Quote(s) of the Week
“If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there.“ -Billy Beane
“The most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘we’ve always done it this way.’“ -Grace Hopper
Kraftism of the Week: Never Out of Position
Back at MIT, I played intramural soccer. (Yes, MIT has sports. Stop laughing.) I was the goalie.
I wasn’t athletic. My reaction time was nothing to write home about. On paper, I was the last guy you’d want between the posts.
But I could calculate an angle.
That was my physics-brain at work. Read the field, watch the attacker’s approach, do the geometry. Keepers call it narrowing the angle. I called it math. Where do I stand so the goal behind me simply... isn’t available? By the time the shot came, there was no math left for the shooter to win. I was somehow never out of position. My teammates counted on it.
I still remember denying a shot from one of the best athletes in my year. (Keep the bar in perspective. Even the biggest jock at MIT got shoved into lockers in high school.) He had the speed. He had the leg. And he still had nowhere to put the ball, because I’d taken the goal away before he ever struck it.
I never got faster. I got positioned. He thought we were playing his game. I was playing a different one - and I made the save.
Applying the Kraftism: Eleven Saves Weren’t Enough
So.
Sunday’s World Cup final. Spain 1, Argentina 0, in extra time. If you watched it, you saw two stories at once. Spain generated twenty shots and controlled nearly every minute. And Emiliano Martínez, Argentina’s keeper, made eleven saves - the most ever in a men’s World Cup final. Stop after stop, each more improbable than the last, until Ferran Torres finally rifled one home in the 106th minute. Even then, Argentina almost stole it at the death - Messi, one of the greatest scorers who ever lived, got his chance in the 117th, and Spain blocked it. It was Argentina’s first shot of the match.
A record-setting keeper. A legend up front. Argentina lost anyway.
Not because they played badly. Because they played the contest Spain wanted - and Spain was better at it.
If you run a web-first premium publisher, that was your game film.
The Best Defense in the Business
You have the storied brand everyone roots for. Your Messi. And you have a revops team playing the Martínez role, and I want to give them their full due. They’ve earned it. Header bidding when the rules changed. Floor strategy when the buyers squeezed. Curation, direct, identity - stop after stop, each more improbable than the last. Publisher revops has spent fifteen years making saves against a relentless attack, and setting records doing it. If you’re on one of those teams: eleven saves in a final is legendary. Be proud.
And the attack keeps coming. Search took the midfield years ago. The walled gardens play up top, with a size advantage you can’t match. Now AI leads the line, and it shoots on every touch. Different jerseys, same shape: possession, pressure, volume. You can defend brilliantly for 120 minutes. Eventually one gets through. Ask Martínez.
There’s No Rulebook
But here’s where the metaphor breaks. And the break is the whole point.
Argentina never had a choice. The laws of the game decide what a World Cup final is about: one ball, one pitch, and whatever Spain’s midfield decides to do with the clock. There’s no version of Sunday where Argentina gets to stop and redefine the contest.
You do. Nobody decides what the publishing contest is about except the people playing it. There’s no league office. No fixture list. The only thing keeping you in a possession battle against Spain is that we’ve always done it this way.
So change what the contest is about.
The Other Positions Your Data Plays
Your audience, your archive, your first-party data - all of it has spent two decades trained for exactly one job: selling ads against it. That’s one contest. The asset plays more positions than that.
License your content and data into the conversation layer - the AI platforms answering your readers’ questions are already an economy, and negotiating your way into it is a different sport than defending CPMs (the blocking dilemma from Kraftisms #19, grown up). Put your record of what actually performs with your audience to work as measurement - the “own your court” move from Kraftisms #42, played on a second field. Take commerce seriously - your data knows what your readers actually buy, and retail media is starving for exactly that signal. And build where no walled garden can intermediate you at all: events, community, the real world.
Four contests where your strengths set the terms. None of them decided at your goalmouth. And buyers can feel the difference - budgets flow toward partners selling something only they have, not toward the best-defended commodity.
I know what you’re thinking, because I’d think it too. You’ve heard “play a different game” before. It was called pivot to video, and plenty of good newsrooms paid for it. But that pivot made you a tenant - new content, built to a platform’s algorithm, on a field the platform owned. These contests make you a supplier. Every one of them starts from the thing only you already own.
What the Saves Are For
And let me be fair to the defense, because the old game pays today’s bills. Audience selling still funds the newsroom, and you can’t walk off the pitch mid-match. That’s what the saves are for. Martínez’s eleven stops didn’t win the final, but they kept Argentina alive for 120 minutes. Your revops team is buying you time. The question is what you build with it. Part of the answer is inside the building: hand the rote work to AI and re-aim the people you free at the new contests - not at more saves. (That’s the handoff from Kraftisms #41 - give away the decisions you can spell out, keep the ones that are you.) And watch the clock. There’s no halftime where you regroup and come out a different team. You change the contest mid-match, saves still coming - or the clock does what clocks do.
Watch who’s already building. The new breed of publisher never tied itself to the web in the first place - social-first, CTV-first, built where the audience already lives, with no legacy pitch to defend. A fresh young team that never agreed to the fixture at all. Some storied brands can evolve, and a few will. But the squads moving fastest are the ones who never signed up for Spain’s contest to begin with.
To Wrap It All Up
I loved playing goalie. That’s the trap. The save is the best feeling in the game - the stop everyone cheers, the proof you belong. Publisher revops runs on that feeling, and I’m as susceptible to it as anyone.
A great save feels like winning. It’s not. It’s a slower way to lose.
I never got faster at MIT. I got positioned. Find the contest where your strengths decide the outcome. And if the game you’re in won’t allow that... stop practicing saves.
Eleven saves is a record. It’s still not a trophy.
Change what the contest is about.
Andrew.