Chef Curry and the Dubs Teach us all
By Adam Kleinberg
At Traction, we are very happy today. Not only because we get to work at this great little agency with great co-workers and great clients, but because we get to do all this in the Bay Area, home of the greatest basketball team in all the land!
CONGRATULATIONS WARRIORS!!! We love you.
So much that I wrote an article in Digiday this week called " 10 lessons the NBA finals taught us about advertising ."
You can read the top 10 on Digiday, but since I wrote that, the Dubs became champs, Iggy won the MVP and we learned even more. With that in mind, here is Lesson #11.
Play the long game
It was great to see ultimate team player, Andre Iguodala, win the MVP, not just because of his awesome play, but because he accepted a role as a 6th man coming off the bench all year for the greater good of the team. This was able to happen because Coach Kerr played the long game. From early on in the season, San Francisco Chronicle quoted Kerr talking about the length of the season, and what it really took to win a championship. He rested key players. He limited key players minutes during the regular season to keep them healthy and rested. And when it came time to sprint toward the finish line, he turned to Andre and said, "Run, Iggy, RUN!!!" Iguodala was the guardian of the Warriors pace in the finals and exhausted LeBron. He became the Warriors most valuable asset, and of course, they won
Marketers should take note. Too often, we focus solely on short-term ROI and forget about long-term brand health. Short-term wins matter (The Dubs collected 67 of them in the regular season), but it's those that play the long game that will be the ones that ultimately win.
This morning I was invited to speak on advanced mobile strategy at the Mobile Marketing Strategies Summit here in San Francisco.
I've just been invited to give a talk to a group of senior level PR leaders and business leaders at a private event here in San Francisco.
For about three years, I've been predicting to anyone who would listen that the final episode of Mad Men would surely end with Don Draper tossing himself from a balcony and resolving into the falling man from the opening title sequence.