Literally. This piece by BK gives new life to the average web banner.

Offering people SOMETHING more than horse racing is a great antidote during a penny-pinching, cheap-entertainment-seeking economic environment.

What’s more, some racetracks are not worrying about how much people will bet–worrying about handle would miss the point.

Invite people to experience your track and your brand. If they have fun, they will come back. And if they come back, eventually they will turn into bettors, even more so when the economy turns.

Whether you invite people using ostriches, fireworks, pig races, or concerts as Del Mar does, first get people to the track. The sun and scenery of Del Mar is not universal, nor is the ambiance of Keeneland or upstate character of Saratoga. And the ability to handicap a 5 Furlong $4,000 Claimer for Three Year Old Fillies and Mares Which Have Not Won a Race Since April 1 will never be universal.

But you know what is universal?

Something you can market, and people can relate to: Fun.

Congrats to Jose for not falling off.

Des Moines Register

DAN JOHNSON • REGISTER STAFF WRITER • JULY 22, 2008 Ostrich fever

Iowans love their ostrich and camel racing. That was proven again Friday when one of the year’s biggest crowds packed Prairie Meadows to see the yearly exhibition. Attendance is measured only in 24-hour intervals at Prairie Meadows, and Friday’s 12,954 turnout was the third-largest this year.

July has produced three of the top four attendance days this year at Prairie Meadows. Attendance totaled 13,404 for the concert to benefit flood relief July 16. And fireworks night resulted in a 12,194 attendance for July 3.

The year’s biggest attendance day was 14,049 on Kentucky Derby day, May 3.

Hump D. Dumpty won the camel race while Breakin’ in the Night, the only one not to unseat its rider, won the ostrich dash. Both animals were ridden by Jose Ranilla.

The camels and ostriches also ran at Canterbury Park near Minneapolis on Sunday, where attendance was 14,828.

I was pleased to see that famed NY Times advertising and marketing columnist Stuart Elliott also wrote an article about Olympics advertising (even though my blog post appeared several days before his).  I feel like I’m in good company, and better yet, we both landed in about the same place on most of the ad critiques.  I really liked Elliott’s Olympic play of awarding each ad a medal:  gold for the good ones, lead for the crappy ones and tin for the ones that rang false.  Nice touch.

A couple of Elliott’s favorites

I do have to hand it to Stuart though — his stories are better read than my blog posts.  So far.

I never thought I would use the words “class”and “ESPN” in the same sentence.   It’s just not a part of my lexicon — until now.

 In the Sunday New York Times, ESPN ran a full page ad in the front section that caught my attention big time. Not only was the layout simple, clean and artful, but the message was stunning in its humility. Again, not a word I would associate with ESPN.

So much has been made about Michael Phelps and his incredible Olympic run.  And the rousing shots of him with arms in the air, cheering his gold medal wins, are being used as marketing fodder by a long list of brands and corporations. All that just makes ESPN’s creative approach even more impactful.

The ad is too large for our crazy office scanner to accept, so I offer you the top 7/8ths of the ad here — unfortunately missing the payout line which makes the copy truly brilliant.

The tagline says “FOR 9 NIGHTS, WE WEREN’T WATCHING US EITHER. ESPN”

Love it. Plus I hear they are considering a bid for the broadcast rights to the Olympics in 2014.

Class act, that ESPN.

I’m totally into the Olympics, and sad it’s almost over.
First, kudos to NBC for not bogging us down with 20 minutes of human interest stories in 60 minutes of viewing time like they have done in the past.

But shame on NBC as well.

It took me a few days, but I finally figured out that what I was watching “live” in prime time, wasn’t actually live in our Pacific time zone . This is understandable, even though the International Date Line confuses me to no end.

Almost everything we are watching is taped. Therefore, in theory, NBC can show Californians the likes of Phelps, Bolt, Johnson or Liukin whenever they want–or is most convenient.

So why the hell do I have to stay up all night to watch swimming or track at 10:30PM after sitting through 2.5 hours of women’s volleyball over and over again. Know how much gymnastics I have seen this year: zero. Best I can tell, they showed it some time after midnight. I understand the desire to tease us and to draw us into watching more commercials, but come on, some of us want to actually sleep.

Just because east coasters get these sports late on their TV, doesn’t mean that NBC needs to follow the same program for us. Does ESPN delay Monday Night Football so that west coasters watch it from 9PM to past midnight? No, I watch it from 6-9:30PM then brag to everyone how the best thing about living on the west coast is Monday Night Football at reasonable hours.

Data shows that great sports moments (Mary Lou Retton, 1980 Olympic Hockey Team, Michael Jordan Era) spawn tens of thousands of little kids to pick up the sport, leading to a groundswell of talent 10 years afterwards.

The World Series now starts at about 9:00PM EST which is killing baseball’s next generation fan base, and in 50 years, people across America will tell their kids about how they never really considered swimming to be a sport, and didn’t see Michael Phelps in 2008 because it was past their bedtime. And you can forget about gymnastics.

Maybe things will be better for Vancouver ‘10, though I doubt it. They’ll screw it up.

I was just trying to explain social media to my 82 year-old dad.  You can imagine how that conversation went.

“What?”  he said.  “SOCIAL MEDIA”, I said loudly.  “You know, kind of like word of mouth advertising, only even more personal.”

“What?”  he said again.  Sweet guy, very smart engineer in his day.  And not too up on the latest marketing trends — not that I blame him.

Finally, I landed on an example that he understood and could relate to.   “Pop, do you remember that old TV commercial from the 70’s about Faberge Organic shampoo?”  Luckily he did, but not until I had to recite the lines……”I told two friends.  And they told two friends.  And so on, and so on, and so on…..”

And then it dawned on me.  Could the makers of a smelly shampoo have unexpectedly hit on something far more important than how many bottles they sold?  Or was that exactly the point?

At least now my pop understands a little more about what I do.  And just maybe I do too.

I absolutely love the Olympic season.

Seriously, it harkens back to memories of growing up and sitting around the TV as a family, watching the US teams show the rest of the world our spirit, our competitiveness, and our pride.  Happily, that feeling hasn’t changed that much in world moving as fast as the web can carry us.  Normally I operate with a fairly high degree of cynisism for this sort of thing, but for these 3 weeks or so, I dunno.

Sure, the feel good advertising and TV spots some of us remember from childhood (like Coke’s “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”) have evolved and are updated to modern sensibilities. Yet, they still evoke those same sentiments about bringing the world together in no other way than the Olympic Games can.

Just like the Super Bowl, the Olympics bring out the best in advertising.  But unlike the Super Bowl, where brands are represented through humorous and often irreverent messages (and we LOVE it) the Olympics are more about sappy emotional connections with brands.  And as marketers, isn’t that what we are trying to accomplish every day for the brands we represent?  An emotional connection.  And we LOVE that too.

There are some amazing examples of our craft at its finest:

      VISA’s campaign using Morgan Freeman as the VO (love the immediacy of having an ad ready to congratulate Michael Phelps on his 10th Gold Medal, which ran immediately after he won it)

      AT&T - the “We” campaign is so well done and subtley patriotic.  Love it.

     Coca Cola — “The Last 80 Years” - very touching compilation of Olympics and Special Olympics       medalists over their many years of sponsorship.

And there are also some big misses, where the brand seems to have been buried in the creative execution:

     McDonald’s.  Please — Mickey D’s chicken for breakfast?  Yeah, I’m sure a lot of Olympians are chomping on these little nuggets of nutrition.

     AT&T Mobile — annoying “Beeeeep” campaign needs to stop!

     Exxon Mobile - Their commitment to malaria treatment just does not ring true when we all know the insane profits they are making.  Couldn’t they just cure malaria with all that money?

All this makes me think there are still good reasons to produce top notch TV spots, even if they exist more strongly now because of YouTube and blogs like this.

There is chatter galore about the changing role of PR firms as social media threatens to take over traditional outlets. As PR pros we’re constantly re-evaluating our role, learning, sharing and cramming more and more initiatives into our job descriptions.

In case you’re out of the loop and aren’t sure what I’m talking about, in case you’re wondering what PR could possibly do with social media and in case you’re thinking you don’t need us to do it, I’d like to share with you this.

AND in case you’re wondering how BG is holding up, I found this on Twitter - that’s a start, to say the least.

We’re looking for a star. We don’t have openings for PR account executives very often (we usually grow them organically from the inside) so when we do, we’re pretty selective. If you want in, you need to bring the following to the table:

4-5 years solid agency experience
Experience working with local, regional and national media – online and off
An understanding and interest (perhaps even passion) for social media
Proven ability to create plans with measurable goals
Proven ability to then measure your work and show positive outcomes
Be able to write, well
A real team player
An open, creative and positive attitude
Experience in consumer pr

Here’s what we bring:
A supportive, learning environment
As much autonomy as you can handle
Great clients
Great team
Competitive salary with vacation, medical, 401K and profit sharing
The opportunity to be a part of a growing, dynamic agency
And, of course, life in San Diego, which doesn’t suck
To learn more, check out www.baileygardiner.com and www.dontdrinkthekoolaidblog.com. Send resume/portfolio to prae@baileygardiner.com and tell us why you want the job. Don’t call or email us, really.

There’s a lot of social media talk going on and everyone seems to be “drinking the koolaid.” It’s time to weed through the good and weed through the bad and make something of it…something like a plan. It’s without a doubt that every business should have an effective social media plan, and thus, every business’ marketing agency should have one of their own. So, Lauren and I are off to present a proposed plan to our agency - a starting point for an agency who will become a leader in San Diego for its forward thinking in all things interactive. Get set - we’ve got the ambition, the knowledge and now…we’ve got the plan.

Will it come to fruition? Watch.