Marketing Rapid Fire 10-7-06

While I sit here in lower back pain from pulling out my back, I figured I'd give you a marketing rapid fire.  Yes, I pulled my back out during this morning's soccer game where I'm the head coach and team sponsor.  Literally for $150 , I sponsored my soccer team and had the honor of coaching this team.   Right now we are 2-3, which isn't bad considering we are not supposed to try and win.  Anyway, without further ado, this week's marketing rapid fire.

• Watch out in SecondLife for your own brand name as someone else has the Avatar name Leo Burnett.  When I logged in, I grabbed the name PardonMyFrench Boehm which the first name is obvious while the last name is not: it is the last name of my good friends Grace and Chip Boehm.
• MLB is running a $10 million advertising campaign to promote the playoffs. I really can't stand the ads with Tommy Lasorda - not that they are bad, but I think Tommy is reduced to a comedic character.  I guess the famous manager that has been reduced to always appearing in baseball bloopers doesn't care that much.  The folks at MLB.com were smart enough to spend more than 10% of their media budget on online properties.  Nicely done.
• How many of you marketing executives can't stand getting your ads approved by your compliance or legal officers.  Personally, I never had any problems because a) these folks were trying to keep me out of jail and b) their butt was on the line if something got out that wasn't kosher.  Over at BusinessWeek, a HP compliance lawyer clearly had concerns and issues with the pre-texting.  If you don't want to read the article, fine, but at least click the links to copies of the email trail.
• NyTimes is blogging about the Yankees and Mets playoffs games from an apartment in NYC.  Hmm - I guess it is ok for the people that can't catch the game on TV or TiVo, radio, or plunk money down over at MLB.com to watch it live.  The platform isn't as good as what you can get over at Yahoo sports where you can see live stats and it is just a blog...My guess is it will make an early exit like the Yankees.
• CNET has a cute article where they figured out by typing in "search" into Google and hit, I'm Feeling Lucky, you get the new Microsoft Live Search page.
• Finally, political blogger Michele Malkin gets banned for putting an anti-jihad video on YouTube and has a lot to say about it.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric