I love baseball. It’s the perfect blend of nuance and number-crunching. GDIP, WHIP and BABIP. Deep flies to left field to score a runner from third, long leads off first that draw a throw from the catcher.

And then I catch the Home Run Derby last night. All sizzle and no steak, the marketing equivalent of a :30 spot in the Super Bowl. Sure, it’s fun to laugh at anthropomorphic animals, beer-hungry fools, and women who bathe in peanuts to make men swoon. But I still prefer more compelling entertainment: the complex conversational sell, the pitcher who can induce the double play, the brand story infused with character and nuance, VORP over HRs.

So let’s enjoy Josh Hamilton’s epic performance (he really was mashing the ball!). But let’s also remember that his team, the Texas Rangers, still can’t pitch a lick and haven’t made the playoffs in nearly a decade.

For more interesting baseball content, check out this DIY segment from My Home 2.0. It features Ryan Howard of the Phillies (a monumental slugger) and a bat we hacked to measure his swing speed.

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I grew up reading the San Francisco Chronicle, home of Herb Cain, the best columnist in the country, as well as a famous story about “Snakes in Toilets,” and a derogatory reference in All the Presidents Men (Jason Robards, as the Washington Post editor says, “Naw, we can’t publish that, give it to the San Francisco Chronicle.”)

The Chronicle may not have always got it right, but they told a great story. And because I have a number of friends who work for newspapers, I’ve been fascinated by the struggles of newspapers to adapt to the challenge of the new media.

Newspapers are famously losing ad revenue to Google and Yahoo, readership to some of the same portals; and their reporting is being challenged by bloggers and even posts to YouTube.

But as my reporter friend Henry Weinstein said when receiving a journalism award a couple years ago, “Who the hell is going to gather and write the news in the future? — Elves?”

How can newspapers adapt and provide some of the three-dimensional story-telling that the big platforms, blogs and forums can’t?

Check out this piece from MediaStorm, by Luis Sinco, a “traditional” photographer for the much troubled LA Times about the Iraq vet portrayed above. MediaStorm is a marvelous project designed to teach journalists the new way.

Technorati Tags: New Journalism, New Media, Newspapers, San Francisco Chronicle

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Rob Norman wrote a fascinating piece on his On Demand blog, taking a stab at how we’ll create, consume, and measure media in the future. From where we sit, his “Work of Fiction” doesn’t seem all that fictional at all.

We know that content is migrating to smaller and smaller screens, that distribution channels are expanding faster than the content creators’ ability to fill them, and that looking at small screens the same way we look at TV and movie screens is a fatal flaw.

As we’re hearing from our friends on the brand side and on the entertainment side, everyone is gearing up to deliver entertainment to mobile phones, computer screens, digital readers, etc. in the ways that people are consuming content today. The real issue–and what makes Rob’s post so prescient–is predicting how we’ll leverage all these platforms to tell brand and entertainment stories tomorrow.

Wayne Gretzky’s cliche’d aphorism applies here: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Yoda couldn’t have said it any better.

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Kluster.com just might be onto something big. They’ve created an online social community! Wow… OK, sarcasm aside, there is, of course, a bit more to Kluster than being a simple online community. The site and the community have actual purpose. Put simply, the site brings together talented people to work towards, and actually accomplish, common goals.

Once you sign up for the site, you’ll go through the standard steps that you generally need to deal with once you join any other online community: background, interests, avatar selection, etc. However, for each segment of your profile that you fill in, you’ll also receive a quantity of “watts” that get added onto the 1,000 watts you receive for signing up. I’ll get to what these are for in a bit but think of Watts as your Kluster currency. However, in an effort to avoid getting ahead of myself, let me explain what the site is all about. (more…)

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More than any other candidate in this year’s race for the White House, presidential hopeful Barack Obama has gone above and beyond his opponents by embracing the ever-popular social networking site Facebook into his campaign strategy. The overwhelming turnout of the usual lazy voting block of young people aged 17 to 29, has help put Obama ahead by one delegate for the Dems.

This is due to the help of Obama supporter Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, who had a leading role in creating my.barackobama.com, a Facebook clone designed specifically for the campaign.

View more from the original article here. [bloomberg.com]

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I’ve been interested in the American newspaper’s progress during the digital age. It’s been a major struggle, as even the best of print journalists have very little understanding of new media.

But there’s a terrific slide show from John Moore, a Getty photographer, who attended Benazir Bhutto’s last rally, where she was assassinated, and posted on the New York Times site.

Moore talks in the first person over his photos, bringing you into the story far more effectively than in your typical print story.

And there’s also an “interactive timeline” provided by the Times that’s simple, but informative. Nothing spectacular — but they are making progress.

Technorati Tags: Bhutto, Media, New Journalism, New York Times

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What a great marketing idea!

“Brazilian ice-cream company Kibon … [is] including the actual prize inside the popsicle: they will manufacture 10,000 specially made propsicles, identical in size and color to the actual thing, frozen with iPod shuffles inside.” (Gizmodo)

A larger image after the jump. (more…)

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Books have been written about it. Songs have been sung about it. Wars have been fought over it.

Salt is a magical compound that enlivens vegetables and meats. It lowers the freezing point of ice and raises the boiling point of water. People use it in their soups and on their driveways. What can’t salt do? Apparently, it can’t penetrate the Campfire pantry.

Here at 62 White Street, it’s been weeks since we’ve had a salted chip, even longer since we tasted a salted pretzel. Just minutes ago, I caught Mike Monello dousing a walnut with saline solution just to give it some flavor. This is true insanity. Send help (or soy sauce)!

I’m begging you, Orderer of the Fresh Direct: please please bring back the salt!

Technorati Tags: conversation, office, pantry

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We had a wild time at the first of five home parties Saturday as we revealed a complete FiOS makeover of the Kaczor Family’s home in Yardley, Pennsylvania. The campaign includes a large interactive web site, reality TV show, and carnival like parties, which included a lengthy chat with James Earl Jones about his early acting experiences.

Over 500 people attended and enjoyed themselves as the Kaczor family saw the complete hi-tech makeover of their home by the Verizon FiOS team.

The Kaczors now have a fabulous FiOS-equiped house, with a home office to rival Campfire World Headquarters, completely webcam-ed home, and an entertainment center with massive flat screen, Surround Sound system, and a secret lever that reveals disco lights and bowling lane — all designed by our techno-geek show hosts, Brian, Lloyd and Yue.

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Alan Schulman writing in MediaPost has a terrific piece on the challenges facing conventional agencies as they try to adapt to the New Marketing environment. (We’ve talked here about some of the same issues before.)

Different Channels Demand Different Creative Skill Sets

Posted April 30th, 2007 by Alan Schulman

The velocity at which new media channels are appearing of late is almost dizzying, as creative agencies try to contemplate the best way to execute against each one. Some are putting serious thought into how to reengineer their creative departments to handle both offline and online work - and lose the wall between the two. But others are still taking a more casual approach and leaving all things digital to the “interactive guys” to do. After all, they have more important “big-brand ideas” to ponder.

If you’re a marketer considering which of your creative partners is best to develop compelling branded experiences for these fast-appearing new channels — be it for branded widgets or “World of Warcraft” — here are some things to consider…

More…

Technorati Tags: Advertising Agencies, Campfire, marketing

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