Sunday, February 03, 2008

Dad-gum rain equals No-Race-For-Masiguy

SoCal needs all the rain it can get, but it means that I will not be racing today and I was really looking forward to putting the new bike through it's paces in the heat of competition. However, since I leave tomorrow AM for a 4-day dealer training event, it would be very unwise of me to risk crashing (and destroying a super gorgeous bike). I will be taking people on demo rides the next four days, so being covered with scabs from ankle to shoulder would be a bad thing. I love the course of this race, but in the rain, it is near suicide- especially as the first crit of the year in this area. That usually spells disaster, as most people have forgotten how to ride in a pack at speed and don't really start to get the flow of things until around mid March or early April. I'm less scared of my own riding in the rain, having grown up riding in LOTS of rain in Alabama, but the rest of the riders scare the poop outta me. Let me just put it this way; there are tons of really strong, really fit, really fast riders in SoCal, but many of them can't ride a straight line, don't know how to corner at speed and typically freak out when it rains. Needless to say, I'm just not willing to risk the injury and damage to a new and really beautiful bike (or even an old and ugly one).

So, instead, it looks like I will put my Marketer's hat on and watch the Super Bowl (Stupid Bore) and evaluate and critique this year's crop of incredibly over priced TV ads. As a "new media" marketer, I am always repulsed by the cost and ineffectiveness of the ads that are purchased during the game. One 30 second ad could easily fund an entire year's worth of social media marketing efforts. It boggles the mind. I fight for each and every penny I get for my marketing efforts and I still dig into my own "funds" (my time and effort) to move the brand forward. The sheer size of the waste of money on these ad campaigns makes my head spin. Sure, the commercials get talked about, but do they "sell" or improve brand image among consumers? I would argue that they don't... but I'm just a small time marketing wonk who likes to ride bikes... so what could I possibly know?

Well, maybe The Princess and I will go to the YMCA and I can get a good workout in before letting my brain get bombarded by over priced and ineffectual advertising.

Hope your weekend is full of fun and fantasticness!

Tim

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

ok... a standard superbowl ad is what... USD2.6m+ ? thats quite an annual budget masi must have ;p

Anonymous said...

Hear, hear! As a football fan, as well as a cyclist, I am appalled by the $ spent on what were once entertaining ads but are now fodder. Stick to teh underground and fight the power!

joelprice.com said...

It's all relative, I guess. For example Go Daddy's 30-second spot is 10 percent of its annual advertising budget. Budweiser and Pepsi probably didn't even spend 1 percent of the anneal budget.