Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

The Super Bowl is as much a championship for advertising as it is for football. Big companies like Pepsi and FedEx spend millions to reinforce established brands, while upstarts like Salesgenie.com or GoDaddy try to gain brand recognition with controversial or aggressive Super Bowl ads. Whether large or small, companies hope that the high cost of entry — $2.7 million for a 30-second commercial — will make their Super Bowl advertising investment worthwhile.

Sometimes it works. Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad for the Macintosh brought huge recognition to Apple at a time when IBM PCs ruled the computing world. Today that spot is seen as one of the most famous Super Bowl ads ever — and indeed as one of the greatest television ads of all time.

Last year, GoDaddy’s steamy Super Bowl ad turned off plenty of watchers, but it also created a spike of awareness — and new business — for the domain-name registration company. Meanwhile, Salesgenie’s 2007 Super Bowl ad, which implied that using the company’s sales prospecting lists would put you in a hot car with a hot blonde on your arm, was voted one of the worst Super Bowl ads ever . . . yet that didn’t deter Salesgenie.com from ponying up for commercial spots again this year.

Why such devotion by advertisers to Super Bowl advertisements? It’s not only that the Super Bowl delivers hundreds of millions of viewers, but that these viewers are actually watching the ads as part of the show. This is especially true since the Super Bowl audience includes many millions of viewers who don’t normally watch football, and who may or may not care much about the Patriots and the Giants. But even these casual sports fans pay special attention when the commercials come on.

For football fans, the Super Bowl is about football. But for the culture at large, it’s about spectacle — and the commercials are a key part of the fun.

Chris Brogan — events planning pro, Twitter influential, and all-around good guy — tweeted something recently about his long daily commute into Boston. When I followed up with him, he was nice enough to answer my questions about balancing work and “real” life in the face of hard-core commuting. My questions and his answers follow:

How long is your regular commute these days, in distance and in time?

It’s 64 miles one way, which is anywhere from 1 to 2 hours, depending on traffic.

Why do you live where you do and work where you do?

I live in a beautiful mill town in view of a river where ducks come and eat from my hand. All the major needs are walkable. The school system is nice, and I’m happy with everything about where I live. I work where the job was. In this case, one of the smarter guys in the events and media business called me onto the team. I couldn’t say no.

What do you find are the biggest disadvantages of a long daily commute?

Besides knowing that I’m killing a dinosaur a day myself, it’s time that I could be doing work instead of looking out the window at the backs of people’s cars.

What do you find are the biggest benefits of a long daily commute?

I can listen to more podcasts. I’m enjoying the hell out of learning more from all kinds of great sources.

What would you change about your commuting / working routines if you could?

Actually, I’m glad to say that I’m going to move to a 3 days on-site, 2 days off-site situation in the next week or two. So that will answer most of it. My job is primarily about the web, except when I’m meeting people at events, so why should I be driving all over the place?

What stands in the way of these changes?

Nothing. It’s just a matter of figuring out team dynamics, and helping teams understand how to measure impact instead of measure by seeing my butt at a desk.

How do you think social media can evolve the way that you (and people generally) pursue optimal working routines?

I think the value of work will move towards those things we can accomplish remotely, and those things we have to be there to manage. I’m excited about this future, because though I love people, and interacting, and the environment of a team, I also know that a lot of what we do in an office is fluff, and I want to focus on the things that matter.

Thanks again to Chris for his feedback on this. I think he’s on the leading edge of changes that will be affecting many more of us in coming years.

If you want to improve your own social-media understanding and practice, by all means be sure to read Chris’s blog.

So, uh, any big games this weekend?

Probably there’s a recent transplant to the U.S. from Japan or Hungary for whom that’s a real question. For the rest of the country, sports fans or not, the answer is becoming increasingly obvious as Super Bowl hype builds to a fever pitch.

The Super Bowl commands so much attention for many reasons, and several of the most imporant ones have little to do with football per se. This is so because the culmination of the NFL championship hunt has become a cultural event and a business event as much as it is a sporting event.

As a cultural event, Super Bowl Sunday has become an informal national holiday, on par with Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. It’s a holiday when people get their friends together, fire up the grill, and drink too much beer as they celebrate . . . well, what exactly? I think most of us are celebrating friendship and a sort of imprecise Americanness — but one that’s open to anyone, male or female, American or otherwise, who’s willing to put up with a four-and-a-half-hour football game.

Meanwhile, canny marketers have turned the event into a major selling opportunity. Old-school advertising has had more and more trouble in recent years cutting through the clutter of marketing messages that bombards consumers daily; the Super Bowl provides one of the very few opportunities to reach hundreds of millions of consumers across all demographics. And since Super Bowl commercials have become a competitive genre in their own right, many of those consumers will purposefully pay special attention to the advertisements — something that they never do otherwise.

The Super Bowl’s success as a marketing venue is the apotheosis of the NFL’s triumphant quest to become the dominant league in an American sports landscape populated by giants. Baseball is still called the “national pastime,” but the gridiron long ago displaced the diamond in the hierarchy of American sport. And while the NBA has risen (in the 1980s and 1990s) and declined (in this decade), the NFL has sailed serenely on, gaining popularity by the year. So it’s no wonder that the grand finale of the pro football season attracts so much attention.

It helps when there’s a good game scheduled on the field, too — and Super Bowl XLII could be a doozy. League officials must have been salivating for many weeks now, since playoff matchups made it likely that either an undefeated New England Patriots team or their archnemesis, the defending-champion Indianapolis Colts, would face either the Dallas Cowboys or the Green Bay Packers — two of the most popular and storied franchises in American sports.

Given the likelihood of these matchups, the New York Giants could be viewed as an upstart team, except that they represent the largest city in the country and have their own long and proud history of championship football. They got to the Super Bowl by beating the Cowboys in Dallas, and then topping the Packers in a bitterly cold game in Lambeau Stadium. The Giants have also peaked at the right time: since the beginning of December, they’ve won six out of eight games.

One of those two losses came in the last week of the regular season, when the Giants lost at home to the Patriots in a 38-35 nail-biter. In facing the Giants again, the Patriots will be attempting to do the unthinkable by putting up a combined 19-0 record, a mark that no team has ever accomplished. Besides establishing a record that might stand for decades — as the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ perfect 17-0 season has until now — a Patriots win on Sunday would crown a great football dynasty, since New England also won championships in 2002, 2004, and 2005. (In their “off” years, the Pats went 9-7, 11-6, and 14-4.) It would also, after the champagne stopped flowing, raise the question of what the most successful NFL team of this decade could do to top itself.

The same spoiled-for-choice question already faces the NFL: how do you improve on the most successful annual sporting event in the world?

~

Stay tuned to this blog and to Bizmology this week and next as we bring you more coverage of the Super Bowl and its business ramifications.

My son is thrilled: today is the 50th anniversary of the Lego brick, which the boy rates as one of the lofty peaks of human inventive skill. More details:

From TIME: Lego Celebrates 50 Years of Building

It was at 1:58 p.m. on January 28, 1958, that then-Lego head Godtfred Kirk Christiansen filed a patent for the iconic plastic brick with its stud and hole design. Since then, the company has made a staggering 400 billion Lego elements, or 62 bricks for every person on the planet. And if stacked on top of one another, the pieces would form 10 towers reaching all the way from the Earth to the Moon.

The Age (of Australia): Children build on as Lego turns 50 today

. . . the traditional eight-stud brick, said Lego’s Australian marketing manager, Caroline Squire, is still the foundation of the business.

“(The brick) is a product that’s never changed from the moment it was conceived in 1958. The bricks that were sold then are still compatible with the bricks we sell in 2008,” she said.

“And, I think, for a product, in light of the way things have changed in the past 50 years to still be in the marketplace … still be a huge hit with kids and adults alike, is a massive achievement.”

Bloomberg News: Lego Marks 50th Anniversary With Reintroduced Building Bricks

Lego, which estimates that children spend 5 billion hours a year playing with its bricks, was founded in 1932 as a maker of wooden toys. The company has made more than 400 billion of the plastic blocks since they were patented in 1958 by the father of current owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Its name comes from the first letters of the words “leg godt,” Danish for “play well.”

The 5 billion hours figure might seem out of whack to me if I didn’t regularly see my son — and, for that master, his older sister/partner-in-crime — plowing hour after hour into their Lego constructions.

Two things about Lego’s marketing strike me as clever:

1. The company does a great job of turning its fans into BIG fans. My son, for example, gets three different catalogs or magazines from them regularly — something he loves since he’s seven years old and otherwise rarely gets mail. As though the bricks themselves weren’t enough fun to play with, he gets a new jolt of enthusiasm with each new mailing that Lego sends him. The effect is magnified since two of the publications (the fan-club magazine and the Brickmaster program magazine) are only for “members” of select groups. When you’re seven, it’s really, really cool to be a member of a club that sends you glossy full-color magazines — especially when the club also has a slick Web site complete with Bionicle video games.

2. Lego also continues to introduce one new tie-in series after another. These range from Bob the Builder and SpongBob SquarePants to Star Wars and now Indiana Jones. (My son and I are both excited about the Indiana Jones sets — and the wee motion picture that will soon accompany them — but given my druthers I might want this for my birthday. Which, by the way, is in June.) These themed toys coexist peacefully alongside Lego-invented series like Bionicle and EXO-FORCE, as well as the classic brick sets used to build fire stations, grocery stores, and the like. In short, Lego has given its fans many, many points of entry for enjoying their toys — a play that works even better because all of the sets have parts that work with all of the other sets.

These moves have helped Lego to shake off the financial doldrums that beset them in recent years. Given their renewed health, it won’t surprise me if I’m be celebrating the 100th anniversary of Lego with my great-grandkids 50 years from now.

You may recall this interesting item from October — one I found via James Fallows’s blog — in which an airline pilot explained some of the irreducible realities of commercial air traffic:

Airline flight delays: an expert weighs in.

The pilot, Patrick Smith, pointed out how airports are overloaded with flights by smaller regional jets rather than larger airliners. The smaller planes carry fewer passengers each, so that a given airline needs more planes to carry the same number of passengers. They do this because more planes allows more different flights per day, which suits consumer preferences for (a) more choice in departure time and (b) more direct flights. The trouble is, smaller planes take up a slot of runway time just like larger planes do.

Which leads us to this dynamic:

• Airlines want to offer more flights, and
• Consumers want the choice of more flights, yet
• Runway clearances — the amount of flights per hour — are inflexible, as they should be given the dictates of safety.

The technical and safety aspects of that last point were driven home to me (in terms that this layperson can understand) when I read this great post via another Fallows-supplied link:

Air Traffic Safety vs. Capacity

The post’s author, Don Brown, was an air-traffic controller for many years, and from all I can tell he knows very well whereof he speaks. He comes down hard in favor of pursuing air safety rather than rewarding airlines’ commercial mandates Read more

Look over to the “Worth Reading” section in the sidebar on the right and you’ll see a set of bullet points accompanied by headlines. Those links will take you to stories that I’ve bookmarked using the service del.icio.us.

When I bookmark stories — sometimes with their original headlines, sometimes with titles of my own device — I usually take a second or two with the del.icio.us interface to write a short description or bit of context to accompany the link. So, if you want to know my thumbnail opinion on any of the stories I mark, feel free to bookmark my del.icio.us page. (There’s also an RSS feed at the bottom of that page, if you prefer.)

The rationale behind this: Every day I encounter stories that are interesting, but that don’t warrant a full post from me. This allows me to share some of these stories with you less formally — and the slick tools of del.icio.us make it easy for me to do this in just a few seconds.

As always, your feedback is welcome.

In May of last year the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting interview* with George David, the highly regarded chief executive of United Technologies Corporation:

Transformer in Transition

(Note that the whole story is available only to WSJ subscribers.)

David is one of the all-stars of the corporate world: in the fifteen years that he’s run UTC, the company’s value has grown tenfold. Today its offerings include everything from Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines to Otis elevators.

One of the things that struck me in David’s comments was his insistence on the importance of energy efficiency and conservation.

I think the solution to the energy problem is actually not alternative energy. To me, the solution immediately is conservation by greater efficiency. Too much in the mind of the public is this idea that conservation means deprivation. You’ve got to be cold at night, shut off the lights, stuff like that. That’s simply not true. The bottom line is that energy is wasted in the world to a phenomenal extent. There’s enormous energy savings potential in the conservation agenda where you do it by efficiency. In our own internal operations, we dropped the energy consumption at UTC by 19% over a decade at the same time the company doubled its size. All of America can drop its energy consumption by 20% in a decade easily. We’re now working with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development to come up with a building that uses zero net energy.

This is music to my ears, especially considering its source. I happen to think that the solution to our energy problems must also include alternative sources of energy, but I also welcome mass adoption of David’s views about the current level of waste in our human operations.

The truth is, an abundance of cheap energy over the past century, while enabling huge strides in technology, global travel, and trade, has also instilled an ethic of waste in many of us. It has become incredibly easy and cheap, relative to the prior course of human history, to make more things, to ship them quickly, and then to whisk away the leavings. In other words, it has been incredibly easy to build pockets of waste into our systems simply out of habit, or for want of better forethought. It has become normal to waste. Indeed, in some cases it seems like we’ve come to see wasteful habits as our birthright.

George David isn’t buying it. He sounds like he wants a revolution in efficiency.

Mr. David: You can’t walk through life with a trained eye and not see the opportunities for productivity. Every time you sit in traffic, that’s a productivity loss. Every time you go to the doctor and fill out a bunch of forms and he refers you to somebody else and you fill out the same forms all over again, that’s a loss of productivity. Whenever you wait for something, that’s waste. I believe you can have 10 times more. I really do.

WSJ: Ten times more of what?

Mr. David: Everything. Everything. Just look at the differences in personal productivity between people, educated versus not educated. Or people in good, really productive labor environments, versus people who are kind of struggling because they’re in disorganized or ineffective companies.

Why am I thinking of this? Because this morning I pulled up to a light that had just turned red. Ah, well, what’s the rush, right? Then I waited . . . and waited . . . and waited while no more than a handful of cars passed on the cross street. It’s a busy street at rush hour, but not at the time I was trying to cross it — yet the technology we’re using so far isn’t smart enough to tell the difference. More sophisticated timing in the lights or, even better, sensor-based technology that tells the light when it should change patterns, would mean less wasted time all around.

If it were just me, and if it were only a couple of extra minutes in the car, it would be no big deal. But the truth is that it’s not just me, and the problems of waste extend far beyond the time, productivity, and fuel wasted sitting in traffic. As George David suggests, we surround ourselves with patterns of waste and call it normal. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

What’s the biggest source of waste you face every day?

~

UPDATE, Thursday morning: I forgot that, back in May, my friend Dan Markovitz wrote something in the same vein in response to my initial thoughts on the subject:

The Normalcy of Waste

Worth a read.

~

* Does it seem strange to anybody else that the date of the story doesn’t show anywhere on that page?

[Photo by Rivertay.]

What, you may ask, does a deceased experimentalist Nobel laureate for Literature have to do with succeeding in business? Nothing except for the message embodied in his famous words:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This brings to mind another quote — one more obviously connected to modern business, since it comes from Michael Bloomberg’s business memoir:

“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.”

“Fail faster, try again,” is good advice regardless, but we’re taking it especially seriously here at the BIZ blog. Now that we have several months under our belt, we’re beginning to see what works and what doesn’t, and we’re sharpening our appetite for ongoing improvements.  Expect more improvements — and appeals for your feedback — in the weeks to come.

So, narrow application of the Beckett/Bloomberg dictum: better blogging here.

Broader application: Well, . . . why don’t you tell me? What’s the best example you know of people embracing the wisdom to “Fail better”?

[Hat tip to Tom Peters for the Bloomberg quote.]

Folks: Next Friday — February 1 — I’ll be speaking as part of the final panel session at the Social Networking Conference in Miami. For more information, see this page. (My session is listed waaaaay down at the bottom.)

Please let me know if you’ll attend. I always like meeting my readers!

No guarantees on how profound it is, but here’s a thought to ponder over the weekend: It’s the 18th day of the year. Short of a few hours, 18 days is 5 percent of a year.

Are you 5 percent of the way home on your goals for 2008? Is your company?

I’m not, which is why I’ll be spending part of my weekend thinking about how I can do more with the next 5 percent of 2008 than I did with the first 5 percent.