We Aren't Polarized. We're Fragmented!

[Ed. Note: Pete's off hunting in Pennsylvania until Monday. In his absence, we are proud to present today's column, written by Mmy -- our resident Tribe Mass Media and Communications Expert.]

Among the various comments posted recently, in response to Pete's rebuttal to my comment in his original Andy vs. James entry, were the following:

Pete: Meaning, you can either love Roddick or hate him because of what he represents.

Ray:  Mmy seems to have an aversion to Andy and she's Canadian.

Okay, let me state this as clearly as I can. I DO NOT HAVE AN AVERSION TO ANDY RODDICK. In truth, I do not think of him at all. What I do have is an aversion to comments such as these:

Let me tell a story to illustrate the problem with statements, such as those above, which might as well begin with ‘everybody has to agree.’

Once upon a time, not that long ago, a student rushed into my office to declare -- with great excitement -- that the movie trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean II had finally been released. To put the poor girl out of her misery, I immediately downloaded the trailer so she could view it. The student began an intense analysis of the trailer, calling others into my office to assist. Meanwhile a male student, with whom I had a standing appointment, announced to the crowd: “Johnny Depp is NOT hot.” The other students argued back, stating that “everyone KNOWS that Depp is hot.”

There is no person, event, or theory about which there is universal agreement and, sometimes, people react poorly to being told that particular things deserve universal agreement.

Normally on the board, when a member of the Tribe says “this player is hott” or “this player is not hott” we understand that the person is actually saying this: “in my opinion, this player is hott” or “in my not-so-humble opinion, this player functions effectively as an ice cube.”

When a tennis commentator says to the world “Everyone here is rooting for Player X” or “Player Z is hottest guy on the tour” they are not, even by suggestion, prefacing those statements with “in my opinion.” I, personally, have had the experience of being in the crowd rooting for a particular player only to find out later, when I watched the television coverage, that I must have been rooting for the other guy. Too bad I didn’t know that at the time. Nor did the people around me in the crowd!

Back in October, I spoke of imposed narratives in my guest entry. What we are seeing here, in these Andy/James entries, is a number of imposed narratives and underlying presumptions.

Let me address each of these presumptions:

First, that we all watch players on the basis of considering them hott or not.

There are lots of players who I don’t find hott but who I like to watch play tennis. There are also players who I find hott that I don't want to watch play tennis -- there are other ways they could give me visual enjoyment.

I never thought Ivan Lendl was hott, but I appreciated his tennis.

Most of the time I don’t find Nadal hot. He does have his moments, but not in general. duck shoes thrown by AmyLu But, damn it, the guy can play.

I never found Andre Agassi hott (in any of his incarnations) but I appreciated his game. I personally never found Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, or Steffi Graf hott yet each gave me hours of enjoyment on-court.

In short, the love of tennis may have many aspects but let us not reduce it to soft-core porn.

Second, that we are all motivated by rivalries, so promoting them is the best way to ‘sell’ tennis.

Rivalries may be interesting but they all die eventually. The death of each rivalry leaves commentators in a tizzy and terrified that they have nothing more to say. Could we not cover tennis for other things AS WELL AS rivalries? If nothing else, this would free commentators from the necessity of inventing ‘rivalry’-based tension where there is none. We might even get more insightful coverage of what is actually happening on-court, if it was not simply reduced to a set of H2H statistics and vignettes.

Third, the people whom the commentators hang out with are a reasonable facsimile of the general population.

I don’t think that the people that commentators and marketers hang out with are just like the general population. In politics, this is called the ‘inside the Beltway’ phenomenon. Of course, based on my reading of the board, the Tribe itself is not representative of the general population. As a student said when I introduced them to Armand, “Just what type of people DO you know?”

However, on various occasions, I've heard American tennis commentators who were clearly so ‘out of the mainstream’ that I had to laugh -- in order to not scream. For example, one commentator thought that listening to the Black Eyed Peas was "cutting edge" and another said that the Serena Williams' various outfits were "dangerous" and "outrageous."

Since at least half of my students think the Black Eyed Peas are mainstream (not to mention, passé) and I routinely see students dress in clothing that makes Serena’s style look banal, I tend to doubt that commentators get out much.

If commentators want to appeal to the ‘hot young people,’ if commentators want to appeal to a ‘younger demographic,’ if commentators wish to connect with people other than those sitting in the box seats around the court then they need to get out and meet some of these young people.

Perhaps they might discover that many ‘younger people’ find the blaring music during changeovers to be obnoxious.

Growing up as they have with personal mp3 players, they find the need to blast one’s musical choices to the world typical, as one said to me the other day, of the type of people who endlessly listen to ‘golden oldies.’

Fourth, tennis should be marketed the same way as other sports are, in the United States.

If I want to watch sports that aren’t like tennis, I have over 700 channels to choose from.

As many of the basic books on marketing and advertising tell us, the United States is not homogenous. It is made up of, fragment into, many different subgroups on the basis on audience characteristics. Marketers, especially high-end marketers, are not aiming at mass audiences any longer. They are specifically interested in the type of people who will both want to buy and be able to afford their product. They want to reach the people who they cannot reach via any other program or medium.

So if I am an advertiser, then I care nothing about the sport itself, just the nature of the eyes that are watching it (are they affluent, what is their typical credit card balance, what magazines do they buy, what stores do they frequent, how often do they replace large-ticket items, do they have a lot of disposable income?).

Fifth, tennis must alter itself to be popular in the United States if it is going to be successful as a sport.

Soccer, anyone? Presently, soccer fans in the United States get to see very few matches in person, yet in a world where more and more television (especially cable and satellite) is driven by the subscriber rather than the advertiser model, soccer is being made available to those who want to watch it. Soccer does not have to destroy itself as a sport in order to ‘make it’ in the American market. In time, all those who wish to see real football in the United States will be able to do so.

‘Free’, network television in the United States will become the world of baseball, American football and basketball. Sports that keep themselves ‘pure’ will migrate to subscription services. Sports that prostitute themselves (in order to gain short-term benefits) will end up being neither particularly marketable in the ‘advertiser’-driven model nor will they have enough true believers left to make the subscriber model fiscally realistic.

Sixth, we should tweak the sport and not the delivery package.

One of the glories of Wimbledon this year, for those of us who bought the online streaming subscription, was that we got to choose the matches that we wanted to watch. Okay, my household was clearly an extreme -- my husband and I had to watch the same matches on television, like most folks, but we were also watching different matches on our computers. This meant that we were constantly selling each other on matches: ‘hey, are you watching the match on court 1?’ ‘no, have you seen what is going on on court 2?’

He could watch the people he thought were hott, I could watch the people I thought were hott. He could tune in to keep track of the rivalry he cared about while I tuned into a different rivalry on an adjacent court. In other words, neither of us had to tweak the tennis at all; we just had to create a media environment as close as possible to actually attending the tournament.

Both of us ended up watching matches that we had not intending on seeing; both of us saw players we hadn’t initially thought would be interesting. Both of us came away from the tournament excited, interested, and happy. But we didn’t have to listen to or watch the same narrative. The only thing we both needed was a credit card.

I think tennis is, in many ways, supremely suitable for the coming ‘new media.’ Too many of the suggestions as to how to improve the sport are, in my opinion, the result of looking in the rearview mirror and attempting to steer tennis coverage in terms of the landscape and challenges that we faced in the past, rather than the opportunities we will face in the future.

--Mmy