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Strategy

Business, Marketing

Why Specialization May Kill Long-Term Agency Partnerships

December 21, 2014

If you’ve followed the advertising and marketing industry news of late, one item that might have caught your eye is the growing number of brands reviewing their media buying, advertising and brand representation. From Jaguar Cars moving their 6 year, $100 million global account from Euro RSCG Worldwide to Spark44, to Disney Media ending their decade long relationship with Publicis Groupe’s Starcom, long-term relationships between brands and those who represent them are coming to a close. Just how the number of players who stay with one sports team their entire career is diminishing, so is the number of brands that stay with an agency for an extended period of time. “Do it all” agencies that once handled the branding, public relations and marketing for large brands are seeing their responsibilities broken up and divided amongst several different agencies.

So what is the cause? What is causing brands like Disney and Harley Davidson (Former agency: Carmichael Lynch) to reconsider the future of their advertising, marketing, and entire branding? The answer is specialization.

Specialization

Specialization is defined as “the act of making something suitable for a special purpose.” In the case of the “do it all” agencies, specialization is a word that can be hard to come by. Because of the growth and speed of information and content in the digital space, there is an accelerated market adoption rate when it comes to new products, messages and brands. This has led to the the need for agencies with quick turnaround times without the sacrifice of quality.

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Marketing

Why Ideas Are Like Eggs

November 26, 2014

Eggs. If you are just starting to learn how to cook, they are probably the first thing you will try your luck at. From hard-boiled to scrambled, deviled to fried, everyone has their own special way of preparing eggs. Still, the unique aspect of eggs is that although they are relatively simple cook, it’s quite difficult to perfect.

Ideas are much the same. Everyone can have think up an idea, but executing it and producing positive results is difficult. There plenty of books out there that talk about ideas, but just how there are many recipes on how to make the ‘perfect’ egg, its less about the steps and more on the detail of the execution.

Paying Attention To Detail

English mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead once said that “we think in generalities, but we live in detail.” His words not only resonate in our daily lives, but they also paint a clear picture of how ideas are formed and evolve. Too often do we assume that having the ‘right idea’ is all it takes that we forget that it’s the details that make an idea relevant and impactful. To fully understand this, we re-visit the egg comparison.

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Business, Marketing, Sports Business

The Sports Executives Dream…

January 20, 2012

When it comes to sports, there are two points of views that it can be viewed from. The first is from a fans perspective and the second is from those who work on getting the actual sporting events to happen. From a fans perspective, sports is as close to an emotional roller-coaster as you can get. From your favorite team driving in the winning run to a buzzer beater shot that sends one team home and the other to the big dance, fans enjoy the luxury of being able to watch athletically gifted individuals come together on a grand stage.

On the flip side of things, sports executives that are involved with the marketing, sales, and organization as whole have a different perspective than that of the fan.  Past all the glitz and glamor, what it all comes down to is that it’s still a business. From the promotions that need to hit its’ numbers to the press release that needs to be done before deadline, the world of a sports executive is full of hurdles, surprises, and twists. Just how Alice entered the rabbit hole toward an unknown adventure, the sports world never ceases to surprise those who enter it.

With that said, we present the question of what a sports executive would ask for if they could have everything go the way they wanted? While everyone wants something different, here 5 ideas on what a sport executives dream might be:

1. Facebook Would Be Easy To Understand

Hate or love it, Facebook isn’t going anywhere. For sports executives, embracing Facebook can be difficult because of the simple fact that Facebook’s Promotional Guidelines cause so much friction because of their lack of clarity when it comes to determining what is and what isn’t a violation. For sports executives and teams, this is especially troublesome as the next level of engagement for teams when it comes to maximizing their digital fan base is through contests and promotions via social platforms like Facebook.

2. League Rules Would Be More Flexible

When it comes to great ideas, there isn’t a lack of them in sports. The problem though that so few of them see the light of day. For sports executives that are looking for ways to maximize their resources and talents, league rules can sometimes create barriers that impede progress. In the ideal world, leagues would work hand in hand with sports executives and teams, giving them more freedom to be creative and leniency to try new strategies.

3. A Mobile Marketing Strategy Would Be Easy

With an expected jump in the number of consumers with smartphones this year, finding a way into the mobile market will become a hot topic for sports teams. While few would make an argument against the viral nature of the  mobile space, what is up for debate is whether it’s worth it financially and also more importantly, if it’s even feasible given both league restrictions as well as the difficulty in creating a single application/mobile strategy that will appease all parts of an organization.

4. What’s A Lockout?

Eliminating the possibility of a lockout is an ideal situation not only for a sports executive, but for fans as well. While potential lockouts irk fans, sports organizations must tread lightly with decisions they make when a lockout is imminent, such as the case with the NBA lockout looming next season. These decisions include a multitude of areas including hiring personnel and budget cuts.

5. Digital Sponsorship Are Easy

One of the biggest question marks going into 2011 is the direction sports teams will take when it comes to digital sponsorships. While sponsorship teams have had mild success when it comes to selling CPM and standard sponsorship space on their team sites, sponsorships teams need to begin focusing their attention on social media assets and distribution as well as developing exclusive digital content that are sponsor eligible. For sports executives, educating and bringing in the right talent that know how to effectively sell digital sponsorship would be the perfect situation.

Social Media

How Facebook Places Will Own The Mobile Market

November 20, 2011

Today, Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team announced their plans to gradually release Facebook Places tonight in the United States for the iPhone and touch.Facebook with a full release expected in the following days. Although Facebook Places is still in its infantile stages, it has all the makings to further Facebook’s growth in the mobile market. Taking into account the partners that Facebook introduced at the event along with their existing assets, Facebook Places threatens to not only take over the mobile space, but change the way we do business.

What is Facebook Places

Before moving any further, we should address what Facebook Places exactly is. Facebook Places is a mobile application that will allow users to do 3 things: (1) find out where their friends are/let them know where you are, (2) check-in at locations, and (3) discover new places. With development for Facebook Places starting in December 2009, Mark Zuckerberg stated that the toughest part in building the new application was “figuring out what is a good set of features” to have. As mentioned, the 3 focuses on the Facebook Places application that have been initially built will focus on enhancing the community experience and sharing it with others. With features such as geo-tagging of images as well as linking businesses to locations, Facebook continues to push envelope as far as innovation and reach.

Facebook Places Initial Partners: FourSquare, Gowalla, and Yelp

One of the common reactions that anyone learning about Facebook Places for the first time will tell you is that it reminds them of a combination of FourSquare and Yelp. In what may or may not be a shock, Facebook introduced a few of the partners that they would be working with from the start: FourSquare, Gowalla, and Yelp. While the details of these relationships are still unclear, what’s important to note is what the implications are of these potential partners.

By bringing in companies like FourSquare, Gowalla, and Yelp, Facebook is positioning themselves to be at the center of the mobile space, while FourSquare, Gowalla, and Yelp have the chance to partner with one of the largest databases in the world (500 million users worldwide.)

3 Ways Facebook Places Will Own The Market

1. The mobile transition

As mentioned, Facebook has over 500 million registered users. Off this same note, of those 500 million, nearly 150 million users access their social accounts from the Facebook mobile application. Unlike other mobile applications where early adopters played a key role in the success of mobile applications, Facebook users are no stranger to mobile applications and will see Facebook Places as more of an extension of something they are familiar with rather than something brand new.

2. The Potential

When asked about the business model behind Facebook Places, Mark Zuckerberg replied that at the moment they were focusing on the 3 core goals [(1) find out where their friends are (2) check-in and (3) discover new places] that they had initially built Facebook Places for, but that because the application has so many possibilities, there will be opportunities for them to profit off of it.

Although he didn’t say it, we can only guess that a few of the revenue generation mechanisms that Facebook Places will allow will include geolocation based deals to users, reward system for checking in, and partnerships with business to create official Facebook Places partners, similar to the relationship that Startbucks has with FourSquare. Taking into account also the brand equity that Facebook has, they should have little trouble finding businesses interested in working with them.

3. Data

The biggest reason why Facebook Places has the opportunity to take over the mobile space is in the data that they posses. Although major mobile applications like FourSquare and Gowalla have their own API available for anyone to use, Facebook Places will be backed by the 500 million registered users which will be appealing to almost every business. While Facebook Places does have permission and privacy settings in place, which will undoubtedly deter some users from using it, if Facebook Places were to get just an eigth of their 500 millions users to use it, they would still have 125 times more users than FourSquare.