The Company You Keep

Bad Company might have better songs

This week, I met up with a friend that I haven't seen for decades, when we were just kids, honestly. He's new to my area, needs to step up his network, and we had one of those 90-minute meals where the conversation never lagged. I left feeling completely energized, and followed up with some leads that hopefully helped him on his journey. With luck, we'll meet up again soon and do more. 

Which reminded me of, well, just how the people in my childhood brought me along in their wake, and how one of the shortest ways out of any personal funk is to think about how much I have to be grateful for. I'm the first person in my family to go to college, and it wasn't easy; no funds (truth be told, my grades and test scores weren't strong enough), not much aid, and I had my heart set on a name brand, private, and pretty expensive school. It all worked out after many years of paying off debt, but the point that I want to make is that no one makes their way alone. Even once I got out of school, that same pattern of being brought along from the inertia of others reasserted itself at various stops in my career. 

So I know a lot of things about a lot of things, and it's mostly because of people I've had the honor of working with. I've said this enough times that it sounds like a canned laugh line in conversations with clients, but because of the actions and support of others, I've been able to seem smarter than I am. I've also been blessed with a memory, and the ability to focus on individual salient points. Which leads to the ability to tell a good story or two. So with luck, I've started to (hopefully) pay back what I've learned.

The point of this isn't to just tell you about myself. More so, it's to share with you how this came to be. Because the people that I've learned from are all over the map, demographically. That's not a coincidence. Your thinking, and your opportunity to think different things, just gets sharper and better if your peer group is diverse. Rather than getting stuck in the same patterns and tactics, you get outside of your comfort zone faster, hear different perspectives, and in general, just go to different mental places. 

Also, you wind up eating better, listening to more interesting music, seeing different movies, thinking different thoughts. It's harder to be bored, harder to get down on yourself, and just a better way to be. And once you find this kind of peer group, you don't give it up.

So this is where I pivot, perhaps obviously, to the election that's going to happen in a couple of days. One side has diverse support; the other does not. One side has endorsements, whether pursued or not, from expressly racist organizations; the other does not. One side has a higher percentage of supporters who are positively voting for their candidate, rather than simply against the other. One side spends much of their political advertising just simply repeating wildly inappropriate and divisive statements made by the other candidate, in the simplest "attack" ads in recent memory. One side relies on statements that are simply and easily shown to be not true, to a much greater percentage. 

This isn't a matter of getting to simply vote for the side that you normally vote for, or the one that's closer to your history. It's also, due to the clearly perverse nature of for-profit "news", a situation where we may never have a not-close, third party "safe" election ever again. 

That's why the polling for this election doesn't show the usual splits by income, but more pronounced by education level. This isn't a matter of insidious indoctrination into a political belief system; it's simple exposure to a diverse community. (The same thing applies to how one side does well in cities, where a mix is inevitable, as opposed to less dense areas.)

I'm not sure what happens next in our very broken system. This election has been an ordeal for seemingly all involved, and the only true bi-partisan point is that these take too long, cost too much, and just infuriate. But I do know that when you judge the sides by the company they keep, the choice seems obvious. So, choose accordingly.

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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.

What's Wrong With The NFL?

Roger Is Not Helping

Ratings for the nation's most popular television programs are off by significant percentages this year, which has raised alarm bells in various sectors of the marketing and advertising media. As I have a foot in both worlds, I'd like to dig into the reasons why this is happening. But first, some ground rules.

1) Before anyone throws my opinion out as being clearly in the tank for some other sport, or being anti-NFL in some way, my bona fides. I run a fantasy football league, play in another, write about it for a blog, take my mom to a road game every year, and watch way, way, too much of this stuff. I'm a lifer. I like the game. I'm not against it.

2) I'm going to try to keep this to new factors, since the ratings decline is also new. It's not as if people are suddenly discovering that the game is violent, that women on the sidelines are objectified, and that commissioner Roger Goodell is cartoonishly corrupt. Those are all known quantities coming in.

So, what's new?

Well, the most obvious point of order is that one of the more remarkable Presidential campaigns in the history of the nation has been taking up all of the oxygen in the room, but it's not as if these audiences are really the same. In any event, the debates haven't ran into football games very often, and the ratings haven't grown now that those events are over. So while this might be a factor in just limiting overall coverage, it's not likely to be a massive point.

The next factor has actually been addressed during the campaign, with one of the contenders (you can guess which one, right? Sure you can) taking issue with the new concussion protocols as somehow being too restrictive. I think there's actually a bit of a point here; if you were weaned on more thrilling displays of violence, maybe the weaker tea that the NFL is serving up now as a middle ground between player safety and viewer appeal just doesn't cut it for you. If this is a major factor, then the NFL's decline could be seen as a purposeful long-term controlled descent, as part of a more sustainable economy. But while long-time fans might grumble about these new rules, I kind of doubt that anyone is really not watching because of them.

Another possible factor is San Francisco 49er QB Colin Kaepernick's continuing symbolic protest against the national anthem, which seems to (a) really rankle some in the audience by its seeming intrusion of politics into sport, and (b) prove the point that if you really want people to pay attention to your political point, you really need to put it into non-political areas of society. Kaepernick's exploding popularity in jersey sales makes me think that the controversy probably isn't that much of a net negative for the league.

Now, I'd like to pivot this into factors that I think are at play here. The first is the seemingly constant deterioration of the officiating, and the murky nature of the league's rules. Things that should be as cut and dried as humanly possible -- what is a catch? what does a player have to do to demonstrate possession of the ball? -- are a constant source of shrug, wait for replay, and we're into the realm of conspiracy theory and random chance. Any time a game can have its integrity questioned, it's not exactly a win for the league's broad appeal, especially to more casual fans.

Which leads me to the next point -- the NFL's declines are, in all likelihood, entirely in the realm of casual fans. Lifers are hooked on the stuff; it's the bigger crowds that gravitate in for night games and playoffs that generate growth in a mature market. Which is a major issue for the league, since two of three night telecasts seem to show the league at its worst, rather than at its most appealing. Games on Thursday are much more likely to show random or lesser teams, with blowouts more common due to the odd schedule, especially when one team comes in with more rest. Those games also get the coverage of Phil Simms, who might be the most irritating announcer on broadcast TV now, if my social media feed is any judge of it. The Monday Night Game has more of the Thursday feel to it, with Jon Gruden matching Simms' obsessions with quarterback minutiae and self-branding. I get that this isn't exactly new styles for either man, but with each passing year, the tendency seems to be getting stronger.

Before we move off the schedule, a further point about this: why is the league so skewed away from 4pm EST Sunday games? This week, we had 7 in the 1pm slot, and 2 in the 4pm; if the Falcons-Packers game hadn't been close, that entire block of time would have been must-skip TV. Combined with the increasing presence of games from London in the morning (can't imagine those are terribly popular with West Coast audiences at 7am local time), and nearly half of the league's games this weekend were viewable on broadcast, spread over a half dozen time slots. Maybe more, if you live in a media market with bleed over coverage fields. There's not much in the way of mystery anymore, and the timesink just keeps growing.

Speaking of the mystery draining out, let's look at fantasy football... which has likely crested in popularity, especially with the boom/bust nature of daily fantasy sites for an expansion of gambling opportunities. With the exercise growing further and further away from something a hobbyist could do without a major time commitment, we're going to a place where only hardcore nerds and fast twitch waiver wire obsessives need apply. More and more people seem to be cutting back on the number of leagues they play, and the demographic group of these leagues also looks to be graying. Not exactly a great trend for marketing pros.

A quick word about the compelling year and World Series that baseball is enjoying, and that's this: there's no strong likelihood of MLB really poaching much of the NFL's market. In its heyday, the NFL would just rollover any contenders to their time slot.

Here's another factor that I think people miss out on... the NFL's probably on the wrong side of momentum with women now. The annual October "pinkwashing" isn't without controversy or detractors now, and the league's sadly erratic history with cutting ties with domestic abuse perpetrators can't be doing much to help its chances. More and more moms and dads are keeping their kids away from the game for safety concerns, which also can't be helping.

Finally, this -- the NFL underserves its market through artificial shortages, by only playing at one time of the year, and not expanding into more regional markets that are currently dominated by high school and college games. As an aside, more and more folks in my network seem to be growing more interested in the college game, especially when it comes to casual betting. If nothing else, the announcing teams seem better.

No, the more you think about it, the more you might be inclined to think that we haven't seen the end of soft ratings for the NFL.

The bigger question is... have we hit the bottom yet, and if not, what does the bottom look like? (My guess is a Thursday night game between Tennessee and Jacksonville. But your mileage may vary.)

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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.

You'll Pay To Know What, And When, To Really Think

Via tech

Here's a small but highly recommended way to seem smarter than you actually are... listen to podcasts. I cycle through a bunch, mostly in a constant effort to find new ways to think about my various projects. Which is how the grist for this week's column came about, which is a new way to think about the next wave of wearable technology.

(Don't worry, I'll bring it around to marketing and advertising eventually.)

Here's the germ of the idea. A research team that was conducting MRI scans of healthy subjects for a baseline study found that, well, it's hard to ask people to just lie still for a long time. Especially in an environment that many people find to be claustrophobic.

So they experimented with a variety of audio programs on headphones during the scan, and found that while music was good, podcasts -- particularly ones that told an engaging story -- were better still.

This probably doesn't come as a striking revelation. From your own day to day, I'm sure you find that when someone is telling you an engaging story, you are more apt to stay still and listen. But what's more telling and interesting is that the actual thought process of listening and learning shows up on the MRI as well.

Here's where I'm going to make two small but defensible leaps of logic. I'm going to presume that the brain is a muscle, and that it does better with routine exercise. And maybe not just the kind that involves sweating, but also the mental kind.

This is, of course, the entire raison d'etre of Lumosity, the "brain games" start up that is, not coincidentally, a frequent buyer of advertising space during, well, podcasts. So it's not exactly a big leap of faith to imagine that properly timed and individually prescribed mental exercises will also help cognitive performance. Also, that we can prove that it's worth doing.

Which brings us to the second leap of logic. A future version of wearables will monitor brain activity, and provide alerts to the user based on various mental conditions.

If you are predisposed to negative potential, you might go immediately to a dark place from this, with thoughts of mind control, exceptional privacy violations, censorship, and so forth. But my inclination is to stay with the personal and the positive, and imagine a scenario in which people struggling with depression are given, well, content at the time when it does them the most good. Or aging patients at risk of mental deterioration are given small puzzles that help them retain and improve. The potential could extend to patients with OCD, postpartum depression, drivers with readings that seem to indicate episodes of micro-sleeping, and so on, and so on.

Imagine, for a moment, just how much untapped human potential would reach the world from people who achieve some measure of additional relief from these conditions. Consider the possibility of lives saved from fleeting thoughts that lead to suicide, moments of regression in fights against addiction, or the more mundane aspects of better awareness and coping mechanisms for stress, and so on. How much more could we achieve as a species, if technology gives us the ability to act without these limits?

Let's bring this back to our bread and butter. So while you are considering all of these possibilities, let's also think about narrow-casting our messaging to people when they might be most interested in buying a product, or most receptive to hearing an advertising message / willing to be distracted from their current task.

After all, a dramatically better human experience?

Still has bills to pay.

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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.