Today at Grantland, Michael Kruse examines how those wild and wacky uniforms have helped turn the University of Oregon into a national college football power.
. . . the head of a think tank and a visiting scholar at Berkeley’s Center for Research on Social Change gave a wonky talk at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. “We are headed,” Michael H. Goldhaber said, “into what I call the attention economy.”
Economics is the study of the allocation of resources that are scarce. These days, more and more, information isn’t scarce. Stuff isn’t scarce. What’s scarce is attention. The companies that win in an attention economy are those that win the eyeballs of people who have too much to look at. Too many ads. Too many screens in too many places. Too many games on too many channels on too many days of the week.
“This new economy,” Goldhaber said in Cambridge in January 1997, “is based on endless originality.
“If you have enough attention,” he added, “you can get anything you want.”
The uniforms got the attention of talented high school football players from across the nation. That’s where the story begins and ends, but there are other things to consider along the way. These are relative to beers that are different; weird, wacky, extreme if you like, but maybe only as different a pumpkin beers.
At times this might be a little unsettling.
“If attention is now at the center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style,” UCLA professor Richard Lanham wrote in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. “It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance trade places.
“Push style to the extreme,” Lanham wrote, “and it becomes substance.”
I can’t decide if this sounds like an endorsement for extreme beer or an Onion headline.
I think there are cases when gimmicks are employed just for attention, but it’s impossible to think all extreme beers are brewed just to garner attention. Many of those beers can be pretty damn good.
My only problem is when people have to announce how weird they are in order to get attention. You know, like people who proclaim themselves crazy or breweries who tout the extremes they achieve with their beers. If it’s weird, we’ll figure it out on our own.
This is one of the excuses given by British breweries for lewd pumpclips and punning beer names. The theory is that it helps them stand out at “point of sale”. I’m not convinced. The odd pint sold on novelty value doesn’t create converts, does it? (Then again, the cult of Brewdog might suggest otherwise, for now at least.)
I’d guess Brewdog could be used as an example of a company benefiting from the “attention economy.” For the record, I can list scores of beers that were boundary breaking and are also beers of substance. I think there is a difference between style becoming substance and coexisting with substance.
BrewDog is the easy target. However, they make a quality beer. It’s too bad all their notoriety comes from gimmicks and not their beer.
This raises an extremely interesting question about the purpose of specialty beers–“attention beers”–in the current craft market. I am donning the thinking cap now.
FWIW, on that Oregon thing, I don’t think the uniforms have much to do with it. They began winning when Phil Knight started dumping money into the program and bought the most sophisticated practice arena and locker room in the country and helped finance top-notch coaching talent. The Ducks have been a good football team since 1994–or exactly the entire life of the current high school player. Winning gets you on TV, and TV gets you in the minds of recruits. These factors help recruiting far more than silly uniforms–which have only been around about five years.
Right, because Oregon never had silly uniforms before five years ago. 😉
Those were the good ol days, Zac! So beautiful…
Another way to look at it: gimmicks and extreme beer (plus the Brewer’s Association corrupt re-definition of their terms) have brought microbrewed beer up to about five percent market share after 20 years (or is it longer?).
In most industries, I suspect, five percent after 20 years of trying would be considered a failure.