When Advertising Strikes
There are no Cinderellas…
A recent ad, above, run during the NCAA basketball tournament in the past few weeks aims to dispel the idea of Cinderellas in sports by showing famous “Cinderella” college sports teams such as Boise State (a must watch YouTube video) and Georgetown (alma mater of our own Melissa Biles and Leonora Stevens) practicing hard late in to the night. Cinderella got lucky, these teams didn’t.
I thought the ads were spot on, and gave fair credit to those Cinderella teams for being good, not lucky. The truth is, there isn’t a ton of luck in sports and all of the teams depicted definitely did their share of practicing and hard work to rightfully upset their opponents.
So once this commercial was followed by a CBS montage of number 10 seed Davidson’s run to the Elite 8 that included the recurring image of a glass slipper, I realized that this was an example of when advertising strikes the network. CBS looked clueless and shallow, taking credit away from Davidson’s talent and hard work by attributing their success simply to luck.
And since when are high heel glass shoes and 6′9″, 280 pound athletes analogous?
Advertising may be the lifeblood of tv networks (and pretty much any media for that matter), but in this case, to me, it seemed almost as harmful to CBS’s credibility than, say, a wardrobe malfunction or scandalous GoDaddy commercial.
Other than the lottery and the Lucky Charms leprechaun, when it comes to sports, careers or, say, building a small startup into a great company, it’s easy for other people to chalk unexpected success up to luck… But in reality, there really are no Cinderellas.
Exclamation Interview: Gawker’s Nick Douglas
LaunchSquad’s Adam Metz sits down to talk with Gawker’s Nick Douglas about the latest happenings in the media gossip world and what sets Gawker apart from other celebrity gossip blogs.
How I Learned To Love Twitter, Even A Little Late
I can safely say that no technology I have tested in recent memory has prompted the same blank stares from my family members and friends as Twitter.
“Twitter??? What is this?” was the response from my flatmate, herself an early Facebook user, when I sent her a friendly Twitter invitation.
“You seriously want me to use this?” immediately questioned my younger brother, the acknowledged technophile of our family, when he received his personal invitation to join the “micro-blogging” service.
And to all those skeptical, incredulous stares, I countered: Just give it a chance.
A micro-blogging service that allows users to send ‘tweets’ of up to 140 characters answering the question “what are you doing now”, Twitter is certainly a somewhat befuddling concept and one that takes a little bit of getting used to. Yet as Facebook (my personal social network of choice) becomes increasingly complicated with new privacy controls, groupings, and filters, I am finding the simple, minimalist unfussiness of Twitter and its 140 character limit ever more appealing.
Being an early evangelist of the Twitter is no easy task, however, and while the technology world seems to have for the most part accepted Twitter as the next mode of constant communication, it’s hard to tell whether the service will ever appeal to the masses in the same way as a MySpace, Facebook or even LinkedIn.
There is one thing, however, that Twitter really has going for it in comparison to the competition and that is it’s pure, unabashed simplicity. While blogging takes time, insight and motivation, Twitter allows you to instantly and instinctively react to your world without filtering or developing that thought beyond its immediate form.
Twitter fans tweet about events large and small, from last-minute dinner invitations to election news to their children’s bouts with the common cold, and it is these seemingly insignificant details that give real insight into their lives beyond the public profiles presented on blogs and social networks.
While it may seem odd, useless, or even just plain silly, I will argue that there is something unique about Twitter’s utter lack of frivolity.
Joining the twittosphere may require something of a leap of faith, but as social networking sites become increasingly convoluted, in my opinion it may just be one worth taking.
Silicon Valley Minute: Reviving The 60-Second Pitch
Sometimes, you’ll be in the middle of a conversation with a writer and think, “I have to record this.” Last Thursday nights was one of those times. I was having a chat with Silicon Valley Watcher founder (and former Financial Times reporter) Tom Foremski, and he was bemoaning the “death” of the 60-second pitch. So, I asked him what he was going to do about it.
Zemanta: Semantic Tools Purported To Make Blogging ‘Sexier’
Zemanta is a new company that is launching a tool for bloggers which will automatically suggest relevant links, articles and images as posts are written. In this interview, founder Boštjan Špetič discusses the blogging tool and why it’ll make blogging “sexier,” as he says.
Exclamation Interview: Natural Causes Directors Paul Cannon, Alex Cannon and Michael Lerman
It’s so exciting when your pals direct a feature film, especially when it’s a great one. LaunchSquad’s Lori (of Gutterball fame) turned me on to Natural Causes when she heard I was attending the SXSW festival. After seeing it, I was lucky enough to be able to catch up for Mongolian Barbeque with the directors. The film is a moody indie drama, and if you dug Garden State or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you’ll surely dig it.
To check out a preview of Natural Causes, watch here:
To check out the podcast, click PLAY below. The film will be showing next at the Sarasota Film Festival on April 12 and 13.
No Leeway For Lacy?
It’s been written about (and Twittered, Meebo’d and whateverelsed about) ad nauseum, so it’s almost not worth discussing further, but there’s something kind of disturbing about the kerfuffle around Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg at the SXSW Interactive conference.
By various accounts, Lacy was described as unprepared and uninteresting. By other accounts she was described as “flirty” and “fawning.” As we’ve all seen before, the boys’ club mentality of the tech blogosphere can spiral out of control – let’s hope that’s not why Sarah Lacy was getting skewered all last week by the technorazzi. Clearly Lacy has a conversational interviewing style that is a bit outside the norm, but obviously it’s served her well – she’s been a reporter at BusinessWeek since her early 20s and has signed a six-figure book deal. Also, let’s not forget that Zuckerberg is a notoriously tight-lipped interview and that counts for a lot.
Maybe Lacy did do a bad job – though it’s tough to see how a BusinessWeek reporter would be that unprepared for an interview with perhaps Silicon Valley’s most famous CEO – but it would still serve everyone’s best interest to keep gender and stereotyping out of the discussion.
LaunchSquad Interview: FreshBooks CEO/Co-Founder Mike McDerment
Freshbooks is one of the coolest things to come out of Toronto since Rush, and it probably helps a lot more people make money than Rush ever did. In this interview, Freshbooks’ CEO and co-founder Mike McDerment talks about how his company transformed small businesses in the last couple of years, and where the company’s going.
Democratizing Restaurant Reservations
It’s only got 12 seats at a bar and the chefs are also your waiters, but Momofuku Ko, a new restaurant that opened last week in New York, is THE hottest restaurant in town. So you would expect to see those few highly desired seats taken by the Olsen twins, Tom and Giselle, the Beckhams and probably a few hedge fund managers, but this restaurant has approached the sometimes shady process of reservations in an new way.
Owner David Chang has established an online-only reservation policy through his new reservation site that gives a hipster in Williamsburg the same chance of getting a couple of seats at the bar as Mayor Bloomberg. Chang has democratized how people get reservations. While most restaurants of this caliber have reservationists that hold the power to grant (or not grant) tables, Momofuku Ko has tapped the internet to level the playing field.
Even the editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine, Ruth Reichl, who raved about the divinity of the restaurant’s fare, was told by Chang at her meal at Momofuku Ko, “No phones, no favorites, no exceptions. Online only. I mean it.”
We often hear about how the web is democratizing so many traditionally undemocratic institutions such as software and education, and Momofuku Ko has added restaurant reservations to that list. The seats will fill, that’s not an issue, but how to fill those seats and who to fill them with is a big decision for any restaurant owner. David Chang has taken an innovative approach to the “how” question. As for “who?” He doesn’t know, and doesn’t seem to care, just be sure to be online at 10 a.m. sharp!
Lara From LaunchSquad On The Today Show This Morning
Some days, it seems that I can’t escape the clutches of the Wojcicki family. In 1993, Esther Wojcicki, better known as Woj to her students, became my high school journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School, permanently molding me as a writer. When I visited her a five years later, she informed me that two Stanford students had started a company, Google, in her daughter Susan’s Menlo Park, California garage. Five years later, I became Esther Wojcicki’s student-teacher, and she let me student-teach her journalism and English classes, which were my fondest memories of my years in public education.
Tomorrow, Anne Wojcicki’s company 23andme is being profiled on the Today Show, and our own Lara was interviewed for the segment. Two weeks ago, the Today show production crew came into LaunchSquad’s San Francisco office for a surprisingly easy interview.
“It was relaxing and professional; it was really not a ’showy’ type of situation. The producer came in with the camera-guy, and they were just regular people, and you could tell they were really professional by how easy it was,” Lara said. The Today Show spent two hours just filming Lara’s gene journal and another two hours interviewing her. That’s over three hours of shoot time, which will be edited down to a five minute segment. The producer told her that usually turn it around the next day.
The field producer, used to working with slightly nervous interview subjects, worked with Lara a bit to soften her up.
“He could tell I was a little nervous, so he was asking other questions that had nothing to do with the subject matter – ‘What do you do at LaunchSquad?’ – that kind of thing. After about ten minutes I forgot there was even a camera there.”
At first, Lara was a little nervous about sharing her experience; 23andme cautions clients not to share their results with anyone.
“I opened the [privacy] door by blogging about it,” she said. “But, it’s an emerging tech company, and we work with emerging tech companies.”
Some of the 23andme subjects were a little blasé about their experiences.
“Everyone he spoke to was unimpressed, saying things like ‘It was cool and fun, but I didn’t understand most of it anyway.’ The interesting thing about 23andme is that in 5 years they’re going to have a larger sample size of what they’ve genotyped, and as time goes on, the gene journal will be more meaningful because they have a larger sample size.”
23andme’s gene journal has increased from 16 to 50 types in the last two months alone.
“They’re obviously doing more research,” Lara said. “The most interesting thing is what’s going to happen in the future, in five or ten years.”
Score another one for Woj.
The episode airs at 7 a.m. on your local NBC affiliate.