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The Marketing Arm CEO Ray Clark
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RAY CLARK is CEO of The Marketing Arm, the entertainment, music and
sports marketing services agency he founded in ‘93 and sold in ‘99 to Omnicom.
Ranked No. 6 by PROMO magazine on its list of the top 100 promotional agencies,
The Marketing Arm manages more than $200M annually in client programs via relationships
with such industry titans as DDB, TBWA/Chiat/Day and BBDO and through its four
business units: Millsport (sponsorship and sports consulting), USM&P (events),
Davie-Brown (music and entertainment) and ipsh! (wireless marketing). Clark
spoke recently with SportsBusiness Journal
New York
bureau chief Jerry Kavanagh.
| FAVORITES |
| Piece of music: LENNY KRAVITZ’ Greatest Hits. |
| Vacation spot: Cabo with the fellas, Laguna
Beach with the family. |
| Quote: “You’re used to what you’re used to.” I make up a lot of
dumb quotes, and that’s one of the ones I use the most. |
| Sporting event: Any sport I get to play. People would be surprised
that I’m not that big a sports fan as a viewer. |
| Movie: “Old School.” |
| Last book read: The KURT COBAIN Journals and BILL CLINTON’s
“My Life.” |
| Pet peeve: People who focus on the negative and people who think
small. |
| Athlete you most enjoy watching: ROGER FEDERER. |
| Basic business philosophy: Create a vision, have a plan, work your
plan, evaluate and adjust, work your plan even harder. |
| Best career decision: Quitting General Mills at age 22 to follow
a dream in sports marketing and, in the last ten years, selling the company
to Omnicom. |
| Biggest challenge: Convincing corporate decision-makers to take
smart, calculated risks. |
Q: EDWIN LAND, a physicist and the inventor of Polaroid photography,
said, “Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.” Does that mean
that a good product needs no marketing?
Clark: That’s like saying nurturing and cultivating
are not necessary for a small child if the child is smart. To me, a brand is
more like a living organism. It has a life of its own and has to be nurtured
and cultivated on a daily basis.
Q: You once said that you could foresee a world in which traditional
advertising would become increasingly irrelevant, where agencies less wedded
to traditional marketing would be the ones that would prosper. Has that premonition
proved to be true?
Clark: It’s been the model for our agency, and in
two years we’ve gone from 55 employees to 700. That’s because marketers realize
the big ideas are being launched off emotional platforms. And those platforms
(sports, music, television, film, gaming) are where The Marketing Arm plays.
Q: Does marketing appeal more to emotions than to intelligence?
Clark: I don’t think there’s a clear difference between
the two; I don’t think the two are opposites. In order to (1) break through
the clutter of over 2500 marketing messages a day that are bombed on new consumers
and (2) change consumer behavior, marketers [must] realize that they will have
to play to a consumer’s existing affinities or emotions.
Q: Does emotion play a big role in marketing?
Clark: It does. And I think that marketers are realizing
that more and more. Unless you play to the consumer’s existing affinities and
emotions, then you have very little chance of breaking through the clutter,
and you have even less chance of changing consumer behavior.
Q: On the sponsorship of college football bowl games, you said: “It’s
not enough to simply sign on as a sponsor. Sponsors need to activate their sponsorships
in creative ways that will actually change consumer attitudes and behavior.”
That’s pretty ambitious. What sponsorships have been able to change consumer
attitudes and behavior?
Clark: Nokia had an incredible run with the Sugar
Bowl whereby it saw, year over year, impressive results that solidified that
people positively changed their opinion of Nokia as a company and of its products
because it was affiliated with the Sugar Bowl. And it was not just because it
sponsored the game; it was because of all the things it did around the game:
consumer contests, hospitality, signage -- a combination of a lot of powerful
things.
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Nokia Drops Sugar Bowl Sponsorship
Despite Successful Ten-Year Run
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Q: And now Nokia has dropped that sponsorship.
Clark: Well, maybe they figured out that ten years
is enough.
Q: DAVID OGILVY said, “I notice increasing reluctance on the part of
marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research,
and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support rather than illumination.”
Is there an over-reliance on statistics in marketing?
Clark: I believe there is an over-reliance on research
at corporate marketing departments. Most corporate decision-makers are risk-averse,
and numbers give them the confidence to take some risks when they potentially
may be wrong. Mass-media decisions, or more general marketing decisions, may
be overly analyzed. However, I would argue that most sports marketing decisions
are based on very little research and are overly instinctive or are due to the
preference of the corporate decision-maker.
Q: You said, “League and team sponsorships are a bit stale and so are
promotional ideas around them.” What’s the freshest idea in sponsorships?
Clark: I’m most intrigued and interested
in brands developing their own content and in an authentic way customizing that
content to a segmented consumer group.
Q: What does that mean?
Clark: It means developing customized television,
film, music or sports, where they own it versus simply signing on to be one
of a laundry list of league sponsors.
Q: Give me an example of a brand that has done that well.
Clark: Mountain Dew recently produced a snowboarding
film that was incredibly well-produced and completely authentic to a core consumer
group in a feature film called “First Descent.”
Q: Is that the ultimate in product placement?
Clark: I don’t know about that, but it’s a great way
to appeal to a core consumer.
Q: Are there any marketing ideas that have outlived their usefulness?
Clark: I think that mass marketing in general is more
and more a stale idea.
Q: Speaking of stale, the whole fixation on, or fascination with, Super
Bowl ads seems so trite. Is imagination dead? Where is the creativity?
Clark: The platform of the Super Bowl has become so
large, traditional 30-second commercials are having difficulty living up to
it. I think you’ll start seeing branded messaging that does not look like 30-second
commercials become the breakout messaging during future Super Bowls.
Q: The Washington Post last month cited unnamed marketing experts who
said that the ‘06 Winter Games represent a new challenge in that “U.S.
athletes must be marketed at a time when television ratings are falling, corporate
marketing strategies are shifting and the battle for Olympic-related advertising
is increasingly competitive.” How do you meet that challenge?
Clark: The bottom line is, winter Olympic athletes
are on an infrequent stage and they have a tiny window in which to showcase
both personality and winning. So, corporate marketers are going to be more resistant
to winter Olympians than ever before because there are so many other alternatives
that potentially could be more powerful due to frequency and success. Would
you rather work with LEBRON JAMES or with the no-name luge medalist?
I’d pick LeBron James if the audience was right.
Q: Who’s the next big marketable star: SHAUN WHITE? REGGIE
BUSH? VINCE YOUNG? CHRIS PAUL?
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Clark Feels Federer Could Be
Greatest Tennis Player Of All-Time
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Clark: I’m a tennis fan, so I think Roger
Federer is a huge opportunity for the right company. It won’t surprise me at
all if he becomes the all-time greatest tennis payer.
Q: You said of next year’s NHL All-Star Game moving from the weekend
to midweek, “I would cater to fans first, the corporate audience second, because
fan interest is what drives the corporate interest.” Has the league lost sight
of that?
Clark: In that particular case, I believe the league
has lost sight of that.
Q: Is there a classic marketing campaign that you admire or wish you
had participated in?
Clark: Like a lot of people, I admire most of what
brands like Nike and Gatorade have done over an extended period of time. But
recently I’m most impressed with what the new AT&T has done.
Q: What’s impressive about it?
Clark: AT&T succinctly told the story of two companies
with different pedigrees coming together for the greater good of the consumer.
Q: What’s a marketing challenge -- in any area (sports, business, politics,
entertainment) -- that you would be eager to accept?
Clark: I’d like to restructure every major element
of how the major professional leagues operate, from compensation systems to
fan influence to rules to how the leagues are marketed.
Q: The Yankees’ interlocking NY logo was judged recently to be the best
of the 20th century. What makes it, or any logo, so memorable?
Clark: It’s not just design. It’s also about frequency
and the brand attributes that live on a daily basis for the brand. In the case
of the Yankees, they’re seen the most frequently of any other sports logo, and
they’ve been seen winning more so than any other logo. Visibility and success.
It’s no surprise that it received that rating.
Q: What brands need a fresh look?
Clark: I think the opportunity and challenge in front
of Wal-Mart is extremely interesting. And more specifically in sports, [MLB],
I believe, will face more challenges over the next ten years than any of the
other major sports.
Q: Why MLB?
Clark: The way our society behaves is in contrast
with how professional baseball is consumed. And, therefore, they have a problem
with how it’s televised, the slowness of the game, and the general interests
of a new generation.
Q: Why do consumers believe that a product is good simply because a famous
athlete or a popular entertainer says so?
Clark: I think what celebrities do best is they get
your attention and they can lend credibility to a message in certain cases.
Again, it’s about breaking through the clutter. If a commercial comes on with
scale talent vs. celebrity talent, you’re more inclined to lean just a little
bit forward when the celebrity talent is in the commercial. It’s a proven fact,
and I still believe in it.
