May 31, 2009

More Online Content

One of the many things the NBA does better than any other league is share content on the internet, but if I want to see a huge dunk from last night, I shouldn’t have to watch some random persons home camera recording of his tivo.  I should be able to see any highlight in HD quality uploaded from the league itself.

Seriously all you need to do is pay 5 people to watch games and upload highlights of the best plays.  Have those people put  together highlight reels of the best catches, hits, goals or dunks from the night.  It is something that should be really easy, but not all leagues do a great job of this.

This is especially important for games that don’t get shown on national TV.  Leagues should be promoting the small market teams that need it the most.  The Sox, Yankees, Giants, Celtics and others will always make it on to sports center.  Their games are always nationally televised.  The leagues should instead use the internet to grow their game in areas that don’t have the same exposure.

Take Danny Granger for example.  This guy had a break out season, was averaging ~25 points per game, was voted into the all star game…and I still have no idea what he looks like!  If is saw Kevin Garnet walking down the street everyone would recognize him, but since Danny Granger plays in Indiana instead of LA or Boston, he is not as well known.

He is the perfect example of a player that should be promoted in league sponsored online content.

  • Feature him in some sort of online behind the scene mini-series
  • If he has a huge play from the night before make sure that it gets noticed on digg or youtube
  • Sponsor some funny videos promoting small market players like Chris Bosh for the all star game a few years ago

Basically, I think there is an opportunity to continue to use more league sponsored HD quality online videos, highlights, documentaries and other content to promote players and teams which may not get national coverage.

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May 27, 2009

A leason in how to turn away fans

News flash to commissioner Stern: If your fans are turning the game off with three minutes to go because there are so many fouls, then you are doing something wrong.   The NBA should take a page from the NHL rule book if and allow the players to decide the game. Its cliche to call it “playoff basketball,” but at some point the refs just need to let things go.

Case in point: Kenyon Martain…ESPN says “Martin has actually collected six technical fouls this postseason, but his previous three before Monday night’s T were rescinded by the league office.”

All this shows me is that refs are overreacting to plays on the court, and the league office is then going back and correcting what should have actually been called.  Sure they might be getting the calls right in the long run, but that fact that the refs are making so many wrong calls is killing the playoffs for fans.

Its essentially the same argument that owners, players and fans make against instant replay.  Sure you are getting the calls right, but only at the expense of killing any flow of the game.  Baseball loses its appeal when an umpire takes 10 minutes to figure out a home run call, just as the NBA becomes boring when there are 5 personal fouls and 2 technicals between the 4:05 and 3min mark left in the Lakers- Nuggets game.

Professional sports leagues are, at their core, companies that sell the same product over and over to fans.  They need fans to keep buying tickets, so there primary responsibility should be to make the games as enjoyable as possible.  While there can be no outward directive from the league office to call less fouls, the NBA needs to do something about the inconsistency and over reactions this post season.  Professional soccer made a concerted effort a few years ago to clean up the game by penalizing players for diving.  Similarly, the NBA must not reward players for touch fouls which only get called once the game is tight.

To sum up:

  1. The NBA (and all sports leagues) are in the business of providing entertainment for fans
  2. To generate revenue these leagues need fans coming back
  3. The league should be doing everything in its power to make the game more enjoyable
  4. One way to make the game more enjoyable is to call less fouls and let the game flow
  5. Fans rarely get upset about a game being to physical (aka hockey or the NFL or MMA)
  6. Once a players  and fans safety is ensured, refs mus take a set back and look at the game as a whole
  7. All the players want “playoff basketball,” so let the little stuff go and truly punish those who merit it
  8. Keep the fans happy and they will keep coming back

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May 21, 2009

Forgive..or at least Forget

All the news today has been about Michael Vick getting out of jail after 19months of confinement in relation to his dog fighting charges.  Will Roger Goodell admit him back in the NFL?  Will any teams be willing to take him? People love to forget….

  • Kobe: rape trial (2004)-…NBA league MVP (2008)
  • Barkley: Drunk driving conviction (2009)…back on prime time TNT (6 weeks later)
  • Shawne Marriman: Steroid suspension (2006)…Pro bowl (same season, 12 games later)
  • Marv Albert: Sexual assault charges for biting a women on the back 15 times during a sexual encounter (1997)…back on TNT prime time (all the time)
  • Latrell Sprewell: Choked his coach (1997)…. played in the NBA through 2006, all-star 2001

I could go on all day with examples of professional athletes getting second chances.  If you are a good enough people love to forget bad things you have done.

In the short term it might look bad for a team to sign an athlete like Vick, but in most cases the long term reward is worth the risk.  Sure PETA and some fans will boycott whatever team picks up Vick, but there is little chance this will negatively impact the teams finacials in the long term. Remember when the blazers were affectingly known as the “Jail Blazers?” History should remind us that fans will still attend games, merchandise will continue to sell and the world will move on.

Three possible scenarios:

  • Vick once again does something stupid, a team is forced to cut him, and everyone wonders what could have been.
  • Vick returns to his status as an elite NFL quarterback and a team gains a great player.
  • Vick turns out to be a mediocore player after 3 years away from the game.  He makes headlines as a back up and part time player for his first team before he is cut and picked up by a second team as a 5 play per game player.  Within 4 years he is out of the league for good.

In any scenario we know there will be immense press coverage during his first days back with a team.  We know reporters will argue about how he is affecting the locker room and fans will act outraged that their team would sign such a bad guy.

Yet, I believe that owners must take the chance at signing such a rare talent., sponsors should at least rethink their relationship (as Nike did Kobe away after Adidas dropped him), and general managers must remember that the only bad press is no press.  If you are operating a franchise you must look at how history has treated players and realize that Vick will likely get a second chance somewhere.  It is in the teams best interest to at least consider the benefits of such a player.

I do not condone anything Michael Vick has done in the past (and I have personally never been a fan) , but if history has taught us anything its that fans have an amazing capacity to forgive…or at least forget.

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May 17, 2009

Website Content

Sports franchises have an opportunity to be THE SOURCE for sports news.

Currently if I want the start time for a game, the TV channel showing it, the latest injury reports, trade rumors, or suspension news I just go to ESPN.com as my one stop shop for all things sports.  The website is great for getting a variety of news stories and pretty much makes every other sports website irrelevant.  Sure some people go to SI sport or Yahoo sports, but ESPN is really the place to be.  This got me thinking about franchise websites are extremely underutilized.  Just think…where does espn.com get all its news?  It’s the “sources inside the celtic organization, ” or “Red Sox team doctors!”

Teams hold the cards when it comes to access and team information.  So why aren’t the franchises bringing news directly to the fans?

If franchises want to make their web portals relevant, then they need to offer something espn.com can’t.  ESPN aggregates stories from across teams and leagues.  Since individual teams cant do this, then they need to offer exclusive content ESPN doesn’t have.  Teams websites must be the fist place to announce a trade, injury, or suspension.  If the Lakers were doing a good job with their web portal, I would have been checking their website instead of ESPN.com to find out if Derick Fisher was going to be suspended for game 3.

Since individual teams cant compete on breadth of information, their value add must be the depth of targeted insight they can provide. Team’s have an opportunity to increase they web presence and connect with the fans in a way that has never been done before.

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May 14, 2009

Non-Traditional Market Segments

Leagues and companies have continued to grow revenues by targeting non traditional marketing segments including malt drinks for me, American sports to foreign audiences, and sports apparel for women.  Below are two current examples of company’s or leagues targeting valuable under-penetrated markets.

Smirnoff Ice:

I’ve been watching a lot of the NBA playoffs this year and one thing that really stands out are the new Smirnoff Ice commercials. Now I honestly don’t know any guy (well one dude from college) that has ever drank a Smirnoff Ice by choice, yet somehow everyone person in their commercial is a guy.   The unlikely option is that Smirnoff is just really confused about who actually buys there products.  The better guess is that they are targeting the essentially untapped male segment that they really WANT buying their drinks.

Whether the reasons are cultural or just the fact that guys are usually bigger, I think its safe to say that guys drink more then women.  So if a malt drink is currently perceived as a “chick drink” then the distributor is missing out on a majority of potential clients.

This line of thinking is the basis behind increasing the volumes of goods sold.  If you cant increase the “size of the pie” because the number of people of legal drinking ages is fixed, then a company must figure out how to increase its “share of the pie.”  By targeting men, Smirnoff is selling into a larger base of consumers, and the campaign will be a success if they can convince even a small portion of men to change their habits.

NFL Games in London:

The NFL proposing a second game in London is one other way this concept of expanding out from a traditional market segment is happening in the news.  Growing success in the US has led the NFL to look for a bigger fan base in Europe.  Though NFL Europe has now folded as a league, there is likely still interest in some fans to attend games.  The fans might not be loyal, but the NFL game is an event the same way Manchester United would be if they played in the states.  Even if American Football never catches on around the world, there are still 6 billion people who don’t know the game.  Capturing a small portion of that they way baseball or basketball has would be a huge victory for any league.

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May 10, 2009

Team Websites

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that teams should be using twitter, or similar services, is to increase direct traffic to the team websites.  With more traffic directly to their teams sites, teams can increase add revenue and improve their online presence.  This all is great in theory, but if your hometown team has a poorly organized and aesthetically unappealing website, then all the tiwtter links in the world will not get fans to visit.

Take for example the screen shots below of the Lakers and Celtics websites.  Earlier today I was checking out the Lakers website to find out what time their game 4 playoff game against Huston was at.  My first thought upon opening the site was “wow, this website is bad.”  Not only is the entire site purple, but its covered in irrelevant links and pictures.  AMPM, uses the slogan “Too much good stuff,” and that is the exact problem that the Lakers website has.  I’m sure most of the content on the page is useful, but the website is so unappealing to look at/ use that this page is just a giant wasted resource.

Picture 1

Compare the Laker’s page to the Celtics screenshot below.  Sure there are ways that the Celtics website could be improved, but at least its not horrible to look at.  The white/ green background and simple page design contrast sharply to the purple clutter that covers the Laker’s page.  This has nothing to do with actual content on the page (another post), but only relates to how the page looks and feels.

Picture 2

If you want to increase traffic, then pay someone a couple grand to make it look good.  I suspect that the increase in add revenue from fans clicking through on the site would be enough to offset the fixed cost of the redesign in a pretty short period of time.

If you want an example of a well-designed web 2.0 website then check out mint.com.  Sure the content is completely different because it’s a personal finance website rather than for a pro sports team, but the principles for good website design are the same.  Keep it simple, make it useable, and have relevant content to keep fans coming back.

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May 9, 2009

Ticket prices and winning

So I’ve decided to start testing my theories with a little investigation of how a teams winning percentage relates to the cost of going to a game.  My idea is that as teams start winning more they can charge more for tickets because they are offering a more compelling product.  Fans are most likely to pay to see a good team than a bad one.  Plus all the bandwagon fans start attending games–aka the Celtics fans once the team pulled off the KG and Ray Allen trades.

As you can see from the chart below, the correlation between 2009 game costs and and winning percentage has increased over the past 8 years.  Another way of thinking about this is to say that a teams winning percentage last year has a stronger relationship with how much it costs to go to a game this year than the teams 2002 or 2003 winning percentage.

Picture 6Definitely not too mind blowing but pretty cool to see some stats behind this.

I’ve also got a theory that this should work in reverse as well.  If fans are paying more money to see a game then the team can afford to have a higher payroll and should therefore win more. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any historical ticket pricing data to back this up.

Notes: This data doesn’t account for one time events like teams building new stadiums or the Montreal Expos becoming the Washington Nationals.  If this were a more detailed analysis I would correct for those sorts of events, but for the purposes of this analysis the trends are still pretty clear.

Sources: The cost in this analysis is the teammarketing.com fan cost index.  It takes into account the price of tickets as well as other extras including food, parking, and souveniours.  The winning percentage data is from espn.com.

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May 5, 2009

Unemployment and Baseball

At least one more post before I start in on the attendance, ticket price, winning percentage theory.  This one is about unemployment and baseball attendance.

There has been a lot of talk about whether attendance will be down this season because of the economy, and with an unemployment rate hovering around 8% I find I hard to believe there will be no impact on teams.  I’m sure some luxury boxes are locked into multi-year leases, and some teams will continue to sell out (Red Sox), but what worries me are small market teams that can’t even fill the seats in good times.  How is Detroit going to continue to pay its roster with unemployment near 12%?

Lets say it costs $25 for a cheap ticket at a baseball game. That means it will cost a family of 4 $100, just for the game.  Add on $15 dollars for parking and $35 dollars for food and the game price is already up to $150.  That is a lot of discretionary money to be spending on a few hours of entertainment.

Check out the graph below to see the relationship between national unemployment and baseball attendance over the past 6 years.  This analysis would be better with a longer time frame and city by city unemployment, but even so it shows a pretty clear relationship.  picture-5

The blue line is the percent change in major league attendance from the previous season (for example MLB had about the same attendance in 2008 as in 2007).  The red line shows the yearly percentage change in unemployment (for example, the 4.6% unemployment rate in 2007 increased to 5.8% in 2008 which is a 26% increase).

Notice that in every year where unemployment increases, MLB has seen a decrease in YoY attendance. If unemployment stays at the same 8% we saw in the first 3 months of 2009, some quick back of the envelope calculations suggest MLB could be looking at a 4% decrease in ticket sales….yikes!

Of course this is not conclusive because it does not take into account many important factors.  Teams build new stadiums with different capacities, teams move cities, inclement weather rains out games…etc.  But in the end its pretty clear that over the last 6 of 7 years, people are less willing to attend games when unemployment increases.

Look for more on this later…

Sources:  ESPN.com for historical attendance numbers,  BLS website for national unemployment statistics.

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Update: 072109

I saw on the TV in the elevator at work today that baseball attendance is down 5% for the year.  In this post I wrote “If unemployment stays at the same 8% we saw in the first 3 months of 2009, some quick back of the envelope calculations suggest MLB could be looking at a 4% decrease in ticket sales.”  Currently we are at a 9.5% unemployment rate which is directly in line with what I predicted!

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May 4, 2009

Attendance, Ticket Price, Winning

I’ve got  couple posts coming up exploring the relationship between winning, ticket price and and attendance.  The diagram below shows my theory on how the three forces interact.

3 ForcesWinning should increase attendance because of the bandwagon effect.  Attendance will increase ticket prices because demand increases while supply (number of seats) remains constant.  Higher ticket prices means a more cash coming in to an organization and the ability to afford better players.

Likewise an increase in attendance means more people in the seats and a potentially better home court advantage which should help a team win more.  A higher winning percentage means the team is a better product that people are willing to pay more for.

I plan to pull some data and see if this theory is true.  I’m also trying to figure out if there is any reason higher ticket prices would lead to highe attendance.

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April 29, 2009

MLB mid-inning entertainment

An idea for MLB teams… Use the time in between innings for something fun!

  • Let kids race around the bases
  • Hide a prize under a base and let a fan try to pick the correct one
  • Have kids spin around with their heads on bats then race

The NFL has halftime concerts, NBA has halftime dancers and singers, but all MLB can offer is a first pitch and the 7th inning stretch?  With 81 home games there has to be something entertaining to do between innings.  This is really the best baseball can do?

milwaukee-brewers-sausage-race

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