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As a marketing professional, I take special note of businesses (particularly in sports/entertainment) that thrive in spite of the fact that I can’t for the life of me understand their appeal.

Case in point: The World Wrestling Federation, most-recently branded as the WWE, which has been a going concern in the United States since 1952. While promoted as a sport, it is not. It’s completely scripted, from start to finish. It’s essentially a highly-promoted collection of pay-per-view and live event matches between large athletic men who pretend to wrestle while dressed in elaborate costumes and using pseudonyms. This is an entertainment franchise where marketing people sit in a room and determine which combination of fake wrestling matches and faux-blockbuster PPV events will most effectively lighten the wallets and debit cards of America’s not-quite-Men, aged 18-34. It’s like Las Vegas in tights.

These are the sorts of things I worry about if and when we make contact with other sentient beings in the universe:

Other Sentient Beings: “OK, so, we get that you all like to sit around and watch others of your species participate in athletic competitions rather than participating yourselves. But you also make time to watch others of your species pretend to participate in athletic competitions? Hmmm.”

Realizing that WWF has long-since jumped the shark, I’ve come to terms with having missed the opportunity to post a timelier blog entry solely devoted to pretend professional wrestling. However, this allows me to turn my attention to a new film about another pretend-competitive sport entitled Moneyball, based on the excellent book by Michael Lewis. This follows the exploits of the Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane, who through a mind-bending combination of non-traditional thinking and statistics manages to make a small market Major League Baseball franchise competitive. By the way, the actual title of Lewis’ book was Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

Hey, wait a minute.

The American Pastime, the National Sport (if you don’t include football or NASCAR) of the most powerful and democratic country on Earth is “unfair,” How can this be?

Picture this: A bunch of kids on a playground picking teams to play a sport. Let’s call that sport “professional baseball.” Typically, the protocol for selecting equal and fair teams (the implicit objective of this exercise) would be to pick captains for each team — who would then take turns selecting players until all eligible and willing individuals were selected. Provided that the captains had an equal knowledge of who to draft based on their ability to play, the rationale for this process is that, ideally, it will evenly distribute the talent across the teams and provide everyone with an equal opportunity to win. Simple enough.

However, what if one or more of the team captains got to pick whoever they wanted and pretty much as many players as they wanted every time it was their turn? Let’s not get all caught up in the reason for this — it could be that their parents have a lot of money, or they just signed a new cable TV deal including the entire New York City DMA, or maybe they haven’t quite gotten over Bill Buckner butchering that grounder in the ’86 Series. All that matters is that they get to pick the best players, and the other captains get what’s left. Which ain’t typically much.

Not to put too fine a point on it, you can’t just buy a World Series Championship — in fact, statistics show that spending in the top 2 only bats a cool .400. Here are the last 10 World Champions and their salary rank among 32 teams:

*Fear not, Tribe Fans, with a lot of luck and $127 million we can follow the lead of the plucky 2004 Boston Red Sox and beat our World Series curse.

And, for the record, OK, so maybe there’s no correlation between total team salary and the best players? Not so much …

*This list includes 2 MLB Most Valuable Players (ARod won it twice) and 2 Cy Young award winners (Santana won it twice).

To further connect the dots, 9 of the 10 best, most highly-compensated players belong to 2011 Top Ten salaried teams — and almost all of them are still in contention for the playoffs as of today’s date.

So, back to Moneyball: The premise of Michael Lewis’ book was that Billy Beane had to fundamentally change the way that baseball talent was evaluated and compensated in order to compete with other teams who had in some cases 3 or 4 times as much money to spend on players. He in effect had to draft what he called an “island of misfit toys,” essentially a team of young, unproven or unaccomplished players who slipped under the radar of the big market teams so that he could field a team that had a chance of winning.

Here’s my question: how frigging crazy is that?

Rather than fix the game to address this major flaw in basic competition and marketing (i.e., if every team has an equal chance to win, a sport is more attractive as a business enterprise, right?), teams have to create extensive databases of esoteric statistics in order to outsmart 31 other organizations, for years at a time, in order to be competitive. Rather than a business construction where any of the 32 teams has a realistic shot at making the playoffs, which would engage exponentially more fans for more of the season, MLB is satisfied to start every season in April with the fans in Kansas City, and Pittsburgh, and yes, Oakland, knowing that realistically they’ll be more interested in the NFL’s Hall of Fame preseason game than Major League Baseball by August.

That’s not just bad for the sport, it’s bad marketing.

Speaking of the NFL: former Commissioner Pete Rozelle of the NFL figured this out during the 1970s, and professional football has enjoyed a semblance of parity and unequaled popularity ever since. He implemented TV revenue sharing long before it became fashionable. In short, he recognized that the National Football League was not comprised of multiple individual companies competing against one another for fan allegiance, media dollars and merchandising revenue — it was one large corporation with many branch offices all working together to put the best, most competitive sports entertainment product it could on the field for 20+ weeks of the year. And when Paul Tagliabue oversaw the implementation of team salary caps in the 1980s, the league was set for unprecedented growth in both fan base and revenue. Oh, and as an aside to the greedy bastard that lives inside every Major League Baseball owner — the NFL just barely avoided a season-ending lockout that was caused largely because they all couldn’t agree on how much of the $9 BILLION in profit they make annually they all should get. That’s right, this is the sort of problem that you could be dealing with, Major League Baseball owners.

I intend to see Brad Pitt in Moneyball at some point in the next few weeks, and based on the reviews expect that I’ll like it a lot because it will be well scripted (Aaron Sorkin!), nicely acted (Brad Pitt! Philip Seymour Hoffman! That Chubby Dude Judd Apatow Loves!) and a really good story (the aforementioned Michael Lewis!). And I like baseball. Almost forgot that part.

But in the back of my mind it’s going to keep bothering me that the root of the issue with which it deals is tangential to a much larger problem — the basic inequity and poor business management of Major League Baseball as a corporate entity. And until MLB fixes this problem, I’ll continue to regard it as a second-tier professional sport without any true sense of competition on a level playing field — a sport where the winners are predetermined by the marketing people before they ever step on the diamond. All that’s missing are the tights.

Official photo, Melamed Riley accounts receivable enforcement squad.

Rick and I spent the bulk of last week in Minneapolis working with the very talented photographer, Jim Gallop, on a big client project we’re all so excited to share. Until that time – and it’ll be soon – what you see above is what happens when, after wrapping up, Gallop suggested we play around with some strobe lights and his fisheye lens. Take some Melamed Riley-branded apparel and some borrowed sunglasses, then add two intense looks and blend it with some photo magic and, presto, there you have it. While the modeling agencies haven’t come calling just yet, we have cleared all phone lines for that inevitability.

We’re really burning the midnight oil over here at Melamed Riley. We have some stellar projects in the works that we hope to share with you soon. Until all of our work hits the launch pad, I thought this might be a wonderful opportunity for me to share with you some retro astronaut advertising. If it were up to me, we’d have astronauts in everything – just like back in the sixties. Enjoy!

Even sober, Betty hasn’t got a clue how she’s going to get all of that hair into that little helmet.

Melpar displays the first wall-mounted iPad. Does this thing get Angry Birds?

The United States, Russia--even the Germans got in on the astro-advertising action – and they hadn’t built a rocket since 1945.

Evidently astronauts were the target market for luxury timepieces.

Such a progressive era, it’s astonishing! Dream big, ladies! Some day you might be cleaning on the moon!

I love my Mac and all the gooey-sweet Adobe CS filling inside it, but sometimes it’s nice to quit Photoshop and InDesign and go make something. One of my passions here is to disappear for an hour or two and create an exact replica of what could be produced in huge quantity. It’s called a mock-up and this usually takes place in what we affectionately call “The Shed.” It’s a mailing/flapping/storage room which contains all of the necessary blades, rulers, elipse templates, T-squares, adhesives and tapes to make these creations come to life. A lot of our mailers and packaging designs require more than a one-dimensional PDF to get its super-creative effects across to our clients. Giving them a working pop-up mailer or a full-sized, 6-foot high dimensional package often helps bring the creativity of each individual piece to life.

The Shed, where the mock-up magic happens.

There’s nothing that can’t be created in The Shed with just a few calculated cuts, scores and folds.

I had the awesome opportunity to attend the first Content Marketing World Conference right here in Cleveland, Ohio hosted by the Content Marketing Institute. There were over 600 attendees from 18 countries who came together to rock Cleveland’s content world. It was two full days packed with knowledge, tweeting, orange snacks, Joe Pulizzi’s rad orange shoes and networking with some of the best content marketing rock stars out there. Check out the great intro video that sums up what the conference and content marketing is all about – “The Power of Story.”

I came away from this conference feeling challenged in my own professional life to work on being a better content marketer. With the evolution of the web and the growth in social media sites content marketing has never been more important, especially if you are in the marketing and advertising industry. In the true content marketing fashion I would like to share some of the key points that I got from just a few of the content rock stars I was able to learn from.

Rock Star: Sally Hogshead (@SallyHogshead)
Session Subject: “The Power of Story”

Key Takeaway:
• “Hi” fails to fascinate.
• Stand out or don’t bother.
• You can be innovative or comfortable, not both.
• You do not learn how to be fascinating; you unlearn how to be boring.

Go take Sally’s “F Score Brand Personality Test” to see just how you are fascinating!

Rock Star: David Meerman Scott (@dmscott).
Session Subject: “Real-Time Content Marketing”

Key Takeaway:
• Nobody cares about your products except you.
• Fear is the biggest barrier.
• Always think about being the second paragraph.

“What is the second paragraph?” Find out the answer on David’s Blog Webinknow.com.

Rock Star: Todd Wheatland (@ToddWheatland)
Session Subject: “Transforming a Large Organization into a Content Machine.”

Key Takeaway:
• People support what they help to create.
• Kill the cheerleader – there is always room for improvement.

Rock Star: Alison Bolen (@alisonbolen)
Session Subject: “Results-Driven Blogging for B2B Brands.”

Key Takeaway:
• Be the voice and they will link to you.
• Don’t talk about your product like it is a rainbow.
• Think big and then scale back.

Check out Lee Oden’s blog on Alison Bolen’s “Results-Driven Blogging for B2B Brands” session at #cmworld.

Rock Star: Robert Rose (@Robert_Rose)
Session Subject: “Killer Story telling Techniques Learned from Hollywood.”

Key Takeaway:
• Differentiate means telling a different story; not the same one incrementally better.
• Good content marketing is alive; it is your story, make it remarkable.
• Good Content marketing is telling a hero’s journey from start to finish.

Check out Robert’s blog TheAdapativeMarketer.com.

Rock Star: Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs) and C.C. Chapman (@cc_chapman)
Session Subject: “The Content Rules for Marketing Executives.”

Key Takeaway:
• Content is an opportunity to create an emotional connection.
• Your most expensive commodity is your time.
• You want to attract your audience’s audience.

Those were just a few of the highlights from some of the amazing content marketers that spoke at the conference. There were many more awesome ideas and insights I gleaned over those two days and I am looking forward to putting those into action over the next year for our agency and clients. I highly recommend if you are interested in social media, or content marketing you mark next year’s Content Marketing World conference on your calendar!

Additional Blog Posts from Conference Attendees:

Content Marketing World Rocks

An Essential Checklist for Creating Valuable Content #cmworld

Build a Better Buyer Experience with Marketing Content #cmworld

Content Marketing World a Great Success

Live From Content Marketing World: Sally Hogshead on The Power of Story

Live From Content Marketing World: Thank you, Joe

The Behind-the-Scenes Look at Content Marketing World’s Success

4 Marketing Lessons I Learned From the Muppets

You can also search for the hash tag #CMworld to see a lot of great tweets and tips from conference speakers and attendees!

We all know you can’t break advertising down into a simple formula. Each product or service brings its own unique challenges and opportunities. However, sometimes similar formulas work for different products in entirely different categories.

Take for example Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” spots from last year and Dairy Queen’s current campaign “So Good It’s RiDQulous.” Both follow a similar formula: Alpha male + tireless confidence + rich baritone voice + exemplary inflection + facial hair + butterfly effect of ridiculous scenarios (see chart below) x 87. And what does it all equal? Successful brand repositioning? I think so.

Before Mustafa came along – who by the way is a former Cleveland Brownie – I thought of Old Spice as, well, old. The campaign breathes new life into a brand that is 74 years old – a difficult feat when “old” is in your name.

When I think of DQ, I think of ice cream. It’s hard not to conjure up images of their signature soft serve. However, this campaign does a nice job of saying, “Hey, that’s not all we do well.”

Maybe the next time I start to feel hunger pangs while on a long road trip I’ll think of DQ instead of the usual suspects. And just maybe the next time I’m in the grocery store I’ll pick up some Old Spice because “The Man your Woman Could Smell Like” has a nice ring to it, too. You may think I’m joking but, Old Spice’s first fragrance was actually “Early American Old Spice for Women.”

The Cleveland Browns claim “it’s always football season,” which is great except that, well, it’s not. In fact, nine long months have passed since the Browns went down faster than Big Ben in an Irish bar and put an end to another hapless season. But with this year comes a fresh batch of optimism thanks in part to a young duo that sounds more like a country music act than an offensive threat – quarterback Colt McCoy and running back Peyton Hillis. And now that the Indians “What if?” has become “What happened?”, Cleveland sports fans from Solon to Scottsdale have once again turned to their beloved Brownies in hopes that football season can transition into a playoff run. Will it happen? I can’t tell you. What I can do is share a video tribute to everyone’s new favorite player and join you in wishing that this season brings more smiles than Cleveland frowns.

Although it’s been around for years, how often do most of us really take note of the information on the small black and white Nutrition Facts label printed on all packaged foods we consume in this country? As part of the population that is trying to make a conscious effort to make better informed nutritional choices, I have been paying closer attention to what these labels say. As a professional in the marketing world, I have also been paying closer attention to how it’s presented. Since the way information is represented visually impacts our decisions as consumers, would a change in design of the Nutrition Facts label change our food choices?

This year, the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism’s News21, together with GOOD initiated a project to redesign the food label. They asked designers, nutritionists and food policy experts to submit a design that would “inspire better food and nutrition literacy with clear, simple, easy-to-understand labels.” A panel of judges then selected a winner from a variety of entries, many of which had a different take on what information should be included and how it should be presented.

Here is a snapshot of the winning entry:

All designs can be found at Rethink the Food Label.

Would a new label design affect how you view nutritional information?

Over the summer, Melamed Riley was selected to help launch a new line of products by a leading manufacturer in the building materials category. Because the official introduction isn’t until next month at the Remodeling Show in Chicago, I need to keep all the particulars hush-hush until the big unveiling. But one of the things I can share is a tactic we recently employed to help generate some buzz at a recent meeting that took place at our client’s headquarters.

They had invited one of their most important distribution partners to their place for a sneak peek at what’s in store for next year. To get to our client’s offices, these buyers were going to have to take one of two elevators. So we designed a custom floor graphic for both – one that made it appear that the elevator floor was missing. All people saw when the elevator doors opened were floor joists and the basement.

Once our client’s guests got the nerve to actually walk into the elevator, they saw a sign on the wall that completed the story that the floor graphic began. (All the products in the line we are launching are used in very early phases of home construction, including the installation of subfloor.)

We worked with TRG Reality to create the eye-catching, vertigo-inducing image and called on Lake Erie Graphics to produce the highly durable outputs. These days, with the ability to create such high resolution images at any size – on materials that can be placed virtually anywhere – the sky (or the basement) is the limit when it comes to creating huge stopping power and tons of engagement with your audience.

Having fun with the graphic in our office prior to sending it off for installation in the elevator.