June 25, 2009
The great George Plimpton once observed that there was an inverse relationship between the size of the ball used and the quality of the writing about the sport using it. In baseball ’small ball’ has a more specific meaning and describes a way of playing that focuses on getting men on base and moving them around the base paths with walks, stolen bases, singles and doubles and a very small reliance on home runs.
My beloved Mets are finding that small ball is winning ball. They have discovered this by necessity rather than by design. Their two principle long ball hitters Carlos Delgado and Carlos Beltran are on the disabled list. The third, David Wright has hit just four home runs this season, around one third of his total this time last year. Additionally, Citi Field, their quite splendid new home appears to be a pitcher’s paradise in which, in vivid contrast to the new Yankee Stadium, almost no one has cleared the fences with ease and regularity.
The happy news is this. Small ball is more fun to watch; it is more tactically complex, and somehow speaks to the traditions of a bygone age when the balls did not fly so far and the pharmaceutical profession had less influence on player performance.
Small ball makes the home run the exceptional moment that the biggest hit should be and makes heros of speedsters, little guys, and those that give their all on the way to first on an infield hit. It also makes the defence sharp, it needs to be. The double play, the force out, the run down and the pick off, the throwing catcher are all propelled in prominence when the game is played this way.
Anne, Lisa; take me out to the old small ball game whenever you like.
Filed under This sporting life
Tags: baeseball, beltran, citi field, delgado, double, home run, mets, plimpton, single, stolen base, wright
June 15, 2009
Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired, has a new book out. It’s called Free ($26.99 from all good booksellers). The essence of the argument is that the economics of scarcity apply less and less in a world of abundant bandwidth and processing power and that whenever the marginal cost of production approaches zero so will the cost to the end user. This applies most elegantly where ‘if something can become software it can also become free.’
As usual there is lots of thought provoking stuff here but maybe the most interesting reference is to what Anderson belives that people will still pay for.
- To save time
- To reduce risk
- For things they love
- For status
- If you force them (once they are hooked)
This creates an interesting draft rule book for brand marketers. It demands that brands require high genuine or perceived utility and equally high real or perceived barriers to substitution. The latter point, it seems to me, is all about marketing. The imperative for brands to develop distinct and defensible positionings has never been greater, and while that is hard it is not half as challenging as creating genuine and sustainable product performance differentiation.
June 11, 2009
In the mid 90’s advertisers built web sites faster than sub-divisions in Nevada. Their premise was the same; build it and they will come and for the brief period that brand web sites were a curiosity, come they did. Their joy was multiplied by the notion that voluntary visitation would reduce marketing expenses by reducing the amount of media they needed to pay for.
As web sites multiplied the curiosity factor ebbed and marketers discovered a whole new expense line item. What do you buy in search and display to drive web traffic? While click rates remained high this seemed reasonable. There was after all a value to getting people engaged with richer experiences and deeper brand engagement. The inevitable followed. Click rates declined, visitation to brand web sites declined and marketers realized that only those sites that informed complex purchase decisions, offered a service of value or permitted transactions were worth supporting with traffic driving dollars.
So it’s 2009. Facebook profiles are free, consumers are curious, marketers are happy because exposure is free again. Umm. Visitation and usage of Facebook applications and profiles turn out to be hard to establish and sustain, it also seems that marketing in a 500 friend stream is challenging, so marketers turn to Engagement ads to do just that. How long will it take for them to realize that the bar for continued interaction is every bit as high here as it was on the web and how long before the Darwinian nature of consumer apathy forces reconsideration of the value of most profiles and renders many that do exist as the digital equivalent of space junk?
This poses simple questions and complex demanding solutions. Sadly…there’s no app for that. Luckily there are agencies.
June 3, 2009
I offer the following extract from today’s BBC text commentary of the British Lions vs. The Golden Lions (rugby union of course). It shows the perils of the medium…..
80 mins – TRY Golden Lions 10-74 Lions
There’s the hooter, Lions turn the ball over… no, the hosts win it back, before but Stephen Ferris comes over all over Pierre Spies, nicks the ball at the breakdown and canters over from just inside his own half, showing Killian a clean pair of hooves. That’s the icing on top, and Hook’s conversion is the cherry.
June 2, 2009
Sentiment tracking is a significant component in social media tracking. It allows brands to understand the tone of conversation as well its volume, point of origin and direction of dissemination.
It’s possible that Adsense has some shortcomings in this regard and a quick review of blogs covering the demise of AF 447 yesterday showed any number of machine generated Adsense placements offering discounted flights to Rio and Paris juxtaposed with the tragic news.
In old media we referred to this as atrocious adjacency and while mistakes were made they were infrequent in their occurence. Automated placement of ads without a sentiment filter in the process creates a vulnerability that needs to be corrected.
May 29, 2009
If you search “Bing” on Google you get 22,300,000 results. In here lies the premise of Bing.
Microsoft’s position is that there is little value in 22,300,000 results and that all the value is in the one result that you actually want that helps you achieve the task in hand. It’s not a bad thought and if it delivers on the promise Bing offers a serious alternative to Google and one that may have a long term impact of the behavior surrounding search. It’s a little fanciful to suggest that Google maybe one click – albeit by lots of people – away from losing its near monopoly but it appears that Microsoft is taking a position. It’s a position that may succeed in extensive retrial and with the rumoured promotional support Microsoft are giving it their best shot.
The notion of Bing as a verb may be hard to process but it’s no less unlikely than Google.
May 25, 2009
Retailers spent a fraction under $19 billion on newspaper display advertising in 2008. That was down from 2007 and you can bet that 2009 will be down again as the recession and declining circulation take their toll on the sector.
In this dilemma lies the principle opportunity for online publishers to capture share and build revenues yet the key to success seems elusive. At the center of the challenge is to associate online exposure to offline sales as very few of the retailers that underwrite the newspaper business achieve more than 10% of their sales through online channels. Put simply retailers need to be persuaded of the effectiveness of online at the store level in order to make radical changes in their mix.
Their seems to be a sense of ‘after you’ in this area. A raft of tests executed in partnership between brands and vendors and supported by Comscore and other data providers seem to provide indicative data but the market remains short of proofs. Those proofs are as important to the retailers as they are to the vendors but it is the vendors that have the flexibility to make the data of decisive value. Their simple advantage is that their supply of inventory is, in practical terms, unlimited and at its further reaches exceptionally difficult to monetize at respectable CPMs. For the retailers budgets are limited and the risks of abandoning print are great.
Today the inventory surplus is largely shipped to ad networks who seek to make their money by optimizing to a CPA or CPC metric that produces an outcome in the online space most often in the form of e commerce outcomes. This activity becomes progressively refined by an increasingly cluttered array of protagonists all dancing on the pin of 10% or less total volume share and the creative and media optimization to deliver it.
Surely this holds both sides of the deal back and the time has come to move the investment in our business towards the 90% of sales that happen online, to tests that prove it and to brand metrics that don’t consider the click as a key metric or even a metric at all.
IAB members have long bemoaned their lack of share among the biggest advertisers. if everything you do is focused on 10% of the deliverable that is not so surprising.
May 20, 2009
Normo,
Cracking observations mate. Here are few more little perlers:
1) The seemingly impossible abbreviation of BBQ to Barbie.
2) Snags = the humble sausage.
3) Sanga = sandwich.
Examples of everyday use:
1) That bloke, he’s a few snags short of a barbie.
2) Anyone who thinks England is going to win the Ashes this year is a few sangas short of a picnic.
C’mon Aussies!
May 19, 2009
Australia has the longest one word name of any country in the British Commonwealth. This is a trivial matter but may explain why no other country ritually abbreviates as many words and peoples’ names as it can.
Start with Oz for Australia and Aussie for Australia, g’day, the adding of the letter ‘o’ after the final consonant of many names as in ’g'day Gordo’ and you begin to get the idea. Then you have footy, roo, the splendid arvo for afternoon, cozzie for swimming costume, the excellent garbo for garbage collector and so it goes on. It ain’t pretty but it works for them.
