So, Barry Bonds is like Ogilvy How?
By Dan Dooley on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007I read an interesting article over the weekend that answered the question: why is sports journalism so much better than the general media? (which I agree with) The author had 3 reasons:
- You keep score, which makes reporting clear outcomes the goal.
- Your reader base has a near expert understanding of the topics (ever meet a fantasy geek? If not, come see me).
- There’s a monopoly in the trade (sure, there are tons of blogs, local papers, etc., but really, it’s ESPN, SI, and then Fox and CBS for NFL and NCAA basketball respectively).
I have a fourth – sports lends itself beautifully to literary metaphor, so writers can use exquisitely crafted language and not be penalized for lack of objectivity or pithiness.
So I was weighing this against why the ad trades are so poor (how many years in a row can this be the “YEAR OF MOBILE!!!”), given very similar circumstances? We do keep score (wins/losses, campaign outcomes, ratings, etc), the readers are all in the industry - for the most part - and there is an absolute monopoly on the reportage: Adage and Adweek (and their sister pubs) are the major filters for what we understand to be going on in the ad/marketing fields. We’ll here’s a stab – let me know what you think:
1. They don’t really keep score – they’ll only tell you who won and lost specific pitches, not who is really losing business, staff and rep. CP+B does some wonderfully executed creative, but how many accounts can they lose, win, lose, win, lose, win, win, lose, before we start asking about results (agencies don’t just walk away from beer and auto accounts, mind you). The pubs also play it pretty straight by NOT predicting how effective ad campaigns or agencies will be - what was the over/under on how many weeks Bud.tv would be live? You can’t grade ads if we can’t grade you, Barbara.
2. Here’s the important one: the readers of Adweek and AdAge are nowhere near as expert in advertising and marketing as a typical sports fan is about the sports world. Really. Walk through any agency – large, small, digital, traditional, other - and ask a typical AE or production coordinator who Jack Connors is, and you’ll get a blank stare. Ask even the most seasoned Art Director what AOL’s announcement that the future is in ad networks means to their world (answer: an awful lot). Net/net: we’re all in the weeds of our own businesses, clients, and agencies, and don’t really have the time to invest in anything outside the four corners of our immediate concern. The CPG cos. read about other CPG cos. and move on. The telcos read about the telcos and move on. Moveon reads about moveon and moves on. I read it all, but I’m a nerd.
3. Lastly, there’s too much of a monopoly, and it’s too geographically considered – The Wal-Mart/DraftFCB/Roehm love tryst was the biggest story in the industry… for about a month. The pubs of note don’t have the deep bench of reporters nor the long term interest of their readers to really dig deeply into a really compelling “human interest story”. Plus, who knows where Roehm will land? Who wants to be shut out of news concerning the largest retailer in the world? They’re too big, and too dependant, to mess with the hands that feed them - news and ad revenue.
