Leveraging the Synergistic Business Value of Rotisserie Baseball
Fred managed our relationships with printers. (I forget his title. Like everyone else’s, it changed every six months.) He’d been playing fantasy baseball with a bunch of similarly misanthropic friends from college for 14 years. And he’d never stopped regretting the moment three years ago that he told Ray that his team, the Whack, had finally won the pennant. All summer long, every summer, Ray asks, marcato, “How’d your Whack go last night, Fred?”
Toward the end of August, Fred sat in on a kickoff meeting for a new promotion where the client wanted to get the attention of physicians in St. Louis. We were pushing a new device that enabled the doctors to remove a patient’s ear wax, concentrate it through a centrifuge, add a chemical that made the concentrate supple, and then inject the substance into the patient’s lips within minutes of the device being turned on. It was a collagen injection substitute—fantastically expensive and of little discernible value.
Anyway, to get doctors to call to see if Wax Lips (not the product name, natch, but that’s what we called it when the client wasn’t around) was right for them, the client wanted to offer Cardinals playoff tickets. “Meet with a consultant between September 4 and November 21,” Ray’s creative strategy said, “and get free Cardinals playoff tickets.” Nobody batted an eye: St. Louisians love the baseball and so on.
Ray finished his initial presentation and asked if there were any questions. Fred, who normally asks one question in kickoff meetings—”What’s the quantity on this?”—gently cleared his throat. Then he slowly said, “Ray, you seem to have a lot of confidence that the Cardinals are going to make up a 10-game deficit in the next four weeks. Did you think to ask the client whether it would be good to be promoting these tickets for a month after the World Series ends?”
