Time for newspapers to start thinking like Veeck, as in Bill Veeck and become marketing disruptors

http://www.petevanbaalen.com/single-post/2018/08/26/Time-for-newspapers-to-start-thinking-like-Veeck-as-in-Bill-Veeck-and-become-marketing-disruptors

Bill Veeck was a market disruptor. They didn’t actually call him that at the time. They called him crazy. Looking back now some 32 years after his death, you might hear him referred to as a genius.

Veeck as in wreck is how people described him, and it also happens to be the title for his autobiography. A baseball hall of fame inductee, Veeck owned three different baseball teams including the St. Louis Browns, Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox. Though he won a World Series in Cleveland, he was a small market, small budget owner before they were referred to as such. This forced Veeck to innovate just to survive.

What made Veeck a genius is he actually thought about the fan experience at the game. Every baseball game you attend that has a special promotion attached to it, from fireworks to bobble heads, exists because of him. Veeck had to create fans of his product just to survive, and that is the lesson we need to learn in the media industry.

Fans of the game of baseball in Chicago have options for their entertainment dollars, including other places to see major league baseball. In Veeck’s era, there were the Cubs on the north side playing at Wrigley Field, and the White Sox with a much smaller following in a dump of a ballpark in a suspect neighborhood on the south side. To gain attention from fans and sponsors, the White Sox had to think differently. Thus they came up with things like exploding scoreboards when a home run is hit, having a crazy radio announcer Harry Caray sing a song with the crowd during the seventh inning stretch and have promotions like “Disco Demolition Night.” Innovative at the time, two of those three examples are now mainstays at ball parks today. “Disco Demolition Night” actually caused the White Sox to have to forfeit a game.

Newspapers should think more like Bill Veeck, incorporating promotions with an underdog mentality to attract fans and revenue. I worked for a couple years for John Dille, who owned The Elkhart Truth. In addition to owning that newspaper, Dille owned several radio stations, and he challenged me regularly to think like a radio station and develop promotions. From special events to contest, the goal was to attract attention to the product and associate good feelings towards it all the while earning revenue.

As an industry, we need to challenge ourselves to make the move from disrupted to the disruptor. One way to do that is to think like a radio station like Dille challenged me. Or Bill Veeck.

In my career, I’ve dreamt up promotions where I hid $1,000 somewhere in the market and provided clues so readers would find it, had a half dozen people live in a travel trailer in the middle of a mall for a week in a Survivor style promotion, among other things. Those were relatively high budget promotions, though I will say neither cost very much compared to the publicity earned. I’ve done many low budget promotions too, which any market at any size can pull off. There is no magic formula. You just have to try!

John Senger, the ad director at Greenfield, Indiana’s newspaper did a scavenger hunt for their readers. Called the “Ultimate Scavenger Hunt” this promotion was a great example of audience engagement, innovative thinking and revenue generation. This was a daylong event promoting the newspaper, its sponsors and the community they serve while generating revenue too.  

Small group of participants in The Ultimate Scavenger Hunt, presented by The Daily Reporter in Greenfield, Indiana.

Innovation often comes from necessity. As the media world changes, we have to think differently to keep the audience’s attention, and to keep our sponsor’s money. Pushing the limits of thinking, and finding promotions and contests that will work in your market will help you do both. If Bill Veeck owned a newspaper today, I have no doubt they would be doing wacky promotions, engaging with their audience, making money and still providing quality content for its subscribers.

Bill Veeck’s son is carrying on the family tradition of amazing promotions and profitability, now for an independent minor league A few weeks ago, they decided to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the movie Animal House with the world’s largest food fight. More than 8,000 people showed up for the game, and the video as of this writing has been viewed over 150,000 times.

OK, so maybe the world’s largest food fight isn’t your cup of tea. I get it. The point is, like Bill Veeck or the St. Paul Saints, to survive in the long term, newspapers are going to have to get creative and become a disruptor.