Spin Is In On Meltwater: $40 Million Is A Bargain! Independent Contractors Are So Yesterday! Tiger Needed Our Thanks!
/The socially distanced chatter around the Global Home’s pizza maker must have been lively today.
Yet despite pretty tepid reactions to having $40 million extra to give to stars based on some kooky algorithm (plus the cost to employ all of the metric services), some fascinating reactions were peddled 24 hours later. And knowing the Tour’s expectations of its media partners or wannabe partners, it sure seemed like folks felt extra compelled to spin and amplify odd details in Eamon Lynch’s reveal of a secret bonus pool for the game’s most engaging players.
(Players who, oddly, generally leave their social media to someone else.)
The most aggressive rebuttal to Lynch’s story was penned by…Eamon Lynch! Some could say it’s odd to write such a strong defense of a secret slush pool less than 24 hours after revealing the scheme with an undercurrent of skepticism. Not all, but some.
Anyway, maybe he revealed the secret fund’s existence because the golf fan will want to root their favorite star home to a secret bonus as determined by a special algorithm of several other algorithms. Lynch defends this as just a fancy way to find out who the cool kids are everyone wants to hang with. His words not mine:
For all its charitable endeavors, the PGA Tour is a business and businesses everywhere incentivize those individuals deemed to deliver value. That value isn’t always easy to define and often harder to quantify. Much of the head-scratching about the Impact Fund centers on the metrics used to determine a player’s impact, a waggish assortment of measurements that achieve what any child in a schoolyard can do with the point of a finger: identify the cool kids people want to hang with.
Given the scale of the Tour’s new TV rights deal, $40 million is a small sum. There is ample left to boost purses in the minor leagues, underwrite the European Tour and otherwise gild the lily.
Wow, that’s a lot of money to tell us the list most of us could guess! And oddly, the Tour had to lay off 50 low-paid employees of a particular vintage just over seven months ago while rolling this out. That was a really small sum if $40 million is couch change to these folks.
Anyway, this from Lynch is fun:
Whatever criticisms are aimed at the Player Impact Program, it incentivizes players to engage more with fans, media and sponsors. That might be an awkward exercise for those ill-equipped for socialization, but it’s a worthy goal.
The 2019 players who would have received bonuses according to Lynch’s original reporting: Tiger Woods, Brooks Koepka, Rory McIlroy, Phil Mickelson, Rickie Fowler, Justin Rose, Adam Scott, Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson and Justin Thomas.
Let’s just say as a nice way of not suggesting someone else runs their accounts, a lot of people have their passwords. Several of them have publicly made clear they have no use for the same engagement stuff the pool supposedly rewards. We’ve even had high profile resignations from social media in this group when the engagement grew to be too much.
Those are your clubhouse leaders!
At least we have Billy Horschel to tell us all of the above is just nonsense and this was a way to pay Tiger some more money. From Rex Hoggard at GolfChannel.com:
“If we look at over a few years the guys who really drive the Tour, the guys who bring in the money to the PGA Tour, in my opinion, I think we should thank them,” Horschel said. “I look at as we’re thanking them, we’re thanking one guy [Woods] and now multiple guys because of what they’re going to do in the future. We have an amazing TV contract now that is going to be beneficial for all Tour players. If Tour players actually look at this, they’re going to be rewarded in a lot of different ways.”
We’re thanking and placing future bets? And giving TV deal bonus money? Is he saying they’re a non-profit organization is so flush with cash that they have to lose the money somewhere? Huh!
The whole layoff thing kind of messes up the financial fairy tale.
Kyle Porter at CBSSports.com offered seven thoughts defending this as a common sense investment.
The Tour has been (probably unintentionally) taking advantage of the fact that its "franchises" are just individuals who maybe did not think of themselves as revenue-generating entities. However, the power in golf rests not with the PGA Tour but with the Jordan Spieths and Justin Thomases of the world just as it rests with the Lakers, Knicks and Heat in the NBA. The PGL shined a light on that, and now there's a $40 million purse to prove it.
The PGL concept had people praising the Tour’s independent contractor ideal. Yet this no-longer-secret pool will pay people for being famous, with a few conflicts on the side. But that’s the Tour and players business to deal with. The fan should be more saddened by what both the program and the spin job means: the Tour’s vision for growing their product involves marketing morons manufacturing a mirage of meaningless media under the guise of player accounts.
That’s not a worthy goal.
Meanwhile, a man who insists he’s never going to be pool eligible—dream big Billy Horschel!—the hissy-fit thrower himself posted this today:
The “engagement” after the Tweet is superb.
I wonder if the Meltwater Method knows the Jonah Hill throat slash GIF is a negative reply?
Moving along, it seems the big secret reveal did not stop MVPIndex from some Twitter humblebragging: “Our partners, @PGATOUR, are revolutionizing their sport and player compensation based on fan and sponsor engagement. We're excited to announce that MVP's performance ratings will be the social measurement tool for this new Player Impact Program!”
New AND one they didn’t tell the public about.
The company also Tweeted this, captured since the Tour or Golf Channel should issue a take-down notice for lifting copyright video. Heck, it should be deleted merely for “quantifies intangible metrics.”
Lesser known players who are actually the Tour’s authentic social media stars did their thing in reaction to the news, as Coleman Bentley notes here with Twitter evidence.
Gents, good luck getting your intangible humor noticed by the quantifiers.
Finally, Mark Calcaveccia was the rare player willing to go on the record with his views:
