Tag Archives: Chicago Cubs

Advertising is a Cubs fan’s best friend

I suppose this day was bound to come. Maybe deep down, those of us who are Cubs fans all knew it. Here we lie at the inevitable moment where our grand old ball park meets the revenue demands of the modern day and the only way to maintain its existence in a new era is to adjust.

I would like to see "World Series Champs!" on this marquee in my lifetime, wouldn't you?

It’s uncomfortable. It’s unpleasant. And it’s absolutely necessary.With Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s “Fenway Plan,” the Cubs potentially could gain in the neighborhood of $150 million in advertising and sponsorships from Wrigley Field and the surrounding streets.

It’s a thought that causes excitement for a marketer and terror for a baseball purist. A time where advertising settles into the role of Bad Guy, and people begin to get emotional about the future with a mixture of fear and anger. Some say Wrigley is beautiful and that the addition of a Jumbotron in right field or a lot more ads would be horrible. Some say it’s a wreck and are all for change as long as they don’t have to pay for very much of it at all. And some dare to suggest that the Cubs should move to the suburbs and knock the stadium down altogether. I wager most of those in the last category are the same bright minds who said the Bears should play in Gary.

At the end of the day, I turn to the brand itself as my guide. And that’s where the answer of all this becomes clear as day.

The Cubs’ brand is Wrigley Field. Think about how rare that is for a moment. We can over-romanticize the Friendly Confines, but there is a very short list of stadiums that are so embedded into their teams that is impossible to unlink the two. This is one of them. In other locations where professional teams are based, you can transport them across town, to a suburb or across a river and the fan base won’t bat an eyelash.

But even the brands with the most cherished heritage need to make some concessions to the modern era. The Cubs’ brand is no different. It’s a new ownership, a new management team and even a new philosophy that’s trying to build a culture of winning. Look around the game – is someone going to think Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park is any less hallowed ground because of some giant ads? I’ll take giant ads if it brings a giant championship.

Purists will grumble that a Wrigley with increased advertising upsets the beauty of the place. You know what? They may have a point. But you know what else I’d hate to see even more? A wrecking ball hitting it and watching them play in the suburbs. That my heart could not take (sorry, suburbs).

Yes, they have a responsibility to respect tradition, too.

Only a fool would make the kind of improvements that practically eliminate the iconic elements that make Wrigley, well, Wrigley – like the scoreboard, for example. The foul poles that carry Jack’s “Hey Hey” catchphrase. The front marquee. The ivy. But there can be a best of both worlds. Advertising does not have to upset the character of a ballpark if done with taste. It’s a challenge. But not an impossible one.

Yes, I have not agreed at all with how much some ads have dominated architecture in this town more than ever on Mr. Emanuel’s watch, and I’m an advertising practitioner. But in this case, there’s a difference. I don’t expect bank advertising draped on the Wabash Avenue Bridge but I do expect it in a baseball stadium. Whether or not people welcome it, they expect it. And if you think they’re going to stop coming because of it, I give you Exhibit A: 103 straight years of not winning a championship. They’ll live. They put lights on the place and although there was a stink, most got over it. When the Bears redesigned Soldier Field to look like a spaceship landed in it, some people had a stink and most got over it.

By the way, one thing to point out to my social-media brethren who say advertising is “dead” – judging by the mayor’s proposal, it still matters a whole lot. Sure, in our world of tweeting and posting, traditional advertising’s role is rapidly changing. But it’s not going away. And if you’re rooting for this home team’s ability to eventually and consistently compete in baseball’s top tier, you’d better be rooting for advertising and its benefits for the long-term.

And when the Cubs win a World Series? Here’s what I think.

You’ll be dancing along the blocked off streets of Sheffield and Waveland or inside the stadium watching the last out of the World Series replayed over and over on the Jumbotron.

At that point, I’d pity the poor soul who says, “Yeah, but I sure wish Wrigley didn’t have this many ads.”

(Original post: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120418/BLOGS06/120419785/advertising-is-a-cubs-fans-best-friend#ixzz1sUowQgC8)

6 Cultural Changes Inspired by Theo Epstein (pt. 1)

When you’ve had a bad year for 103 years, what would you do to turn things around?

It’s practically incomprehensible for us to relate to a question like this because while a business can have a bad month, bad quarter or – in this economy – a bad year, we usually don’t know what it’s like to have consecutive bad decades.

It was something I couldn’t help but wonder as I was speaking at the Chicagoland Chamber about vision, brand strategy, culture, and how to keep that culture thriving. Maybe because, long before Theo Epstein ever came aboard as President of Baseball Operations for the Chicago Cubs, we’ve often heard of the need for the North Siders to instill a “culture of winning.”

“The goal is to win a World Series, but it’s about how we get there. We need to build a foundation for sustained success, including player development, for something that’s going to last. We don’t want to be the type of club that gets there and then disappears for 4 or 5 years. We want to be playing baseball every October someday.”

– Theo Epstein, Cubs President of Baseball Operations

How does one find this elusive culture of winning? Well, I think organizations searching for that may be able to learn a few things from Epstein based on his past stop and already what he’s doing here. And if you’re a Cubs fan, you should be encouraged by this too. Let me explain with 6 key observations.


1) Visions have to be clear, concrete and more specific, not broad core values nobody can understand.

What I find refreshing about Epstein is that, when he announced the search for a new manager, he let everyone know exactly who he was looking for in a candidate – one of those aspects being that the manager had to be someone with major league experience. For better or worse, that immediately ruled out hometown favorite and popular choice Ryne Sandberg.

But when you leave no doubt as to what you’re looking for in an organization as far as the kind of talent that belongs (and doesn’t belong), then you set a strong tone that people can get behind. The same holds true for your customers – you can’t be for anybody with a buck. So who are you for? And not for? Do your people get that too?


2) Locate the cancers in the environment as quickly as possible. Then remove them.
You can give someone with a poor attitude the chance to turn that attitude around (warnings, probation). But if they don’t, they should be removed before the cancer spreads.

I have seen environments where some people had become so jaded with “that’s the way it always is” and “we’ve always done it this way” and that’ll never work” statements that it permeates throughout the rest of the culture. You can’t build a winning culture with people that way and it doesn’t take many of them. And the more you make excuses for people who don’t deserve a free pass, the more others will be impacted. In relation to the Cubs, this is why Carlos Zambrano will probably never pitch at Wrigley again, unless in an opposing team’s uniform.


3) Winning cultures have to be accountable.
My colleague, friend and co-presenter Rob Jager of Hedgehog Consulting often speaks of this. Managers can speak all they want about how employees should do this or that, but if they don’t follow the same practices, the words coming out of their mouth have significantly less meaning. If someone is a nice person who doesn’t produce (and assuming they’re in the role they’re supposed to be in), they too should be removed. Mike Quade is probably a nice enough fellow, but the team’s fundamentals on defense were horrible. That points to poor management and is a big reason why Epstein wiped the slate clean by deciding, in order to have a winning environment, a change needed to be made.


In the next post, I’ll provide 3 more cultural changes you can make based on how Theo might run your organization.

Cubs, Sox Looking Up at Teams in Social Media Standings Too

The San Francisco Giants are the world champions of social media. Oh, and I suppose they deserve that World Series trophy too.

Let me explain. I began to write this as a Cubs vs. Sox comparison of social media usage – and I do speak to this. But I also wanted to show the whole picture of how both the North Siders and South Siders compare against other teams in baseball. Plus, I didn’t want Sox fans to think I was trying to intentionally be biased against their team as I fully disclose my passion for Cubdom.

There may be Cubs Nation, Yankees Nation and Red Sox Nation, but in my view, the Giants are the best all-around baseball team in terms of being truly “social.”

And what’s crazy is that it primarily comes down to effort, not technology.

Some will say, “that figures because they’re in Silicon Valley and there’s a lot of tech people out there.” No, no, no. You and I both know that we’re talking about interaction, not building microchips. It involves maintenance and consistency but being a social media marketer doesn’t require hardcore engineering. So take that thought and smack it out of the stadium of your mind.

To arrive at this finding, I took a look at Sports Fan Graph from Coyle Media, Klout, Social Media Today and my own analysis of teams’ social media channels.

Now, let’s discuss some of those categories in greater detail:

Twitter Interactivity

I don’t judge too much by number of followers because obviously that favors the big cities vs. the smaller ones. Plus, I don’t believe that should be the most heavily weighted piece of criteria when measuring social media influence anyway. Instead, I looked at whether teams were actually conversing with followers or they were just using Twitter as an outlet for broadcasting.

Using this measurement, the Giants top off around 33 follower responses in a 24-hour span alone. That may or may not sound like a lot, until you consider what both of our teams did combined.

Cubs: Within a 72-hour span @Cubs acknowledged and responded to zero followers. The front office Tweeter at @CubsInsider was a little better – one follower in 72 hours. All the rest of their tweets were broadcasts.

White Sox: In the same 72-hour timeframe, @whitesox had the same result – zero responses to any followers.

 

Frequency of Tweets

Even with sharing play-by-play, scores and interviews, you can only tweet so much when it’s one-sided. The Giants are masters of pumping out tweets that are frequent and varied. As noted, they know how to give and receive feedback. At this point, they tally nearly 15,000 tweets.

By comparison, the Cubs and White Sox combined total a little less than half that many tweets. That’s a little embarrassing when you consider these teams have a fan base that’s much larger than, say, the Blue Jays or Rangers – just a couple of the teams out-Tweeting the Cubs and Sox.

 

Facebook Pages           

It’s almost a given that size of city will play an influence on size of Facebook Page, so it’s not terribly surprising that the Yankees, Red Sox and Cubs have the largest amount of Fans on their Facebook Pages. Yet this is what makes the Giants’ showing of the 4th overall Facebook Page all the more respectable, considering San Francisco is in a market behind New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston, Philly and several others.

The White Sox aren’t terrible overall in terms of Facebook Page volume (11th), but they certainly shouldn’t be losing out to anyone within their division – and Detroit’s Facebook Page is nudging it out by 20,000 Fans.


Check-Ins

More check-ins occur at AT&T Park, home of the Giants, than any other baseball stadium, according to Social Media Today. As of right now, their fans have checked in on Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places 284,854 times.

The Dodgers are second (233,008) and the Cubs are third (233,008). Not terribly surprising considering the beauty of the Friendly Confines but this is nonetheless a bright spot for the Cubs as they’ve nudged past those checking in at Yankee Stadium.

I don’t mean to pick on the White Sox here, but the number of check-ins at US Cellular Field are dead last in baseball (24,285). That’s pathetic. And you can’t put that all on the fans either. If they had enough incentive to check-in through certain promotions, they’d do it. So let’s see the front office do something in this area so the Sox can at least pass up the check-ins by Houston fans at Minute Maid Park, which deserves to relegated to last for its stupid hill in center field.


Conclusion

Some teams can rest on their laurels and get a sizeable fan base, but you’ve got to admire when a team becomes Avis-like and tries harder because it knows it has to. The Giants are in a smaller city and even have to compete with a team across the Bay to a degree. Yet there’s nothing preventing many other teams from doing the things the Giants are doing – they’re just hustling a lot more when it comes to posting, tweeting and interacting. Who knows? Maybe that’s a mandate from the front office there – hustle on the field and off of it.

As far as the Cubs and White Sox, there’s room for improvement overall. From a social media perspective with all factors considered, both teams are looking up at the Giants, Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies. And when it comes to Twitter, they’re behind the Phillies, Yankees, Giants, Braves, Dodgers and Blue Jays. If you believe in Klout scores, add the Mets and Rangers above them.

I can understand being behind the Yankees. But the Braves, Rangers and Blue Jays?

Wait until next year, I guess.

How about your thoughts on how your team can be a little more social? To spur ideas, check out this article in Fast Company that talks about the “6 Things Sports Teams Can Do With Social Media To Engage Fans.”