EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING? Kinda, sorta...

Last Friday, I went online and bought tickets for a couple of Red Sox games. Tickets for the game I was most interested in - the Patriots' Day game - were going on sale at 10 a.m. And at 10 a.m., I was ready to pounce. But so was everyone else in Red Sox Nation, so I had to wait a bit.

Years ago, the Red Sox used to call this The Virtual Waiting Room. And The Virtual Waiting Room was the ante-room to hell.

After one particularly hellish wait, I did a Pink Slip screed about the experience. This was in December 2006, a couple of years after the Red Sox had won their first modern-time World Series. They were coming off a not-so-great-season (they finished 3rd in the AL East) but were still flying high off of the 2004 feel-good - make that great - season. They were still everyone's darlings (at least in all of New England if you subtract out the NY Yankees part of Connecticut). And it was really tough to get tickets. (Maybe people were prescient and figured 2007 was going to be another banner - not to mention trophy - year.)

Anyway, The Virtual Waiting Room was just terrible, and I didn't hold back. Among other things I had to say:

Just how long have I been with the Red Sox? A lot longer than [then Red Sox GM] Theo Epstein's been alive. And long enough to not only remember when Ted Williams' head was attached to his body, but to have seen him hit a home-run in his last season. (July 1960, Red Sox beat the Indian 6-4. We sat in the bleachers. You could look it up - the score, not whether or not we sat in the bleachers. Of course we did.) And as an old-timer, I wish that getting a ticket weren't the equivalent of gearing up for the Oklahoma Land Rush or the Running of the Bulls. Okay, in the Virtual Waiting Room you don't get trampled, but that's about the only positive I can think of about it.

Well, things have gotten better (ordering tickets) - and worse (the team, at least last year's edition). The Red Sox are still pretty popular, and taking yourself out to the ballgame at Fenway Park is still fun, but it's no longer quite as difficult to get tickets. They've won a few more World Series - 2013, 2018 - and we've gotten a bit jaded.

When you enter the ticket-buying area, here's what pops up:

EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING

Sit back. Relax. And stay right here for your chance to start your next great experience. We’ll do the work for you. In an effort to get tickets into your hands, the system selects true experience seekers like yourself at random to enter the site and purchase tickets.

IMPORTANT: No need to refresh. No need to go back. No need for multiple browsers.

You know, sometimes I'm embarassed to have had a career in marketing. Oh, I was in business-to-business (B2B0 technology, or techie-to-techie (T2T) which I'm pretty sure I coined. (And which no one other than I ever used.) So I didn't have to fluff things up about the overall "experience." I was a marketer in the great era of The Solution, when everything was a solution to something and the marketing was supposed to focus on benefits. The trouble with this approach is that pretty much every tech business application touts the same benefits: make money, save time, save money... You could look at websites and come away not knowing whether their appliction was used for accounting. Or customer service. Or logistics.

I always resisted this approach. While business people did want to know about the benefits (augmented with some faux return on investment analysis that, fortunately, no one ever looked back on once they'd actually used your product) so that they could sell interenally to get the beancounters to sign off on it, someone, somewhere in an organization - especially on the tech side - was going to know just what the application was for. As my friend V - one of the smartest and savviest marketing people I've ever known - was famous for saying, "There's always someone who's going to ask 'but what do it do?'" Indeed.

And everytime I cited a benefit, I insisted on coupling it with a point on how, exactly, the product helped achieve that benefit. Just wanted to keep things honest.

Anyway, I marketed, hmmmm, solutions, not experiences. (As an aside, at one company, we were pitched by a marketing consultant who was going to help us rebrand our product suite. Their suggestion: The Final Solution. I had to point out that this tagline was already taken...)

But now, it's all about the experience.

And when it comes to going to a ball game, I guess I am a true experience seeker.

But how does the system know that I'm a true experience seeker, and not someone who doesn't really give a hoot about baseball. Oh, I guess these folks are experience seekers in their own right, but I wish there were a way that they could divvy experience seekers up into a couple of groups - true experience seekers and whatevers - and pick more and more rapidly from the true believers group.

As it turns out, it was plenty easy to get tickets for a couple of games. I got great seats for the Patriots' Day Game - much my favorite game of the year, even though, in order to get to and from Fenway Park, you have to claw your way through crowds watching the Marathon, as the route goes near the park. Last year, getting home was a nightmare. We had to walk way far out of our way, as all the streets anywhere near the finish line were blocked off. It was cold and rainy, too. Plus the Red Sox, giving us a definite foreshadowing of how rotten the season was going to be, stunk up the place.

But back to 2006, before I knew the baseball fans were experience seekers, the Red Sox actually responded to my screed.

I got an email from the then VP of Marketing for the Red Sox Charles Steinberg, and in the thread, I could see that Larry Lucchino (then President and CC) had been copied and responded via Blackberry (remember when Blackberry was a solution? or was it an experience???).

Here's Larry:

Get back to her please and tell her we are determined to make. It better

And here's Charles:

...we must understand the path of the experience that this writer has published for the world to read....

For the world to read. (I like that...) And there was that early use of the word experience.

The upshot was that I got to work directly with someone in marketing to buy tickets for a few games without enduring time in the Virtual Waiting Room. The person I worked with turned out to the son of someone I went to high school with, of all things.

Even though the Red Sox sucked last year, and are starting out a bit rocky this year - they had to fire Alex Cora, their manager, who has been caught up in a sign-stealing scandal - I'm looking forward to being a true experience seeker a couple of times at Fenway.

As for Larry and Charles, they're now emeriti with the Boston Red Sox, but are running the Red Sox primo minor league team, which next year is moving from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Worcester, Massachusetts. Where they will operate as the Woo Sox. 

I will be doing some true experience seeking there, for sure.