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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Advertisers Need To Know More About Us

Forever In My Feed

Six weeks ago, my eldest was just starting her sophomore year at high school. (She's 15, and don't worry -- this is actually about marketing and advertising.) We live a little less than two miles from her school, and there is no convenient bus or mass transit option. Historically, my wife would provide taxi service, but she's now got a part-time job, so my eldest is scrambling to figure out a way home for a few days every week. Walking and biking are options, and so is just staying at the school late at extra-curricular activities, but that's up to three hours after the final class where she's just hanging out. This will all stop being a problem, perhaps, when she's driving and we can think about getting her a car, but for now, it's a bit of a strain. Her books are heavy, and she's fashionable enough to not want to be sweaty at class on a bike or from taking a half hour hike, maybe alone.

Oh a whim, I started to poke around the Web to see if there might be another transportation option. That's when I saw the hoverboard. You have probably seen them on the news or YouTube. They are kind of like a Segway without a podium, and there's a picture of one at the top of this column. Some go up to 10 mph and can operate for up to an hour, so hey -- maybe an option. It looked small enough to maybe fit in her locker. I read some reviews, went to a few sites to price options.

Then I showed it to her, and got the kind of side eye and shade that only a fashionable 15 year old can throw. Oh well. Transaction averted; not the first time that Dad's Idea got shot down. No worries.

Anyone that has thought about buying something on the Web, and wound up not doing it, knows what happens next. The hoverboard has been in my banner ads ever since, with an ever-changing number of prices and shipping options, from an ever-changing number of vendors.
I could, of course, opt out of these banners by clicking on the AdChoices logos, or maybe clearing my cookies, and so on. I am, of course, not going to do this, because no one in the world ever has done that, because honestly, who has the time? Besides, if the hoverboard was not in my ads, it would just be something else.

Now, some see this kind of thing as proof of Advertiser Malfeasance, or an invasion of privacy, or just one more instance of modern life going to hell in a handbasket. (Have you ever noticed that handbaskets are the only carrying containers for trips to the netherworld? No one's going to hell in a backpack. But I digress.)

I see things a little differently. I see an advertising medium that, far from getting too much information on the lives of individuals, just isn't getting enough. In my case, that the hoverboard is a no sale.

In a few more months, I'll shop for some other stuff as part of my Q4 gift giving. My retargeting banners will reset to whatever new thing comes into my life without a purchase. But offline, I'll still be watching football games... and unless there is Congressional action or some spectacular bit of public relations misery, I will be seeing ads for daily fantasy leagues, auto insurance, mobile phones and services, trucks and fast food.

I don't play daily fantasy leagues, and never will. My wife works for an insurance company, so I'm out of market there, thanks to her employee discount. I got my phone four months ago, and won't replace it for another 18 months at least. I've never bought a truck, and never will. I don't do fast food. There's no way to opt out of any of those ads. (And honestly, I think I'd pay money to not see any more daily fantasy league ads. I also don't think I'd be alone in making that purchase.)

Eventually, online advertising will grow up and consolidate targeting files, because there's money in better targeting, and much of the infrastructure is already in place, especially with advertising being much more tied to purchase. Much later, targeting will also occur offline, and I'll stop seeing all of those lovely ads that are so irrelevant to my life.

There's simply too much money in doing things smarter, and life for consumers will also get better. Smarter will happen, as soon as we move past this incomplete amount of information. And just because we're used to dumb ads in non-digital mediums, that doesn't make them less dumb.

(Oh, and as for what my kid wound up doing, rather than pioneering a new transportation fad? She's now pretty much hanging out at her best friend's house after school, who lives pretty close by. And giving me side eye for new and better things.)

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Never Give A Sucker An Even Panacea

Would I sell to you?

So as the continuing fallout from the Volkswagen engineering fraud continues to hit the news, there's one point that continues to hit home for me.

Honestly, how did so many people get fooled by this in the first place?

I drive a hybrid hatchback, in that I'm something of a hobbit (honestly, I've met middle schoolers that are taller and heavier than me), and clean tech appeals to me in a major way. I recycle, walk, run, bike, turn off lights and so on, and so on. For years, my family lived without a clothes dryer, and just used lines and racks. I'm not as far along as we might be one day -- no solar panels on the roof, and we don't compost -- but I do my part.

It's not as easy as not doing your part. You can, and will, save time by using a dryer, dumping everything in the same trash can, driving everywhere, etc. You might save a few bucks as well, but you'll have to take a little sacrifice, from time to time. You know, like a grown up.

I like my hybrid a lot, but it has tradeoffs, mostly from torque. If I need exceptional giddy up, I'm going to pay for it with poor mileage, and I better turn off the air conditioning and the econo settings to get it done. So I just don't drive the car the way I used to drive other cars, and I drive proactively to not put myself in those situations. I still drive at or faster than the traffic around me, but with much less in the way of sudden acceleration. I used to own a two-door sports car with a stick shift, and in terms of being fun to drive, there's no comparison; that ride was a hoot. I get 18 miles per gallon more with the hybrid, and accept a little less fun in my life for the payoff. I didn't have the means or interest in paying a lot more for a Tesla, or the tech chops to make my own electric supercar. So I compromised with my hybrid.

Volkswagen, with the promised clean diesel (never mind the idea of a fossil fuel having clean slapped in front of it) offered, and its buyers believed, in a fraudulent tradeoff. You could still be green, have the same get up and go, and not have to pay for the bleeding edge Tesla. All of the benefit, none of the pain. Automotive panacea.

Not very surprisingly, it was a lie. Just like, well, just about every panacea ever sold. Drugs, even life-saving ones, have side effects. Patriotism, faith, fitness, all great virtues in moderation, but all can be taken too far, or have unforeseen consequences. Those solar panels might not be made under the best working conditions, or be as reliable or potent as other sources, at leas for a while. Adult life is filled with choosing the lesser of two evils, from going to the doctor or dentist for preventive care to voting to buying insurance. The only people who get to believe in panaceas are kids, and they get away from it soon enough.

So while I have sympathy for the defrauded VW owners, who are suddenly driving cars that are worth a lot less than they were before, and feel like they've been taking advantage of...

Well, that sympathy is not total, because on some level, you had to know better, didn't you?

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Awful, Awful Peeple

Urge To Say Mean Things Rising

So there was a lovely example of utter and complete Start Up Fail this week in the media. First came the news in the Washington Post that a new start up (Peeple, because the concept alone wasn't creepy enough without hinting at clandestine viewing) was coming to be "Yelp for everyone", where users would get to post reviews of, well, anyone they'd meet.

After the WaPo shot the fish in the barrel for a few hundred words for privacy violations and the rights of the general public to not worry about getting their lives ruined by a problem neighbor with time on their hands, social media joined fire. Now, the founders are backpedaling to say that the reviews have to be positive and approved by the named user, so the too creepy but potentially voyeuristic and useful site is being replaced by non-stop fluffery that's unseen outside of a talk show couch.

A few points:

1) There is, of course, next to nothing shown here that you can't already do with other applications that you've already heard of; you can write a blog that says how so and so kicks puppies, start a Facebook page over how your 4th grade teacher is in need of abuse, and so on. The fact that no one uses them for this purpose, because it's beyond the pale of human decency and can't drive sustained traffic on its own, seems to have eluded everyone involved.

2) While the truth is always a defense against libel and slander, it's also generally difficult to prove, and expensive when court is involved. It's hard to imagine how a successful Peeple rollout wouldn't result in a great deal of work for the nation's lawyers, which is yet another reason to really dislike this.

3) Honestly, did we need another way to be horrible to each other?

4) Short of paying the site to not be on it, how is this a business?

No one reads the Internet for B+ opinions, and that 1 and 10 ranking rule isn't going to make for nice moments among humanity. We also, as individuals, tend to limit our marketability moments for, well, professional marketability, and to have who we are while on break or vacation or whatever impact our professional lives is always dicey... and even more so when, unlike a lapse on social media, it wasn't entirely self-inflicted, and indicative of a lapse in judgment.

I get that this is now a gig economy. But it really does not need to be a bad gig, with always-on criticism. Work-life balance, people.

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Brand Kid, or the Tuba Paradox

It's all about the Benjamins

This weekend, I took my eldest daughter, a high school sophomore, on her second college trip. We're trying to spread these out over a good period of time, so that she doesn't apply to any place she has not gotten a sense of, and that we don't rush when we get closer to a decision.

The school we visited would be a reasonable choice. It's far enough away so that commuting home on weekends seems unlikely, and as we're committed to giving her a residential college experience rather than a commuter one, that matters. One of my old college friends works for the school in IT Administration, so we got to see some stuff you don't get in the usual tour. The school does a few things very well, and if every visit is as productive as this one, this is going to be a great process.

My friend has been working in academia for most of her life, and knows a lot about, well, a lot. After quizzing my kid about her likes and dislikes, and getting to a comfort level with her overall intellect and ability to withstand direct questioning, the conversation went into a discussion that went far beyond the college we happened to be sitting in.

What my friend described was a situation where the process roughly mirrored the world of venture capital and start up businesses. The best schools may have a bigger sticker price for tuition, but they also have more to offer in terms or scholarships, grants and opportunities. It struck me as the same story and trade-off that you get by taking less money in salary to work for a more stable business, with better benefits, but potentially a worse title and chance to learn faster.

Third and fourth tier colleges are struggling to overcome demographic shifts in the marketplace to stay in business, just as third and fourth tier start ups struggle against competitors with deeper pockets and better engineering. If you are willing to go to places that others are not, or have strengths that are uncommon, your prospects are brighter -- in college and in business. While going to a bigger school might seem to put you in line with a bigger alumni and social network, small schools are frequently more tight-knit and provoke a better outcome.

On some level, it should be noted, this all seems contrary to the goals of a better society. Education should be about a meritocracy, a levelling agent between calcifying income classes, and a more or less equal playing field... and nothing described above really fits with that. But on another, it just makes sense, especially since this is likely to be one of the most important decisions my daughter makes in her life... and affluent parents just aren't going to sit idly by and not try to give their child an advantage. What's a better item to spend on?

Turning back to the conundrum that colleges find themselves in, let's say you are the dean of admissions at a school that is known for an active music program, a great English department, and a science school that hasn't been able to attract top talent. You would appreciate the registrants that want to study English... but what you really need are kids who want to study science. And if one of them happens to play the tuba, and you don't have one of those right now? You're going to make that kid your best possible offer, and do everything you can to make sure that they are part of your next class. But if the tuba trick becomes known, and suddenly there are thousands of tuba players in the market, that skill loses its magic.

It was all good information, and got my kid to stop being afraid of applying to better schools, and to not let sticker price start and end all decisions. Hopefully, it will all end with what all parents want -- a college experience for their kid that's as good or better than what they had. And the right fit for her needs.

Oh, and one last thing, in re how all of this relates to marketing and advertising?

New technologies, especially with remote learning and the Internet of Things, are just going to grease the skids for also-ran schools in the US, who were already on the very wrong side of trends in regards to population. That level of serious worry permeates the presentations of even schools that are above that tier. And as more and more information about positive outcomes after school are shared, it's going to get harder and harder for the ordinary to survive.

On some level, it was all oddly reassuring. I've spent my life being convinced that academia was a place that just raised tuition prices without regard for the pain and suffering of parents and students. Turns out, they are as subject to market forces as everyone else.

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Ad Blocking vs. Mobile Blocking

Yes, So Very Sorry

For the past couple of weeks, AdLand has been awash in discussions about ad blockers. What was previously the province of a growing but tolerated number of techies is now mainstream behavior, ever since Apple supported the programs with their new platforms, and popular blockers have gone to the Droid system as well. With exceptional abuses like publishers producing 4X the memory bloat on trackers for cookies and ads as opposed to content, and data plans costing real money, it's easy to see why the apps are popular, despite the moral culpability. Besides, as the history of the music industry has shown, if you give people the technology to steal without any real threat of consequence, people will steal.

All of which has left me with one very small, and very out of touch and out of the demographic, question.

What is so wrong with the desktop and laptop experience that has made all of the traffic go to phones, anyway?

I understand, honestly, why some forms of content work better on mobile. If there is, well, Adult Utility going on, a screen that is more portable is clearly preferable. Certain dayparts are also going to be dominated by mobile. But what we're seeing from a data standpoint now is that it's not just the screen that is preferred in those hours, it's also the one that you use when you have the option to use something bigger, in the evening and weekends.

Why, especially when the mobile Web experience is so much worse than the desktop one, let alone something that puts you at risk for data issues that just don't exist on other platforms?

If you went to a print magazine and told them that they had to make a second version on much smaller stock, they just wouldn't do it. But everyone makes a mobile site.

Laptops are similar in real price (i.e., the lack of a contract) to smartphones, and dramatically less likely to be lost or dropped. They also let you type without the constant threat of error and/or auto-correct, and there's all kinds of extremely useful apps for those machines. Many of them with significantly less bugs and other issues. There's the nasty problem of people treating laptops as Work Only, and not wanting to put their personal browsing history on a machine that can be traced by an employer, but honestly. Having a second laptop isn't going to break the bank of most people.

There is, however, almost no sexiness in having the latest and greatest laptop. And that, really, is the crux of it, isn't it? Smartphones are stylish, customizable, and take away the point that people never really wanted -- the relentless literacy, since there's this big imposing keyboard that makes you type -- eww, words! -- and replaces it with an endless junk drawer of apps. Hoarding without the shame, on a screen no one will ever see but you.

If I were in charge of an upscale online publisher, I'd advertise my publication's full-size version -- aka, the actual Web site -- on my mobile site. I'd investigate having longer and better versions of my content that lived on full-sized hardware only. I'd put all of the cool Easter eggs that my content team could deliver on that site as well. Then, I'd price my ads to match the much better experience for full-sized viewing. I'd also try to put the ad-blocking software in place, again, for full-screen viewing only.

I'd also probably run the site into the ground in a month.

Which, judging from the hue and cry coming from online publishing over ad blocking, just means I'd get to the same place as everyone else. Just in less time.

But at least I'd have a dramatically better epitaph for that career.

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You're More Likely To... Insult Our Intelligence

Feel Teh Dumb

While I've been in marketing and advertising for over a generation, I've been pontificating about it in public as a content marketer (shh! I'm doing content marketing, kind of, right now!) for less than six months.

What I've learned most in that time? That there are some breathtakingly dumb, or at the very least, willfully ignorant, people who are also publishing about these very same subjects. This was manifest most plain in this little snippet in a treasure trove of dumb, in a column that I am not going to cite or link to because rewarding the dumb is against my ethics. The money quote from that is one that you are likely to see, or may have already. It's so dumb that we need to beat it down with sticks, and set it on fire, and then get serious. Here it is: you are more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad.

Now, I could talk about the branding benefit of display ads. I could talk about how A/B studies show rises in purchasing for prospect groups that have seen relevant display ads, or increased search engine traffic and email and direct mail conversion, and so on, and so on. I could talk about determining true response rates when you factor out bot traffic, or other forms of page view busting malfeasance. I could talk about viewability and above the fold points, or how click traffic on mobile can be a complete whiff because of user error. All of which is so obvious to everyone who runs display campaigns, and why they care more about viewability than click rate, because only utter freaking idiots care only about click rates. I could also ask about what kind of planes, what defines a crash, and where you get these sentiments, but I'm pretty sure we all know the neighborhood, seeing as we've all got one, and tend to need to cater to its needs on a routine basis.

But as this has been a clear and obvious point that adtech pros have been trying to make for the better part of a decade, I'm going to try a different tactic. Did you also know that you are more likely to help a  narwhale give birth, than buy a car from a single 30-second automobile ad? Clearly, no one should ever buy or make one of those. The odds of shifting your business computing systems from exposure to sponsorship at a golf tournament is the same as gargling with motor oil by mistake, and the odds of shifting your prescription heartburn medication from an OTC ad is the same as discovering a cure for male pattern idiocy.

Clicks on banners are nice, if you are placing the ad campaign. Sales as part of a coordinated media campaign, with lifts in your other channels coming from the branding and awareness benefit that a viewed and relevant campaign can provide, is what you are actually trying to accomplish.

But so long as we are, you know, slandering a marketing and advertising channel for things that aren't very important, as if they were the be-all and end-all of their existence...

Well, why be so limited as to stick to tried and true nonsense, when there's a whole world of brand new nonsense to explore?

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Four Marketing and Advertising devices that are actually doomed

Buh Bye

One of the stocks in trade for the folks who work at M&AD is to make fun of clickbait columnists who want to declare a marketing or advertising medium to be Dead. Look around, and you can find people sticking a fork in just about anything that employs pros, from email to display to SEO to individual consumer categories, and so on, and so on. If you are first to declare something Dead, you win!

It's hackery, but it gets clicks and views, so the best you can do is make fun of them and move on.

However, there *are* business models that are closer to this mortal coil than others. And at the risk of belaboring the obvious, here's the ones that we see as not being around in another generation or less.

1) The (printed) Yellow Pages

If you are anything like me, you are kind of amazed this is still around in the first place, since the only thing you've done with it for 15 years is move the book from your doostep to your recycling bin, since there is this thing called the Internet, all while wondering why you haven't called to opt out of delivery in the first place. My children don't even know what this is, and in a world with ubiquitous communication via the Internet, a total market coverage device that's outdated the day its printed just doesn't make any sense.

I get that there are probably direct marketing pros with coupons and spreadsheets that show this is still a winning play and purchase. That math is getting worse every week and every month, and there's no reason to think that trend will stop.

2) Outbound Telemarketing

In retrospect, it's amazing that this ever was an industry, given how disruptive and disagreeable a cold-call can be. While the phone will still be a prime tool for reaching targeted lists and CRM work, the days of trying to reach new customers with little more than a number are going to be blocked and trucked out of existence, even to the point of robo-calling getting the heave ho. No one, other than the people who made a frightening amount of money on it over the years, will mourn its demise.

3) DRTV

This is one of those formats that may be hard for elites to imagine still exists, but remnant broadcast inventory is cheap, and it really does not take much in the way of conversions to make the math work. The problem is that broadcast viewership numbers are just crashing against the Web, especially for youth demographics that make up a sweet spot for many of the products offered. At some point, production costs have to make even the remnant buy a poor purchase, especially when the remnant audience is getting smaller and smaller.

4) TMC Mailers

Unlike many digital pros, I don't believe that all direct mail will go away; there's just too much value in print for establishing brand credibility and integrity. But I do believe that elements of direct mail are doomed, and the foremost among them is the most unwanted. That would be the Total Market Coverage piece, with bundled flyers from your local grocery stores and pharmacies, that's been littering your mail box since, well, forever.

The problem with the TMC is, like the other pieces on this list, is that there is little branding benefit, and spreadsheets that are just going to point in the wrong direction until there is just no reason for it to continue. Beyond the environmental issues, the plain and simple is that some people in a neighborhood are never going to become customers of the stores that have been hitting their mailboxes every week. If you can pull out those dead addresses -- and with the Internet of Things, you will -- there is no reason for these mailers to exist.

You'll still get flyers, but only for the places that make sense. And only the print shops and mail carriers that are going to see less billing will mind.

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Ads on Jerseys

Slightly more garish than usual Mets

Complaining about things like ads on sports jerseys is a great way to seem very old and crotchety... but there are moments when, well, the crotchety just overwhelms.

To wit, the notion that ads on sports jerseys are not just an atrocity, and an abomination, but also an inevitability.

What's the big deal, fans of the English Premier League might ask? After all, Arsenal makes over $46 million a year in a deal with Emirates, ad Manchester United makes $81.6 million a year from Chevrolet for their deal, which includes jersey-front sponsorship. People in the U.S. should just relax and accept the ads. You won't even notice them after a while.

And sure, the money is great, and they may be right. Heaven knows sports fans in the U.S. have gotten used to many terrible things. But there are a handful of critical differences that make all of the difference in the world. To wit:

1) Teams in leagues outside of the U.S. do not benefit from a closed market monopoly.

If your NFL, MLB, NHL or NBA team is just plain terrible, and doesn't even try very hard to get better, or pay to retain or attract the services of good players, they stay in the league. Forever and ever, really, and the level of derpery does not really matter. In fact, there's a very real chance that a team that does not try to win will make more profit than one that does, thanks to revenue sharing.

In other countries, the worst teams are relegated -- in other words, sent down to the minors. It makes for fantastic drama for a much wider number of clubs, and serious misery and joy for fans and haters of a specific laundry. But what it means, more than anything else, is that making hay while the sun shines is very, very important. As you might imagine, advertising revenue from jersey sales, not to mention tickets, TV ratings and all of the rest, is highly dependent on staying in the first division.

2) Teams in the U.S. benefit from corporate welfare around stadiums and broadcast rights.

Thanks to some highly questionable public service decisions based around the artificial monopoly of "major league" teams, local municipal governments in the U.S. are set up in a perennial game of chicken against other cities, especially when it comes to retaining at-risk franchises in stadiums that aren't quite as new and lucrative for corporate sponsors.

Other nations? Well, there's no artificial monopoly, thanks to relegation and promotion. So there are really no true "minor league" cities -- there are just ones that are at that status in the here and now. Once again, the sources of perpetual revenue just aren't as evergreen.

3) The non-viewing public does not, for the most part, subsidize sports outside of the U.S.

Everyone who pays a cable bill is, whether they ever watch the network or not, paying ESPN about $5 a month. Smaller, but still potent, amounts also apply to other networks that carry sports, including the ones that are actually ran by the leagues. If and when cable becomes unbundled, or enough of the paying public cuts the cord, maybe the math changes, but that's a great deal of inertia to overcome. Other countries, well, not so much.

So the plain and simple is that American leagues are literally awash in money, and simply have to decide whether if there is anything they can do that is so beyond the pale that it will kill the golden goose. Will it be ads on the front of jerseys?

Probably not.

But honestly, why risk it?

Especially when you've already got more money than you will probably ever be able to spend?

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The Internet of Cranks

A year ago, the Gartner Group predicted that an affluent family home might have, within seven years, hundreds of objects with connectivity to the Web. Which has, with the greatest of speed, provoked the backlash of all Old Man Yelling At Cloud backlashes, because back lashing about technology, especially technology that seems unnecessary or exploitative on cost, is like falling off a log. Without wi-fi.

And sure, there's some of that, and it seems like a far off thing to imagine that a connected oven is going to make a lot of sense, since the best it can do right now is just start the oven from an app, as if you've left dinner in the oven before leaving for work. Security issues are also a concern, and a reason why bleeding edge is never fun.

But that dramatically misses the point. The reason why you connect dumb items to the IoT isn't for what they'll do on version 1; it's for the possibility of a version one in the first place, and the much greater potential of a version five. Starting your oven with an app is pointless, but having an oven that never burns the meal, because it's got sensors that prevents that kind of thing? Or coordinates with a future IoT robot? Well, that's handy, and wins on energy and safety, and you can't get to that point without the early stuff that seems pointless.

This also works for just about every other device that seems silly now. The IoT toothbrush? Well, on version one you get kids brushing more and better, because it's an app on their always-on phone that shows all of the places that they are missing. On version two, maybe you've got an early decay diagnostic that will make your dentist trip happen sooner and with less drama, or maybe inspire the flossing that you haven't been getting to.

An IoT mattress pad? I'm getting spam from my bed! Ridiculous, except when it's a potential life-saver if it gets to a strong enough diagnostic level, and part and parcel of a more efficient exit patient strategy for post-op. The IoT toilet? Gross! But the same diagnostic abilities (not pleasant to think about, sure, but true) and I, for one, would be happy to pay for a plumbing situation that alerts me as early as possible when there is a stoppage, so I never have to clean up that job again. The IoT Basketball? Keeps score for you, and gives you the true shooting percentage. (Personally, I'm looking forward to IoT golf balls, because losing golf balls is my personal hate moment.) And so on, and so on.

Will there be abuses? Of course; no progress is ever perfectly smooth or sensible. But there's no chance of progress without the connectivity in the first place, and the price of adding the connection is so borderline trivial, especially as more and more connection points and devices hit the market, because, well, Scale.

So lighten up, IoT Scolds. The future is coming no matter how snarky you get about it, and some of these executions are going to be great. (And others, we'll just giggle at later. Much later.)

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Fighting The Good Fight

The Only Option, Really

This weekend was filled with strong Guy Fun for me, with three events that I enjoy a lot, but are in no way guaranteed to bring satisfaction. The first was hosting my poker game, which went well, with a mild cash in the tournament, and break even in the later cash game. The second was a round of golf at one of my favorite courses, with great weather and good play (had a tap in birdie at a picturesque hole, which is a very rare event for me) making up for slow pace. Today was watching my pro football team (never mind which one; it's not germane to the conversation) and tracking my fantasy football team.

Well, two out of three isn't bad, right?

My teams, both real and fake, lost handily, and both defeats were utterly maddening, in that they didn't play well, but were in contests where just giving up and not watching would have been giving up before the loss was assured. So it was bad time after good, and a situation where I didn't just feel bad about my teams losing, but worse for wasting the time to watch in the first place. (I've also gone on record as not believing in my real team this year, even back in pre-season, and feeling that they were doomed so long as they had the current management... but, well, being right is of no comfort, really.)

Logically, it's a pretty simple solution -- just stop watching the games. I've honestly got enough to do without this amount of timesuck, and my other hobbies are far more participatory. But I've had bad times playing poker and golf as well, and if you give up every hobby that doesn't work out for you every time you do it, you'll be out of hobbies very soon. Besides, I'm a creature of habit, and just losing one isn't very likely, no matter how exasperating my team is. (And yes, they are powerfully exasperating.)

We pivot, as always, to insights about our chosen field. There's been any number of times in my career when, in the back of my mind, I pretty much knew the project was doomed (just like my football team, really)... but had to put my whole heart into it anyway, and find reasons to convince myself to become a fan of it. It's not as if you get into a level of true self-delusion, but without some measure of hope, creative execution of a marketing or advertising program will fall into the dread valley of going through the motions. And no one ever made a good ad or marketing piece that way.

But in the back of my mind, if you had asked me off the record which approaches were going to tank? I almost always knew. And tried like mad to forget while doing the job.

Not every project is going to be a winner. Same as any poker tournament, golf round, sports game, and so on, and so on. But self-sabotaging the process with negativity before hand doesn't make the struggle any easier, or give you any points when it goes off the rails. The only thing it will do for you is give more time to prepare your excuse. And who, really, needs that?

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Stop Saying Ads Must Get Better

Fighting Dirty

In one of the best moments of "Inside Amy Schumer" this past season, there's a skit where a self-defense class is taught, but instead of physical combat, it's emotional combat as part of a male-female romantic relationship. In the middle of many solid laugh lines, a male student tries to get a word in edgewise, and is told that he can never raise his voice... with the joke being that, well, he hadn't raised his voice.

But there it is, the perfect way to escalate an argument into nuclear warfare: tell someone they are doing something when they aren't. (Oh, and if you want a bonus one on this, feel free to accuse someone of always thinking they are right. Well, um, does anyone really argue for things that they think are wrong, without being, well, psychopaths? But I digress.)

We now turn to the reason you read these little musings: the point in re marketing and advertising.

The purveyors of ad blocking software, in a remarkable bit of conflation, seem to believe that blocking ads will (magically?) make advertising better. The argument is that native is great (um, sure, if you've got great content producers who don't mind working in the gray area), and the current ad situation, especially vis a vis mobile, is so bad that you are going to have to burn the village down to save it.

There's some merits to these arguments. No one can, with good conscience, argue that the mobile Web and advertising experience is what it should be. Defending the status quo is borderline impossible, especially when you consider how viewing ads has recently put people at risk from malvertising, let alone data plan costs. Like file sharing before it, the existence of the technology seems to argue for the use of the technology.

But, well, lots of technologies exist that you just can't use any way that you like. Plenty of markets are nearly as messed up as online advertising, not the least of which is healthcare. But pointing a gun at a doctor and demanding service, or bringing a bazooka into your local pharmacy to debate per pill costs, is not going to work. That would just be obvious theft, and result in either incarceration or societal chaos... and asking doctors or pharmacists to fix the healthcare market, since they now have this new stress to make it better, would be insanity. Online advertising will get better when it is properly priced, and when we stop making it dance on the heads of pins (I'm talking about clicks here) that other ad channels don't have to do.

Also, well, how exactly should ads get better? No one wants to give up more of their information to make them better targeted. No one wants to give them more time and space to tell a story. And truth be told, the vast majority of ads aren't supposed to be Great; they are supposed to make you more likely to buy something. Great ads are mostly great for the people who make them, not the companies that run them.

Finally, this. I've worked on more ads than, likely, anyone you have ever met. (Thousands of clients, 15 years in online. It's been fun.) The number of ads that were not the best we could do, given the size of the contract and the need to make a deadline? Damned near none, really. It's what professionals do; you work to the best of your ability, even if the client has challenges (maybe especially if they have challenges). We didn't shortchange anyone. We made the best ads we could. So does, well, just about every ad pro in the business.

So stop saying ads have got to get better, because they are already just about as good as they can be. What needs to improve is the technology and bandwidth around the online experience, the pricing for viewable impressions for branding value, and the understanding from consumers that without some form of value exchange, most professional and quality amateur content will have to go behind pay firewalls, and the Web as we knew it, where traffic meritocracies could spring up based around a roughly fair system of monetization, will end.

With the same quality of ads as any other medium has.

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The Five Impressions Rule

Classic marketing -- and by classic, I mean the stuff we learned when everything wasn't through our own very personal screens -- held that if a marketer was going to have any chance of making the case to sell to a new prospect, they needed to reach that prospect in a wide variety of ways to establish branding and legitimacy. While there were always a few people who had an immediate need, or might buy just on impulse or price, most consumers went with a trusted brand, and that level of trust was achieved through a long tail of broadcast, radio, print and more.

Now, those factors are still important, but they seem increasingly subservient to just in time marketing impressions through digital modes. Word of mouth still matters, but it might come from social media or a blog, rather than a moment in the market.

Where the rubber hits the road, however, is building a brand. Even for online-first brands, broadcast is where the story is told, because that 30 to 60 second spot is so ingrained in the story format that's expected... even if it's not needed. And perhaps those just get ported into online video, with ad-blocking being the only issue to overcome.

Well, that and the fact that public acceptance of ads, especially in the mobile platform, is so low that the blocking software is getting pushed as a performance, bandwidth and security saving measure. Rather than just, well, simple theft.

My belief is that despite the commonality of everything still coming through that single screen, different channels make your look and feel of that screen very different. If something's in your social media feed, that's a different place in your consideration set and mental acuity than an email, native ad, interstitial, audio ad in a podcast, and so on. Daypart might also make for a very different brand impression, on a very different platform, with more or less time on their hands.

It's an open question as to whether the market will support this supposition, because it's all new, and the screen is personal enough to make some think of stalking. But it won't be an open question for long. (Yes, that's a bit of a tell.)

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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.

Putting Numbers To Nonsense

Ever run into a situation where your client is just insisting on what you know is a poor practice?

It happens a lot, especially in digital, where metrics can be learned pretty quickly. At some of my gigs, I've been front line with clients who just had to do things in a certain way, even when it meant they were leaving money on the table.

(A small aside: of all the places to leave money, isn't the table one of your better choices? At least there, you'd think you'd be able to get to it pretty quickly. Moving on.)

You'd be surprised, honestly, by just how hard it is to change some processes, especially in more conservative verticals. Bringing in more aggressive e-commerce practices and design work can seem like you are downgrading the brand or threatening the margins.

In moments like this, your only real course of action as a marketing and advertising change agent is to try to put numbers to the practice. Ideally, this is done in a test cell, but if you aren't getting enough traction to change the poor practice in the first place, maybe a test is also asking too much.

Here's the process that I usually take.

1) Defuse the situation. Often, changes can be seen as a threat to outside creatives, or a situation where you can come off as insensitive or threatening. So what you need to do is point out that your motives in making this recommendation are for the long-term success of your client. It seems like something that's so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but believe me -- it needs to be said.

2) Clothe it in a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) moment. If a competitor is doing better because of the practice, if you feel like you've established a little bit of rapport, then show the better practice in question. While you should never quote a performance boost in a way that seems promissory for obvious liability issues, quoting a general "up to" number can be effective. 

3) Don't get doctrinaire. You don't need to make this a my way or the highway kind of approach. If your new way of doing things inspires a test because it speaks to a new thought process, that may be a bigger win that what you were recommending. Remember, the point isn't to just improve performance; it's also to learn something significant.

4) Make it seem like their idea. If you can tie the thought process from your clients's supplied materials, it's a spoonful of sugar. Again, it's all about where you get to, not who will get credit for the direction.

5) Identify the blocking agent, and if necessary, set yourself a reminder. Every meaningful change tends to come all of a sudden in most testing situations, so if you do find yourself blocked, keep in mind the name of the person performing the block, and a 3 to 6 month window where you ask again. Persistence pays, especially if you work in a restrictive environment.

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Persistence can also pay off when you like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit our RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Intrigue In The Inbox

Must... Look...

In the Gartner Group's most recent Hype Cycle Research Report, published about a month ago, there were literally thousands of technologies discussed. On the left side of the axis is all of the stuff that gets venture capital dollars, where the hype starts to build around advancements that will either change the world or just waste a lot of money. Bioacoustic computing, smart dust, human augmentation, 3D bioprinting systems for organ transplant, and so on, and so on. There's no difficulty in getting excited about what these might do, if only they, well, work.

As we move deeper, and the tech becomes more and more real, the slate of development becomes known as the Peak of Inflated Expectations. Here, we've got stuff like self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, wearables, and so on. Stuff that's real, but where all of the kinks haven't been worked out, or how it's supposed to make money.

The next stage is the Trough of Disillusionment, where the hype burns off and we're just left with the realization that while the product might be real, it's also no longer owning a limitless field of potential as to how it's going to change the world. Gartner puts cryptocurrency (aka, bitcoins) here, along with augmented reality and hybrid cloud computing. This is the state where start ups shake out to just the survivors, where the venture capital gets antsy and starts to look for the next new thing, and folks in the space are just getting irritated that what might be an actual business is just getting nicked for a lack of sex appeal. Survive that, and you get to the Slope of Enlightenment, ending in the Plateau of Productivity.

Email, as you might guess, doesn't appear anywhere in this graph. People have been making money in email for so long, you are much more likely to hear how the channel is Dead, rather than anything with any kind of monetization and appeal.

The truly funny thing? There may have never been a better time for the channel.

Why? Well, the obvious point is mobile, which means that the daypart to get emails in front of the audience you need to reach just became, well, damned near 24/7. The average person checks their smartphone over 100 times a day, and so long as the device is latching up to email -- more on that later -- it's just an always-on channel. Send at a time when no one else is sending, and you might get full attention and unmatched consideration.

The next part is, well, the comparative misery of so many other channels. TV has a massive demographic problem, plus ad skipping for additional monetization misery, for anything but DVR-proof live events. Online ads are getting blocked with a vengeance, and have viewability and maladvertising problems to boot. Print and outdoor and radio -- it's not as if any channel, other than email, has actually had life get better recently.

There are, however, problems, and they are major ones. Young people don't read email. They live in social networks, IM and chat... and while they might eventually graduate into email, they also, well, might not. Reading isn't exactly on the rise compared to image-based work, and the channel is under constant stress from overuse, filtering, deliverability, and all of the other challenges that pros have worked on for, well, decades.

But there's still that device in your hands, and the plain and simple fact that when you read an email, there is nothing else on your screen, or in your mind. HTML5 will let you incorporate video and conversions without a landing page visit, and reaching an affluent audience is entirely possible. There are major tactical advantages here that no other channel can match.

Email doesn't sizzle. It just works. And might for decades, or a lot less.

More intriguing than you realized, no?

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Feel free to like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

How Fast It Goes

Timeless?

This last weekend for Labor Day, I took the family to our favorite amusement park for our annual holiday tradition.  As I rode down the modified ski lift that the kids insist on taking as a low-energy palate cleanser between thrill rides, and saw the whole of the valley and park before me, the kids lazily kicked their heels up with their cousin on the bench ahead of us. It was all very serene, and more than a little wistful. My wife took out her cell phone and took a minute-long movie for her Facebook feed. I just looked, becoming very aware of the cinematic nature before us, as more and more of the park revealed itself from the trees.

While the view seemed timeless, it really was anything but. There were new rides that we had never seen, an ever-growing mix of people, changing lights and so on, and so on. As usually happens around this time of year, the trees are just starting to turn, and the mix of smells from the forest and the food is never quite the same twice. Change is the only constant.

Changing even faster than the park were the passengers in the car ahead of us. My kids are 10 and 15, and while they both still love the place, things change, and at some point, maybe vacations together might seem more like an obligation than a treat. Also, well, my eldest keeps getting attention in ways that haven't happened before. There may come a day when she decides she has more interesting things to do than hang out in the same old park with the same old parents.

Life Is Changing. It's changing really, really fast.

From a marketing and advertising standpoint, I'm well over halfway done on the legal limits of parenting, with changes to my demographic class coming up quick. And the need to keep in touch with new technology, thoughts and and ideas has never been greater, really.

But the funny thing about those changes? The kids are going through them with speed, too. We were in a hotel room for a couple of days, and the TV screen never went on. That wouldn't have happened just two years ago, when we took our last vacation. It's also not because my kids are that virtuous and active, but because they'd much rather spend time with their personal screens (phones and tablets), where the content is more under their control, and they have more privacy and interaction.

Media buyers will note that their business is just fine, really. They sound a lot like record labels a couple of decades ago, or travel agents, and so on. That's just how fast it goes, and nothing is slowing down. Or probably ever will.

Even in the most timeless of places.

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Feel free to like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Of Clipboards and (Future) Convicts

The killer as a young genius

My first job in marketing was at an independent music trade show. The show in question was started by my housemate, who saw an opportunity based on an underserved region, and his friendships with a great number of hustling indie musicians. That number included me, but I also held a couple of degrees, and the aggression taught to those who study journalism.

The show needed a lot of everything, and the job was different just about every day, because most of the work was done by volunteers. Organization was haphazard at best. Either I was listening to showcase submission tapes, arranging sessions, selling advertising and sponsorship slots, writing the directory, and so on, and so on. There was always something to do, always a fire to put out, and, well, I've got a motor. I wound up doing so much for the show that it led to my second job in marketing, because the lead sponsor of the show was impressed, and hired me away from it.

Anyway, my all-around fireman duties included talent relations, because music industry celebrities would much rather talk to each other than the public, and need a gentle amount of rousting to get them to conform to a schedule and get to their various rooms. At an event such as this, where the fans aren't just fans but incredibly desperate creatives who are trying to secure fame and fortune by impressing industry, getting them to and from various rooms is pretty much a nightmare. Which is why this advice is absolutely golden: carry a clipboard.

Why a clipboard? Because when you have one, along with the studied air of blue collar indifference and/or annoyance, you seem like someone who has Some Official Duty, and that's all you really need for a lot of real-world situations. I've walked past an inordinate number of security guards with nothing but a clipboard and a desire to not spend time explaining why there was nothing but blank paper on it. It doesn't work nearly as well as it used to, but it still works a lot. People think you are there to check on the electrical or plumbing. Anyway, back to the main story.

Twenty odd years ago, Phil Spector was universally regarded as a producing genius, as close to famous as any rock producer had ever been. We also knew he wasn't a very nice person, not at all, and that he liked to carry a gun to places where he probably should not. He was also one of the biggest names to show up for our show, and knew it. So he came late, with the limo dropping him right at the front entrance of the hotel, with the driver storming off because he had clearly offended someone in the process of getting there.

No security. No entourage. Just a famous and very scary recluse, in front of hundreds of people with demo tapes in their pockets and dreams in their hearts, and no one is particularly interested in having him get to his panel. We also know he's armed and Not Right. (Spector turned out to be all kinds of not right later, and was convicted of murder. He'll be behind bars for the rest of his life. Having met the man, color me not surprised.)

So I whipped out the clipboard, pretended I was at least a foot taller than I am, and decisively cut through the crowd, and shepherded Spector. We got through the crowd, with an awkward pit stop at the restroom (I got lucky and guessed the best right direction to get to one), and the panel proceeded without incident. Spector's limo came back some hours later, and he left without rancor. The trade show's attendees got the access they paid for, and not more.

A bluff, strongly presented, took down the hand and saved the day. Nothing went wrong, when so much could have.

Which, when you are doing event marketing, is about all you can hope for, really.

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To pay for my clipboards, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

The Worst Thing That Can Happen

One of the best creative pieces that I've ever done was never used, and until you've had this experience, I don't think you've actually worked in marketing and advertising. I'll share it here, because someone really should get something out of this idea, before it completely passes from the culture.

Four years ago, I was part of an on-site team that was presenting at a major client, with lots of seasonal business around the Halloween season. (Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can guess who they were, too.) The team is trying to secure the business for a client that's pretty much uncontrollable, because my company really isn't up to providing the constant care and service required to satisfy their needs, but they are a whale, and we won't know any of the fail stuff until later. There's no saying no to them, unless you had a half dozen other major clients ready to sign IOs in your back pocket to cover the revenue shortfall.

Anyway, they are unhappy and making all kinds of threatening noises. As the tone of the meeting goes from bad to worse, my sales VP makes eye contact with me, and puts his Hail Mary pass in motion. On no spec, with no branding documents, on overnight turn, my team and I have made an ad for them. I've presented to less interested and colder rooms, but it's hard to remember when, really.

The ad is dynamic, so it pulls in recommendations based on the individual profile, with product photography and selling copy pulled from the client's site. It's on their brand, and it conforms to IAB standards. It could run on thousands of sites overnight, as part of our RTB solution. It toggles through a feed of items that match the buying pattern of the individual user. But one thing more.

Most of the banners in this world are to template, and use the list and offer, along with the strong recommendations, to pop on the user's screen. But this set goes one further. It uses the space to show the items on the backdrop of a Polaroid picture.

The room goes silent, then with wild praise for what the team has done. It's encapsulated the magic point of Halloween for parents; the photo moment, the knowledge that you'll be saving this memory and showing them to adult children and grandchildren so much later. It's as close as a formulaic and heavily automated ad solution can get to a Don Draper moment.

The mood in the room changes dramatically. The client apologizes for their overwhelming needs, and tries to scale back the ask to more in line with what we can deliver, with more advance notice for turn, especially over nights and weekends. We wound up keeping them for the better part of a year, and a strong amount of billing, before they moved on to other, better, vendors. My VP thanks me, profusely, later, for saving the meeting. It was one of my best days at that gig.

Oh, and they never used the ad.

Why? To this day, I have no idea. It wouldn't have cost them anything. It's not as if the ads came with bylines, or that it looked so different from everything else they wound up running. In the end analysis, I just think they didn't want to use any idea that wasn't theirs. And hey, they've got the market cap and the runaway success, so I guess that's all well and good...

But there it is, the great work I just had to kill, just about the worst thing that can happen to you as a creative, and something that happens, on average, just about once every two years.

Oh, and it just happened again, a couple of months ago.

Can't tell you about the client on that one yet, though. I haven't gotten their check yet.

Which is, actually, an even worse thing that can happen...

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If you like or share this column, it's a fine end to the pitch meeting. Feel free to also connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or visit our agency. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Seven Steps To Make Golf Better

17th at Mercer West (8 here today)

Today at my local county public golf course, I had one of the best rounds of my life. (Note: I'm really not very good, but 100 was Heady Progress on the course in question.) Drives were straight and true, irons were frequently well-struck, and some of the wedges led to tap-ins. I holed out a bunch of long putts, got lucky a few times, and recovered relatively quickly from the inevitable shaky strokes.

It as all remarkably pleasant, despite a very slow pace of play. If you were judging by the state of the course today, you'd have no idea that golf was in serious decline.

Why? Well, it takes time, especially if the course is crowded. We played as a twosome between foursomes on a crowded course, on a Sunday afternoon, which meant that a round that could have been done in three hours took four and a half. It's pricey, but that's never stopped the game from doing well in the past. It skews badly on the demographics, as the game has always seemed exclusionary, old and classist, what with the enforced fashions and strong male bent. There has been, to date, no New Tiger Woods, so the game has just not sustained the popularity boom seen in the 1990s. Too many courses were made as part of the land / housing boom, for too few lifelong new players, and it's an open question as to whether we're going through a correction or a death spiral.

I think there's a lot that can be done to make the game better, not just for players, but for the areas where the courses are -- and without making the game unrecognizable with oversized holes and other fundamentally rule-busting moves. Here they are in list form.

1) Use the Internet of Things to enforce pace.

It's not hard to track carts with transponders (either driving or push) and get a sense of who is holding up play, and have them get a visit from a ranger. Especially for players who play from tees that aren't at their true levels.

2) Help hackers with beacons. The single most irritating aspect of play as a weak player is trying to find the ball on errant shots, and this should be the kind of thing that technology should be able to fix with a quickness. Wire that up to the cart, and I won't even mind paying more for it, since I'll be saving money on the lost balls that are the current bane of my existence.

3) Dial in for food and beverage. Nothing's more annoying than waiting on a group that is ahead of you as they do business with the beverage service; as always, of course, having other people wait when you do the same thing is fine. If these orders can be sent in and billed to a standing account (say, the same card you used to pay for the round), then the service is no slower than a drive and drop. Plus, no one's fumbling over change.

4) Develop a Web-wide player profile. I play a handful of courses within an hour of my home, and I doubt that I'm a strong outlier in my golfing habits. If my rounds tend to go faster or slower than the 10 to 17 minute per hole speed quoted on most cards, that should show up in my record, so that when you set me up to play at your course, you don't just slot me at the same time as everyone else. Eventually, we might get to the point where everyone's playing without spending so much time waiting.

5) Expand the available time to play. I haven't tried it yet, but a local course to me has offered night golf, with special equipment and holes; it sounds like a blast. I've played on indoor simulators that have gotten better and better, though the putting is still a mess. I'm pretty sure that we'll eventually get to at-home set-ups that allow for realistic play, which might even get to letting you play the course of your choice, with your remote friends, at the hour of your choosing. Virtual also helps fix the next problem, which is...

6) Make this a much more green enterprise. Chopping the use of strong pesticides, using alternate materials in areas where elements aren't local, and using the lay of the land instead of wild modifications, should all be standard operating procedure. It's also a point that should be used when marketing and advertising the course.

7) Use technology to improve the overall golfing experience. Use the tech to give me distance to the green from driving the cart to aid in club selection. (Some clubs do this already; make it the standard.) Give me the option to tune in the game on that cart screen, which would be wildly popular during football season. Have scoring incorporated into the cart tech, so that we're not spending time doing math at the turn, and can have the card e-mailed later. Maybe do shot analysis from beacons, and even selected moments of video capture, with the ability to post to social media, so my friends and family can see the 30-footer I holed out from the fringe today.

It's not as if there isn't the money to do this, an audience that says no to technology, or any reason to just keep doing things the way we've been doing them. The future of the game is at stake. Use the tech to secure it.

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If you like or share this column, it's as good as a gimme putt. Feel free to also connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or visit our agency. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Business lessons from fantasy football

This Year's Board

T'is the season when America's football fans get their statistical nerd on, and I am no different. I've also been playing in leagues since before the Internet, because the nerd runs all the way back to childhood... but in thinking about the exercise and the agency, it struck me that some of the rules that you play by have been of high value over the years in business.

1) Get Your VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) On.

Especially in an auction situation, good strategy is to go the extra mile to get players that have something special. In football, that usually means the player has talent to help you in more than one way (running backs who also catch passes, wide receivers that are good at multiple kinds of patterns, quarterbacks who can run for extra yardage, etc.). In marketing, it's creative people that make pieces that stand out, or can work in tight spaces. Difference makers, in other words.

2) Play your position. 

Most leagues have some form of draft order, which means that you will be making your picks with action likely from a few specific competitors. If you know what they need, and what they value (especially if someone acts on a real team allegiance), that is information you need to use to your advantage... because, rest assured, the other savvy players are doing it to you. In business, this is known as knowing the competition, and it's table stakes for doing work, but you'd be amazed how many people just come and play their own hand, without a care in the world as to how others are working them like a speed bag.

3) You can't win on Opening Day.

There's never been a league where I've drafted so well that I haven't had to work the bottom fifth of my roster like a day trader. Most seasons are too long, and injuries are too prevalent, to just set and forget, especially if you are any kind of league with quality competitors.

From a business standpoint, the corollary is that no matter what your starting advantage might be in a market, the grind is all -- and that winning a client is only the start of a long road. Motors are required.

4) Run through the tape.

Only one person can win a league, and at least a third of the players will know they have no chance halfway through the year. Far too many people will then use this info to throw in the towel and stop playing. Not only does this run the risk of ruining the game for others who are still in contention by making things easier on some members of the league, but it just shows poor character.

In business, the equivalent act is mailing it in as soon as you get a new job, or pulling the chute on a client that shows signs of leaving. Sure, it's defensible in the short term as a matter of prioritizing, but this is the kind of thing that people remember, and not well. It can easily become the defining aspect of your personal brand, and, well, deservedly so. Run through the tape.

5) Do it with your whole heart.

In my league, the winner gets an authentic old-school leather helmet, with the winner's name on a plate on the front of it. It's very stupid, but the extra mile matters, and ties the name of the league together, in a way that's distinctive and special. I also run the league as a real-world experience, with big labels and a room that's prepared just so. The people in my league have the choice to play or not, and any number of other leagues to join. They stay with mine, for the most part. I appreciate it.

In business, the same kind of commitment applies. Go all-in and sweat the details, because those details are how you separate yourselves from other professionals. The people at your company have the choice to work with you or not, and any number of other things they could be doing with their time. Make them want to stay with you, and appreciate you.

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Something else you should do with your whole heart: like or share this column. Feel free to also connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes on the top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.