Technology Or Toilets?

It doesn't really matter what the marketing problem is these days, the answer is always technology.

A great example is in the sports world. Many professional and amateur teams have been suffering from decreasing attendance. They're losing customers to that dead old thing -- television.

This is particularly true in college football. Millennial college students just don't seem to want to go to football games.

So what are teams doing? They're investing millions in technology.

Every new stadium is being built with increasingly complex and advanced connectivity. Every old stadium is being retrofitted with millions of dollars worth of technological wizardry.

A little over a year ago I spoke at a conference of major professional and NCAA sports enterprises. One of the dominant themes of the conference was "fan experience" and the critical role technology plays.

According to Forbes...

"Smart technology solutions provide opportunities for greater fan engagement."

According to Cisco...

"Fans go to a live event to be part of a tribal experience: to connect to the action, to connect with their favorite stars, to connect with other fans...they want to share their experiences and interact with their friends and the global fan community on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media while they’re at the event, not after."

Only one problem: It's all bullshit.

As usual, the marketing techno-lemmings are all wrong and the insufferable clichés about millennials are also wrong.

According to an article in last week's Wall Street Journal...

"...a new survey by the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators and Oregon’s sports marketing center... asked almost 24,000 students across the country to rank the factors that influenced their decision to attend games...by far the least important was a stadium’s cellular reception or wireless capability. 

"At Michigan, ...among the seven possible improvements to the game-day experience...students ranked cell reception last."

"At Ole Miss... fans said before last season that mobile web, apps and email access were the three least important of 53 elements... the most important things for fans coming to the game are parking, restrooms and concessions.” 

"One of the shocking things that schools have learned is that...students currently care more about clean restrooms than fast Internet. In the recently released Oregon study, which surveyed students across all five power conferences, fans ranked cellular connectivity last on their wish list."

As I said here over a year ago,

"It is remarkable to me how much time is spent on technology voodoo and how little time is spent on solving the real problems of real customers."

We'll Never Sell Your Personal Information. Unless We Need The Money.

Pretty soon the whole house of cards that is the Internet Bubble 2.0 will come crashing down.

When it does, we'll finally get an unambiguous view of what a fetid pile of crap the whole ad supported web has been.

In addition to the fraud, criminality, and corruption that are the everyday life of the web, last week we learned of two other facts that reinforce the belief that we can never accept anything that anyone associated with the ad supported web tells us.

Revelations about the amount of data web publishers collect has led web publishers to assure us that our data is safe with them and that they "respect our privacy."

A piece in The New York Times last week reveals that, like so much else they tell us, this is complete bullshit. The Times did a study of the top 100 sites in the U.S. recently. Here's what they discovered:

"Of the 99 sites with English-language terms of service or privacy policies, 85 said they might transfer users’ information if a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, asset sale or other transaction occurred"

The Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center had this to say...

"...companies make representations that are weak and provide little actual privacy protection to consumers...”

Or as the Assistant Attorney General of Texas put it...

"...we are never going to sell your data, except if we need to..."

The second revelation was about Google. Google, of course, makes its money by misdirection.

Instead of directing you to the most relevant answer for your inquiry, they direct you to the company that pays the most to "own" the term you are searching.

We have been led to believe that once we got by the misdirection of the first few Google results -- that are the product of "paid search" (which is just a euphemism for advertising) -- natural or organic search would be free of misdirection and would give us an unbiased answer. More bullshit.

An article in The Wall Street Journal last week reported...

"New research by two U.S. academics suggests that Google Inc. is harming Internet users and violating competition laws by skewing search results to favor its own services"

The article cites a study conducted by two prominent American academics...

"The study’s authors—Michael Luca of Harvard Business School and Tim Wu of Columbia Law School—found that users were 45% more likely to click on results that were ranked purely by relevance, rather than as Google ranks them now, with its own services displayed prominently."

The ad supported web is currently headquarters for the world's sneakiest little bastards. Almost everything they say is untrustworthy. Only a fool takes anything they tell us at face value.

Why Won't Broadcasters Fight?

The great Dave Trott has distilled the essence of effective marketing strategy into two words -- predatory thinking.

"Predatory thinking is ruthless and aggressively focused on beating the competition."

Predatory thinking is not for the timid or the fearful. It is not for the fat and happy. Is not for those who have forgotten how to defend themselves.

It is not for the U.S. broadcasting industry. Our broadcasting industry refuses to fight.

In the past few years, I have had the opportunity to speak to several broadcaster groups. They are good, well-meaning people. But they don't get it.

They know they are getting their asses handed to them by the online ad industry. They know the online ad industry is very vulnerable on many fronts. But as I wrote a while back...

"(The online ad industry) have the press in their back pocket; they have ad agencies pimping for them. But broadcast(ers)... are pathetically unprepared for this fight. They haven't learned that if they don't tell their story, no one else will."

The broadcast industry is so used to printing money (in their heyday some had margins of 60% and higher!) that they seem to have decided that a permanent posture of aggrievement is a substitute for a fight. 

They are being taken to the cleaners by hyper-motivated digital evangelists who understand what predatory thinking means.

It's not as if the broadcast industry doesn't have a good story to tell, they just don't seem to know how to tell it.

It's not like they don't have the resources to tell their story, they just refuse to use them.

It's not that they don't have a killer weapon, they just don't recognize it.

It's not that the broadcast industry isn't doing a good job of implementing their strategy, they don't even have a strategy. 

The longer they allow the online ad industry to convince impressionable marketers and clueless agencies that broadcasting is dead or dying, the closer they are to enabling those fictions to become facts.

I have no dog in the fight between traditional and digital advertising. I don't care who wins or who loses.

But I bought a ticket and I want to see a good fight. All I'm seeing is one lean and hungry fighter and one overweight punching bag.