How many car commercials do you see on TV during any given week? How many cars do you buy a week? Were you influenced to buy your last car because of a car commercial? So GM, how about firing all your marketers and cancel all your TV ads and take that $20 or $30M per year and a third to your employees, a third to your shareholders and the other third to your customers in the form of lower prices. My guess is that total revenue would not diminsh anywhere near what the savings in expense would be.

But I’m also guessing that there are tons of studies which prove me wrong (all of which are generated by marketing guys who need to save their jobs on a daily basis.)

There were definitely more people at the RB than I expected given the quality of the opponent, the quality of UCLA, the Dodger game, the Southern Cal game and the crummy weather. But it looked to me as though there were a lot of free tickets given away to youngsters in the end zone. I think it is great to give tickets away to high school kids if they aren’t going to be sold, but I doubt that there were 65,000 people in the stadium who actually paid for their tickets. Maybe they calculated it as people who paid for tickets (whether they showed up or not) plus people who attended for free.

The bigger issue to me is not whether or not the marketing department jumped the gun by declaring the monopoly over. The bigger issue is that they put this ad out without any prior approval or knowledge of CRN (as I remember from prior posts). The effect was that CRN had to take time away from trying to put the pieces back together in our football program, to address an ad which he had not seen.

This marketing group definitely needs much more oversight, to avoid distractions for CRN. Outsourcing is supposed to mean that people can spend more time on tasks for which they are better suited. It is not supposed to mean headaches for others in the organization, like CRN. Just shows that outsourcing needs to be supervised, more than it has been to date with the marketing effort.

How about cancelling the marketing contract and the marketing budget, and putting those funds into Pauley renovation and (ultimately) an on-campus football stadium. “Oh no!” you say. UCLA cannot make a move without marketing geniuses dictating it. Hmmm. Seems to me that we did OK with Coach at the controls and the only marketing was announcing when and where the games would be played. And we fill the Rose Bowl to our capacity every time – 65-70K (with exceptions.) Let’s just stop paying these clowns who have been shown to be more of a detriment than anything else and use the money where we know it’s doing something positive.

The BN is fact based. I defy ANYONE to demonstrate that any dollar flushed down a marketing toilet generates more than a dollar in revenue. I am not asking for a list of exceptions. I would like to know how much revenue the “monopoly is over” ad generated. I’m sure the marketers who spent the bucks for the ad (in the fishwrap, which is an abhorrent choice as a spending target) and who collected big bucks for coming up with the copy, should be able to demonstrate to the penny how many people who previously had not gone to a UCLA game now decided to do so. Oh, wait — we had to give away tix to the Wazzou game.

If marketers and politicians (and is there really any difference between the two groups) were only allowed out of the asylum one or two days a month, I truly believe the world would be a better place and each one of us would have substantially greater wealth than we have now. Of course, there would be far fewer Chia Pets around these United States, and a campaign promise might actually mean something.