Luke, I am your cookies.
My wife stayed up until all hours of the night making these cookies (there are yoda and storm trooper ones as well) for our nephew’s birthday. Homemade sugar cookies, something called royal frosting, those frosting bags — the whole nine yards.
read of the day: is soccer innovative?
Soccer can be researched, carefully planned, and strategically devised—however, the most beautiful thing about this beautiful game is the fact that there is no lag between idea and implementation. Creativity can be immediately applied and has to be found on the pitch again and again. Every match is a blank slate. This is what business leaders can learn from soccer: Innovation is, literally, a “play,” and the best players will win.
via good.is
look out for the mama grizzlies
via youtube.com
This is a really interesting (oh, and fucking scary) video from Sarah Palin’s political action committee. It essentially wraps the hate and racism found in the tea party movement in a gauzy, soft “mom’s speaking out” message. It’s frankly, very effective and takes a lot of cues from the types of videos the Obama Campaign and Blue State Digital produced in 2008 — ads like Signs of Hope & Change.
That said, the language, particularly the repeated line “the fundamental transformation of America,” seems to ring hollow here (and yes, I am extremely biased against this type of thing). What made Obama’s campaign effective was that it gave people something to root and work for. Palin and her tea party ilk are still only against things. She’s not “for working moms” here, she’s for “moms rising up (like a damn grizzly bear) against the government.” This is an extremist message that just isn’t going to fly with a broad majority no matter how its packaged.
And this is why I don’t give too much thought to the tea party people. Being opposed to things and capitalizing on unfocused rage may win you primaries in the deep south, but its not something you can build a mass movement on.
best buy should promote, not fire, iphone v. evo guy
If you care about tech and mobile at all, you’ve seen the above video already — hell, you’ve probably seen it/had it passed to you numerous times by now and may be sick of hearing about it by now.
Well, stay with me for just a second, because this video — and its aftermath — has a lot to say about the current state of big corporate thinking. After this video became a huge YouTube hit (2.5 million views and counting) the filmmaker, Brian Maupin, was contacted by his employers at Best Buy, and was asked to take it down. When he refused, he was put on suspension and led to believe he would be fired. The latest report has Best Buy saying they’re not sure how they are going to proceed with Mr. Maupin.
Putting aside the colossal stupidity Best Buy demonstrated by bringing bad publicity onto itself for this threat, I have some advice on how to “proceed with Mr. Maupin:”
Promote him to your marketing department because Maupin knows how to create a compelling web video and you don’t.
A quick comparison between Maupin’s Tiny Watch Productions YouTube channel and the one occupied by Best Buy demonstrates how badly they need this guy:
Tiny Watch
Channel Views:74,669
Total Upload Views: 3,136,919
Age:25
Joined: December 31, 2009
Subscribers:2,273
Best Buy
Channel Views: 69,291
Total Upload Views: 697,331
Age: 22
Joined: March 18, 2006
Subscribers: 1,590
Best Buy is clearly getting schooled here. Plus, the content on Best Buy’s channel frankly sucks. It’s full of corporate speeches and employee rah-rah bullshit, there’s nothing here that could even remotely attract a viewership.
Frankly, I’m surprised by all of this, because Best Buy has shown they can actually do some innovative stuff with social media and be forward thinking. But someone has clearly mismanaged this situation badly, and frankly just not thought it through. If I were in Best Buy’s marketing department — and in the position to do so — I would ring up Maupin right now and congratulate him on the success of his video. Then I would offer him an entry-level position in my social media or graphic design department (his choice) and begin to channel and develop his talent. After all, he’s only 25 and he’s already gotten 4 times as many views on YouTube than Best Buy.
Posted in tech, web culture
Tagged best buy, iphone4 vs. htc evo, tiny watch productions, you tube
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nike: paving the way
via youtube.com
Nice spot here from Nike.
I’ve been disappointed in their marketing for this year’s World Cup, which essentially focused on players that either A) Did not play in the World Cup at all (Ronaldinho) or B) Performed terribly (Ribery, Rooney, Drogba, Cannavaro, Ronaldo). The performances were so bad, The New York Times speculated that the players appearing in the spot were cursed.
Of coure, there’s nothing Nike could have done about the latter, but there was really no reason to roll out Ronaldinho for this campaign, especially when they had Robinho already teed up for this.
Never the less, this ad thanking the U.S. Men’s National Team is spot on.
listen to klinsmann
He absolutely nails the long-term problems faced by US Soccer right now and what needs to be in place to address them. Unfortunately it’s all a very hard lift.
naiveté
“We were a little naive tonight…”
– Landon Donovan
Truth be told, we were all a little naive. The goal was always to get out of the group phase and the United States accomplished that goal. But when a toothless England squad relinquished the top spot to the U.S. and we ended up facing the Ghanians instead of the Germans, we all got a little naive. We started thinking that it didn’t matter if they gave up a goal in the first 20 minutes of every match, or if their strikers couldn’t score a goal. We had Donovan, Dempsey and Bradley — we had the cardiac kids — and we’ll surely come back again.
But as we found out, and as we surely knew in our hearts, you can only go to that well so many times.
Surely, Bob Bradley didn’t help us any. Less than 15 hours after I heaped 1700-plus words of praise on the man, he goes out and gets it all horribly wrong. He starts Ricardo Clark instead of the rock-solid Maurice Edu, as if Clark hadn’t been riding the pine in the Bundesliga for nine months and Edu hadn’t netted a stoppage-time winner for Rangers over Celtic this winter. He reinserted Findley into the lineup instead of going with any number of combinations that had performed many times better in three games of World Cup play. He left Benny Feilhaber, the team’s one true spark on the bench for the first 45 minutes. The Black Stars made him pay dearly for those mistakes — again, within the first 20 minutes of the match.
Once Bradley got the set-up right — after wasting a half of soccer — things looked better. Clint Dempsey drew a foul inside the box and Donovan banged home the penalty kick. The US started to control possession and threaten the goal. There were several tantalizing chances, but Richard Kingston, Ghana’s terrific goalkeeper, was always up for it. In the end it was Ghana who found the extra gear as the U.S. faded. Extra time began as all of our matches began this year — with a defense-splitting run and strike right at the target. This time there was no coming back.
But really, we were naive to think we could win. We were naive to say things like, “if it breaks right, we could go to the semifinals.” We were naive to say these things because we were depending on breaks and luck to carry the team through. In the World Cup, teams that depend on breaks and luck get punished — they lose.
So in the end, this U.S. team finished right where they should have, leaving in the round of 16 by a razor’s margin. And they leave behind so many questions: Will Bob Bradley be back for another campaign? What will this team look like in four years? Will soccer ever catch on in America? Will the team ever have this chance again — the fortuitous draw, the “easy” path to the semifinals, etc.?
Posted in soccer
Tagged bob bradley, brazil 2014, Charlie davies, clint dempsey, espn, jozy altidore, jurgen kilnsmann, landon donovan, Major League soccer, maurice edu, michael bradley, MLS, US Soccer, USA, world cup
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