PR Move of the Day: As we move through the opening week of baseball season it is great to see hope springing eternal for all the fans of America's pastime. One brand that has always been synonymous with baseball is the Topps Card Company, and thanks to the efforts of their marketing staff and the PR team at Dan Klores Associates, the hallmark brand in collectable trading cards is well on its way to a great season. First the company started the season by including cards of Presidential candidates in preseason packs, which led to some solid early spring training pieces, as well as great buzz around a fake card of Rudy Giuliani celebrating the Red Sox winning the World Series (featured on ESPN.com among other places). Then the company took the hoax cards to a grand new level, combining the interest in opening week with April Fools Day by including a “Future Stars” card of 16 year old flamethrowing phenom Kazuo Uzuki (nicknamed “The Uzi”). The card play got some solid national coverage across the country (as well as in papers such as the Daily News in New York) and had TV play on ESPN and CNBC as well. Now while some may think the card stunts may be old fashioned or played out, the placement at strategic points in the baseball calendar was a great branding move by Topps to set themselves apart in the collectable game and garner press that no other company received, not to mention showing that the brand, which is supposed to inspire fun, has the ability to not take itself so seriously. Great hits for the traditional brand.
On to some other articles of note…this week's NFL meetings produced some worth reads with NFL owners, including a Washington Times q and a with Skins owner Dan Snyder, and a Florida Sun Sentinel sitdown with new Dolphins part owner Steve Ross…legendary baseball writer Roger Angell put his first piece of the season into this week's New Yorker and is always worth sharing…we came across a great chart that showed how Stanford would have won the NCAA tournament had the winner been determined by median salary of its graduates…good read in the New York Times on Jamal Patterson, an IFL light heavyweight who sells by day and trains by night (shows great personality and diversity for the athlete) and Media Post offered up a note on the mix of politics and sports, with Derek Jeter and David Ortiz doing some “campaigning” for XM Radio...
