Yearly Archives: 2007

This American Life: Poker Pros

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“Ira travels to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, gets hooked, and tries to figure out what it would mean if he ditched his job in radio to become a professional card player. What he learns: a professional gambler can suffer two heartbreaking losses back-to-back, costing him over $100,000, and moments later, at the casino bar, calculate the million-to-one odds of his unlikely losses…in his head.”

By all means, go to the This American Life website and listen to the program there. (26 minutes)  As always, this is brilliant story telling, but it’s a must-listen for anyone that ever thought they’d like to play cards for a living.

Email Marketing

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In April of this year, Barb and I attended a performance by Blue Man Group in Columbia, MO. Prior to the show, you could register to win a "trip back stage" by providing your email address. Barb did.

Five minutes after checking into Treasure Island Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on Friday, she received an email from… Blue Man Group, inviting her to come see their show while she’s in town.

I’m guessing they have some sort of arrangement with with all the MGM-owned hotels that allows them to match the email database against guest as they check in. As far as I know, they have not abused Barb’s email address since collecting it. They were waiting to use it in this –or some other equally clever– way.

Multimedia getting big in collegiate sports marketing

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The company I work for has the marketing rights for the Oklahoma Sooners.  Last week the university announced a new new 10-year, $75 million extension of our deal. Here’s the part that caught my attention:

"Sooner Sports Properties (Learfield) will create a broadband channel to run content about Sooners athletics in addition to certain radio and television rights for events not covered under contracts through the Big 12 Conference. It also holds provisions for emerging technology."

If I read the release correctly, multimedia content generated $2.65 million last year. Sounds like a whole new ball game doesn’t it?

Surviving Las Vegas

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Fake waterfalls, fake grass, fake tits. Las Vegas is city of illusions. If Branson is Las Vegas for people who don’t haved teeth… Las Vegas is Branson for people who do. In fairness, Las Vegas is for people who like to gamble and shop. I don’t care for either.

Nice wedding on Friday and a great show on Saturday. Cirque DuSoleil’s "O" is amazing. Beyond description. The O Theater (The Mirage) seats 1,809 and the show has been sold out every night (2 shows) for years. Tickets range from $85-150. Let’s call ’em $100, or $180,000 per show…$360,000 a night. And the show is probably a loss leader to get folks into the casino.

Took some pix and video and will share those when time allows.

Now I’m about to check email for first time since Thursday. This won’t be pretty.


But these days it seems
Nowhere is far enough away
So I’m leaving Las Vegas today

Google Lunar X Prize

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“Put a robotic lander on the moon, take a spin across the lunar landscape, and beam back visuals — with minimal or no government assistance. Pull that off before anyone else and the galaxy’s richest, most audacious Internet company (Google) will hand over $20 million.” [Wired]

After reading this story, the first thing that popped into my head was: I have more confidence in Google (and a few other companies for that matter) than I do in the U. S. government. My gut tells me Google is more efficient, less corrupt and possessing greater vision.

Guy Kawasaki, Gnomedex 2007

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One of the best presentations at last month’s Gnomedex was Guy Kawasaki. He’s a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of eight books, has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College. He talks about evangelism in this video.

“Things we were told about online that were wrong.”

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Steve Safran at Lost Remote takes a look back at some of the responses to his suggestions regarding the web. These bring back a lot of memories:

  • Nobody will break news on their site before the story airs
  • Newspapers won’t put much news online because it will cannibalize sales
  • Nobody will buy web advertising
  • Only young people use the web, and they don’t want news
  • The bubble has burst – there’s no future in the web now
  • There is no need to hire a web-only salesperson
  • News websites will never “blog” or have anything to do with blogging
  • Social networking tools don’t belong on news sites
  • The networks will never send programming directly to the audience and ignore the locals
  • People won’t watch video online because the quality is not high enough
  • People won’t watch video on an iPod because the picture is not big enough
  • Viewers won’t upload video and pictures because it’s too hard to do

The news we want or the the news we need?

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“Mainstream media outlets may not be offering up the stories online users most want to read, according to a new survey that found user-generate new sites like Yahoo giving top billing to different stories than mainstream outlets. The study, from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, took a week’s worth of news from three user-driven sites, and Yahoo, and compared it to top stories on various mainstream outlets. The result: online users gravitated toward different topics than those from traditional news outlets.”

— Editor & Publisher:

“You become what you say you are.”

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Scott Donation, blogging at Advertising Age, says your customers are more important than your brand:

“I hate to say it, but we need to re-draw the wheel one more time. This time, take the brand out of the center spot and replace it with your customers—audience and advertisers. Yes, media products should still think of themselves as brands, but everything they do needs to be organized around serving the customer, and the only way to create a truly customer-focused operation (rather than just mouthing the words) is to start at the core and build out. “You become what you say you are,” a savvy publishing-industry chieftain said during a recent lunch with me and my management team.” [Thanks, Roger]