90 Full Minutes
April 16, 2008 6:15 PM
Well, the 2008 season is underway, and so far so good. From early on, there appears to be two very apparent differences from last year. First, the team is going to be one of the top conditioned teams in the league and second, this team is going to play a pressure up-tempo style that will excite our fans. Both of these are attributable to our new head coach, Teitur Thordarson and our returning assistant, Todd Wawrousek, and their preparation has brought some renewed excitement and optimism to the club.
Of course, my season began a long time ago. You see, the marketing department has to be a few steps ahead of everything else so that we can prepare the marketing campaign, the advertising and print material, and a whole host of other activities to ensure the games are well promoted. Now that the first match is under our belts, things become at least a little more manageable; but February and March are a whole different beast for me. Late nights spent at the office aren't the same as late nights in the summer when there's at least a soccer match being played in front of you!
But you probably weren't reading this hoping to learn about the minutiae of my job. So, let's get to the fun part - the campaign.
Now my university marketing profs, whom I never quite agreed with, would probably throw fits to see me openly divulging the method to our marketing madness. Marketing experts always like to withhold their theories and reasoning like it is some privileged sacrament. For a great example of this phenomenon, watch Mad Men on AMC, a fantastic tv drama set in a 50's ad agency. But the web is the place to share, and I'm inspired by The Score's brilliant series called Branded that looks inside the marketing of athletes, teams, shoe companies, and so on.
So our campaign. 90 Full Minutes. What is it and what does it mean? Well, I'll tell you what it means.
There's a fantastic article in Macleans Magazine about the fact that most North American sports give you much less sporting action than the actual time required to watch them. Check out the story yourself here:
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/sports/article.jsp?content=20080123_3718_3718
To paraphrase, Major League Baseball and the National Football League both produce games that last more than 3 hours. Yet if you measure just the actual action, there is only about 12 minutes of football and 10 minutes of baseball. The rest of time is spent setting up the next play, bringing players on and off the field and other equally boring delays. Even hockey, for all its speed and grace, produces only about 60 minutes of action in a 2.5 hour contest.
Soccer is the only sport that allows you to witness the entire match in full action. There are no stoppages (save for halftime). The clock runs on and play continues. In fact, the few times when the play is stopped due to injury, the ref is even afforded the right to add a couple minutes at the end to make up for it.
It is that essence that we tried to capture in our campaign. 90 Full Minutes. When you come to a Whitecaps match, you are going to see 90 full minutes. Not 10 or 12, but 90. You can be in your seat and on your way home in less than 2 hours, with the majority of that 2 hours spent watching all the passing, the battling, the tackles, the set pieces, the saves, the goals. To watch a soccer match is to witness an organized chaos of both attacking and defending all at the same time. It's ebbs and flows, it's momentum swings, it's changes of pace, are all there unfolding before your eyes. You don't have to wait until after the replay has been reviewed or the Budweiser commercial is finished to see if that momentum swing is going to translate into a score. That is what 90 Full Minutes is.
In any campaign that you run, you hope it has resonance. You hope it can provide life to an organization and to a fan base. It isn't just a message of who we are, but who we want to be. In that vein, the men's team have taken 90 Full Minutes to be their mantra for the season. Game in and game out, you can expect the team to battle for every minute and use pressure to force the opponent into making mistakes. So far, as seen in the home opener, it's worked out pretty well.
So here's to a great season. It's going to be a great ride.
Every minute of it.
Posted By: Ryan Mckee on April 16, 2008 6:15 PM
