It occurs to me that the popular board game, Monopoly, has become the poster child for old economy thinking. If we can learn to think outside the Monopoly “box”, we can expand our revenue opportunities.
Monopoly is a “zero sum” game.
One person wins when he or she bankrupts the other players. When one person has all the money, the game is over. The market is finite. It’s fixed. There’s no expanding the board or adding properties. The graphics or themes have been updated, but the rules never change. And most Americans like it this way. We can count on it.
The World Wide Web is the exact opposite of Monopoly.
The operates by the laws of abundance, not scarcity. The more people and companies who connect into the system, the more opportunity there is for everyone. When one company thrives, it creates more opportunities for others in that ecosystm to thrive as well. The Web grows larger every day. You can’t hope to contain it, nor should you. The graphics change, sure, but more importantly the underlying technology keeps changing.
The Web is no longer static stuff to be consumed. It has become interactive stuff. Social stuff. Shared stuff. Co-created stuff. It’s messy. It’s moving fast. And for those of us brought up to rely on the stability of Monopoly, it’s REALLY tough to understand and even harder to embrace…but if you can wrap your mind around a new way of thinking, you can make money from it.
Sports (and sports marketers) operate under “Monopoly” mindset
Team sports are a lot like Monopoly. The winner takes all in a “zero sum” game. And on the marketing side, our “playing field” has been finite, up until now.
Stadium revenues are everything, or are they?
Whereas most of the money generated by teams comes from the local market (i.e. “stadium revenues”) the Web opens up a window of opportunity to a fan base that goes well beyond both the stadium and the local market.
The Colts fan base, for example, is 6 million strong and it is spread around the globe. Only 25% of our Website traffic comes from inside Indiana - and of that - less than half acutally comes from Indianapolis proper.
To capture revenue from these 6 million fans and to broker relationships for our sponsors to connect, we need to re-think our entire business. That’s what our social network is for.
Television isn’t the only mass audience anymore. In fact, TV represented less than half of all the hours of NFL media consumed by fans last year.
New media is actually bigger than old media.
And new media centers around the TEAM sites.
And new media is being consumed by new fans with new mindsets. Check out this Pew Internet Research article explaining the main attrubutes of “Generation Next”.
It’s not just young people who are changing behavior. It’s everybody. But for the most part there’s nobody - not teams, the league or sponsors - who are leveraging new media like team sites as much as they could.
I could go on and on…but we’re busy preparing for the SUPER BOWL.
Here’s a small sample of other “riffs” from my blog that relate to this post. I welcome your comments to this conversation. I don’t have the anwwers. But I think we all could be asking better questions.
Anyone considering building a social networking system should understand these three things:
1. We’re not playing with “Monopoly” money.
2. It’ll take more than just “passing go” to earn $200
3. There are no “get out of jail free” cards in this game
Just for fun…
Colts.com 12-months traffic summary:
Total Unique Visitors to colts.com: 6,148,218
Total Visitors to colts.com: 11,247,270
Total page views: 53,900,702
That’s a great insight, It also explains why most of my career Monopoly games either ended with a lot of ill will, or were extended indefinitely by a benevolent-minded credit broker adding a new income source in the form of interest on loans.
You are dead on in viewing the interaction as the value. The more people connect, the more value is created. The zero sum aspect of the Internet is present, though, in the form of time available to spend in media. I’m sitting here typing this instead of reading a complexity paper for a class this morning (bad me!), watching TV or finishing the Maverick’s at Work book. I’m also only able to make those particular decisions because it is 6:35a and both of my boys are still sleeping. Once that ends, my time gets reallocated.
What would be ideal is if my participation in various communication channels were able to be linked, so the impact of my choices wouldn’t be zero sum. What if every interaction I had was so connected that I saw value appear everywhere? Is it possible to take the radio and television content and link it directly to Internet tools, and vice versa?