Game and halftime

Social media comments made during the Super Bowl rose from 1.8 million in 2011 to (wait for it) 12.2 million on Sunday. That’s a  578 percent increase. Last night’s Super Bowl also set the record for social media comments made in any kind of TV event. The 2011 MTV Video Music Awards was the previous record holder with 3.1 million. The fact that this year’s Super Bowl had 12.2 million should tell you why TV advertising rates are so expensive. On no other stage will a company be able to have so many eyes and ears on its product.

Of the game’s 12.2 million comments, 862,000 of them came during halftime. That nearly matches the number recorded for the 2011 Academy Awards, which inspired 966,000 comments. The halftime show on its own would rank fourth all-time for entertainment-related social TV comments – behind the ’11 MTV Video Music Awards, the ’11 American Music Awards and the ’11 Oscars.

Commercials

Bluefin Labs measures commercial comments from when they air live to the 45 minutes following it. The commercial altogether received 985,000 comments, which is ahead of the ’11 Oscars. Here the top five commercials for parents, students and sports fanatics:

Parents – CareerBuilder (“Business Trip”); Teleflora (“Adriana Lima”); Best Buy (“Phone Innovators”); Honda CR-V (“Matthew’s Day Off”); Budweiser (“Prohibition”)

Students – ‘Hunger Games’ trailer; Planet Fitness (“I Lift Things Up”); Sketchers (“GO RUN Mr. Quiggly!”); Doritos (“Sling Baby”); M&M Wars (“Miss Brown”)

Sports Fantatics – Chrysler (“It’s Halftime in America” featuring Clint Eastwood); Bud Light (“Rescue Dog”); Doritos (“Man’s Best Friend”); ‘Act of Valor’ trailer; Chevy (“Happy Grad”)

Top 10 commercials with social media comments – Samsung (“Next Big Thing”, 26K); Bud Light (“Rescue Dog”, 29K); Sketchers (“GO RUN Mr. Quiggly”, 35K); Doritos (“Sling Baby”, 41K); Chevy Silverado (“2012″, 41K); Pepsi (“King’s Court”, 45K); Doritos (“Man’s Best Friend”, 74K); NBC The Voice (“Vocal Kombat”, 90K); Chrysler (“It’s Halftime in America”, 96K); H&M (“David Beckham Bodywear”, 109K)

My three favorite were the Chrysler Halftime in America spot, the NFL evolution piece and then the Volkswagon one with the golden retriever who gets in shape. Laughs are always worth points, but ultimately humorous commercials don’t typically have much takeaway value. (Save for Bud’s “Rescue Dog” commercial, which promoted a worthy cause.)

Ultimately, I want commercials to mean something. I want value. That’s why I was so intrigued by the Halftime and Evolution spots. The Halftime was my favorite because it hit the deepest emotional chord it realistically could during a sports event. Most of us in this country have known some sort of suffering since 2008. Most of us have had to dig for some sort of inspiration or perseverance to progress our lives – professionally, personally and in other ways.

Chrysler has embraced the “serious” side of commercials with its Eminem-laced spot in last year’s game, and now this year with Eastwood. Even though he’s 81. There’s something strangely relatable between Eastwood and people of my generation who are in their mid- to late 20s. We think of Eastwood as being a badass because of Dirty Harry. More than that, Eastwood seems “real”. He’s authentic, doesn’t bullshit and we respect that. That’s why his words brought so much value, even if they were written by other folks.

The NFL Evolution commercial piqued my interest obviously because I’m a sports lover at heart. The evolution of sports is a particular interest, from how equipment changes to the types of player who mark specific eras in a league’s history. I believe that commercial captured it appropriately.

I’ll show three very good visuals that Bluefin Labs provided along YouTube videos of my three favorite commercials.

The AUD$363M project added several new features – a 16,000-seat center court, a 6,000-seat court with a  retractable roof, and a facilities building for Tennis Australia, among other structures. New landscaping features and public squares were created to promote outdoor circulation. I have a slew of renderings of the redesign that I would like to share. I’m not writing a story on this project, so I don’t have very many notable details. But this project sure does look outstanding.

The team explained that tweaks to the features in the eye and mouth are the logo’s primary alterations. Check out the new logo in the PDFs below.

Carolina_2012_logoslick

panthers_logorelease

All of this is to say that Schilling is a really impressive baseball pitcher. Which makes it understandable that the competitiveness and determination he displayed on the mound might carry over to another part of his life. In this case, it’s his ownership in a video game company – 38 Studios. I recently interviewed Schilling about 38 Studios (38 representing his former jersey number) for ESPN The Magazine. The story is in the issue that comes out today. I thought it would be helpful to include on here the full 30-minute interview we conducted. So, you can read the story that is posted below this line and then turn to the interview. Enjoy and let me know what you think of Schilling’s mindset. Does he inspire you? Does he turn you off? Get at me through @KyleStack or +KyleStack.

Curt Schilling – The Reckoning

Kyle Stack: Why did you choose to start 38 Studios?
Curt Schilling: It’s just something I’ve always done – gaming. I’ve been doing it 30 years now; I’ve been gaming since 1980. And when I looked at my post-baseball career, I knew I was going to want to stay busy. I didn’t know it would be this busy. This was kind of a natural fit for me. I’ve always had a passion for it, always been interested in it and I’ve developed some relationships with athletes. It’s become a much bigger thing now. You won’t find a team where half the players don’t have a console; they have to have a laptop when they travel. But it was just something I’m interested in. It seemed like a natural fit once everything was said and done, and I wanted to put my energy into something else.

Kyle: What was your vision for the company when you started it?
Curt: I wanted to take a shot at being the best in the world at something else. I think I’ve always played with the ‘Go Big Or Go Home’ mentality. I think there were some chuckles at first – a lot of chuckles at first, I’m sure. I’m sure the company and I were the butt of a lot of jokes for a couple years, but I think, The Reckoning, the response that it’s getting…the conversation used to be 38 Studios the game company Curt Schilling started and now when they mention me as a part of this, it’s at the end of an article. The games have opened people’s eyes. I wanted to take a shot at doing something better than everybody else did it. In a job or an industry where nobody gave me any good odds.

Kyle: Has that vision changed now that 38 Studios has begun releasing games?
Curt: The end goal: no. But everything and nothing has changed in the meantime. The carryover from my former job and career as it relates to team and team-building and culture, and then this is a totally different work environment. That’s different.

Kyle: What do you spend most of your day doing?
Curt: I get in here anywhere from 7 to 8 o’clock in the morning. A lot of meetings, a lot of email. [Laughs] A lot of play testing. Every day is kind of a little different challenge. That’s been probably the hardest, most unsettling thing for me is being ADD and ADHD and all things that go with that…the thing I loved about starting pitching was the routine. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday all went the exact same and then I pitched on Saturday. This is the exact opposite of that life. Every day is a dice roll.

Kyle: When you email, I’m sure that includes a whole range of subjects – marketing, game development…
Curt: I’m on the periphery of all that stuff. I used to be the point man for all those emails, and I’m now a guy who’s cc’d. The best managers that I played for and played against weren’t the best tacticians. That always helps. But for me the best managers – the guys I was most committed to be around – were the guys who understood where to put their 25 players in the best position to succeed. Managing a baseball team, managing a football team, it isn’t as much about X’s-and-O’s; it’s about managing people. When you got Manny Ramirez and Tim Wakefield in the same clubhouse, or Jason Varitek, the same rules don’t always apply.

Kyle: Were your experiences with your managers primarily what helped you in learning how to run a company?
Curt: It’s one of the many things that helped me, absolutely. I’ve always believed that when you talk about the upper one-half of one percent in the world, you’re talking about a minute percentage of the multi-billion people on this planet. You could make an argument that for a couple years in my career I was one of the five best people in the world at what I did. What I tried to find out was why. I played with a lot of players who were physically gifted but most of them didn’t make it to the big leagues and didn’t succeed. I realize that when you talk about the upper one-half of one percent of people in the world, you’re talking about I think 95 percent of it is above the shoulders. They think differently, they do things differently. I think there’s a tremendous fear of failure. There was always for me.

And I think the other thing is I was incredibly coachable because I wanted to be the best. I wanted to learn about my craft, and this is no different. I sit in a lot of meetings and I’m around a lot of situations that it’s more important that I listen than talk. That’s obviously a challenge for me at times. But that’s what I’ve had to learn. The company is better and performs better in a lot of places when I don’t have input because these are really smart people [who work here].

Kyle: I’d think that the way you interact with people at 38 Studios is a lot different than how you interacted with teammates and coaches in baseball because of the differences in work environments.
Curt: It is and it isn’t. One of the things that I noticed is everybody wants to matter. Whether it’s the 25th guy on the roster or the ace; everybody wants to be important and have input. There are a lot of similarities if you look at the end goal: best in the world or world champions. It ends up being about everybody. A lot of people don’t get that, especially in the business world. In the business world, the priorities are who do I manage, who reports to me. It’s almost about lack of accountability. People don’t want to get in trouble for stuff.

What I’ve tried to do here is to create a very different environment. I don’t care if you don’t make a mistake if there’s effort in it and positive intent behind it; just don’t make the same mistake twice. That’s absolutely a baseball lesson. There are two types of players: those who are afraid to fail and those that are paralyzed by failure. The world has a lot of people who are paralyzed by failure because they don’t want to lose. They don’t want to get beat. But you make people understand losing and failing are two very different things. I played a job where you started the season in your head 50 and 50 and what you do in those other 62 games kind of determines how good you are. In a job where 30 percent success rate was Hall of Fame material, that’s a challenge. People don’t understand the difference between losing and failure. The only way you can actually fail something is by quitting. I’ve never quit anything in my life. I’ve lost a lot, but I became who I became and I did what I did because I hated losing so much that I didn’t ever want to feel it again. That’s what pushed me. So, I wanted to create an environment bought into the future of what we do and who we are.

It’s funny because six or eight months ago I had jerseys made for the company. Majestic made these jerseys, we put a 38 Studios logo on it and everybody’s name was on the back and it said 38 Studios on the front. I did it for two reasons: one, I thought it looked kind of cool. Two, I wanted to use the thing I had always heard in sports, that you play for the name on the front and not the name on the back. And that’s a very easy way to get a 23-year-old person who’s just come out of the Rhode Island School of Design as an artist to understand one of the core concepts of every world champion team there’s ever been. The more examples and the more times I could talk about those things…I was a field guy. Don’t tell me what the manual says to do; tell me what it feels like. And I think there’s a lot of that here. Explaining that to these people, I can give you a text book answer for it. But there’s an emotional piece that you need to understand.

Kyle: What makes The Reckoning unique among games?
Curt: Everything. I saw a review last week where a couple guys were going through the game. They were marking off where they felt like the game kind of felt like something else, where we had done something from God of War or Oblivion. It ended up being 14 or 15 games out of the RPG genre that they felt like we took some stuff from and at the end, it said, ‘This game isn’t a bit of this or a bit of that. They’ve taken the best pieces of everything and turned it into something we’ve never played before.’

This is God of War meets Oblivion. Those are probably the two most-referenced titles as you talk about [The] Reckoning. We’ve created combat that is, second to second, as deep and immersive as you choose it to be. If you just want to mash buttons, you can do that, too. We’ve created 10,000 years of history and lore where you can lose yourself for 100 hours reading the books and the lore and the history of the world or none. We’ve given both genres – the action-fighting combat player and the deep, questing RPG player – a game where they can get immersed in and I believe we’re the first company to ever succeed in its execution. I know others have tried it but I think we’re actually the first to do it.

Kyle: What type of person will enjoy this game?
Curt: If you’ve played any of the Oblivion series, you’re going to love it. If you’ve played God of War, if combat is something you enjoy, then you’re going to love it. Everything about the quest system and the combat system is easy to learn but very difficult to master. You look for that magic elixir when you’re creating entertainment and the team in Baltimore nailed this one. If you loved Fable, you’re going to love this game. I’ve heard a lot of people say this is what Fable 3 tried to be. In addition to being stunningly gorgeous – the world is amazing – I don’t think fans of any of those titles will have a problem putting hours and hours of time into this product.

Kyle: What is it about the Fantasy and RPG genres that appeal to you?
Curt: Well, I think fantasy is inherent in all of us, to some degree. When you were a kid, you were a cowboy or astronaut or a knight, a hero. We all grow up believing in fantasy as one of the things that carry kids through their childhood, in a good way. And I don’t think we ever grow out of it. I think it matures.

It used to be a hidden indulgence for people. To find out somebody in Hollywood plays Dungeons & Dragons – publicists don’t say those things about players. You have athletes openly admitting to spending…now, if you at professional sports now, what’s the coolest thing these athletes can do? They can get a commercial for PlayStation or Call of Duty; it’s hilarious. That, to me, is kind of how much entertainment has invaded and is so pervasive in our lives. How we get entertained is different and what we entertain ourselves with is very different. We’re growing up with a generation of kids who have the Internet as their playground and has been since they were 7, 8 or 9.

Kyle: Did you get a lot of your teammates in your playing days to play video games?
Curt: Oh, absolutely. The last year I was in Boston 2007, I had J.D. Drew and Coco Crisp playing World of Warcraft. It’s funny because Coco ended up going to Kansas City and Zack Greinke is a hardcore World of Warcraft player, and they were running a guild of 60 people. All of the people were Major League Baseball players.

When I was in Arizona and then Boston, I had two gaming console units packed up in bags that we would take on the plane with us with portable TVs and play Madden or whatever on long flights.

Kyle: Well, as a baseball player and a pitcher, you’re always on the road and you have some downtime, right?
Curt: Oh, yeah. If you look at a potential nirvana for a gamer, I had the perfect life. I had a lot of disposable income, I had a lot of free time and I was by myself a lot. And that was part of the reason I became such an avid gamer. The other reason was you guys. When you look at the proliferation of sports media and media in general, you didn’t have to look far to get a story about an elite athlete doing something wrong. Being in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, whatever. I was in enough situations – or a couple situations – early in my career where I wasn’t actually involved in anything that happened. I was just in the area and the event ended up being a story on SportsCenter. And when I met my wife and got married, I realized I was a bad choice away from jeopardizing my marriage. I had kids. This is what I did on the road. This was my social life.

When you look at MMOs – Massive Multiplayer Online games – I had the ability to “hang out”, meet people. The stereotype of living in mom’s basement: that’s not the gamer anymore.

Kyle: Does having this studio satisfy your competitiveness?
Curt: It’s different. The challenge is in baseball, as a starter, that every five days I got my fix. I would lose and spend four days being more miserable than anybody on the planet and then I could do something about it on the fifth day. The wins and losses right now are much further apart. You have to find those daily wins. My favorite part of this company is being on the floor and hanging out with the team in the dugout, so to speak, talking about what we’re doing, where we want to go and what we want to be. Being able to empower these kids to do things they never thought possible. That’s kind of my job here is to inspire these people to do things they never even considered, much less considered they could do.

Kyle: Was there one facet of your industry that you learned about more than anything else during development of The Reckoning?
Curt: One of the things I had an idea of early on is how little value is placed on people and their families. This is an industry of very high turnover and a lot of attrition. They don’t place a premium on the people. It’s all about fiscal quarters and shareholder meetings, much more so than it is about the health and well-being of their families. Coming from a profession where they say a happy wife is a happy life, I think it’s something I’ve tried to bring here.

Valuing not just the employees but their families and making their families understand they’re every bit a part of this company as the employees themselves. I went to work for 20-something years in professional baseball, and I don’t ever remember whether it was making $700 per month in Rookie ball or $15 million, I don’t ever remember my paycheck being the reason why I was happy or sad. I was miserable and happy for all the same reasons you are. When my family was healthy and good and the team was winning, life was good. When my wife not healthy or my kids were sick or we were arguing, it wasn’t good; it didn’t matter how I was pitching. I don’t think a lot of people understand that.

And obviously it’s easy for me to say, because I did make a lot of money, but I didn’t start out making a lot of money. I didn’t sign for a big bonus; I didn’t make a lot of money as a young player. And I took the same risks and chances everybody else did. But even after getting to the pinnacle of the game – world championships and things like that – my happiness had to do with my faith in God and the happiness and health of my family.

Kyle: It seems like part of your outlook on how you treat people at 38 Studios is because you didn’t get that while playing baseball.
Curt: I would agree with that. You think about, I played 20-something years. The amount of people I played with as teammates is well over 1,000. I probably legitimately talk with less than ten. You don’t become close with a lot of people because the life is not conducive to it. You’re forced to be with people; you don’t have a choice. You do here. To me, that’s the value. This is not a place to work. It’s a place to belong. I think it’s a very different outlook and approach. Being apart of this team is different. It matters.

Kyle: Was there one challenge you faced in developing The Reckoning that you proved difficult to overcome?
Curt: The game is built on proprietary technology. It’s our own engine and all things that go with it. But for me, the biggest challenge has been in the marketing and advertising [of the game]. Players of both genres – the combat-action genre and the RPG genre – neither of them believe the other aspect is actually there. Our combat players, when you look at this game it’s very hard to believe that a quest, stat-driven system is what drives the gameplay. For questing and RPG players, it’s hard to believe that it has a true meaning or impact on the combat. Explaining to people what it is has been the biggest challenge.

The development piece…they cut it, they figured it out, they knew what they had to do and they committed to it. They busted their asses and wore themselves out over the past year and a half on insane schedules to do that. They always worry and I’m sure there was always concern about actually delivering different pieces. In the end, we actually did what we set out to do and it’s been very challenging to tell people exactly how we did it or what we did.

Kyle: You obviously have to know your customers very well.
Curt: That’s the challenge is we’re asking EA to market something they’ve never marketed. They truly don’t believe it’s been done before. I don’t think anybody has made this game before. Other people have tried but we’ve executed. You were asking EA to market something that traditional standard marketing and PR advertising campaigns aren’t going to work. It’s been a challenge.

Given the economy we’ve been in the last five or six years, I’ve been able to help save and create 400-something jobs. And that means 400 families have had their lives changed by being involved here, which is a pretty powerful and cool thing.

Kyle: It’s good to see that you think that way. I wish other companies had the same approach.
Curt: I mean, honestly, I have $30 million-plus of my own money in the company. I have my own skin in the game, so there’s a personal piece to this that [other companies] don’t have. I’ve gone all-in; I’ve bet all-in on these people. And companies generally don’t bet on their people. They bet on their products and there is a big difference.

A company’s ability to lighten its environmental footprint resonates with customers. People want great products, but many are placing value on how those products are made. Another good example of that came from a Nike event I attended this morning for their Hyper Elite Platinum college basketball uniforms.

Within the bowels of the Hudson Hotel on NYC’s Westside, Nike unveiled why these uniforms are unique: they’re the lightest basketball uniforms ever made, according to them. The unis clock in at less than a pound – five ounces for the shorts and roughly the same for the jerseys. Nike said a pound of weight was removed from their previous college basketball uniforms. Other design techniques, such as laser cutting holes in the side panels of the jerseys and shorts and removing stitching in favor of bonded seams, cuts out miniscule amounts of weight.

The jerseys are made with at least 96 percent recycled polyester with 12 plastic bottles, on average, comprising the material. The shorts are 100 percent recycled polyester and are made from 11 plastic bottles, on average. Nike said that 440 million plastic bottles that would have made their way to landfills were diverted from there to their manufacturers to create these uniforms. There is your social responsibility. Improve the environment and (hopefully) make a great product at the same time.

Rather than bore you with more tech and design chatter, I figured I’d display a group of thumbnails. This way, you can see what the jerseys look like. I’m interested in what you think. Does a company practicing social responsibility matter to you? Does it affect the way you perceive them? Are you more interested in buying products from companies that do something good for the environment? And what do you think of the design of these uniforms?

UA is further extending its relationship with Maryland to basketball by helping honor former men’s coach, Gary Williams. Williams retired from coaching college ball last May after a 33-year career, 22 of which came with the Terps. He’ll be honored January 25th at Maryland before their game against Duke. The university will name its court at Comcast Center by calling it Gary Williams Court, and Under Armour is finishing out the dedication with three shoes in honor of the coach.

Maryland players will wear the Bloodline and Juke while the Funk will be given to Williams in a commemorative box. Heck of a design job by UA to dress up these kicks. This isn’t a huge deal, but it’s one more way for Under Armour to deepen its association with the university that they probably hope becomes as identifiable with them as Oregon is with Nike.

(From L-R: Bloodline, Juke, Funk, Funk in the box)

Before I get into that, I want to point out that terming a franchise a dynasty can be made on a case-by-case basis. There’s no clean definition for it.

My first general rule is that the same core group of players and/or coaches must win multiple league championships, e.g. Super Bowl, NBA Finals, World Series. And the time frame in which that franchise was elite in its sport should have lasted for at least five seasons. By saying ‘elite’, that doesn’t mean a team has to appear in a semi-final or final series or game every year. There are times when a team has a great regular season and flames out early in the playoffs. Yet if that campaign is sandwiched between others in which it advances far in the playoffs – or wins the damn thing – then it’s fine.

A good example is the ’90s Dallas Cowboys. They get automatically called a dynasty because they won three Super Bowls in four years – ’92, ’93, ’95. They were absolutely a dynasty, but I think people forget that their run atop the NFL was relatively short. In that four-year window in which they won three Super Bowls, they won 12 regular season games three times and 13 once. In ’94, they lost to the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game. (It was technically in ’95 but it was for the ’94 season.)

Yet the ‘Boys won 11 games on the front-end of their Super Bowl years and 10 games on the back-end. In totality, they had six straight 10-game win seasons, with four of them having the ‘Boys playing at a Super Bowl level. I suppose it’s arguable whether they were truly elite for five straight years, but they come close enough.

I consider the Patriots to still be a dynasty because, first and foremost, Tom Brady has been the quarterback and Bill Belichick has been the head coach. They’ve been around the whole time. I can’t argue the Super Bowl title thing, since they won one in ’01 to kickstart their dynasty, two more in ’03 and ’04 and haven’t brought home the Lombardi Trophy since then. They obviously lost in ’07 (technically ’08; these NFL seasons are so confusing) and they’re back in the ’11 season. Look at their overall timeline, though.

Since the 2001 season, they’ve won 11, 9, 14, 14, 10, 12, 16, 11, 10, 14 and 13 regular season games. That’s a run of almost 10 consecutive seasons with double-digit wins. They’ve made the playoffs all but two years – the nine-win campaign in ’02 and the weird 11-victory season in ’08 when Brady was hurt and Matt Cassell QB’d the team. The Pats have been remarkably consistent in this NFL era of increased free agent movement. This is their fifth Super Bowl appearance during that time. Given how little difference there is in team quality between the Super Bowl winner and loser, I think Super Bowl losses shouldn’t count too much against a team.

That’s why I consider the ’90s Atlanta Braves to be a dynasty. They don’t pass my requirement of multiple titles – they won a single World Series during their 15-year reign atop the National League East from 1991-2005 – but they were still so damn dominant. They nearly strung together 15 consecutive NL East titles. The only division title they didn’t capture during that ’91-05 period was in the strike-shortened summer of ’94, when they finished second, even though they may have won the NL East had the season not halted in August.

During their reign of terror on the NL, the Braves lost four World Series – ’91, ’92, ’96, ’99. This got people to call them the Buffalo Bills of MLB, although they were stronger over a much longer period of time than the western New York club. Extended dominance must count for something, especially when factoring in the need to replace productive players due to injuries, retirement or reduced, you know, productivity.

Anyway, I think the Patriots are still in the midst of their dynasty, which stands a decade long. I’m interested to hear (or read) from my readers about this subject. Do you think the Patriots are still a dynasty? What is your criteria for determining what constitutes a dynasty? Fire away on here or get at me on Twitter (@KyleStack) or Google+ (+KyleStack).

Adidas has Derrick Rose and Dwight Howard. Nike has Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Kevin Durant. Reebok has John Wall. But UA and Jordan have gone above and beyond to show why their shoes mean something to their players. It’s in the way the shoes are designed, with special details that mark a player’s life to that point. It’s done also by the videos created for those players. Check out the two-minute vignettes UA produced for Jennings, Walker and Williams as part of their Are You From Here? campaign (more text after the videos):

Those videos strike a chord. You see the players off the court as ordinary people. Of course, they have extraordinary athleticism as well as other qualities that make professional athletes unique in what they do.

Jordan Brand has also made a connection between their product and their endorser. In this case, it’s the CP3.V shoe for, obviously, Chris Paul. They’ve churned out a two-minute video of their own in which Paul discusses how he celebrates his love for his family through his newest signature shoe. I’ll list the video below with two images and three sketches of the shoe to follow, all provided by Jordan Brand. (You may notice a yellow and blue colorway that was obviously intended for Paul to wear on the New Orleans Hornets before his trade to the Los Angeles Clippers.)

One comment to add: I appreciate the fun factor of Kevin Durant’s Nike NERF shoe and what the Kobe System represents about Kobe Bryant as a ballplayer, but I especially dig what UA and Jordan Brand have done for their endorsers. They’ve personalized them to the point where a reasonable person can feel empathy for that player. That effect can’t be underestimated in terms of how a consumer views an endorser, and thus, that endorser’s brand.

My research on the subject began in early September after I read an article in the St. Petersburg Times about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ use for the tablets. I knew the way I would start it was by contacting each team in the NFL. It was necessary to run team-by-team to see who was putting their playbooks on iPads, who was using them to watched edited video and to see who was and wasn’t using iPads, or other tablets, in the first place. It’s a responsible thing to do when writing a national story, as I intended this to be for Wired.com.

Given that I didn’t have a particular locale to cover, it was better for the story that I cover all my bases. So, I contacted each team. As you might suspect, that is a lengthy process. Some teams respond immediately; others doesn’t. For those who do, it then takes awhile to coordinate interviews with those willing to talk and it takes time to convince other teams to discuss things. But this was just one part of what I knew had to be a well-rounded story.

By October, I noticed the New York Times had a story of their own. In it, they detailed the Bucs and the Baltimore Ravens creating digital playbooks via iPads. The story also incorporated information from the NFL on how the league monitors security issues. Contacting the NFL was a given, but this story made it that much more of a priority that I included it in my story.

I recognized that my goal for the story had to encapsulate as many aspects of the NFL’s relationship to tablets as I could find. That meant embracing teams which use them for more than just playbooks, as the two stories I had seen represented only that part of it. Which led me to contact the software companies which make applications and programs that make it possible for teams to view playbook information, scouting reports, video edits and other stuff on their tablets. (I discovered early on that iPads were the only tablets relevant to this story.)

So, I called and emailed XOS Digital and DV Sport, two software companies I already knew of. Through speaking with people there and with more teams which were getting back to me, I became aware of Hudl and Coach’s Office. Then I found out about Ironworks Sports through an email the founder of that company sent my editor.

Player quotes weren’t a valued asset for this story. They’re in the newspaper stories I mentioned above as well as subsequent stories in the Baltimore Sun and Los Angeles Times, which each outlined only the Ravens’ incorporation of their playbook into iPads. (A CNN.com story shined a light on how iPads were revolutionizing several sports, including basketball.) While those newspapers likely included player’s quotes on iPads because fans are intrigued by what they have to say, I avoided players for their lack of specificity. I did make an exception when the Bills told me they would rather offer a player to speak with than someone in their front office; I relented.

By and large, I wanted this story conveyed by the several teams I spoke with and then the software companies to explain what they’re focused on developing. The NFL interview would play a supporting role in it. That’s how this story came together.

Click on the link below to read the story:

For NFL Teams, iPad Is Valuable Playbook

Leitsch aimed his contention with Twitter – and how it’s altered the way people interact with one another – at Darren Rovell, Mr. Sports Business Reporter. You might know Rovell by his regular reporting on CNBC or by his show on Versus (soon to be NBC Sports Network). I disagreed with a few characterizations Leitsch made about Rovell, in particular that Rovell is a “Twitter cop”, as Leitsch phrased it.

I know Rovell. We’ve met five or six times at various events during the past year. We’ve spoken on the phone several other times in which he would serve as a source for a story of mine. We follow each other on Twitter. He’s always been a nice guy, although that isn’t the point. Leitsch wrote that he found Rovell to be generally likable. But what I and I’m sure many others have noticed about Rovell is that he is deeply opinionated. That can be a good thing if used well, which I think Rovell does. He’s smart, he’s passionate and he uses those qualities to form opinions.

If Rovell uses the information he has gathered about Twitter (and social media) to form opinions on how people can and should use it, then who gives a damn if it’s policing or anything similar to it? The manner in which Leitsch and Justin Stangel (the Dave Letterman Show writer who’s been on a weird anti-Rovell rampage the past few weeks) criticize Rovell makes them seem ultra-sensitive. What are their expectations of Rovell?

The way I look at it is Rovell is already intelligent, so any opinion he forms is likely to have some value to it. But if his natural smarts are enhanced by the research and experience he has on a particular subject, then I’m interested to hear what he has to say about it. The fact remains that he understands Twitter, and social media, in general.His 13 Golden Rules of Twitter is a very good reference guide for anyone who wants to maximize his/her effectiveness on the social media platform.

What annoys me about Leitsch and Deadspin, for which he served as its founding editor, is the deliberate skepticism they take. It comes off as deliberate to me, at least. I feel like there so many times that they are skeptical or pessimistic about a topic because they feel like that’s the route they have to take. It’s disingenuous and sets the site up for coming off as some all-knowing entity when it’s not. Deadspin is hardly a bastion for any kind of journalism, save for the celebrity trash stuff upon which it has built its fame.