Category Archives: Personal
In a related story, signups for rugby leagues rose 143%
You gotta wonder how a TV company can make this kind of blunder…According to the BBC:
New Zealand rugby fans watching a regular sports programme found themselves viewing hardcore pornography instead on Sunday afternoon.
Four minutes of pornography interrupted sports coverage on the Prime Television channel, after what a spokesman described as a distribution mix up.
The pornographic footage was meant for an adult pay-per-view channel. Instead, it found its way onto a regular free-to-air programme called "Grassroots Rugby".
Rival television channels reported that some viewers were angry about the broadcast, which may have been seen by children.
And yes, I am fully aware that when I run for public office someday, some crackpot reporter will Google my name and the word "pornography" and momentarily think he hit the jackpot…
If you can’t make fun of a mass exodus, what really can you make fun of?
I suppose we all should have seen something like this coming. With nearly every key executive who is not named Yang fleeing the sinking ship formerly known as Yahoo, a few enterprising young folks put togteher this web site to make it easier to write your resignation letter. Ah, must be good times down there.
Down the road it will be fasicnating to review the complete company history of Yahoo, and analyze their strategic decisions. Can you think of any other company that had such a specacular rise and (possible) fall in just a 15-20 year period?
The Best Seat in Pro Sports
This comes to us from the Stanwood division of Andy Boyer.com.
This is what happens when your marketing team doesn’t check things out with the legal team. Or maybe they couldn’t reach the lawyers, since the whole legal team was in court trying to make sure the Seattle based Marketing team would be out of a job in a few weeks….
If My Friend Does Something While Facebook is Down, Did It Really Happen?
What did I do before mini-feeds? I can’t remember….
Are You Having Pool Parties That You Don’t Know About….
I don’t think Sergei Brin or Jeff Zuckerberg ever envisioned their companies could be used together like this…
Would-be revellers are using satellite images on the internet to find houses with swimming pools – and then turning up uninvited for an impromptu dip.The craze involves using the Google Earth programme, which provides high-quality aerial photos of Britain and other countries. Once a target is chosen, the organisers use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo to arrange to meet, say police.
Fan Friendly Ticketing
I promise, if the Seattle Sounders do something like try to move to Oklahoma City, or spend $117 million on players I wouldn’t add to a Fantasy baseball team, I’ll complain about it. But as long as they keep doing things that impress me as a marketing professional, I’m going to keep sharing how impressed I am.
This week, I went through the pleasurable and fun process of selecting my 2009 season ticket package. In comparison, I’ve completely given up on using Ticketmaster.com due to its inflexibility and 75% Convenience charge. It’s amazing that you can’t choose your seats on that site, but instead are held hostage to a weak algorithm that supposedly gives you "Best Available" in a certain section. Plus, I honestly don’t understand how I can order 5 books from Amazon Marketplace from 5 different people and pay like $15.00 total in shipping, but if I try to use Ticketmaster to buy 4 concert tickets, they want to charge something like $50 just to print out a couple of ducats and stick them at will call. Why? Are my tickets taking a limo from TM HQ to the arena? Is the paper laced with gold? What could command $50 in service charges? Anyway, now I just take the time to go to the stadium, pick out seats I want and leave happy.
But I digress.
The Sounders experience was as close to "Anti-Ticketmaster" as I can find. Even if you don’t care about soccer, I encourage you to go through the process at 
http://tickets.soundersfc.com/ . Choose whether you want to sit or stand during the game. Or if you want to be in a section that sings or not. Take a virtual tour of every row in every section. It’s a very fan friendly experience, and trust me, the fans appreciate it.
Let me know if you have found any other ticket places with convenient tools such as this.
Proving Marketing Can Be Creative….and Cheap
I’m not one to think that Marketing is free. I think you can be effective on the cheap, but you have to commit to at least spending SOMETHING.
I liken it to a party. You need one of these to be extremely great – location, people, food or music – to make it worth talking about. But no matter what, you need to spend some money on booze to loosen things up.
Marketing is similar. You either need extremely great product, creative, design or placement for a campaign to be noteworthy. Take a boring product, give it a standard design, a few relevant pieces of copy and stick it in tradional media and you have something to put in your portfolio but not much else.
But I digress.
Here’s a company who is executing a very nice campaign on the cheap, but they are nailing the creativity and placement attributes. They spend some cash on shipping, but have potential to have a lot of "free creative." designed for them. Here is a copy of the email below:
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Hey fellow Magnifier –
We’ve had amazing response to the Mascot’s first week out and about in New York City. He’s been on the Subway. He’s been to Columbia University. He came to a Magnify.net board meeting. He event had a night out with Obama Girl!
Now, he’s ready to travel the world. So, invite him to your place – we’ll pay the way.
Magnify Mascot will travel first class (fed ex) to you. He’ll bring a gift (a brand new American Apparel Magnify T shirt), and he’s ready to have a photo take with you.
We’re going to feature some of the best photo’s, most glamourous locations, and most creative channel admins on our homepage over the next few weeks. So, if you’re looking for a house guest who is flat, and orange – we’ve got a guy who wants to visit you.
To apply to be a stop on the Magnify Mascot World Tour:
1). Send an email to: [email protected]
2). Tell us the name of your Magnify.net site(s)
3). Tell us about some great photo op (famous tourist destination he can visit?) or neat photo location.
We’ve got a backlog of Channel Admin’s who have already invited the Mascot to come to their unique and wonderful part of the world – so get on the bandwagon now.
We’re excited about coming to you!
Best,
Steve, Simon and the Magnify.net team
Here’s a picture from our latest Board meeting, with Board Member
David S. Rose giving the Mascot a ‘Hi Five.’
PS… yes, we know he needs a name… we’re still accepting suggestions for the Name the Mascot contest. Expect more news shortly on this.
Watch Great Soccer – Support Seattle’s All Nations Cup
If you have not booked out every Saturday or Sunday for the next 3 weeks, try to book some time to check out the All Nations Cup 2008. This is truly one of the most unique events in Seattle, and a great example of what makes the city a pretty cool place to live.
The All Nations Cup is an amateur soccer tournament where every player competes for their home country. It’s like the World Cup, but for amateurs. (This weekend’s schedule here.)
I’ve been sporadically over the last few years, and the soccer is always of high quality. But the real fun is seeing the fans. You have these small communities of people from Ethiopia, Bosnia, Gambia, etc….There may only be a few hundred in the whole city, but most of them come out to support this group of amateur players. Everyone has their flags, songs, drums, etc…
All games are at Starfire down in Tukwila and it’s like $10 or $15 or something per day. With 4 games going on at once, you can shift from field to field and see some pretty strong players.
If you get down there, let me know.
Polls Made Easy, with Vizu
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Vizu is a neat little app that you can use to add a touch of functionality to blog posts and the like. It’s probably been around for a while, but recently hopped on my radar screen thanks to a friend in the ad industry who uses it for quick polls. I don’t know how they make money, but for the rest of us, it’s a pretty slick little tool. If I had to nitpick, I’d ask for a few more size options. In the case of a short blog post like this one, the Vizu poll doesn’t really fit. So, even after playing with table widths, I still need to drone on and on just to fill up some more space with copy so the poll fits in better. But on the plus side, you do have plenty color options, so it can work it’s way design-wise into just about any web template. And it’s a breeze to use. The whole process takes less than 2 minutes. |
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