Promoting the promotion promoter

July 27, 2008 by James D Kirk
Filed under: passing it on

The above link will take you over to Seth Godin’s blog, a most excellent place to find yourself. Usually. I’ve been a subscriber to his online writing for some time now, and enjoy his little insights and tidbits that he publishes quite regularly. And while he doesn’t have commenting on his site enabled, I could sort of understand the hassle of dealing with them (the comments) if the volume was consistently high, and there were other things to do with ones time. So, if you want to comment on Seth’s writings, you produce a post (hmmm, like this one!) and say your piece (or is it peace?)

His (mini) rant on the fact that a business has opted to pay the (likely) very big bucks to “sponsor” an athletic event in which the business seemingly has little to nothing in connection with strikes me as curious. I mean, do you watch sporting events at all, Seth? Have you ever watch the “Net Zero Half Time Report”? Or how about “College Game Day, built by The Home Depot” on ESPN during college football season? (Well, on that one, at least they were savvy enough to tie in “building” with the fact that the HD supplies building supplies, but still not sure the connection with college football.)

And while not advertisers connecting with an event, what does Bryant Gumbel have to do with “Real Sports“? Wasn’t he just a regular, run of the mill on air personality before landing the long running sports show hosting gig on HBO?

And while this is simply conjecture, do you think the NBC family of networks is going to have an advertiser or two over the next month or so while they air (do networks still air their programming? I digress. Forgive me!)? If you’ll go with that, just how much do you think those businesses are going to have in common with whatever event they are sponsoring? Obviously, we’ll see a lot of Nike, and likely other sporting goods/clothing manufacturers. And those companies “fit” into Seth’s desired paradigm.

But I’m guessing that we are going to see a few other misfits that will (hopefully) have Seth boiling with consternation. Actually, even though I don’t know him, and have clearly never been to his home. I’m guessing Seth Godin doesn’t even watch TV (or much of it, if in fact he even owns a television set!) so all of this might just be moot!

My point here, I suppose, is that a connection can be forged between to seemingly disparate end points. Pay enough money and I start thinking about All State Insurance when I see a home run hit in baseball (we’ll, okay that’s a stretch, but at least I get what the networks and advertisers are after.)

Anyway, I wanted to promote Seth’s post for two reasons: 1) Even though I wouldn’t consider this particular post incredibly valuable, you should read it and decide for yourself, and 2) Once you get over to Seth’s blog, you might want to consider reading other posts of his, and definitely consider subscribing to his blog so you get all of his stuff. And I hear he’s not a bad book author either!