A Draft and a Lot of Hot Air

So, I was watching the NFL Draft this weekend, which is the annual market for college gentlemen trying to make the NFL. ESPN has made a spectacle out of this annual roulette where people get all excited about potential, 40-yard dash times, and "upside." Mel Kiper, the Punxsutawney Phil of sports commentary, gets pulled out of the freezer for his yearly appearance to shed some wisdom on the whole process. He comments on every single player and seems to have a strong opinion on everyone from the highly touted prospects out of big-time schools to a second string wideout on Cal Poly Tech. Nobody knows if he's right, and I don't think anyone has ever tracked if his analysis correlates with success in the NFL (thus proving that you can stay on TV almost indefinitely if you sound like you know what you're talking about and nobody in the audience knows any better. I call this the Giada Rule....I don't know if what she's saying is right, but I'm interested).

What's amazing is that nobody really has the draft figured out. Good players slip, and players that don't pan out get drafted early, even with the best teams and despite millions of dollars in scouting. Why is this? I think it's because there is no way to truly measure the variables that will correlate with success in the NFL. Prospects are drafted based on a number of correlative and measurable factors that aren't necessarily causal: 40-yard dash times, bench-press reps, Wonderlic tests, and their track records performing against inferior competition.

In statistical parlance, or at least in my limited knowledge of it, this would be called extrapolating, where you plot known points and try to guess a new data point (NFL performance) outside of that data set using a bunch of previous data points (previously mentioned measurables). Extrapolation is normally less than desirable, because it's outside the range of your experience. It's like trying to guess how much weight you'll gain in college; you might have an idea based on a number of factors, but it's generally a wild card. It's normally much better if you can interpolate, or, given a set of information, trying to guess a point that occurs within the extremes of that data set. It's not always right, but it's normally more accurate. It's kind of like trying a new Belgian beer; if you've had Belgian beer, even if you've never had that one, you probably have a good idea if you like it.

What's amazing is that, like the NFL Draft, most major decisions are based on extrapolations, where you take a number of factors that we know and try an make a decision that is kind of related but not entirely causally linked to those factors. Generally, college or high school kids choose a career without having a real in-depth experience of what goes on in that career or any appreciation for the required time or emotional investment. Hell, you even pick an apartment without having a real way of knowing if if the people living above you have the grace of inebriated elephants, your window faces a street that is the major ambulance route to three hospitals, or the wall separating you and your ever-naked neighbor is paper thin (OK, I knew that going in, and it worked out well).

Most of the time, you try to interpolate new decisions and data points and try to figure out how they fit in your previous experience. I'm convinced that this is how a lack of experience, or a couple of anomalous experiences, can lead to messed up thought processes. For example, imagine if one of the first topless women that you ever saw was the girl from Total Recall with three breasts (NSFW but Google it if you're the one person who reads the blog and doesn't know what I'm talking about..and yes, this movie was on at my friend's house when I was about 7). Without additional experience, encountering a tri-breasted individual would not seem terribly unusual. In fact, if that was all you had seen of women (just roll with it), you might expect that to be the norm. You can take this example a number of different directions, but, in the end, most of our experiences are interpreted through interpolation into established schemas.

The cool thing about the draft and big life decisions is that there are major statistical efforts to try and "plot" people (or anything else for that matter) on the general data set of a larger population and interpolate the outcome. Myers-Briggs does it with careers, Chemistry.com does it with dating, Billy Beane did it with baseball, and Football Outsiders did it with running backs in the 2009 draft (Eagles pick LeSean McCoy is missing, unfortunately). I feel like almost anything could be reduced to statistics, somehow, to give some interesting results and predictions, and if you're the first to do it, you make a ton of money or at least get a book/movie made about you. Now if only I could find that thing and liked doing statistics in my free time instead of just pontificating about them...

Taking Notes on a Criminal Conspiracy

Around New Year's, Gatorade introduced a new brand strategy/ ad campaign based simply on the letter "G".

Watch it first so we can all be on the same page.
Here's a second, probably better one.

This series of ads came most likely as a response to Vitamin Water becoming crazy successful and supplanting Gatorade as America's Favorite Drink That Doesn't Have Alcohol/Caffeine in It. Gatorade needed to completely change their identity. They needed to get over the Lightning Bolt and the whole "Developed at the Swamp at the University of Florida to replenish electrolytes lost in the heat of battle" marketing angle. They needed everybody's favorite buzz word of the moment, Swagger (or Swag, which is to say the word Swagger, with Swagger.)

So they went with "G". It seemed clumsy to me at first. It seemed a little forced and wasn't all too sexy. Then it dawned on me that they were not shooting for sexy. By changing the name to just G and selling the product on the glory of athletic competition (not the performance in the game itself) and the cross-cultural implications of said glory, Gatorade gave itself a street drug name and brand positioning. The street drug of the sports world.

I really hope this was intentional, and I'm not at all mad at them for doing this.

To me, this change showed that Gatorade realized the manner its most likely consumed in. Most of the time, you're not gonna grab a Gatorade in the middle of athletic activity. There are options that are usually more convenient and equally effective, take water fountains for example. There's also your shiny Sigg or Nalgene to help you look young, active, and purposefully hydrated at all times. Oh, bottled water works too, since we're all now afraid of the stuff that comes out of pipes and is free.

Anyways, most of the time I'm stopping at a bodgea for a Gatorade if I'm hungover or just need a little sugar and salt combo to make up for not drinking water for a while. Gatorade knows this because Vitamin Water has made 50 a billionaire by marketing to Soccer Moms and Whooo-Girls who need to be emotionally comforted by their soft drink. Athletics are not a key factor in choosing which colored water you want to drink. Since fun, cheeky, and quirky were taken by Vitamin Water, Gatorade went the other way. They went Street.

I say they chose a street drug because they made it seem as if you had to be in the know to really understand G. The commercial's dark and rough, not bright and happy like Vitamin Water. Lil Wayne narrates it (he's both very street and an avid user of drugs). Words like golden and god are used. It's the idealized appeal of being a glorious athlete in a similar vein to the idealized appeal of drugs. They show the greatest in their particular genre, perople to be equally revered and feared: Ali, Wooden, Jordan, Russell, Jackie Robinson, Tiger. Hell, even Misty May and Kerri Walsh are the biggest ballers in the history of beach volleyball.

The commercial is trying to sell that Scarface side of the drug, not Dukie's mom neglecting to feed her kids because she's fiending. It's now the soft drink from the other side of the tracks; the one your parents were never too comfortable with when you said you were hanging at their place on a Friday night. Is G's parents home? Can you put them on the phone so I can talk to them?

I also want to emphasize the street slang part of the whole scheme. Drugs can have all sorts of connotations. Do you remember when the cop comes into your elementary or middle school and shows what all the drugs are? He'll talk about smoking marijuana or "puffing reefer"; all his slang was stiff and forced. That was Gatorade. Some scientist or Mad Men-era ad exec connected Florida Gators with the Tang-like substance they had developed. That''s not G. If Gatorade is Heroin, G is Herr-on. You want to walk up to the corner store and say, "Ay man, you got that G?"

So why should this matter? This is a major shift in brand positioning and marketing. This company revamped its whole image because it knows that you like The Wire, Reasonable Doubt Jay, and Dipset circa '03-'06. They figured out that I'd rather connect with the Elephant-Hide Jordan 3's floating four feet off the floor, tongue-out, than the 5 AM taining sessions and macrobiotic diets he put himself though to jump that high. Gatorade changed from a company selling sports beverages to pushers, knowing that it's the high of victory you want, not the challenge to get it. I kinda like it, and when it hit me, I went out to the corner and got that G.

~MC Squared