NEWSLETTER
If you’ve ever bought Cubs tickets or signed up on Cubs.com or MLB.com, you probably received yesterday a survey about the proposed video board in left field at Wrigley Field. I just completed mine.
It looks like the Cubs want to have a good sense of what fans are looking for in a JumboTron before they actually implement one. Kudos to the Cubs on that.
Among the video board questions the Cubs ask: should it be exclusively about the game going on there? Promote fan engagement and participation? Other MLB scores? Other Chicago sports scores?
Does content unrelated to the game detract from the game experience? Do replays, stats, etc. from the current game enhance the game experience?
The survey does a good job of cutting, quite quickly, to the meat of the video board issues that fans debate (at least with respect to the in-game experience). Is it going to make things worse? Is it going to be annoying? Is it going to be helpful? Is it going to be fun. Am I still going to feel like I’m at Wrigley Field, which is a special, different place? It doesn’t ask these questions directly, but this is the information the Cubs are clearly looking to gather. If you have five minutes and care about the Wrigley experience, I’d encourage you to respond to the survey if you received it.
The survey also asks folks to rank the kinds of things they want to see on the video board, which will give you the opportunity to shred any kind of “Fan Cam”/”Kiss Cam” stuff, if you are so inclined. For me, that kind of stuff just doesn’t feel very “Wrigley.” Replays? Stats? MLB updates? Cubs player videos? That’s all cool with me.
The Cubs also ask about a long list of potential uses for the scoreboard, the best of which, in addition to the obvious stats and replays, are past game highlights, dugout shots, and minor league updates.
The survey digs into fans’ smartphone usage, presumably to gather data on how the video board might do a good job of supplant folks’ need to look down every five seconds, and then concludes by asking a little more about you as a fan.
It was short and solid. Hopefully they take the responses to heart, and hopefully folks respond thoughtfully.
