Stealth Correction

Posted on August 13, 2008 Written by 2 Comments

Alabama football fans who were interested in partying before the Chick-fil-A College Kickoff can now proceed with the knowledge that they won’t be forced to congregate with the Clemson contingent.

As reported earlier, there was a mistake on the website which listed the officially-sanctioned tailgate event as follows:

As any Bama fan will tell you, a mistake over the mascot might be forgivable, but not one involving Tigers.  (Particularly ones wearing some shade of orange.)  Without a peep or a mention, the graphic now shows a proper title — “Bama Bash” along the left margin:

I only wish I had been less busy and more vigilant monitoring my server logs… I’d love to know if they found the site and made the fix. But the larger question is ‘should they have acknowledged the correction?’

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, college football, marketing, Alabama, Clemson, Chick-fil-a[/tags]

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged: ,

Fit to be Tide

Posted on July 30, 2008 Written by 7 Comments
leftbar_clemsonparty

A month from now, the University of Alabama will square off against Clemson in the Chick-fil-A College Kickoff.  It’s being hyped as a Bowl Game to start the season, taking place at the neutral Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

There had been a fair amount of criticism in both Tuscaloosa and Clemson from fans who think a home-and-home series would do more for the local economies.  Yet, there is also a case to be made that playing in Atlanta guarantees more national exposure, and cements inroads into recruiting players from the state of Georgia.

Still, one would have to think that if the game were being promoted by the in-house staff at each respective institution, one wouldn’t encounter a graphics gaffe like this:

Look at the left margin of each graphic.  In purple script, there is an invitation to the Clemson fans to come to a Tiger Tailgate.  And in white letters on the Alabama graphic, an invitation to come to the Tiger Tailgate.

I wonder who proofed that?  And I wonder how long until it is fixed?

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, college football, marketing, Alabama, Clemson, Chik-fil-a[/tags]

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged:

Base Assumptions

Posted on July 16, 2008 Written by 2 Comments
diamond2

Conventional wisdom can be a good guide, but why elevate it to canon and law?  How often do we go with the prevailing thought instead of challenging it?

This came to mind in the 11th inning of Tuesday night’s All-Star game.  Baseball is a sport that is steeped in tradition, and it’s hard — even when you have the statistical evidence in front of you — to challenge a base assumption.  Here’s the situation:

With two outs in the bottom of the 11th, Carlos Quentin is at the plate.  Dioner Navarro is on third base, Michael Young is on second.  Conventional wisdom tells us that with two outs, the runners should always be running.  Sure enough, Young charged forth the moment the pitch was delivered — and as the ball bounced to the shortstop, Young almost waltzed right into a tag for the third out!  I’m here to say that conventional baseball wisdom is stupid, and here’s why:

  1. Young was no longer a factor in the game.
  2. With two outs in extra innings, either Navarro scores or he doesn’t.
  3. Young cannot be forced out at third base.

Michael Young should have parked his butt on second, and started drawing stick figures in the dirt just like my son did on his tee-ball adventures!  The only thing that could have happened that would have mattered is if he had been tagged out!  But hey – after 30 years of being yelled at to run with two outs, who can blame a guy.  Unless that guy is making $6,174,974 this season alone!  Think for yourself, Michael!  Don’t cost your team a game by blindly following rote!

Sports Smarts

Baseball used to be filled with examples of managerial decisions that were based on hunch instead of science.  That’s not as true anymore, as the geeks and nerds have compiled massive quantities of data that indicate a different strategy than gut instinct offer.  Earl Weaver, the late manager of the Baltimore Orioles was obsessive about his charts, and would choose his lineups and pinch hitters based on leveraging the smallest of advantages.  Then he’d ditch the charts entirely and follow the old safe rules, because no one faults you for playing it safe.

Now a whole generation of stats-minded people are running major league teams.  I highly recommend the book Moneyball, which looks at how the Oakland A’s used statistics and smarts to outwin and underspend everyone else.  You don’t have to be a sports fan to find it fascinating.  There are many examples of how the value of stolen bases is over-inflated, how defense is under appreciated, and how the scouts really have no idea what they are looking for!

Extra Points

Baseball isn’t the only sport that confuses tradition with reality.  Gregg Easterbrook has taken football coaches to task for clinging to the punt when the numbers clearly indicate that punting is a losing bargain.  It’s a thoroughly-researched piece of athlethic academia, as is his ongoing explanation of how teams kill themselves by blitzing too often.  The former is a case of coaches playing it safe, and avoiding criticism in case they don’t convert.  The latter is an issue of playing to the fans, or placing too much credence on “momentum” instead of just following your averages.

You’ll find a lot of this sort of non-analytical thinking in places other than dugouts and sidelines.  It happens anywhere there is a management structure that is “inbred.”  Baseball managers are former players, and as such learn the subtlties of the game from other managers.  Football coaches typically come from within the offensive line, the position that rates the highest on intelligence tests.  Offensive linemen are certainly in a position to appreciate the battles in the trenches, but it’s hard for innovation to take root when everyone in the coaching fraternity pledged the same script.

Game Theory

In a truly free market, innovation is rewarded with success.  Adam Smith’s so-called “invisible hand” was merely the recognition that when a bunch of people act in their own self interests, they optimize their activity to follow the rules in place.  In economic terms, this means higher efficiency, lower prices, and better service.  Those who can’t compete lose out.  Monopolies are dangerous to free markets because if there is no reward for innovation, there is no investment in innovation.  That’s why they are either regulated or disintegrated.

However, what about those occasions where the game (and those playing) has stabilized at a level that is NOT really the optimum?  We’ve highlighted several examples in sports, but what about other industries and professions?  Do we not see newspapers and broadcasters clinging to their business models even though the game has changed around them?  Are we not living in a political age where it’s now entirely imaginable that a candidate can raise a previously unimaginable sum?  Not to mention the generational flip-flops that occur with regards to health and nutrition.

Hold ‘Em

How easy would it be to win at Poker if you had the luxury of looking at your own cards and your opponents’?  Information is king, and traditionally those who had access to the information had the advantage.  Much of the speculation markets are built on the concept (or rather the wager) that one person knows something the other doesn’t.  In this present age, the prevalence of information and the ability to quickly find it has shaved away most of that imbalance.  Someone on the other side of the world has access to much of the same data you do — and maybe more.  (And being on the other side of the internet is the perfect poker face – you never see the cards either.)

This isn’t a disintegration of markets – it is just a more rapid approach to equilibrium. (Equilibrium is never truly reached, but we get closer much faster.)  Want to know exactly how much a Wii Fit is worth?  Click on eBay and look at the sales about to close out.  Want to know how much your life is worth?  Compare insurance quotes, instantly.  The closer we get to real-time information in a universal format, the more the rough edges disappear.

Swing for the Fences

The above would be sobering news, but human nature always affords us opportunities to find an imbalance to create a new market.  The trick is to not get sucked down the rabbit hole, chasing a never-ending stream of decimal points in search of an advantage.  There are still many instances where the collective wisdom of a particular group has calcified and become stagnant.  They compete with each other using a set of assumptions and measurements that no longer reflect reality, if they ever truly did.  Don’t quibble about inches when there are yards to be gained.  The key is to question the assumptions that lock everyone else into patterns of behavior.  Challenge enough of those, and you’ll find an answer no one else would have expected.

There are more than enough base assumptions waiting to be called out, if you only have the guts to sit your butt on second.

Postscript: Michael Young, who nearly made a foolish out in the 11th inning, won the game with an out in the 15th.  He hit a sacrifice fly to bring home the winning run.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, baseball, football, economics, statistics, moneyball, TMQ, Gregg Easterbrook[/tags]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged: , ,

Gaming the System

Posted on June 11, 2008 Written by 2 Comments
dime

Where there are rules, there are winners and losers.  The real trick is designing a set of rules that elicits the behavior you wanted to begin with.

I’m about as competitive a person as you’ll meet, and over the years I can take a quick look at the rules and conditions of a contest and tell you where the holes in the system are.  In essence, the game becomes a meta-game for me — how quickly can I dismantle the original intent? I tried to do it at an Outward Bound Red Cross training over a year ago.  Teams were given three hours to complete as many odd games and tasks as possible.  My suggestion?  Let’s skip the first half-hour, split up, and see how the other groups were faring with their feats.  Steal the best ideas, and get done in record time.  Our facilitator put a stop to that before we started (and admitted no one else had ever suggested it.)

The old Game-Breaker reared his ugly head again this week.  My kids are going to a half-day Vacation Bible School, and the game is to see whether the boys or the girls can collect the most change for a charitable mission.  There is a daily weigh-in for each side.

That’s right.  Weigh in.  Within an instant, I was scheming of ways to convert my daughter’s quarters and dimes into pennies, pronto.  (Dimes are a particular handicap liability in this scoring system, with a very small weight-to-value ratio.)

Clearly, if the goal is to raise more money for charity, you have to buckle down and actually count the currency.  Not while there are ways to exploit the rules.

The Tweak is On

This happens more than you think in sports.  Rules and competition committees meet to decide how far the three-point-line must be from the goal, how much leeway a defensive back will get in putting his hands on a wide receiver, how wide the strike zone will be, how long before you must pass the ball or throw a pitch or take a shot… Each one of these rules is designed for one reason:  To make the game as entertaining as possible.  Who wants to see slow and boring slugfests? Tweak the game, get more fans in the gate and more remotes ordering premium pay-per-view packages and season passes.

Now, I’m not advocating cheating in any fashion.  It’s one thing to blatantly break the rules to obtain a competitve advantage over opponents.  It’s another to find an optimum strategy that exploits a peculiarity in the rules.  If the game is no longer fun, then you blame the designer.  Lore Sjoberg had a perfect example of this recently, explaining why he’d never enjoy any Superman-themed videogames: “An accurate Superman game would have one button labeled “Use Powers” and you would press it and win.”

The Game is All Around Us

I admit I’m more competitive than all of you.  (You’re right, I didn’t say most, I said all.)  But each and every one of us exploit the rules around us.  For instance, there are parents out there who will put their children through several Vacation Bible Schools at different congregations over the course of the summer.  (Hey, it’s cheaper than daycare.)  It’s just that we don’t call it “Game Theory” when you’re sitting down and calculating if the extra distance to that other store will be worth the slight price break you’ll get retail.

More importantly, when you set up expectations and boundaries, are you really encouraging the behavior you want?  If those in the mix start doing crazy things you never anticipated, there might be a hidden reward in your scoring system, or an unforeseen obstacle that makes your intended outcome impossible.  As it happens, there is a correlation between weight and value for some US currency.  A quarter is worth 2.5x a dime, and it weighs 2.5x as well — so a pound of quarters not only weighs as much as a pound of dimes, it will also buy as much.  (The average weight of a nickel is exactly twice that of a penny, while having 5x the value.)  So I’m off to the bank, to trade in silver coinage for those wonderfully heavy pennies that so many want to discontinue.  Pennies from Heaven, I’ll call it!

A shortcut on your part in measuring success can make more than a dime’s worth of difference in the outcome.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Game Theory, Economics, Currency, Sports[/tags]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged: , , ,

Five Reasons Why Financial News Is Bogus

Posted on February 21, 2008 Written by 6 Comments
Stock Market

Stock Market“The Dow dipped sharply today amid rumors that Britney Spears would get out of rehab a week early.”

Well, why not? It’s about as correct as anything else the financial pundits spew.

One of the functions of feeding a 24/7 news cycle is creating content where no verifiable news exists. Analysis has its place, but that piece of real estate should be very small if the news editors had any sense of shame. Stocks go up, stocks go down. Trading is either heavier or lighter than expected. But the vast majority of those measurable effects are the product of chaos, non-linear dynamics, and random flux. The way these analysts share their 20/20 hindsight is the height of windbaggery, but it is also dangerous in many ways:

  1. It divorces causes from effects

    There are very real causes for some of the major trades and influences on a stock market. Unfortunately, many of them exist beneath our observations. External factors that are important but counter-intuitive get no attention.

  2. It celebrates causation

    It’s easy to come up with some big news of the day and tie it to an economic outcome. Maybe it’s investors who are jittery about a natural disaster, or news of a political scandal. Anything in the headlines can contribute to the “watercooler effect,” even if the Wall Street stuffed shirts only drink bottled water. These faux explanations have the same predictive value as the winner of the Super Bowl has on the markets.

  3. It promotes fear in the marketplace

    As a reporter, I hated those days when the Dow Industrials took a sudden plunge. It meant a newsroom scramble to tell people what to do with their 401-K plans. The people assigned to the story could neither name a single stock on the Dow Industrials, nor how many stocks there were in the index, nor that the “K” stands for Keough. It creates a shark mentality, that if you aren’t actively buying and selling and swimming forward you’ll somehow drown.

  4. It promotes a false sense of assurance about our ability to know

    The manner of these presentations is always sure and omniscient. No analyst has ever turned to the camera and said “Beats the hell out of me, Jack.” Since the numbers are mostly arcane, unknowable, or unpredictable, it’s nice to have a tour guide who can make sense of them. It lulls the public to sleep, thinking there are in fact geniuses who can make sense of these things. Things like climate change, for instance.

  5. It is non-predictive and useless

    We’ve got much better data on the markets than we do planetary climate. If we’re so damned sure the computer models are on the money (assuming the right observations), why hasn’t the same fuzzy-logic been used to make some egghead dizzyingly wealthy? Because the models stink. They smugly pronounce the whys and wherefores as if they knew it all along that morning. And they did. Pick some significant political event or speech, circle it, and then attribute it at the end of the day to the ______ in the index. (Insert either “rise” or “fall” in the blank.) This is how they write the story before they know the final score. It’s just a matter of reverse engineering.

Intelligence is a measure of your ability to acquire and use knowledge. Wisdom is a measure of your willingness to accept your limits. The financial airwaves are filled with very smart fools — empty heads in tailored suits selling fairy tales to fill the time between commercials.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, finance, news, markets, broadcasting, Super Bowl, statistics, chaos, nonlinear dynamics[/tags]

Filed Under: Communication Tagged: , , ,

Filter Folly

Posted on January 2, 2008 Written by 3 Comments
Scales

Filtering is a delicate balance — an craft, moreso than an art.

Publishing to the internet carries a degree of responsibility. You are accountable for what appears on your site, even the comments made by others.

This is the 800,000 pound elephant-shaped obstacle in the room for big businesses that are considering a foray into new media. When you buy into the conversation, you may get more than you bargained for. The more people involved in your community, the more risk you carry about what they say. You do have options:

  • Require registration
    onerous to new users, the paranoid, and those who want to stay anonymous
  • Hire many moderators
    whether professional or assigned, an expensive proposition
  • Employ content filters
    a low-cost solution, but they are still rather dumb and can lead to “reverse embarrassment”
  • Lower expectations

Context is King

It’s not enough to throw in a list of obvious profanities and slurs. Smart filters need to be able to judge the context. Here’s the example that caught my eye from the discussion page of Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, posted December 31st:

http://myespn.go.com/s/conversations/show/story/3175081

ESPN – Conversations: Do the Patriots need to run more to win it all? via kwout

(I would have linked directly to the comment itself, but that feature is not enabled on the comment threads – another necessary tweak for another rant someday.)

Here’s the “offensive” language in action:

ONCE AGAIN, TMQ STARTS WITH HIS PREFERRED CONCLUSION AND THEN COMES UP WITH THE STATS

TMQ is clearly looking for the #### in New England’s armor (so are 11 other playoff teams). But does he have to be so baldy dishonest?

The word blanked out is “chink.” The “chink in the armor.” Yes, in the past “chink” has been a slur word referring to Asians. Somehow, I don’t think the word “slant” has been redacted out of descriptions of the routes run by slot receivers, even though “slant” is also a derogatory reference to Asians.

Your Hidden Prejudices

Some filters are even more dumb. My friend Rob tried to register his blog with Meebo, and got blocked. His blog is named Stuffleufagus. If you look very carefully, you can see the letters f-a-g toward the end of the word. It’s obvious that Rob is secretly trying to promote smoking. God forbid he would ever create a tribute sites to athletes like C###ius Clay or ###lord Perry; or films such as Octo#####, ####tail, or Fun with #### and Jane.

The technology is available to parse these differences. In the Meebo example, it’s an easy fix. In the ESPN situation, you’re looking at a more hefty expenditure in either software, programming, fuzzy-logic training, or just plain-old human moderators. Even then, the creatively profane will find ways to turn the filter into a parody of itself, using characters that look like letters to get around that stupid $#!t.

Lowering the Bar

I’ve deliberately not talked about the last suggestion: lowering expectations. It’s the cheapest and least insulting of the bunch. You simply tell the members of the community – up front and on the way in – that they run the risk of getting their feelings hurt. Which is the grown-up thing to do, even if it isn’t the “marketing” answer. The marketing/PR people will have a conniption if they discovered that a few people allowed a “bad word” on the website to forever tarnish brand equity. There’s no telling, after all, how many real potential clients that represents. (“Real potential.” That’s a good one!)

At the end of the day, corporate sites and communities have a different set of priorities and fears than average idiots like myself. They have shareholders and investors with money on the line. I don’t have a monetary stake. They’ve got massive intangible assets built within “the brand.” The only intangibles I have are the inherent pressures of having my wife (seldom), my mom (likely), or my preacher buddy Drew peeking in from time to time (religiously). And it’s not like I’ve got overwhelming site traffic to deal with here.

Yet – the average person sees roughly the same comment interface on a political forum, on this blog, on ESPN.com, and on his local newspaper website. He is invited to participate and the tools look darn similar. And I’m not so sure he’s willing to cut big business sites the same sort of slack – whether they insult his emotions with the lack of moderation and the leakage of a “non-PC” term – or they insult his intelligence with senseless nanny-state word-blocking. It’s not in our nature to give businesses the benefit of the doubt.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, language, censorship, social media, marketing, community[/tags]

Filed Under: Communication, Language Tagged: , ,

Product Placement

Posted on October 25, 2007 Written by 1 Comment
Fantasy Scoreboard

I’m in a rather competitive fantasy football league with a few current and ex-journalists from around the country. No money, just bragging rights and fun. (And nothing is better than reminding them of 2005, when I won both the head-to-head league and the roto league running away. But I digress.) This year, I am Vulcan’s Visigoths.

I am the Vulcan Visigoths

This season has been a bit of a downer. Got off to a very slow start, but the past couple of weeks I have been the high scorer in the league. I was going to start trash-talking about being on a roll finally. Then I looked just a bit further down the scoreboard, and realized my achievement had been already recognized:

Viagra sponsorship

Pardon me for saying so, but while that seems to be a great match for demographics and product placement sponsorship — doesn’t that sully my achievement by linking me to performance-enhancing drugs?

And even worse — will the system start cheating the stats each week to allow the MightyGroins to win? That would be too tempting.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, viagra, fantasy football, marketing, endorsement, product placement[/tags]

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged: ,
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