Joey,
I agree with you 100% as I've expressed similar sentiments in other postings.
There are millions of people around the world who like to play pool that we are not tapping into. With better marketing and publicity, there's no reason why we can't have thousands of people watching these video streams, insteads of just hundreds.
For the upcoming U.S. Open tournament, has anyone from CSI contacted the local and national newspapers and TV stations to let them know about it? Has the press been invited to send a reporter/photographer/tv crew? Will anyone be providing tournament updates to the media before, during and after the tournament? Have flyers been distributed to the local pool rooms?
Without better marketing and publicity, pool isn't going anywhere.
Allen
The answer to most of your questions (at some point in time) is yes. But this is Las Vegas. There is one gigantic event after another here all year long. One week its the SHOT Show, one weeks its CES, one week its NAB, one week its pool players, one week its dart players, for a month its rodeo and on and on. Local media could give a shit less whats going on in strip casino ball room.
This year Mark paid to run a 30 second ad for three weeks prior to the nationals on cable channels through Cox. It wasn't cheap but he wanted to see what effect if any it would have on spectator turn out and try to get some new traffic for vendors.
Its always easy to say what needs to be done until its time to either find the time to do it or the money to pay for it. Of course there is always more that can done. The question is when you are dealing with finite time and resources what do you NOT do or NOT pay for in order to do something new ?
The people at the CSI office talk about this kind of thing literally every day. It always comes down to the EXACT same thing:
1. WHO has the time, skill and/or knowledge to do it ?
2. What does it COST? Where do we find the money? What do you scrap from the budget in order to pay for it?
The things you talk about are all great ideas. The thing is there is only so much time and money to go around and we run out of both long before we run out of good ideas to spend them on.
Just to give you few examples of where those resources have gone:
- Daily video updates on the general happenings at the event put together by Samm Diep and Holly.
- A professionally created 30 second spot that is running in the Las vegas market on multiple cable tv channels for weeks leading up to the event.
- The live feed of the pro event throughout the hotel and on the tv's in all the rooms
- The above feed in two different 9 foot by 16 foot projection screens. One n the pro arena across from the skyboxes and one in the amateur arena.
-Text updates via your phone for amateur players to let you know when and where your next match is scheduled
- The CTS tournament system that allows anyone, anywhere in the world to track any event at the nationals and see the charts for each one updated at the end of each round. You can also type in the name of the person you are looking for see all of their performances in all current and past events that they played in that used the CTS system. This is a HUGE deal and no one else has anything like it. It has cost a lot of time and money to get right and IMO could be a game changing technology.
There are more and you are right there is always more that can done. I just hope people remember that while that is the case those things that seem easy sometimes are not.