CPMs are dropping across streaming TV platforms and the gap between platforms is shrinking. Could mean more ad slots are coming to increase revenue.
Who Owns The Brand?
From the linkblog (which you can get as a handy weekly email digest):
This bit from The Garden Report podcast is bigger than sports.
The teams are your property as the fans. They’re yours. [The players] are the stewards—they’re carrying the mantle now and then they’ll hand it to someone else and someone else. So they’re managing something that’s yours. It’s more yours than theirs. They come and go. This is your team.
Teams are the ultimate. We get irrational about our teams.
But they’re still brands. Brands built on community.
Employees of companies come and go but the customers (hopefully) stay. Which means the brand is theirs, not yours.
Be good a steward.
I'd thought about including sports teams in my piece about the death of social media managers as an example of brands that will trick others into thinking that organic social can work.
Kyle Mensing
I didn't because it was leading me down a rabbit hole of brand as community. But isn't that the brand dream? To become a point of identity and gathering for customers/fans/stans?
What do sports teams have–as far as branding goes?
- Clear iconography for easy identification of fellow fans (there is a hierarchy of iconography for many teams as well that act as gates to ever deeper levels of fandom (Scary Terry anyone?))
- An opponent (or enemy (possibly many)). Fandoms can as easily be defined by who you love as by who you hate. Being a Boston fan is nearly synonymous with being anti-LA and/or NY.
- Differentiation. There is (usually) only one team per market, which means geographic monopoly. It also allows for rivalries based on local pride (see the point above). There is also differentiation within the style of play and roster, which means each season a team can be different than the season before.
- A routine fans can galvanize and evangelize around. It's called game day. (And for the hardcore fans it can also be called draft day, preseason, offseason, training camp, trade deadline, and on & on.)
Teams are cults. Fandom is cultdom.
What if you thought of your brand more as a team and less like a business (teams are most definitely businesses, but this is about public perception)?
What would you change if you thought of your customers not just as customers but as fans?
An aside:
As in the world of brands, sports is seeing a shift towards persona-centric fandom. Some people are Lakers fans and some people are LeBron James fans. For now they wear the same colors, but that fan camaraderie will end when the player-team relationship does.
Running a brand that has loyal customers means your are in charge of an entity that people have chosen to make part of their identity. You are not just managing a business with a recognizable logo, you are managing an instrument of personal identity and social signaling. You are working in service of your fans (or you are about to burn down all the value (everything is customer service)).
Be a good steward.
Imagine that people with disabilities are pioneers anticipating your future.
-Yuki Goto
OXO Good Grips was created because the founder’s wife’r arthritis made it hard to use a vegetable peeler.
When you design for the extremes, you design for everybody.
2 types of curiosity via the ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin (paraphrased):
When the shaman holds out the pipe, the anthropologist declines, saying it will make them impartial. The ethnobotanist says “yeehaw.”
Both are valid and both are needed.
Figure out which one you are and which the situation calls for.
Yeehaw
When groups of people with a shared preference or attitude choose to do something, we see markets and cultural trends.
But these people aren’t different kinds. They’re simply people responding or reacting to what’s on offer. This means that people can have different responses based on different offers and different conditions.
Generations are useless. In-depth personas have always felt overwrought to me.
Our ideal customers are best defined by the problem they’re trying to solve and the state they’re in.
Sometimes this leads to demographic similarities, but don’t confuse the two.