Marketing Bowl XLV

There’s a Football Game Too
.

Each season, around the time the start of the playoffs, the chatter begins about the cost of a 30 second spot on the Super Bowl. broadcast. This year it’s $3M USD or 100 grand a second.

For years, the NFL and large companies have danced an interesting dance of airtime versus exposure. You may remember all the dot coms who blew VC cash on a 30 at halftime on the hopes the website that had no actual product or offer would turn a profit from the exposure.

Money? What Money?

Apparently, the U.S. is still limping through the worst economic downturn in eight decades yet the Super Bowl is sold out today. They somehow found enough companies to drop the coin to fill the space. But we know what airs tonight is a small fraction of the mileage each campaign will get.

Volkswagen, Dell, GoDaddy, Doritos, Best Buy, Snickers and all the rest have teased, leaked, posted, repurposed, tweeted and broadcast their campaign in every other channel, for weeks. Millions of YouTube views, Facebook likes and Twitter RTs have proven how they are leveraging their $3M to those who don’t even like football and won’t be watching tonight.

Find Them Where They Reside

The point here is as business owners of any size, you need to find ways to meet your customer – at least – halfway. And your website is rarely their first destination. The Super Bowl for most is the launch of a new campaign, yet leveraging the social channels have given them weeks, maybe even months of additional momentum.

And if you are still not convinced of the power of the social web, do a search on "Super Bowl" and you will find out that the official Super Bowl Twitter website (not profile) is higher ranked than the official Super Bowl site.

How can all this help your business?

And congratulations to Super Bowl XLV Champions - The Green Bay Packers.

knealemann

Have You Found Your Fans?

Earl "Curly" Lambeau was an employee of the Indian Packing Company and got the idea to start a football team. Curly needed some bucks to get gear so he asked his boss for help.

His employer agreed to give him $500. The only condition was that he incorporated the meat packing company’s name in the team name.


Curly was general manager and head coach for the next thirty years and is a member of the NFL Hall of Fame.

Launched on August 11, 1919, the Green Bay Packers have a record twelve championships and remain the only non-profit community owned American professional sports franchise. For years, NFL rules stated that each team must be owned by one individual. In the case of the Green Bay Packers, the entire city of Green Bay, Wisconsin owns the team.

When the Packers are playing at Lambeau Field, the city of Green Bay is a ghost town. Residents are either at the game or watching it. The franchise is as much a part of the community as any person or major company.

Line Up and Wait.

If you want tickets to a game, line up, for a very long time. If you want season tickets, you have about a forty year wait and you have to prove you are a permanent resident of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The Green Bay Packers are celebrating their 91st anniversary. The team has not won the championship in 79 seasons since 1919.

Content Context Community.

Fans happily wear a wedge of cheese on their heads - a tradition that began when fans in rival Illinois attempted to insult Wisconsinites. Instead of turning the name calling in to something ugly, they embraced it and the sight of cheeseheads at Lambeau is as common as beer.

Buzz phrases such as “brand evangelist” come to mind but in this case, Curly Lambeau simply wanted to start a football team and asked his boss for some cash to pay for some gear. And nine decades later, Packers’ fans will virtually defend the green and gold with their lives.

What can you learn from the Packers to apply to your business?
Have you found your fans or still looking to sell a few tickets?

@knealemann
strategy. marketing. social media.

photo credit: goinglikesixty | wikipedia

Gridiron and Wall St.

I wake up most Sunday mornings hoping to turn off the world and sink into potato mode on the couch to watch several NFL games. My friends who don’t care for football wonder how anyone can just sit and watch a game where grown men don armor and smash into each other while chasing an oval-shaped sphere.

The average NFL stadium holds 70,000 people, it’s only used eight times a year, and the average game features the ball-in-play for about 15 minutes.

The cost of an NFL franchise is close to $1 Billion. There are travel and staffing costs, player and television contracts, coaching and scouting networks, merchandising rights and if you’re lucky – once or maybe twice in your history, you will win a Super Bowl.

But why are 32 teams fighting for the silver ring every year? Because the work involved in getting there is worth every ounce of sweat and toil. Because there are enough rich people on the planet who think it’s cool to own an NFL team. Because football fans would watch two low-end teams battle any day of the week.

It’s not about winning; it’s about the chance to win. It’s not about championships; it’s about the possibility of championships.

Why do you get up every work day and try again? Do you have competition within your business category? Are there others offering similar services to you? Are there companies that are doing some things better than yours? Why not give up? Why do you keep fighting and trying to improve? Why do you keep reaching for that championship?

Wayne Gretzky was asked after his Edmonton Oilers won their 5th Stanley Cup, why he keeps trying to improve. His response: “Because winning never gets tired.”

So excuse me while I couch it for a while and get inspiration from the gridiron. I just happen to like the dress code better than the one on Wall St.

km

The Plot Is In The Story

In a world of content, product placement, infomercials, advertorials, and other integrated models,
perhaps it's time to get back to simply telling stories.

Every year, one of the big stories surrounding the Super Bowl is how much it costs to buy a 30 commercial during the game. Last year, the price was $2.7 Million. Think about that. Think about your company. Can you or your company afford over two and a half million dollars for a 30-second event? That doesn’t include production costs so lob a few extra bucks on the tab.

Glorida Goodale writes in a recent blog post that we need to “forget product placement – that's so 20th century. Even product integration is passé. Advertisers these days want to do far more than just place BMWs, Manolo Blahnik shoes, and other luxury items within reach of favorite TV and movie characters. They want to create entire worlds of consumption.”

You may remember receiving a copy of the “banned” 90 second X-Box commercial a few years ago. I received it seven times in a two day period. It was shocking how broadcasters had refused to air this and the community seemed outraged. They were so outraged that the “banned” commercial was shared amongst millions of people. These people watched the “banned” commercial on their computers and portable devices instead of their television screens.

How dare those broadcasters ban such a thing and we all rallied around the floundering Seattle software firm to “fight the man”. It was not a staged or calculated event, nah.

YouTube is consistently in the top five most visited websites on the face of the earth. This space is jammed with material that doesn’t see the traditional light of day. Shocking.

BMW has been the sole underwriter of one of the most wonderful visits in cyberspace – TED.com – and they do it through wickedly cool visuals (not “commercials”) that compliment the content, not interrupt it.

Goodale talks about product plots – another concept that has been going on for years but only now starting to gain traction amongst content providers, producers and companies like BMW, TED, and Microsoft.

What’s important is you must have a story before you dive in the deep end of storytelling. This is not about plunking your product into some backdrop and calling it a plot. Go back to making commercials or another traditional concept route until you can utilize this wonderful integrated option.

Goodale cites this as; “the heady days of brand integration and immersive commercial environments.”

When you are embracing what seems like a new idea, you can’t expect everyone to nod their heads and join in. But that is not enough of a reason to stop.

Mass traditional media has its place and there is audience for it. But we are building swiftly, evolving rapidly, consuming wildly, and multi-platforming constantly. And this is not a specific demographic issue.

Anyone toiling in content generation, marketing, production, advertising or promotion who thinks the “we’ll be right back after this” model will not continue to erode should be prepared to one day utter the phrase;

“What happened!?!”

km