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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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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A good friend once derided a traditional agency Creative Director by saying, “he has never encountered a marketing problem that a sixty-second spot couldn’t solve.” If you’re reading this blog, you probably already agree with us: the role of the TV commercial is no longer primary. It’s merely one of many tools to apply on behalf of our clients. A mere cursory glance at our Case Studies will show you just how far we’ve moved away from the spot-centric universe that existed only a few years ago.

But does that mean TV spots have no role in our new media landscape? Of course not. If you have a clear, concise message for a product or brand that can be explained in 30 seconds, then go ahead and make that killer spot.

And that’s why I love beer commercials. The whole point of beer marketing is to influence–however slightly–a consumer’s split-second decision when he opens that refrigerated case. So the challenge for beer marketers is giving that consumer something positive and positively entertaining to base his choice on. They’re not selling Verizon FiOS, for crying out loud, just beer.

That’s why a lot of people love this ‘Dude’ campaign from Bud Lite. It’s a simple idea well-executed. It says positive things about the brand and doesn’t ask the consumer to do anything. Is it Apple’s Revolution? Of course not. But when we come up for air on an intricate project like My Home 2.0, it’s refreshing to sit back and just enjoy a mindless beer commercial like this:

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