While this work week has no games during the day or at night, the previous two weeks in March is (hold your breath I'm about to say something earth-shattering) centers around the NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament, AKA March Madness. No disrepect to the women's tournament either or the NIT, but the top stories on Sportscenter and the top websites (ESPN, FoxSports, Yahoo Sports, Sportsline) are focused on who's going to make it to the Final Four, what teams have advantages in their next games, basically analysis ad-naseum with so called "experts" on bracket technologists. Seriously, I think on ESPN there is a guy named Joe Lunardi and his title is "Bracketologist." Give me a break!!!
I have to admit, I filled out one bracket with a group on Yahoo Sports but I didn't dissect every single game; I spent literally 10 minutes on the entire thing by usually just picking the higher seed winning all games. Turns out I have 3 of the Final Four (missed Kansas losing to UCLA) but then again there are hundreds of thousands of people that have all 4 Final Four Teams. Unfortunately for my alma mater Vanderbilt, they SHOULD have beaten Georgetown last Friday night, but either there's a conspiracy that wanted G'Town to win or the refs truly didn't see the 4 or 5 steps Mr. Green took before his last-second shot went in. I can write more about some other conspiracy theories in other posts so apologies for my digression.
In any event, I really wanted to figure out how much - if any - loss in productivity there is during the first two weeks of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. Many articles are written by very well-established entities (bizjournals.com, cnn.money.com, forbes, and others). I will point out a couple of them in a second. First off, though, look at the traffic swing just from what Alexa tracks - http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=ncaasports.com&url=www.ncaasports.com . Basically, NCAASports.com (which offered FREE video streaming through a partnership with CBS Sportsline) went from a top 8000 site to a top 3000 site in just a couple of weeks. That's pretty amazing and was Alexa's #1 mover and shaker. Similarly, Sportsline went from a top 600 website to a top 350 website in a matter of a couple of weeks. Granted they get a bunch of free PR as every game on CBS plugs the "watch online for free" scenario, but neither NCAASports nor Sportsline technically had to pay a dime for the increased traffic. The advertisers that were shown on CBS were also shown through the streaming feed; one advertiser I can vividly remember was Courtyard by Marriott and their ads were very clever.
Back to productivity losses or gains...CNN came out on March 10th ( http://money.cnn.com/2005/03/10/news/economy/marchmadness/ ) saying March Madness will cost American companies $889.6 million dollars in lost productivity over the next 16 days. Another source raised the stakes by saying March Madness will cost companies over $3.6 billion dollars in lost productivity. That article can be seen here: http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2006/03/13/daily6.html . One other article that came up on the 1st page of my Google request takes an opposing view, and that article can be seen here: http://www.forbes.com/home/work/2006/03/13/march-madness-productivity_cx_hc_0313marchmadness.html
My opinion is that even if workers are sitting around watching basketball games for free rather than calling a current customer or potential customer on the phone, accessing websites for personal use vs. business use is not something new. It's OK for companies to track what sites their employees are visiting, I can tell you that my current company does that. I have no problem or issue with that: I am using a laptop that is company property. If people weren't watching these games, wouldn't they just be on MySpace building out their buddies or emailing friends through their Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL accounts?
Regardless of the dollar amount that companies like Challenger, Gray, and Christmas throw up into the wind in terms of lost productivity, a couple of things are clear:
1. I think it's brilliant that CBS Sports decided to give access away for free in advance for more eyeballs listening and seeing their advertiser's ads.
2. A lot of the basketball games didn't even start until 6pm or 8pm East Coast time, so if workers are watching the games at work, isn't it better that they're watching it at work rather than cutting out of work at 4:00 or 4:30? People can multi-task, even if just during the commercials...firing off one more email to a potential client or current customer.
3. Last but certainly not least, I have no chance of winning my March Madness bracket, but I will be watching Saturday's UCLA / Florida game and Ohio State / Georgetown game. Hopefully that is music to the advertisers' ears. I believe I'm their target audience: male, around 34 years old, homeowner, dog owner, and parent.
Scott Pannier | Director of Media | Motive Interactive | www.motiveinteractive.com
