How We Remember Sports: FreeDarko's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History

The title of the FreeDarko collective's latest book--The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History--is something of an elaborate joke. The only part of the title that accurately reflects the book's content is that two-word segment about Pro Basketball. If not for the need to market this thing with a keyword friendly title, it very well might have been called The Subjective and Personal Recollection of Pro Basketball Memory.

FreeDarko's first book-length effort--The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac--presented its thesis right at the start, with a six-part manifesto outlining the group's conceptual approach to basketball, elaborating on such concepts as the primacy of the individual and the superficiality of judging basketball players and teams solely by the unforgiving categories of wins and losses. The Undisputed Guide, on the other hand, hides its working thesis on page 210, in the book's afterword.

And I quote:

As historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote, "Certain memories live on; the rest are winnowed out, repressed, or simply discarded by a process of natural selection which the historian, uninvited, disturbs and reverses." In sports, history is winners and losers, statistics and dates; memory, which is where the stories start, is imperfect, stylized, personal.

The chapter introduction pages contain the most basic achievements of history--NBA champion, MVP, along with per game leaders in points, rebounds, and assists--but the meat of the book, as one might expect, is devoted to topics more closely associated with memory. This most often takes the form of re-readings of accepted wisdom, interpreting, for example, Red Auerbach's Celtics not as the embodiment of slow, stodgy, right way basketball that have become the darlings of strong-willed coaches over the last forty years, but, instead, as a fast-breaking, ass-kicking team that was "tough and focused, sure, but a hell of a lot of fun."

The book's strongest sections, though, describe not the result but, rather, the process of memory. Two examples will suffice here. The first is the essay "Cult of Personality," which examines the ways in which shoe commercials redefined or defined basketball stars of the 1990s. Chris Webber's barbershop commercials amplified his essential character. Larry Johnson was viewed as Grandmama, that slam-dunking old lady in Converses, even after he "grew a beard of Abrahamic proportions to signify his conversion to the Nation of Islam, called his Knicks a teams a group of 'rebellious slaves,' and remarked that he and Avery Johnson were from the 'same plantation.'" Dikembe Mutombo overcame the affected Africanization of his Adidas-designed multicolor shoes through the sheer force of his personality. Perhaps most interesting, though, are those players whose personalities are seen entirely through the prism of their sneakers. When Penny Hardaway's personality was found by Nike to be lacking, the marketing folks replaced it with a stronger one. Thus was born Lil' Penny, voiced by none other than Chris Rock. And Dee Brown simply "was his shoe," the Reebok Pumps. This chapter may necessarily oversimplify these complex athletes, but it serves as a forceful reminder that in the public memory, the shoes really do make the man.

Appropriately enough, the book's ultimate chapter, "Arbiters of Amazement," discusses YouTube's democratization of basketball's public memory. No longer does the NBA and its corporate partners hold exclusive control over the dissemination of basketball moments. They're not mentioned by The Undisputed Guide, but Ron Artest's various post-game interviews given during the 2010 postseason are perfect examples of this new democratic spirit. Artest's meandering conversations with Craig Sager and Doris Burke would never have been given a place in the sanitized official history of the league, but they have been viewed many hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube.



This book is really strong. While other recent additions to the basketball enthusiast's library have claimed to tell the story of the NBA from a fan's perspective, I much prefer to align myself with the approach espoused by these fans and with their thoughtful conception of the game I love.

Recommended.

Yale School Musical

I'm not sure if this is the work of a madhuman or a genius. But make sure to watch until the LARPers.



As a marketing-focused guest-blogger (hey, another guest post is up), I do find it interesting that I watched what amounts to a ~16 minute ad for Yale. 16 straight minutes is a pretty significant hold on my attention.

Via @KenTremendous.

How The New York Times Does Business

This, it seems to me, is a brilliant way to conduct business. From the June 1, 2009 The New Yorker, in an article titled "Slim's Time," about Carlos Slim and his effort to purchase The New York Times:

"In my early days as an editor, I had someone explain to me the marketing strategy of the Times," [executive editor Bill] Keller recalled. "What most newspapers do when they want to expand is to conduct a survey of people who don't read their paper and ask, 'What would make you like our paper better? What could we change to appeal to you?' Then they go out and add the advice column or the comic strip--whatever it was that the nonreader said he wanted. The Times' approach was to go find our most loyal readers--who say they couldn't live without it, they read it every day--and to profile those people. Who are they? The strategy was to find more people like that, to define ourselves demographically, not geographically. The whole marketing apparatus was out there looking for people who want what we're doing. The commitment to solid journalism wasn't just a slogan. It was a sound business proposition."

The confidence the Times has in its product is amazing. They know they have the best product in the field, and they just try to find more people who would appreciate what they have to offer.

Figure out what you do well, and focus on that. Don't water down yourself or your product. Sound advice.

A Different Type of Product Placement

I spent a huge amount of time riding subways today. And this means I spent a huge amount of time looking at subway ads in order to avoid making eye contact with other riders. In addition to horrible usage (e.g., "Dr. Zizmor has been treating New Yorker's skin problems for over 25 years;" I feel bad for this poor New Yorker, and I wonder why Dr. Zizmor's treatment hasn't been effective over the course of a quarter century), I was struck by Dentyne's Make Face Time ads.


The key to subway ads is simplicity. And these manage to have a consistent and easily understood message. But the coolest part is found in the bottom, left-hand corner. I love how the actual product serves as the logo. Products, obviously, are often featured prominently in ads, but it seems rare for the item to be placed above the main action of the advert, really functioning purely as a logo would. The only other example I can think of is Coke's bottle-shaped logo, a type of abstraction of the company's product. Coke is an icon. I'm not sure that Dentyne will ever match what Coke has been able to become, but I applaud this effort as a step in the right direction.

Movies Meet Marketing

There's a great article in this week's edition of The New Yorker, dated January 19, 2009, by Tad Friend, titled "The Cobra: Inside a movie marketer's playbook." The piece follows Tim Palen, Lionsgate's co-president of theatrical marketing, and it does that quintessential The New Yorker thing of using Palen as a means of investigating the marketing of films as an industry. Here's the money quote:

One of the oldest jokes in the business is that when a studio head takes over he's given three envelopes, the first of which contains the advice "Fire the head of marketing." Nowadays, though, former marketers, such as Oren Aviv, at Disney, and Marc Shmuger, at Universal, often run the studios. "Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates, " one studio's president of production says. "So at green-light meetings it's a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross. No one is saying, 'This director was born to make this movie.' "

And, on the topic of trailers:

Another problem with free samples is: what if the product isn't particularly remarkable? "How many great movies are there each year?" the trailer cutter David Schneiderman says. "We're in the business of cheating, let's face it. We fix voice-overs, create dialogue to clear up a story, use stock footage. We give pushup bras to flat-chested girls, take people's eyes and put them where we want them. And sometimes it works.

OK. So we know now that the goal of films is to make money--and not, you know, be good--and that advertising lies to us.

But what do these marketing folks think about us, American citizumers? Is there room for nuance? For subtlety? For experimentation?

No:

An unexpected corallary of the modern marketing-and-distribution model is that films no longer hve time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn't expect will succeed with at least two quadrants, and a film's budget is usually directly related to the number of quadrants it is anticipated to reach. The most expensive tent-pole movies, such as the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, are aimed at all four quadrants.

Reading this article makes me question how I choose what movies to watch. I try to avoid movie reviews because I like going into the thing without previous knowledge. I want to decide for myself what worked and what didn't work. But are the trailers and commercials and newspaper ads commissioned and designed by the people trying to sell the movie any better? In a strange way, they may be. I may see the best joke in the trailer, but, after reading this article, I'm pretty convinced that the trailer won't actually have anything to do with the full-length movie.

And, just for fun, Gelf Magazine runs an occasional feature titled The Blurb Report, in which the magazine takes a look at the original context of excerpted movie blurbs. For example, here--from their Best Worst Blurbs of 2007-- is a quote attributed to Michael Wilmington of The Chicago Tribune regarding Norbit: "Eddie Murphy's comic skills are immense." And here is the complete quote: "Murphy's comic skills are immense, and 'Dreamgirls' shows he's a fine straight dramatic actor too. So why does he want to make these huge, belching spectaculars, movies as swollen, monstrous and full of hot air as Rasputia herself—here misdirected by Brian Robbins of 'Good Burger,' 'Varsity Blues' and that lousy 'Shaggy Dog' remake?"

That was just in case you still believed any form of marketing.

[Update: I didn't realize the Best Worst Blurbs of 2008 was out. But it is. Check it out, if you just can't get enough of out-of-context movie blurbs.]

A Delicious Case of Who-Donut

During the ~month I spent proofreading my first book, I traversed a decent portion of the Washington Heights neighborhood.


View Larger Map

I hardly ever followed this exact route; my travels were more reminiscent of that blond kid from Family Circus.


But just about every day I did pass the storefront that formerly hosted Gruenebaum's Bakery. For as long as I've lived in my current apartment (June 2008 or so) that location has been empty, with various For Rent signs posted in the windows. But the overhead signage of the bakery remains, signage that looks remarkably like these photographs I took earlier this morning:


and...

It took a solid month of looking at this logo to realize why it looks so darn familiar.

Compare that bakery logo with this one:


Hmm...

Two bakeries, both with a sapphire shade of blue, both with this lilting script of a font, both with prominent underlining, and both with exaggerated capital letters. There are some differences--most obviously the script used for the closing "s" in each logo--but the similarities are more pronounced than the differences.

I snooped around the internet a bit, and discovered that Entenmann's was founded in Brooklyn by a German immigrant in 1898. Their stylistic and baked-goods competitor, Gruenebaum's, according to an April 6, 2001 article in The New York Jewish Week, was "founded...in Frankfurt, Germany, early in the 20th century." The article continues:

The Frankfurt bakery closed its doors in 1938 and the family immigrated to the United States in 1940. Banin's father worked for different bakeries until 1957, when he bought out a store on 177th Street and Broadway. In 1961, he opened Gruenbaum's on 181st Street and "the place took off. Bakeries was all my father did," says Banin. "That was what he knew."

I haven't been able to find any reference to the histories of these two (or, maybe, one) logos. I don't know if one bakery initiated the blue, lilting logo craze before its competitor "borrowed" the design. I do know this, though: I will continue my investigation of this story, and The Daily Snowman will continue to be the internet's premier source for investigative journalism in the field of corporate logos, especially baked goods.

Incoming

Recently on: twitter.com/thedailysnowman

• I like my bed at least 50% more, now that I changed the direction on some of the supporting wheels, keeping it mostly in one place.
• Ain't no party like a publishing party.
• Jeter's speech closing Yankee Stadium may have been this generation's Luckiest Man speech. Athletes should give more speeches. (Not really)

And, just for fun, this is kinda awesome and creative.

Jennifer Banash has created microblogs on Twitter for three of the characters in [her Young Adult novel], Madison, Casey, and Drew. The characters make reference to the real world—"read the interview with the director of American Teen in the Times this morning"—as well as their own exploits.

I also just heard last night, at a publishing party, that the author of the upcoming book Captain Freedom, G. Xavier Robillard, has created a network of in-character blogs for personalities from his book, including one written by Captain Freedom himself, and one which is a general site for his nemeses, The International Society of Supervillians.

I like this trend, and thank Stephen Colbert for introducing it to us. Stephen Colbert: is there anything he can't do?

Mirror Marketing

Eugène Atget, the French photographer who lived from 1857-1927, is probably most famous for his series of photographs examining the Le Bon Marche department store of Paris. Atget’s photo-set features an array of consumer goods all seen through the looking glass of the store windows. These pictures, taken just as department stores emerged as centers of both consumerism and entertainment, focus on the onlooker’s point of view. The window pane functions in two ways as it both displays the goods located inside the store, and, also, duplicates the reflection of the shoppers standing outside. These shoppers see the reflection of their own faces on the store mannequins, as the mirror effect of the glass portrays the consumer as already possessing the goods on display. The impression of already owning a particular possession may appear to be just a typical ploy of advertisers, yet the effect is significant. Instead of a consumer imagining why he would need this particular good, he must justify to himself why this possession he already owns—at least, in his own mind—is superfluous.

Here's a good example of one such photograph.



















One of the nice things about the subject of these photographs, i.e., the marketing of goods through slightly reflective mirrors, is the subtlety of the project. It seems, to the casual onlooker, that these department store goods aren't even being advertised: they're on display, sure, but nothing more. The really serious instigation of product-desire all takes places in the brain of the potential consumer.

It's this subtlety which, I'm sad to say, is lacking in Best Buy's newest ad campaign. Their latest tag-line, which I just noticed today even though it apparently has been around for a while, is simply this: "You, Happier."

This dude named Sam Van Eman, who, judging from the name of his blog has something to do with advertising, doesn't seem all too thrilled with the implications of You, Happier coming from purveyors of stuff.

I am happier when I get a new laptop or scanner. Shoot, I'm happier when I get a fresh ink cartridge. Not happiest and maybe/maybe not happy, but I'm definitely happier.

Happier is good. So is buying stuff that we need and even an occasional item we don't need. Most of these make us happier, but happier must not control us. Here's a serious reason why.

In Waiting for God, Simone Weil wrote, "The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry."

The ways we hunger and satisfy our hunger for happier are deeply spiritual matters, which is why Weil's comment is a theological one. When Jesus said to deny ourselves he wasn't calling us to be ascetics, but to be people who recognize the spiritual danger in satisfying our hunger.

Best Buy? Fine, but we could all do a little better at going hungry once in a while.

I'm equally annoyed by the tag-line, but for different reasons. Advertising has always been about selling happiness through products. That was true in Atget's time and it's true now. The interesting part, though, is how marketing manages to accomplish that without being overly imposing. It's a creative process. Best Buy just removed all creativity from the equation.

Some Magazines, Not Surprisingly, Have Many Ads

This post is inspired by two discrete occurrences.

First, I found a great new blog (or, more likely, new to me), called Panopticist, which has a stated goal of taking a critical look at magazines, but which, fortunately, deviates from that goal often enough to examine the pronunciation of a word I'm not sure I'm ready to use on this blog. I'm also a big fan of anyone who's interested in Bentham.

Second, I went to the MoMA this evening, and my two favorite exhibits were the temporary exhibition called the "Modern Dwelling" and--I'm not sure what this says about me--the collection of Esquire covers designed by George Lois. Here's what the MoMA site has to say about him:

From 1962 to 1972, George Lois changed the face of magazine design with his ninety-two covers for Esquire magazine. He stripped the cover down to a graphically concise yet conceptually potent image that ventured beyond the mere illustration of a feature article. Lois exploited the communicative power of the mass-circulated front page to stimulate and provoke the public into debate, pressing Americans to confront controversial issues like racism, feminism, and the Vietnam War. Viewed as a collection, the covers serve as a visual timeline and a window onto the turbulent events of the 1960s. Initially received as jarring and prescient statements of their time, the covers have since become essential to the iconography of American culture.

All that was in the way of introduction, and all this is in the way of the body of my composition (there probably won't be much of a conclusion). The New Yorker this week is one of their special, thick issues, which has writing on the spine; it's the "Style Issue." These special issues are big for advertising purposes, I suppose, so there are four full-page spreads (F-PS's) of advertisements before the reader reaches the table of contents. This is very much out of the ordinary for the NYer, as a normal, non-special, issue has at maximum two F-PS's but more usually just one. This is phenomenal for a magazine, at least compared to the other ones which are scattered throughout my apartment.

Esquire is horrifically bad in this regard, with 21 (!) F-PS's in its September '08 edition, including one foldout, before the reader knows what's in the magazine. Though, to be fair, Esquire has this weird habit of scribbling its content on the cover, complete with page numbers.

Rolling Stone has, in the two issues I could find, on average, 3.5 F-PS's before the T.o.C.

And, lastly, Guitar Player, in the three issues I could find, has, on average, 2.83 F-SP's before the Contents which are listed in table form.

This alone probably shouldn't be the only way for you to measure the quality of a magazine, but it might be important to think about.

Weird Childhood Histories, Part 2

Like many folks who earned their college degrees in the field of the literature of England (i.e., English Literature), I have a somewhat strained relationship with mathematics. This, however, was not always the case. This may seem obvious, but I was always good at math that made sense to me, which means that I did A-OK through like ninth-grade geometry, after which point things got a little bit fuzzy. Luckily, the SAT doesn't test on anything past the math I was comfortable with, leading to my scoring of an 800 on the math section of the exam, while earning like a C+ in pre-Calculus or whatever my eleventh-grade math class was called. That was kinda fun, because it made all my classmates who were actually talented mathletes jealous, because they scored something like 790. I still don't know how I pulled it off.

I was never able to articulate what changed, math-wise, until I read Moneyball. This book is seriously awesome, partially because of a train of thought attributed to Bill James, the smartest baseball thinker who ever lived:

The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games. James later reduced his complaint to a sentence: fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, were what interested him. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey. "When the numbers acquire the significance of language," he later wrote, "they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry....And it is not just baseball that these numbers, through a fractured mirror, describe. It is character. It is psychology, it is history, it is power, it is grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, it is success and failure, it is frustration and bad luck, it is ambition, it is overreaching, it is discipline. And it is victory and defeat, which is all that the idiot sub-conscious really understands."

James said what I started to understand about myself way back in like tenth grade: numbers are interesting only if they tell the truth, if they tell a story. That's why I was wholly uninterested in my stats class of eighteen months ago: knowing the probability of drawing a blue marble from an urn is a parlor trick, which doesn't reveal the truth about anything. Knowing which players really helped a baseball team succeed isn't necessarily of life-changing significance, but the point is that they tell the truth about something. And knowing what leads to success is somewhat of a big deal in a multi-billion dollar industry. At least to the people running that industry.

I had a similar Moneyball-type experience last week. We had the director of online marketing for Random House come present the type of stuff that he thinks about on a day-to-day basis. Some of it was trying to figure out where publishing is heading, and how authors are going to deliver their content to readers, the only two indispensable components of the book-making process. But he also took us on a tour of what the internet (in this case, mostly Google) allows you to learn about marketing. The real trouble with traditional marketing is that no one has any idea if the damned thing worked. I put an ad in the NYT, and it is impossible for me to know how sales were affected by that one ad. Did someone decide to buy, let's say, this book because of the ad in the paper, or did they hear about on NPR, or did their friend recommend it to them, or was it some combination of all of that and more? The effectiveness of a print ad is meaningless because it can't be measured with any type of accuracy. Companies can be throwing away money with unsuccessful ads and they'll have no way of knowing.

Compare that situation with what's possible on the worldwide internet. In this magical place you can see exactly how many people clicked on your targeted Google word-search ad, how long they stayed on your website, how many products they purchased, and a whole lot more. You can submit multiple ad wordings for the same product, and Google will automatically use the ones which prove to be most effective in getting the interwebular traveler to click on the link. I'm not all that fascinated by marketing, but this type of thing, for a change, tells the truth about the real world. You can measure things based on reality, based on how people actually behave. I think that's pretty powerful. These numbers tell a story.

This seems appropriate after a week of Marketing classes

From, again, The Onion:

World's Worst Person Decides To Go Into Marketing
'I'm Thinking...Marketing,' Says Horrible, Horrible Man

NEW YORK—Twenty-three-year-old Louis Deenan, undeniably the most detestable, loathsome individual ever to walk the earth, willfully decided Monday to devote his miserable life and all of its awful ambitions to the field of marketing. "I think it's the career path that will best utilize my networking skills and my ability to think outside the box," said Deenan, whose smug, gloating tone and shit-eating smile just make you want to punch his goddamn teeth in. "So I'm definitely thinking marketing. Either that, or PR." Deenan's mother refused to comment on why she didn't abort the despicable pile of human excrement when she had the chance.