It seems the US Postal Service has had enough of the wonderful publicity Lance has brought them … After this year, the team will have to shop around for a new sponsor. I always figured they’d drop sponsorship once the publicity wasn’t so good, but I never thought they’d do it while he’s still going strong. Oh well.
Since calling them anything other than “the Posties” just isn’t right, I would like to suggest the following as a possible new sponsor:
Anyone else?
I could never figure out why the Post Office needed to advertise in the first place.
Haj
Because people are using the post office less and less. Sure, they still have a monopoly on first class letters and junk mail, but that doesn’t help them much. They want to be competitive on higher-margin services like parcels and overnight mail, but UPS and FedEx have eaten their lunch on both…
Mr. Armstrong is most well-known for his Tour de France wins.
Not many americans watch Tour de France, compared to other sports.
Cycling is huge in Europe.
So, why was USPS advertising for French people in the first place? ?
I think they let Armstrong go because they finally figured out they
had the wrong audience…
Meh. I always thought the USPS had two main advertising campaigns:
[ul]
[li]You can’t compete with us or you’ll go to jail. This works when someone gets miffed over a stamp price hike.[/li][li]UPS is the Devil! This works about as well as you think it would.[/li][/ul]
On one hand, I’m glad I can send mail around the world for what… 45 cents? On the other, I wonder why they need to be a monopoly and why they need to give reduced rates to junk mailers. I think a lot of their problems would be over, financially, if they instituted a surcharge on all advertising they had to carry.
Of course, what’s their next campaign? “What is the color of shit? BROWN!”
Junk mailers get reduced rates because they presort their mail. It’s a much higher margin “product” for the post office and, in fact, subsidises the cost of mail for the rest of us.
Sure the post office should advertise about how their package shipping is supposedly better than UPS. That brings them more business. How does sponsoring a cycling team bring them more business? I am sure that their marketing people realized that they were losing money on the deal.
That all being said, I love Lance and hope they find a new sponsor very soon.
Haj
Let’s see, for a mere $8m they got their name and logo prominently on an athlete that is a verifiable star, to the extent that he’s in Nike commercials. A man that has been Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year, and who has been nominated for that honor multiple times. A man that appears in commercials paid for by Saturn, Nike, Glaxo-SmithKlien, and financial institutions, each time in his “official” clothes with the USPS logo. A man that has appeared at the White House, on Letterman, and on the Today show, for the last five years, in well-covered events, each time presenting a USPS-logo’ed jersey to the host. A man that has his own, very large, US racing series. This year, his appearance at the Tour of Georgia (the state, not the Former Soviet Republic) turned a small event watched only by locals and cycling fans into a race attended by literally hundreds of thousands garnering nationwide coverage.
No, I don’t see any benefit at all to the USPS sponsoring Tailwind Sports. They weren’t getting any good press out of it in the US, were they? Why bother? :rolleyes:
Advertising aside, Lance is going to win it this summer. And not only is he going to win it, but its going be like the early Lance, with the leads well before race end.
People seem to think that it was bizarre that USPS wanted to advertise in Europe (for whom the Tour of France is only one of three important grand tours, albeit the most prestigious of the three).
Well, for some time now the USPS has been most interested in promoting its Global Express Guaranteed service, especially in Europe. Sponsoring a team in one of Europe’s most popular sporting events was a terrific way to do just that.
Do you understand how marketing works?
Sponsoring a successful cycling team with such a heroic and well-known leader as Lance Armstrong has been a spectacularly efficient way for the USPS to increase its exposure worldwide.
Don’t forget that the USPS is not just about domestic mail…
You’ve proven exactly squat. Please tell me how this gets people to ship more packages via the USPS rather than UPS. While you’re at it, show how it generates more profits that it costs them to pay for the sponsorship. Exposure does not necessarily equate to a successful maketing campaign.
There are MBAs get paid for this stuff. They must have done an internal study to show that this isn’t paying off for them or used to and isn’t any more. The USPS is not a charity.
Haj
I think Knorf said it very well. There is rarely any direct way to measure the value that “good will” or “exposure” brings to a company. Most advertising professionals will tell you that exposure is (at least one measure of) a successful marketing campaign.
Companies of all sorts struggle with this every day. How much does sponsoring the Nextel Cup bring Nextel? Even if you simplistically look at the delta between sales in 2002 and 2004, you aren’t looking at the increase caused by the sponsorship agreement. As I said, the USPS got huge amounts of reflected public good will for peanuts.
Finally, there wasn’t any “internal study to show that this isn’t paying off for them.” It was pressure placed by PostalWatch and Congress through the OIG that lead to terminating this contract. They had a pre-conceived notion, and in the end won the day.
Man, that picture of Lance in the linked article, it looks like his nuts are in a vice!
“But I’ll always regret that Rwandan thing.”-- Bill Clinton
Newsflash: The United States Postal Service has recently withdrawn its sponsorship of Cyclist Lance Armstong. “Being associated with speed and reliability is simply not what the USPS is about,” a spokesman said. Rumor has it that the USPS is currently looking into sponsoring a small herd of amnesiac turtles.
Heeheehee. 
Ouch, looks like he’s being tortured!
Random assertion for all of y’all:
Advertising is completely worthless for any established brand that is not changing its product line-up, or being attacked by a competitor…
Of course, this is just personal observation. My mom ran a business for a number of years, and word of mouth worked just fine. The only time she advertised, she apparently got nothing out of it.
Ah, now that explains a lot. Remember, the USPS started its sponsorship of Lance when no one else believed in him and were certain he was doomed to languish in obscurity. Since the USPS was looking for an inconsistent turtle of a rider to project their proper image, they selected someone who they thought was going to be just that … But as soon as they figured out that Lance was a rider of speed and reliability, they dropped him as fast as they could! It only took them, what, 6 years to figure it out? That’s pretty fast for a government agency …
Well, in that pic he is racing a time trial, after all! It’s from last year’s Tour, Stage 19 - Saturday, July 26: Pornic - Nantes, TT, 49 km. Lance won that TT; he is something of a time trial specialist.
Notice the road rash on his arm. He had just come through a brutal week in the Pyrenees, particularly Stage 15 which ended at the summit to Luz-Ardiden. Lance went down after snagging a spectactor’s bag, but still managed to win the stage.
Yes, I’m a bicycle racing freak…
Did you all catch the recent Tour of Georgia? Lance won a sprint, Stage 3, of all things (he rarely contests sprints), and took the GC title as well as one additional TT stage. It was a terrific week of racing, and so great to see a legitimately world-class road racing tour in the U.S. again.