Oh, What a Camera Would Do!

NASCAR has them in the drivers’ cockpits. MLB has them dug into the ground in front of home plate. The NFL has had them in players’ helmets.
In sport, cameras give us a view we’d otherwise never see (unless on the field of play or going 200+ mph in the race car).
Here’s where the next camera [...]

Wasted Away in Swine Flu Ville

Cinco de Mayo used to be dream date for Tequila makers, Mexican beers breweries and margarita mix devisers.
Not this year.
The unfortunate hype around “H1N1″ aka Swine Flu and our friends in Mexico has cast a cloud over Cinco de Mayo. For places like San Diego (just 30 miles north of the border), today’s a barometer [...]

Kilroy is Here… And Here… And Here

Hop around on the Web (especially Twitter) and you’ll see a common design trend: Cropped head shots–cropped for bios, avatars, for a lot.
If eyes are the window into the soul, a photo of a cropped human face is the window into Web 2.0 personal, digital branding.
Consider:
There’s the famous top half of a head (Seth Godin, [...]

Personal Brand & First Amendment Blogging

Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester’s social media analyst, posed a question this week on how corporations respond to personal brands.
The two most interesting parts of the post:

Are there risks associated with personal brands?
Do you have a First Amendment right to blog?

The first idea of possible “risks” for the corporation made me immediately think of Dan Pink’s book, Free [...]

Markets and Psychology

Advice from James Surowiecki in the Nov. 10 New Yorker:
“Markets work best when investors are thinking for themselves, and tend to go awry when obsession with what everyone else is doing becomes a dominant concern. Maybe what investors really need is to periodically take a market information vacation.”
This could also apply to markets for consumers, [...]

Talked About Tuesday: 12 Minutes to Top 100

As the post-Super Bowl ad hoopla fades, an unassuming rocker got a bump in sales.  
Before Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers played their 12-minute halftime set Sunday, they were nowhere in the iTunes Top 100 songs.
As of Monday night (7:30 p.m. PST), all 4 songs the band played at the Super Bowl were in the same Top 100 (barely, see two in graphic).

Free Fallin’ – #33

I [...]

“I Actually Can’t Believe What I Just Saw”

ESPN uber-commentator Chris Berman said those very same words between a tirade of others you’ll never hear on an ABC-owned network.
And we wince as we watch him unravel over the course of a minute.
When you work in front of a camera, don’t ever do this off-camera. Someone got the raw video and posted it on YouTube. [...]

Airport Security Advertising

Zappos Shoes has come up with one of the better ads I’ve seen in awhile. And it’s so smart, you have to wonder why it wasn’t done sooner since we’ve been living in an airport security checkpoint world since 9.11.2001.
Inside the security screening trays at San Diego International Airport, there’s a very simple message and colorful visual: PLACE SHOES HERE. [...]

Best NFL Brands

Four NFL teams still playing. One best brand: Packers.
Although the Green Bay Packers have won just a single Super Bowl in the past 30 years, the organization’s “G” logo remains a symbol of excellence. The team’s 12 championships are more than any other NFL franchise. And the organization is the only community owned non-profit major [...]

News Center: Keep it Newsy

I left a sweet marketing gig with TaylorMade-adidas Golf last summer. I could have left on Valentine’s Day, tracked the intimate business closely and not missed a single press release from one competitor — MacGregor Golf — until right before Halloween.
Absent a blog and online community, a company’s “News Center” on its website is among [...]