross-country on a red-eye, spent the better part of a day getting a venue to its proper state, and was genuinely touched by my community. In some respects, it was an ordinary experience, because I've done all of these things before. In other ways, it made me feel validated that the project that I've taken on is on the side of the angels... because it feels like more of the same.

Let's get into it chronologically. I've never flown JetBlue before because it just hasn't been an option from a logistics or expense standpoint. This time around, the overnight flight from Oakland was in the market on the budget, the pre-dawn arrival at JFK was OK from a pickup standpoint since my ride out was too early for morning rush hour traffic, and my late August flight dates didn't put me into holiday surge pricing.

There's nothing *particularly* magical about JetBlue, and I'm not sure it's a better experience than Virgin (now Alaska)... but it's close. The wifi works and it's free, the leg room is just better than others, the flight attendants don't seem beaten down by the gig, and the whole experience just seems a little better. Not so much in ways that are going to make me pay more all the time, and I still wish that they had more mid-Atlantic ports of call because JFK is just not a great place for me. But they are preferred now, and I wasn't sure that there was enough of a difference in airlines to bother with before. (Frontier and Spirit, on the other hand, seem like they are actively trying to punish you for saving money.)

I flew back to New Jersey this weekend to run a poker game for my regulars, then conduct a fantasy football draft. The poker game has been going on since I left for the Bay Area in May, with the regulars keeping the flame alive... but the guys just don't have my same attention to detail and fiddly personality, so the venue just wasn't as clean as it should be, the snacks just weren't up to the same level, the vinyl records weren't spinning, and so on, and so on. There's no specific single thing that I do that makes people more into the game, but the cumulative impact of all of the little extras just gives the players more of a premium feel and helps them get more enthusiasm for the game. They reciprocated with an unprecedented expression of generosity, and I honestly teared up a little when I told my wife about it the next morning. It's not just nice to be appreciated for what you do. It's life-affirming.

Finally, Saturday was the fantasy football auction, which was more involved than past years given the depth of the draft, and another moment where my community picked me up when my own performance was lacking. I got the number of bench slots wrong on the prep materials, a basic oversight that I've never made before, and a mistake that could have had a real impact on the outcome for the players involved... but everyone just rolled with the mistake and picked me up. I have a history with both of these groups, and I know that I've given them value over the years. We retain our players in both the poker and fantasy leagues. Jet Blue retains their customers. The word of mouth from people who play in my leagues, or my poker game, draw new players because people like to tell the story of good service. (Not as much as they do bad service, but there's nothing you can do about that.) The same goes for Jet Blue.

There's always the temptation, especially when you can put dollars to decisions through data, to cut corners. Jet Blue probably loses a few fares every flight for the leg room decision and puts themselves at risk of not seeming as serious about making a profit as their competitors. I put myself at a little more financial risk, especially if my players don't tip at the poker game, or make my role difficult as a fantasy league commissioner. I also could have turned the time that I spent working on the venue into cash, or just not flown back for the events in the first place. There's also the love and tolerance shown by my family, who don't see me very often during this period and then shared my time and attention with my friends this weekend.

As a consultant and a marketing and advertising pro, I've known for a long time that you make your own luck.

To me, the best way to do that is to make your clients love your service.

Besides, you feel better about yourself that way.

And it seems to be working for Jet Blue, now in its 20th year of operation...

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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.