There is a massive difference between pro and amateur sport. A distinction lost on most spectators and huge amount of sports administrators.

Most spectators and viewers honestly believe that when you are watching Arsenal and Chelsea play football or England play Australia in the ashes that they are watching a “grown up” version of school football or cricket or Old Parks playing Pirates. Wrong.

Pro sport is show business, the objective of which is to generate revenue. It does so from ticket sales, sponsorships, advertising and selling television rights in the main (also from merchandise sales etc)

It operates in the leisure time/entertainment market. It wins when people prefer to watch the event than do other stuff. Other stuff includes watching other sports, going to the movies, the pub, playing cards even staying home (or going out) and having sex. They are all alternative uses of that time and some alternative uses of that money.

If you are marketing that sport you would do exactly what you would do with any other brand, improve the product to make more interesting, exciting etc than the alternative. The real win is to get more and more people talking about it. I remember a time when the Transvaal Mean Machine would pack out Newlands cricket ground, and when Clive Rice walked onto the sold out ground the Mountain Goats (Capetonians) would boo. What a win.

Think about it. If you were marketing a sport would you rather have technology bringing certainty into every decision or people talking about the human refereeing mistakes. Would you rather have a John McEnroe on centre court (whom people remember decades later) than an endless stream of bland tennis players. Would you rather have newspapers speculating over whether the player was actually offsides when the goal was scored.

It is no accident that Football is the most popular sport on the planet, that FIFA can instruct governments, even get them to pass laws in their favour. Football has the perfect formula. It’s a beautiful flowing game with an unbeatable combination of strategy and skill. It also builds heroes, villains and controversy.

Its amazing to me that those calling for electronic surveillance and decision making on the football field don’t get that
professional football, especially the world cup, is the the biggest entertainment event the world has ever seen.

If I was consulting to FIFA would I suggest that they install goal line technology to judge whether the ball had actually crossed the line? Would I advise them to replace penalties with referee awarded goals (see my previous blog post)

Not on your life. I would want you to talk about it!

PEDRO UGARTE/AFP/Getty Images

Luis Suárez saved a certain goal in the World Cup by handling the ball while he stood on the goal line. In the microsecond he had he went with his instinct and prevented the ball going into the net by batting it out with his hands.

That the Ghanaian, Asamoah Gyan then missed the penalty and that the game eventually went Uruguay’s way became to many a huge injustice.

I mention this is my blog because I have been in a somewhat heated debate over this ever since and it needs more than 140 characters to analyse, the talk has been of cheating and a morally sad sport. I think that a few deep breaths should be taken by some.

Did Suárez cheat? In my mind he did not. He followed his instinct. Cheating is acting with deceit, usually cheating is done with some sort of premeditation, there was clearly none in this case. there was no time. It will be easy for anyone who has played competitive sport at a high level to understand that he did exactly what 999 out of 1000 footballers, rugby players, polo or hockey players would do in a similar situation. He prevented a goal.

Did he commit a foul, no doubt, was it a foul that prevented a certain goal? Absolutely. Did he break the laws of football? without question.

What was the appropriate action for the referee and soccer to take.

The referee should have given a penalty, He did. A penalty is awarded for any of the 10 offences that a direct free kick would have been awarded in the field of play but for the fact that the offence has taken place in the 18 yd box. He should have been shown a red card. He was. FIFA then automatically suspended him from the next game. In my mind a totally appropriate and sufficient response.

But, there has been an indignant outcry though, the opinion expressed that a “penalty goal” should have been awarded (or the law changed to make this possible) and even that Suárez should have been banned for life. Maybe some would have liked to see him in front of a firing squad.

Why? because we feel disappointed and there must be someone to blame?

Any of the 10 offences that a penalty is given for could have resulted in a certain goal. That’s why its not a simple direct free kick but instead a kick from the penalty spot which is in itself an almost certain goal.

For the referee  the decision is then very easy to take, he judges the facts. We wouldn’t still want the referee to make the highly subjective decision to award a goal because he, in his opinion, believed that there was a 87% probability that the foul would have resulted in a goal and only a penalty kick because the probability was a mere 79.3%. The Laws of Football are simple and easy to apply in most cases and their simplicity is one of the reasons that football flows in the way it does.

The law is also beautiful because it introduces that bit of skill and the penalty has still to be converted, still giving a chance to the team possibly wrongly penalised by a human referee error and adding interest for spectators.

Those who feel the urge to criticise the game of football, and brand its players, supporters and administrators as condoning cheating could maybe think of this.

Sure the fact that the Ghanaian player choked meant that the “wrong” team went through to the next round and disappointed millions of Africans. Me included.

Certainly Suárez’s subsequent behaviour has been poor (the “hand of god” comment) and worthy of criticism.

But all the rest of the attacks on football, the administrators and the Law are totally inappropriate.

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• Uruguay fired by ‘shameful’ criticism of Luis Suárez handball (guardian.co.uk)
• World Cup 2010: Uruguay’s Luis Suárez revels in second coming of Hand of God (telegraph.co.uk)

In a lecture room in Johannesburg on Wednesday, I finished my class with a slide with only strange square image that looked like a haphazardly coloured in chessboard. The title on the slide was “Your class assignment.”

For the past 6 days I had been running a workshop with 38 of the future leaders of the creative industry. A class of copywriters, art directors and designers all students at the countries leading advertising school. The topic was digital marketing.

On the first day I asked the obvious opening question. “Who of you have blogs?” Not a single hand was raised. On the second last day of the workshop the students aimed their cell phone cameras at the square QR “barcode” on the screen, which led them to a website landing page with their instructions. Within a day a video response shot on those same phones to the viral “Die Antword” had been uploaded onto a video sharing site and then embedded in a blog post on their individual blog sites and shared with the world.

They had joined the revolution.

It has always bothered me that the education system focuses on teaching compliance, for 12 years at school and 3 years at college they are taught to listen, are rewarded for obedience, punished for daring to stray. It’s no wonder then that in a class of communications professionals none had a blog, they had not been told to have a blog.

I often feel that those who understand the tumultuous changes that have been brought about by the Internet are living in a parallel universe. It’s a world in which people are connected, and because of the connections the way they find stuff out, the way thye buy, the way they communicate the way they get things done has changed completely, in this world everything is possible and things happen at the speed of light.

Living right alongside us are people who don’t understand the extent to which South African’s are connected whether they live in Diepsloot or Dainfern. Who don’t understand that the development of the mobile Internet is happening eight times faster than the equivalent stage in the development of PC Internet. There are those that don’t even know about the millions and millions of messages a minute travelling along mobile based IM channels in South Africa nor the imminent availability of fast and cheap internet connections and how much influence that will have.

Many of these people are in influential positions spending advertising and marketing budgets. When the penny drops will we find that as brand marketers we don’t have the ability to connect with our customers who are finding their own voice, that our marketing communications agencies you have been following the same formulae approach to producing campaigns are lost.

Pablo Picasso said “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up”

We are going to need artists in this new world. Where are we going to find them?

Certainly not out of an education system that rewards compliance.

Photo: Cobalt123

See if you can find me in this photo – Its the inside front cover of Seth Godin’s new book “linchpin” its kind of in the centre right, at 2 o clock from the black square.

I can’t wait to read the book, my copy is on its way from amazon.

And its really cool to be in this picture.

In the US Domino’s Pizza has come under a lot of flak for their new marketing strategy.

For admitting that their product sucks, that the pizza base tastes like cardboard and saying sorry and then as a response to what their customers said developing and launching a new recipe. Crazy stuff Dominos, say the critics, you are alienating your loyal customers who presumably love cardboard and you are damaging your brand.

You can read the criticism on eConsultancy and Advertising Age by clicking on the links. While you are there read the comments. and when I tweeted the article today almost all the responses were the same, surprisingly disagreeing with the criticism.

Traditionally you would have either defended the product and shored up the brand or launched the new recipe with a “you always loved the old pizza but we have made it better”type of line.

But actually in today’s market that’s a very risky strategy.

• Domino’s customers all know the Pizza sucks, they buy it for convenient fast delivery.
• Their friends all know it too.
• They are connected to their friends.
• If you lie they will tell their friends that you are a liar.

So this is what domino’s did:

Now’s time for another story. In the late 80′s I was Client Services and Strategy Director for one of the hottest agencies in South Africa. One of clients was the biggest wine and spirits distributor. They had a dog of a wine brand, it had been promoted on the basis of its heritage – it was named after the birthplace of man who had opened a refreshment station at what is now Cape Town for ships bound from Europe to the East Indies in the spice trade.

Only one of the products was doing anything, a sweet wine loved by drunks in the Eastern Cape.

The heritage positioning was so thin that I suggested that we should throw it out and call it what it was “a good everyday drinking wine” the kind of stuff you would drink with your friends, people whom you had no need to impress.

Much to the horror of the Brand Manager but with the support of the senior management, who had decided to give the brand one last shot. So we told the truth about the brand and implemented that positioning, won a Bronze Lion at Cannes and saved the brand.

The foundation of good marketing is not just great advertising its great product and great experiences. What’s the point of trying to tell your customers stuff they already know is bull. Why not show them a little respect, show them that you care, maybe they will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe this campaign will get customers to have a fresh look.

Well done Domino’s – Telling the truth may just be the Killer Strategy.

Photo by cafemama on Flickr

The notion that there is a divide between digital marketing and traditional marketing based on whether the technology used is analogue or digital is really a little ridiculous.

This thought was all sparked by a conversation I had with a prominent industry person yesterday. We were talking about the state of digital and traditional marketing in South Africa. During that entire conversation I felt that we were on different planets, as though our point of departure was entirely different. I concluded that I must be  communicating badly and when I thought about it I realized a reason.

The marketing, adverting and for that matter digital industry often think of digital as a medium. That your job is to have a smart idea that you push onto the customer and you use the media they use because then they will see it. This allows traditional ad agencies to think that because they have a digital or interactive section they are in the game. That digital is a channel. This is where the thinking is flawed.

Marketing needs to change because the way people find things out, how they learn, how they connect and so how ideas spread has changed. Its a fundamental behavioural change.

People are still people and brands are still brands, but neither behave the way they once did.

If you use new channels in the same way that you used old channels then the new channels wont work, they wont just work because they are digital You can rethink the way you use the traditional channels – so that they do work.

The divide is not between digital and traditional, or new media and old or anything like that. The divide is between those who cant understand the changing consumers and those who can. Its not a debate between media types its a debate about how ideas spread.

Its a question worth asking and the subject of my chat on the Internet economy on Friday, January 15, 2010.

Brand stewardship/ custodianship has traditionally been a space that has been claimed by the advertising agency, althjough we are seldom in a conversation in digital circles that we don’t hear the view that the “agencies just don’t get it”  so if they dont who does. Are the digital agencies ready to lead the brand?

My fellow “The Beancast” panel member Ana Adejelic wrote about this in Advertising Age and was ridiculed by both agency and digital groups. In her view digital are in exploratory mode and ad agencies focused on exploiting a tried and tested approach, in essence this means digital will shoot the lights out but generally cant be trusted with the whole brand, whereas the ad agency are so locked replicating a “safe” formula that they have forgotten whats good for the brand.

Traditional agencies and marketers are stuck in a marketing model which is hopelessly out of date, it is based on the idea that homogeneous groups of consumers exist which are called target markets, and that loyalty can be built in these groups by repeatedly interrupting them with brand messages until they listen and when they do they will believe what they see and read.

Digital agencies are often built around the concept of search engine marketing and the techniques of SEO. They drive the “direct marketing” concepts of measurability and conversions, turning interaction into sales.

Is either of them right?

The Internet has been alive for years with the view that Advertising is dead, and more and more we are hearing the view that SEO is dead. In the words of Mark Twain in both cases “The report of my death has been grossly exaggerated” although in both these cases there is a whole lot of truth tied up in those reports.

Lets propose a different set of views:

• The Internet is essentially a social creation.
• The Internet is not another marketing medium as little as a discussion around the braai (BBQ) is a marketing medium.
• The internet is not only about analytics and conversions – about OBSERVATION, it needs also to about a UNDERSTANDING of how people behave.
• The real strength of the Internet is that it connects people.
• Brands are created by the experience that customers have.
• Because of the network of connections ideas (good and bad) can spread faster than ever was possible before.
• There is too much information around and customers have too little time.
• People don’t believe advertising, they are starting to not even search in the way they did. They ask their friends. (Real time search)
• If it’s important,information will find me.
• The power in the transaction has shifted, brands are no longer the only source of information.

These thoughts fundamentally change the way we think about brands, branding and marketing.

New marketing is essentially understanding that the game has changed, that the connection created by the internet, however it is accessed, by computer or mobile phone has fundamentally changed the way that society operates in a way that will never be rolled back. Because brands no longer have control of the information that customers can access. Brands will be built in new and different ways. They will use all the traditional tools but in a totally different way. Brands will be built by experiences and interactions.

Modern marketing was only invented in the 60s to understand the use of the most important communications tools of the era. The character of the new tools are fundamentally different. Although paradoxically when we read the early ad men it seems they got it.

Marketing has always been about making stuff and creating experiences that people want, making it available to them and getting them to talk about it. Branding in the final analysis is what people believe about stuff, what they talk about.

Ad agencies don’t get it and will never get it because the agency model and the way they work does not fit the social interaction model; agencies were invented to solve a different problem and to use one way communications channels. The new boys, digital agencies will battle as the Internet becomes more and more a way to connect ideas and people and less like a catalogue, a searchable database and so the role of the search engine changes dramatically.

Brands are built around storytelling, there is a legend that surrounds every brand, that story was being told by brands about themselves, now the story is being told by customers, about their experiences. Customers who have the ability to connect to anyone, anywhere, now have the capacity to share and collaborate on a scale never before thought possible, to share and spread ideas and stories around the world almost instantaneously.

Although the fundamentals of marketing have not changed, because customers have the approach also needs to. Brands are still important and marketing now becomes more than just a box on the organogram, it becomes the entire business as seen from the point of view of the customer who don’t care where they interact with the brand as its all part of the same experience, an experience they tell their friends about.

The story that becomes the brand.

I see a totally new type of agency, one that understands the new customer that will guide its clients through the process of building the customers total experience and of engagement. An agency that has a fundamental understanding of how people buy, of all the communications channels and how to use them not to attempt to overpower customers into brand loyalty but assist them to spread the idea. The idea that is the brand.

This is part of the vision behind PiKE | The New Marketing Agency

Listen to what we spoke about Podcast Link Here

That is just not correct and I responded to her.

The reason why I persisted with the discussion is that it such a fundamental but broadly held misconception which needs to be addressed and it gave me an opportunity to do so:

• You cannot separate a brand from the products that support it and I use the broad definition of products here that include services.

• Brands are according to Seth Godin “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” The definition works for me and rather that face @gennefer’s  criticism of drawing on the academic foundations of marketing knowledge I shall not quote from a text book.
  

Underlying assumptions such as hers is the belief that you can build a brand independently from a product. This is seriously OLD SCHOOL thinking it is steeped in the advertising myth that you can manipulate customers to believe whatever it is that you are telling them.

Brands are the total set of experiences. They include both judgments of the performance of the product as well as the feelings associated with them. These feelings come from every touch point.

In this NEW world we have to understand that the days of thinking that we can separate the belief and feelings the customer has of the product from the product itself are naive.

We also have to understand that what our customers tell their friends is part of the brand.

There is a wonderful old advertising saying that goes “there is no better way to kill a bad product than good advertising” This is even more so today because people tell their friends.

By the way I concede that @gennefer and I may have got lost in the limitations of 140 character conversations, but this served as a spur for a blog post so I took it. ( and the conversation did continue after the screen shot used here)

This is another cool idea from Seth Godin, he is spreading ideas in a free ebook, a collection of ideas that matter, its called ‘What Matters Now” and you can download from his blog by using this link Download Free eBook

I have just read it because the ideas are really interesting and thought provoking, but also it is supporting a good cause and promoting his new book at the same time, and getting me (and others) to promote it for him for free

Go look.

Museo Rufino Tamayo - Mexico

The view that you can build brands with advertising has always been a myth. This a point that I made in an article published in 2005 reviewed by @karllong here the original has moved to here. The producer of  MEDIA@SAfm had dug this out and invited Brett Morris group creative director at DraftFCB and I to discussed it on this sundays show.

It was surprise when I saw the article lying on the host Ashraf Garda’s desk but I thought that it was really cool, firstly to see how consistent I have been in my views of how marketing works, and although I am into social media and stuff now its still the same philosophy, its just that the tools have become more powerful.

The point is that brands were always built by the experience customers have of the brand, advertising can create expectations but its the real experience that determines the brand. What changes now is the speed at which people can share experiences through their connections and  social networks on the internet and on mobile phones. So the expereinces that they share are even more likely to be real than what the advertiser tells them they should be.

Not that there isn’t a role for Advertising in the future – there is but its a different one.

This is the space in which I launch the new PiKE | The integrated new marketing agency in January.