Monday, May 20, 2019

Mark's Marketing Tips

Years after the "poker boom" has come and gone, it's still amazing that you can find poker on any sports channel on any given day.  Gotta fill those hours somehow, I suppose.  Yet it's equally amazing to me that, to my knowledge, none of these poker events have ever been sponsored by a potato chip company.

Think about the logic, if you're Pringles or Tostitos or Ruffles or someone.  Whenever I watch poker, I get an unbearable urge to eat chips.  Every other sentence on one of those shows is, "He's reaching for chips," "He's put half his chips into the pot," "Joe just added 50,000 chips to his stack." It's subliminal advertising at its most insidious.  By the end of the show, I'd walk over my own mother for a bag of chips (p.s. happy late mother's day, Mom! I just admitted I'd sell you out for snack food!)

This kind of viral marketing doesn't work for other sports.  You'll never see a summer theatre production of a Midsummer Night's Dream sponsoring a hockey game, or Court TV sponsoring NBA games.  But if you're a chip company, there's definitely money to be made in throwing a few bucks at a poker tournament, since what better time than 2019 to invest in the poker boom?

This may seem like a silly idea, yet was it any worse than Lays having Mark Messier as its spokesperson in a series of increasingly crazed ads?

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