Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

The huddle was a very important thing to our grade school football team. Run back to the huddle, form a neat huddle, no talking in the huddle. Huddle up!! These were phrases we heard quite a bit. The huddle was the foundation of our entire gameplan. Without a huddle we were lost. Even the pros used huddles before almost every play.

The huddle is part of a rich football tradition. Every kid remembers taking a knee while encircled by his friends, stabbing his finger into the dirt and drawing up the winning play, all in the private confines of the huddle, where the world is shut out, and nobody else can hear your team’s planning.

But watching the NFL these days, it seems the huddle is being replace by “no huddle” offense

More and more teams are operating without the huddle. They are not circling their wagons and forming private conversations. Instead, they are staying open. Open to change. This is a key point.

Advantages of “no huddle”

The “no huddle” offense puts added pressure on the defense by the defense from making situational substitutions. Because the offense doesn’t pause to talk, the defense can get strained and confused.

No huddle requires collaboration between all 11 offensive players, and takes it cues from the defense as well. No huddle offenses often use of hand signals, and audibles. The offensive players’ assignments may change based upon what the defense does in reaction to their movements. It’s a high speed game of cat and mouse where the defense (in a sense) actually helps call the play - in real time - along with the offense.

Another innovation that “no huddle” teams like to use is the silent count. The silient count is particularly useful in noisy enemy stadiums. When a team goes on the road, and the opposing fans are cheering loud, it’s tough for offensive players to hear the quarterback. A silent count (based on signals and movement) allows the offense to run - in theory - without talking to each other at all.

While the “no huddle” can be operated poorly, and can lead to miscommuncication between the quarterback and is receivers, it is becoming a very powerful tool in “today’s” game.

The no huddle offense emerged as a way for an offense to cope with mounting challenges from clever defenses and hostile crowds. It solves problems, changes the game and puts pressure back onto the competition. It speeds up the game and cannot be operated without every player on the offense being “on the same page,” linked into a system where data gets passed accurately and quickly in real time so that decisions can be made and plays executed.

So what does all this have to do with marketing?

The huddle is a symbol. It stands for a closed system where the outside world is not allowed and where only the voice of the coach or quarterback is heard. Nobody else can have an opinion. Nobody else can add value. It’s a top down, command and control model.

I’m using the “no huddle” as a metaphor for an emerging phenomenon called “mass collaboration,” or “open source” collaboration. The “huddle” model has worked well for decades, but it may be time to consider a change.

This old model is dying fast.

Just as football teams go “no huddle” to speed the flow of the game, businesses are moving on-line and into peer-to-peer collaborative relationships with customers, suppliers, and even competition. They’re opening up their “huddles”, or doing away with them altogether.

Obvious examples of “no huddle” marketing would be Netflix and Amazon, where user reviews from a major driving force for other customers to buy or rent titles. If you read the books I mention below, you’ll learn about companies ike GoldCorp, P & G and Eli Lilly, who each employ open source collaboration techniques with tremendous results, even as their compeition fails to adopt new strategies and fall behind.

Business is not just like football, but it’s close

Unlike the “no huddle” offense which requires low-tech hand signals, open source collaboration on the business front involves wide use cutting edge information technologies. Thanks to Web 2.0, millions of players can collaborate in systems that speed innovation and transactions for all sorts of companies.

Opportunity for NFL to gain even more ground

The NFL has built its strengths on a foundation of revenue sharing, but we don’t do a great job sharing data between the clubs. We are separated by miles, and sharing information between so many parties is difficult without a facilitator. But technology has erased the geographic problem, and reduced the need for us to be in the same place at the same time in order to share info. For this reason alone, I believe it’s time we start to experiment with IDEA SHARING.

So instead of operating as we used to, with 32 franchises each doing their own thing with very little collarboration with the league office (huddle up everyone!), we can use a “no huddle” approach to league and franchise marketing operations. We can share information freely between the franchises and the league office so that best practices and real time learning can be used by each player on our league wide team. I believe this approach would be especially valuable as the league forms its Internet strategies and brings Web operations in house.

Like it or not, the Web is already teeming with open source colloboration. Everywhere you look these days you see old, hierarchical, command and control business models are straining to keep up with new, more fluid, open source models.

Every established brand (like the NFL) and every popular business model (media and media web sites) needs to take a hard look at the emerging wave of “open source” collaboration and find ways to leverage its strengths.

What is open source?

It started with Linux - the open source operating system that provides inspiration to countless other industries.

Today, open source initiatives are being tested in industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals and packaged goods. Even Microsoft, the ultimate “closed” system is opening itself to open source. Hey, if Microsoft can go open source, the the NFL can too!

Here are a couple of great books on the subject:

Mavericks at Work

Wikinomics