Sports or Show Business?

I tuned in to NBC-TV’s coverage of the Sochi Olympics Opening Ceremony last week, knowing that I would watch very little of any of the actual two weeks of competition.

*By the way: Am I the only one who found it just a tad ironic that the one malfunctioning snowflake that refused to open was the one representing Asia – the home continent to about three-quarters of the host country?

But I digress…

Why am I not planning to watch the Olympics?

Because I’m a sports fan.

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy a variety of mildly-athletic activities like shooting darts, flying kites and playing shuffleboard. But I’m under no delusion that any of them are “sports.” And neither, of course, is curling.

I also like watching daredevil stunts from time to time, but that doesn’t make any one of the seemingly-endless array of skateboarding-on-ice type of Olympic events actual “sports” either.

I remember tuning in to “ABC’s Wide World Of Sports” every Saturday afternoon as a child, just to be entertained by an hour-and-a-half of often-strange endeavors that vaguely resembled real sports. That’s the only place Americans were ever exposed to obscure “sports” like barrel-jumping, cliff-diving and curling. Now, thanks to non-stop, multi-channel television coverage, millions of Americans will subject themselves to hours upon hours of similar pseudo-sports for these two weeks – only to almost-totally forget about them until 2018 rolls around.

And speaking of Wide World Of Sports…

I may be dating myself here, but I remember the most sensational part of the iconic opening video montage, where host Jim McKay would talk about “the agony of defeat” while we watched a black-and-white video replay of an incredible wipeout by a ski jumper wildly flailing off the side of the take-off ramp.

I tuned in to one evening of NBC’s Winter Olympics coverage last week while in a hotel room on a business/pleasure trip to San Diego, and caught a little bit of this year’s ski jumping competition. I noticed a few interesting things:

• All of the competitors were from countries I care little about, and whose names I could barely pronounce – let alone remember 3 minutes after the event ended.
• Just about every single jump looked exactly the same in every way, except for extremely minor differences in the positioning of one hand or wrist – visible to the non-expert (in other words, 99.99999% of television viewers) only on the super-slow-motion replay.
• An “agony of defeat”-type wipeout is no longer even possible, because (believe it or not – see photo below) the ramp itself actually has tracks on it, so that every skier’s skis can’t possibly do anything but stay precisely and perfectly on course the entire way down.

Are you kidding me?

What’s next? Will golf courses install tubes running from every tee right onto the green? Oh wait – They already have holes like that on miniature golf courses all over the world, where everyone’s putt goes into a big house/barn/whatever and comes out of a chute on the other side, pointed right at the hole.

Which begs the question: When will Miniature Golf become an Olympic sport?

That same night last week, NBC also televised some of the performance art known as “figure skating” or “ice dancing” or whatever.

Commentator Scott Hamilton actually said this at one point:

“You can’t forget – figure skating really is a sport of show-offs.”

You’re right, Scott. We just can’t seem to forget that.

Hamilton also said of one competitor (a beautiful, blonde, teenage girl in a sparkly mini-dress) whose collar came a little undone during all of her spinning gyrations, “The only bad thing about her performance was a costume malfunction.”

Yes, you heard that correctly. In every real sport, the players wear “uniforms.” But in these fake-ice-sports, women put on fancy dresses and full makeup, and the men prance around in tuxedos and clown-like get-ups (like the gold medal winner at right).

The National Football League penalizes its players for all kinds of behavior that these ice dancers are rewarded for, like showboating, playing to the crowd and dancing. Uniform/Equipment Violations are assessed, including fines of up to $100,000, on players who put on attention-getting elements like these non-regulation shoes one player had the audacity to wear (below).

Which is why, I guess, you’ll never see football make it to become an official Winter Olympics sport.

So…

What does all of this have to do with growing your business?

In this day and age more than ever before, you need to understand that no matter what product or service you sell, you are actually in the entertainment business.

NBC is well-aware of this fact. It knows that its two weeks of Olympics coverage is really all about entertainment – and not nearly at all about “sports.” Pay attention to how it structures its nightly primetime shows: heaping major attention on Americans – especially those who perform in popular events for American television viewers and/or those who have attractive appearances and/or personalities.

The NBC announcers are rarely critical of anyone or anything, inviting the viewer to feel sympathetic towards performers who make mistakes. For example, you’ll hear a lot of “Oh! She landed just a little bit off, causing her to totally wipe out. What a shame!” and very little of anything like, “This is his worst performance in years. His head really isn’t in the game today.”

NBC programming executives are also well-aware that The National Hockey League has never been able to sustain much of a national television audience in the U.S., yet “Dancing With The Stars” has been one of the biggest hits on television for 17 straight seasons.

That’s exactly why you won’t see a lot of Olympic hockey coverage during primetime hours over these two weeks, but you will see night after night of flamboyant figure skating, featuring attractive, young, perfectly-groomed performers skating to pleasing music and attired in sparkly, fun costumes.

Here are just a few of the ways you can start to inject “the entertainment factor” into your business…

• Think of yourself as “putting on a show” for your prospects and customers in everything you do, including your website, newsletter, signage, uniforms and “sales choreography.”
• Create fun, entertaining videos to explain what you do and why you’re different from others in your industry.
• Tell interesting stories about yourself, your business and your customers. This is one of the main ways NBC gets you to care about “athletes” and “sports” that you would otherwise have zero interest in. (“He was born in a small town in the middle of nowhere… He started skateboarding everywhere when he was 2… He broke his leg three years ago, then worked harder than ever to come back… Here’s his Mom, who has attended every one of his competitions his whole life, and his Down Syndrome brother, who he is dedicating this Olympics to…”)
• Engage with your prospects and customers on social media, making sure to write interesting and provocative posts and comments.

How many other ways can or do you “Olympicize” your business?