Making It Better: Seven Marketing Ideas for Gymnastics Meets

Very Important Gear

As a parent of a competitive gymnast, I've spent many hours at my daughter's meets over the past three years. If you've never had the pleasure, let me describe how this works. You pay to place your kid in a class. You pay to have her on a team, complete with the shockingly expensive team leotard that she'll be constantly pulling at. You pay to get into the actual meet itself. And then you duck hours of lame lottery pitches, cold concessions, and candygrams and stuffed animals that you can give to buttress the confidence of your athlete. All while spending four to five hours of stress, waiting to watch your kid perform for less than ten minutes, on four different pieces of apparatus.

Needless to say, there's a lot of dead time. And more than enough time for me to think about ways to make it better. Let's go to the list!

1) Computers and projection systems exist. Use them. Every meet I've ever been to has come down to people with clipboards writing down scores, and way too much time waiting around at the end of the meet so that someone can do math, badly and slowly, before handing out awards. All of which is very exciting to the kid for her first meet, but after about two or three times through the ringer, they are pretty much done on wanting to wait around. Have the awards ready to go as soon as the last kid performs, because every parent alive will adore you for this. Failing that, mail 'em.

2) Set up your gym for prime photography and video. With everyone having the ability to get performances on video, and professionals in short supply or need, there should be a simple and defined place for people to shuffle in and out and get their video done. Enough with having the heads and bodies of other people getting in and out of shots. Just set up walkways and defined spaces. This shouldn't be hard, and we've never seen it.

3) Go beyond 50-50 tickets. Honestly, from the folks I've seen at these events, scratcher tickets would sell. So would video poker in the lobby. We've got a lot of time to kill here, people. If you gave a concession split to a vendor on this, you'd make a mint, and add a little more poignancy and tragedy to someone's losing day. Why is Daddy crying? Because he's so proud of you. So much that he's going on a diet for a few months.

4) Actually make Wifi work. I know, I know, I'm asking for the world here, but this never works, and drives everyone insane the entire time they are trapped in your gym.

5) Premium seating. I'm not talking about actual front row stuff, because to be honest, you should move around during the meet as your kid goes to various apparatus. But if someone wants to rent seat cushions to supplement those terrible folding chairs? Ca-ching.

6) More freedom with the candygrams. Why limit messages to how proud you are of your kid, or how much you love them? Let's hear some options like how much the other teams stink, how in a world where death and taxes are the only constant, her beam routine is the reason for hope, and that life itself is very much like the vault. Let's add some head scratchers to these, please.

7) Juke box heroism. Sure, you can do your floor exercise to your preferred music, but can you do it to music that's been chosen at random, with special challenge tracks brought in to see if you can avoid laughing? Add some drama to this. And if the kid can hit her spots to Barney the Dinosaur or Metallica, I'm even more impressed.

Bonus - Liquor license. And maybe vendors. Beer Me!

Got any others to add to the mix? Feel free to add them in the comments. I've got many more meets before the season is over...

                                        * * * * *

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.

Global and Local Change

Gets License, Facial Hair

If you read about Millennials and their buying habits, you've heard how there's been a sea change in their thinking and needs in the past few years. Gone, we are told, is the all-consuming interest for their own cars, replaced by the desire to be ferried around while they text in peace. Failing the Parent (or Grandparent) Valet Service, we're told that Uber and Lyft are just the ticket, especially because such a move is summoned by the all-powerful smartphone. Independence and the open road? Meaningless, compared to the wonders of cyberspace. Oh, and by the way, Dad, no one uses the word cyberspace anymore.

They also cast a fair amount of side eye, by the way, at the idea of self-driving cars. No one's seen that where I live, and you generally aren't going to be able to sell kids on bleeding edge technology. Besides, the mechanisms of the local school system codify drivers education as a credited course, with simulators and everything. It's very serious business, Dad. Cars matter.

And as for the new tech... well, maybe somewhere else. Especially in places where ride sharing services are ubiquitous, or the kids make their own money and pay for everything. (That place is, I am sure, Parent Utopia.) Which isn't exactly my neck of suburbia, or the experience of either of my siblings, both of whom have auto-ready kids. For them, the rite of passage is the same mix of excitement, terror and tedium that it was for us, lo those many years ago, when we became of automotive age.

This is, alas, the nature of change. I don't doubt that in the Bay Area, or maybe the boroughs of New York City, or other enlightened areas with massive ride-sharing penetration and good mass transit, there's less appeal than there used to be for cars. After all, the median age for new car purchase is now in the mid '40s and climbing ever higher, and there's got to be something to all of those rising demographic numbers.

Just not in the here and now, or in my personal zip code. (Couldn't get her to sign off on the hoverboard a few months ago, either. Maybe my kid's just a Luddite. Or has secret stock in an auto insurance agency.)

                                                                  * * * * *

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.

When Many Forms Of Money Are Speech

Your Speech Isn't Green Enough

It's not my place, as a marketing and advertising consultant, to show my hand in politics. In my time as an ad man, I've worked both sides of the aisle, on both a candidate and commerce level, and at the core of the work, there's something of the ethos of a trial lawyer at work. You make the best case for your client, and trust in the marketplace of ideas to prove the merits of your argument. Whether or not I believe in, or patronize, a product or service should not ever be obvious to my client, because if we're in that mental space, we're in a place that's far from doing good work.

So this isn't where I join in the cavalcade of people who give you their opinion on the phenomenon that is Donald Trump, or offer up my take on the latest statement that has garnered headlines, awareness, approval and condemnation. If, for no other reason, that I'd like this column to have more of a shelf life than a fruit fly. But I will note that, from a marketing and advertising standpoint only, what's going on here is fairly revolutionary.

Thanks to social media, Trump no longer needs the media to communicate with his audience, but communicating with just that audience isn't, of course, enough in an era of fragmentation. What's needed is for the media to take these moments and reflect them to a wider audience.

This is, on some level, paradoxical. Trump's difference as a candidate, for good and ill, is that he is independently wealthy on a scale that differs from his opposition, so much so that he is able to speak off the cuff about, seemingly, anything. We've had candidates like this before -- Ross Perot is the obvious historical parallel -- but unlike Perot, Trump hasn't actually spent that hard on this endeavour, or even had to collect much from his flock.

Instead, it's the money that he's made in the first place, along with the decades of playing for media time, that qualified Trump's output as news. That output has produced undeniable ratings, to the point where Trump tried to leverage the higher ratings from his appearance into a paid fee, beyond what any other candidate would receive. (That, in and of itself, is revolutionary, since every candidate up to now has seen enough benefit from appearing on camera in the first place to not worry about also getting paid for it.)

Finally, it's meant that no network has been willing to just stop covering the candidate, because to do so would be to court lower ratings, let alone risk the ire of his supporters, or the candidate himself... with, of course, every other network willing to give air to the fire.

There's been some signs of weak polling for Trump in the past week or so, so maybe actual voting will stop the money -- err, speech. But there's a sense that the toothpaste has left the tube, and that the next political war won't be fought with the air power of big media spends. Instead, it might be the millions of unpaid voices on social media, all of which, of course, wouldn't have been there in the first place without the money.

Amazing system, this.

                                                           * * * * *

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.