Matt Pensinger

Interested in brands, marketing, experiences, people and sports. Managing Director at Jack Morton Worldwide in Chicago. Views are my own.

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

A brand = the experience it delivers. Really interesting @HarvardHBS piece on the notion of a brand "system" and the reciprocal relationship brands have with consumers: https://t.co/2iUdob8Dy3

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

@Orioles Baltimore Seafood House closes tonight in the third inning?? Not a great fan experience for visiting Camden Yards for the first time. Go Cubs!

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

BART spent $90 million on new fare gates. They're recovering about $10 million a year in fares.

That's a 9-year payback on paper. The actual return hit in six months.

Embarcadero station went from 112 hours of corrective maintenance in the six months before installation to 2 hours after. Daly City saved 109. Balboa Park saved 75. Across the system, 961 hours of cleanup work disappeared. Corrective maintenance is the term BART uses for graffiti, heavy soiling, vandalism, the damage that needs a crew not a janitor. At several stations it dropped to zero.

Crime fell 41% year over year. Riders who reported seeing fare evasion on their trip dropped from 22% to 10%. Citations issued by BART police went from 2,200 in January to under 1,000 in July, because there was nothing to cite.

The gates were a filtering project disguised as a revenue project.

Old BART gates were waist-high orange fins designed in the 1970s. You could hop them in under a second. That made the station effectively a public space, and the rider mix reflected that. The new gates are 72 inches of polycarbonate with 3D sensors that detect tailgating. You either pay or you don't enter. Once you don't enter, you also don't smoke on the platform, sleep in the elevator, or harass other riders.

BART tried hiring more police for years. Blitz operations at high-traffic stations. Increased patrols. Dedicated transit cops. None of it moved the numbers the way six feet of polycarbonate did.

The $10 million in recovered fares is the smallest line in the return. Fare revenue used to cover 70% of BART operations. After the pandemic it collapsed to 22%. The gates won't fix that gap directly. They fix the precondition for fixing it: a system that office workers, families, and tourists are willing to use again. Ridership growth at stations with new gates outpaced ungated ones before the rollout finished.

A $400 million annual deficit is heading to voters in November as a sales tax measure. Voters don't approve sales taxes for transit agencies they don't feel safe in. The $90 million on gates is buying BART the right to ask the public for more money.

That's the real return on six feet of polycarbonate.

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

@wingstop Are you having a problem with your online ordering system? The website keeps timing out on both desktop and mobile while I'm trying to place an order

[Barstool Illini @BarstoolILL]

yup we are cursed

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

@PDNAChicago @GovPritzker Do you need to keep making political posts from your PDNA account? How about getting a personal account on X for such views?

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

@DPiper247 Are you going to cover any of the heavt rumors about the offensive coaching, namely Tyler Underwood, contributing to this situation? Lots of smoke out there about his negative impact. Is it true?

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

@WaddleandSilvy What is this Eddie George story about??

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

@WaddleandSilvy Great defensive discipline on last play on Flus' scheme. Can't wait to see what lame answer he gives about that plan. #FireFlus

[Darren Rovell @darrenrovell]

Illinois with the helmets of the year.

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

@obvious_shirts When is the Tory Taylor line coming out?!

[CWBChicago @CWBChicago]

ICYMI:

A woman was found shot to death Saturday morning in an alley previously served by ShotSpotter.

The local alderman was a vocal supporter of the gunfire detection system.

https://t.co/PrWzy0aDoe

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

@DavidHaugh Coaching. Period.

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

@WaddleandSilvy Lots to talk about in this game, but the bad clock and game management by Flus is absolutely unacceptable #Bears

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

So painfully true

[Nick Friedell @NickFriedell]

I feel like I’ve watched that exact same Bears game about 1,000 times in my life.

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

We've all been at this for a while, shouldn't we be better at this by now? New study from @4As and @ANAmarketers details that only 5% of clients and 10% of agencies have an established corporate definition of value for client-agency relationships https://t.co/sb2PrEPV1M

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

Planned media spend surges up to 27.9% of budgets, while agency fees drop to 22% - their lowest % since pre-pandemic.

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

Average marketing budgets have dropped to a post-pandemic low of 7.7% of revenue per @Gartner_inc CMO survey. And, 64% of CMOs say they lack the budget to execute their 2024 plan. Implications for agencies? https://t.co/hxTl3EKSOJ

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

Some great perspectives on agency business development from @LBBOnline via leads at @droga5 @PereiraODell and @GALEPartners. Nice wisdom here on having a clear agency POV and maintaining focus: https://t.co/G0M1Uqm7SG

[Matt Pensinger @pensinger]

Interesting @contagious story interviewing former Huge CEO Mat Baxter. His view on the challenges in transforming the agency business model: "Agencies are some of the most traditional and legacy-entrenched businesses on the planet." https://t.co/ILnKCgwIqU

[Nirvana @Nirvana]

Steve Albini.