Speaking of Losing: NASCAR

Did you pay any attention to the NASCAR trial a week ago? Probably not, because it does not impact 994 out of 1,000 of you. But for the six that did pay attention, watching The Teardown on DirtyMo Media (click here), it was as riveting as "content" can get. Michael Jordon suing NASCAR, claiming they are a monopoly, squeezing their own racing teams out of money while generating nine figures of revenue for themselves?

Oh my God, the testimony. The text messages. The emails from team owners to NASCAR. The email from Bass Pro Shops to NASCAR. The Judge begging the parties to settle because he knows that if Michael Jordon wins, it means NASCAR is a monopoly that will be broken up and it will cease to exist as it exists today ... and he knows if Michael Jordon loses, it's the end of his teams, they're done.

I mean, NASCAR thought a hokey twelve-car made-for-tv summer racing series was their "competition". They can't even see that FloRacing is their competition ... Flo essentially has their own sprint car series, they just bought their own late model series, they are aggregating regional series and dirt tracks. On a Saturday night in July, a Flo subscriber can watch a dozen or two dozen main events across the country, each race taking about a half-hour of time. NASCAR Executives have to be asleep at the wheel to not see the threat.

Eventually the testimony was so overwhelmingly against NASCAR that NASCAR elected to settle. The terms of the settlement mean that ALL NASCAR racing teams benefit ... would you do that if you went out on a limb even though the teams you compete against were too cowardly to put their necks out there? Would your terms of settlement help teams that wouldn't help you? That's what Michael Jordon did. He helped all the racing teams with his settlement terms.

In the late stages of a business model, those within the business model become so disconnected from modern realities that they miss the "easy things". I see this in my world ... catalog boutique agencies and #papertarians who are so utterly disconnected from modern commerce that they actually believe Gen-Z loves paper. They'll say absurd things like "74% of marketers believe print has the highest ROI of any marketing discipline."  Really? If that was true, what would stop marketers from taking advantage of the highest ROI of any marketing discipline? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They'd employ the discipline immediately.

Of course, they don't have a Judge helping them understand their shortcomings, they're instead subject to the raw realities of capitalism. Saks comes to mind ... suing Nordstrom because a Chief Merchant is leaving to go to Nordstrom. How utterly clueless do you have to be to believe THAT is your problem? You're nearly bankrupt and that's where you'll spend your remaining $$$ ... on lawyers?

As you get older, this stuff gets exhausting. You've seen the patterns repeat for four decades. You realize there isn't anything that can be done to stop the patterns. You simply hope your readers aren't Lemonheads.