Competition
It’s what makes for innovation and success.
Whatever you are competing in, whether a game of Wordle, sports, chess, track, or
schooling, you are playing to win and using your mind to create a better result.
You all have stories to tell…here are a few of mine:
When the Dodgers’ radio rights came up for renewal, I was invited to pitch for it with KLAC (we had the Lakers) against KFI and the incumbent KABC. In meeting with Peter O’Malley and his staff, I knew we couldn’t offer enough money to compete with billion-dollar companies, so I cleared a plan with ownership and offered something that neither one could compete with…We offered 50% (49.9%) ownership of KLAC and a change in format to all-sports radio. Your value as half-owner of KLAC is $20 million. It blew their minds, and if it wasn’t for the fact that they needed the cash, O’Malley told me we would have won. Ironically, 25 years later, new Dodger ownership made a similar deal with KLAC, which is now All Sports and in partnership with the Dodgers.
In another competition, some years later, I started a marketing/advertising company, Travel Related Marketing, specializing in promoting travel destinations on Television and Cable TV.
How can we compete against the biggest Ad Agencies in the country? Since most Ad Agencies rely on production to make big dollars, I came up with producing 5 ninety-second travel vignettes using a CBS TV reporter (Lonnie Lardner). They were to be aired 10 times on the TV News (non-Prime) ten times. We could produce these for around $25,000, whereas an Ad Agency would charge $500,000 and much more. Secondly, we ate the cost, and the clients got this added value plus trip giveaways for no added cost. No one could compete with us because they couldn’t do free production. This gave us a competitive edge as each campaign was valued at 3 to 1. This allowed us to get major accounts like Hawaii, London, Hong Kong, Montreal, Quebec, Niagara Falls, Arizona, Utah, and the City of Los Angeles, to name a few.
Competition forces you to innovate in the same sense as “Necessity is the Mother of Invention“.
