We’re on Pinterst! I’m sure you’re not surprised. Who isn’t these days?! We used it about a year ago to share our experience at SXSW and now we’re hopping back in to share our story and pass along fresh and relevant content.
This first round has some goodies: killer infographics, arcade gaming and an Instagram Pinterest mashup.
I am a hoarder, of magazines. You wouldn’t really know it by looking at my office desk or at the coffee table in my house. As a middle child, I know how to hide my shit. I also know that there is seriously no reason why I continue to make the poor mailman shove them into my tiny mailbox each month. But for some reason I cannot let all my traditional media habits die. So it was with conflicted guilt that I filled a whole bag with monthly magazines for a single night road trip out of the city a couple of weekends ago.
That Sunday morning, as I relished in the success of brewing a rather delightful pot of coffee, I settled into the couch with my bag of magazines before anyone else got up. I devoured my weekly gossip rag because that is a guilty pleasure that I won’t ever give up and was about to do arm lifts with the two Vogues I’d brought when I decided to actually take a real stab at reading one. I discarded the previous months issue without a second thought and cracked the March 2012 spine instead – Adele was on the cover so I was interested enough to began my search for the cover story among the hundreds of ads. I won’t lie, it took a long while to find and yes, I used the table of contents. In the process, I’d dog-eared a few other stories to come back to. One of those was an article on Twitter.
Twitter, in Vogue.
I’m guilty. I’m guilty of basing nearly every decision I make off of someone else’s review of it. No review means that the product isn’t worth it. Three stars on Yelp means it’s only a backup to a backup for Thursday night girls’ dinner. At first glance, this seems only natural and right. The point of having reviews is to be able to make informed decisions based on others’ experiences, right? But what happens when there are opposing reviews, making it nearly impossible to make any decision at all? Four reviews say the DSW boots look like quality leather. Two say they look like “pleather” and make your calves look fat. Naturally, I don’t want to make my calves look fat, so I’ll keep perusing and find something else. This is the issue of analysis paralysis or “I’m going to read every bad review this product has ever had and be talked out of purchasing something I could actually like” paralysis.
** This article appears in the February issue of PLAYED, our monthly gaming newsletter. Download the entire issue here. **
Of the many drastic changes to the industry in the past five years, downloadable content could certainly be considered one of the most impactful. It’s tough to imagine that when the Xbox 360 launched in 2005 we were excited and amazed by downloadable games on a service called “Xbox Live Arcade.” Now, we’ve advanced to the point where it can be difficult to tell where disc-based content ends and downloadable content (DLC) begins. For a long time game publishers have been pretty cut and dry when it came to adding content to their games.
This past weekend I attended the in Boston for the third straight year. Typically after coming back I recount everything I heard like an excited first grader coming home from summer camp. Mostly because I hear awesome nuggets of information and can’t wait to tell someone because then it’s like I came up with the ideas.
This year, though, I was struck by how many things that were discussed that were applicable to brands. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because the ultimate goal of marketing and sports business is the same; sell. The following are five things that marketers could learn from the sports business world.
Culture Comes First
There was an entire panel dedicated to franchises in transition. There was one resounding consensus: the most important thing for a team is its culture. That will be way more valuable than any draft pick. The 49ers hired Jim Harbaugh because he is a strong personality and would create a winning culture. Drew Bress came to New Orleans because it felt like family to him because that is the culture they fostered. It’s how teams identify themselves and connect with fans. It should be no different for your brand.
