On Equal Pay, and the Creation of Media

There's a meme spreading across the internet on the topic of Equal Pay for Women, kicked off by an interview with Georgia Gould on VeloNews.com and bolstered by an online petition directed to the UCI which has collected some 2000 signatures so far. Several local folks have chimed in on it, including the thought-provoking (read as 'provocative') Unholy Rouleur, who challenges a blanket pay parity policy based on race registration ecomonics, and Karen Got Wheels, who proposes that prize money be eliminated from most fields because even when you win in the lower cats, you still lose money. So what's the point? (An excellent point, Karen.)
 

There's another economical aspect to consider as well. The entire bike racing economy is based on Events, and the Event Business is driven by Sponsorship. In my real life I'm in the Event Business. I know of what I speak.

When in need of guidance, seek out oracles. In many cases it's Google. It others it's that guy in the cube by the server room with 3 laptops on his desk. In the case of Event Sponsorship, the oracle is NASCAR. Nobody understands sponsorship like that organization, and no sponsors get more for their money than NASCAR sponsors. There are a dozen reasons for this - not the least of which is that getting a foot in the door of NASCAR stills sets sponsors back 7 digits or more. If you have to pony up that kind of coin for some media, you're going to get exceptionally smart on how to make the most of it. And that's the great irony of the Event business - the more you're able to charge for sponsorship, the more work sponsors must put into it themselves, and the more sponsors rely on themselves - not the event - to optimize their investment.

Before I tie this back to bike racing, and specifically, Mid-Atlantic bike racing. let me give you an example. Home Depot. Pull into a parking lot of a big orange Home Depot and walk towards the door. What's the first thing you see? A row of orange shopping carts shaped like the #20 Car, festooned with decals and logos. And they're parked right next to a big soda machine similarly adorned with a life size picture of Tony Stewart in his racing suit. Inside you can buy toy pit crew tools for kids with the Home Depot Racing logo, officially licensed NASCAR paint in Home Depot racing colors, and tins of chocolate candy at the register shaped like the #20 car. Home Depot Racing even has its own website promoting the store's promotion of the sport.

What Home Depot is doing with its NASCAR sponsorship is not simply Appropriating Media - they're Creating Media. That's the secret to optimizing any investment in the Events business - wrapping it around as much media as possible. Companies like Home Depot have had to get exceptionally creative  with media in order to generate a return on the sizable investment they make in NASCAR. Without the media they create in their stores and online, they very likely wouldn't get a return on their NASCAR investment. But they easily double their return by creating media that ties into the event itself, and carries the goodwill they generate among NASCAR fans back into their stores, where Home Depot most needs it to be.

The model works because Home Depot, and other NASCAR sponsors, extend their perceived support of an enthusiast's pursuit outside of the sporting arena, and into the personal lives of the audience they're trying to engender goodwill with. And the model works for NASCAR because the entire burden of sponsorship ROI isn't placed on their races. Sponsors work harder, but the return is more than justified.

Theoretically, bike racing could work the same way. But it's caught in a vicious circle right now. The cost of sponsoring a bike race or a club is pitifully low. With a few exceptions, I could approach almost any race promoter in the region today and offer a sum no more than the value of the average racer's bicycle, and have a reasonably good chance of landing myself a premiere sponsor's billing. Because it costs so little, what incentive do I have to put in several times as much value in additional resources (person-hours, swag to distribute, my own media, etc) to get the most out of that investment? (That's why online ads are so crappy, by the way. If you spent $.05 per 1000 impressions, I'd be very surprised if you bothered to come up with something more compelling than Punch the Monkey.) But once the sponsorship cost goes up, the sponsor's commitment to their investment goes up also. To wit.

Yet the cost of sponsorship can't go up until the value of the sponsorship increases. And most bike races typically don't create enough "media" to justify sizable investments of sponsor cash or resources.

But what of the bike racing related Media that exists outside of the races? Some sponsors have tried the Home Depot model and created their own. Cannondale has blogs of their own and Clif Bar has recently launched the 2 Mile Challenge. Both are designed to extend the sponsors' presence beyond the races and into the personal lives of their audience. But they won't work alone - they're effective only in conjunction with a solid presence supporting the activity their target audience is engaged in. In this case, it's bike racing.

Not every sponsor can do this, however. And most that I've seen end up failing. Still, the objective should remain: wrap event sponsorship around as much media as possible, and extend the sponsorship beyond the event and into personal lives.

That's why I launched GamJams.net, and why the GamJams.net Ambassadors is a big part of it. There's not enough exposure at that crit out by the airport to justify a major sponsor to get involved. But we as a racing community generate and consume GIGABYTES of media around that dinky little crit, and the other 30 just like it that run all season long. Since the GamJams.net Ambassadors launched only a couple of weeks ago, they are collectively generating over 2000 page views PER DAY. In December, when most people aren't racing, and a whole heck of a lot are barely riding. By May they'll be tracking at 250,000 page views per month. And almost all of that is from Maryland, DC, Virginia and Delaware. About 90% so far.

So collectively, these dinky crits, and bucolic time trials, and standing group rides, and even lonely sessions on the trainer in the garage, ARE media. And they're media that reach people in their personal lives, not just on a Saturday morning out in an industrial park. And as a media vehicle, it doesn't exist without the races, however small.

On the issue then of Parity in Pay at races, part of the answer lies in sponsorship support. If the Media (like the Ambassadors) attached to races becomes valuable, the races themselves become more valuable, and should, theoretically, bring in more sponsorship support.  And that support is not always unqualfied.

I've been talking about sponsors as if they are faceless entities, corporations governed expressly by sheer economics and data. But they're not. They're people, each of whom has business objectives as well as personal objectives. And while it's true that most major cycling companies are relying on women's cycling for a cut of their profits, it's more significant to note that within these companies there is an individual whose career and livelihood depends on the growth of women's cycling and how much of that market he/she is able to capture. So any talk about Pay for Parity has to include some recognition of the role of sponsors; and every mention of Sponsors must take into account that there are people in this industry whose objectives are, or could be, aligned.

Which is to say that Sponsors - particularly these brand and product managers whose vocation it is to sell more cycling-related products to women - have an enormous opportunity to get in front of the Pay for Parity Parade, with qualified investments in the events themselves, as well as support of the Extra-event Media that amplifies the work they're doing on race day, and extends their investment from the course, into the home, and ultimately to the register at the LBS.

Can I go ride now?