By J.B. Bernstein @JBBERNSTEIN
I spend most of my days toiling in the details of executing deals and servicing clients, but in the rare moments I find myself free from that work, I want to spend that time creating new business.
There are literally 1000’s of ways to create deal opportunities for my clients, but I have outlined a few here that seem to be never ending fountains of idea generation.
- What’s Old is New Again – I have had a lot of success looking back at campaigns that were successful for brands in the past. You see this all time, with campaigns like the “Nothing But Net” ads that McDonalds ran in the 90’s with Michael Jordan and recreated this year with LeBron James. What I like to do is go back through old ad and promotional campaigns that were critically acclaimed or considered to have had a big impact on their brands, and figure out ways to reintroduce those campaigns in the current market with my clients. A great example of this was an ad campaign we did back when I was Upper Deck, called the “TRADE” campaign. We put a billboard up in Chicago that simply said TRADE JORDAN at the height of his career. The billboard was virtually demolished and it received worldwide media attention. The next week we revealed the same billboard with a copy of his Upper Deck trading card, saying “We’ve been doing it for years”.
We did the same thing for Patrick Roy in Montreal and Wayne Gretzky in LA. The campaign was a huge success on every level. When Barry Bonds was getting ready to break the all-time MLB HR record, we did the same thing with him and his Topps card in SF right outside the stadium (http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/bonds-billboard-riles-san-francisco-19222). It was an even bigger success for Bonds, as the internet helped spread the news faster and further than we had been able to do in the early 90s with the Upper Deck campaigns.
2. Relocation of Ideas – The internet is probably the best tool for a guy a like me and in this case it makes it possible for me to fill the hours each night I don’t sleep with reading. I am not talking about Dan Brown or Stephen King, I am talking about the good stuff… Foreign Sports Business journals. In inverse proportion to how boring they are, is how valuable they can be. To see how sports leagues, teams, and athletes are monetizing their investments in sports and entertainment abroad can be directly applicable here in the USA. One example is a special edition cup featuring a player that was distributed in stadium by a German soccer team where by tweeting a pic of your ticket stub you could win a signed jersey. We are doing a similar program with the Lions and Barry Sanders this Thanksgiving. There is no shame in taking something that has worked somewhere else and reengineering it for use where you operate.
3. Recycle This – So many times we pass on or trash a concept that we think will fail. Some ideas are just terrible and should never work, but for some, it is just not the right idea, the right time, or the right market. Most times our gut call is probably right, but what we forget, is that times and markets change. Market needs change, and some ideas that seemed destined for failure in the past might be just what you are looking for now. This is why I am a bit of pack rat when it comes to ideas. I have extensive files of many of the ideas I have had that were shot down. When I find myself stuck on a current program, I often roll back through these old files and see if any of yesterday’s junk has ripened into today’s treasures. The key is if you are going to do this is, make sure you categorize things in a way that you can easily go back and search your database. If nothing else, I find the comedic relief of some of my old clunkers helps to keep me humble and reminds me that if you want to have a few good ideas to your name, be prepared to come up with a lot of bad ones.
4. If it is not Broken, Don’t Fix It – In my business the companies that are most invested in the sport are the ones most likely to use players to activate their marketing campaigns. In addition, most of those companies are huge corporate conglomerates and market leaders so they plan far in advance and really think through their campaign execution. The worst thing you can do in pitching an athlete to one of these companies is to present an idea outside of their strategy. Not only will it seem to the brand like it does not fit with their existing efforts, but it is also a huge insult! As if somehow you know more than the 100 people at their company who spent a year working through how to market their product and who are privy to tons of market research and brand history you have no access to. That is why I like to see what companies are doing and then find natural athlete driven extensions that augment what their efforts and are easy to buy into for the brand. A great example of this was the Twitter giveaway we did with Barry Sanders and PepsiMAX where fans could send in there most creative picture of Barry interacting with the brand. You can see below some of the contest winning entries and it is clear why this was a good extension of their brand and the campaign that they were running with Barry this season.
These are just a few ways I use and I hope they are helpful to you in your efforts to come up with big ideas you can actually sell in.
jbbernstein 