Would the Super Bowl be quite so super without Ed Sabol?

There are many reasons the NFL is the most popular professional sport in America: the violence. The speed. The tailgating.

I would argue one other reason must be included in that list, perhaps as important as any other: the mythology.

While baseball has its infatuation with numbers, the NFL has its lore, and no institution has been more critical in the cultivation and dissemination of that lore than NFL Films.

Because of NFL Films, when we picture the NFL, we see the slow motion of a tight spiral in flight, we hear the bright brass of a symphony orchestra serving as the soundtrack to gridiron battles, and we hear the somber intonation of John Facenda talking about “the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field.”

Better than any other pro sport, the NFL knows how to tell its stories, and that storytelling skill began with Ed Sabol (right, with son Steve), who started NFL Films by paying the league $4,000 for the rights to film the 1962 NFL Championship game.

Sam Donellon of the Philadelphia Daily News has a great piece about Sabol and the place of NFL Films in the history of the league:

Sabol’s use of orchestra music, dramatic narrative, slow motion and tightly cropped shots became as familiar to the public as a laugh track, and far more interesting. Slow-motion spirals, bloody hands and faces, microphones catching coaches’ comments and the combatants’ grunts and groans, defined the NFL for the prosperous decades to come, made legends of the men who played and coached the game.

This Saturday in Dallas, a day before the Super Bowl, the Pro Football Hall of Fame selection committee will vote on whether to induct Ed Sabol into the Hall as a “contributor” — someone who never played, coached, or worked for an NFL team.

I don’t get a vote, but I think it’s safe to say that Ed Sabol and his brainchild, NFL Films, have been a significant contributor to the league.

UPDATE 2/5/2011 - I’m happy to say that Ed Sabol was indeed selected to the Hall of Fame. The headline of Ray Didinger’s article on NFL.com says it all:

Happy ending for pro football’s ultimate storyteller

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

“Currents” on Living St. Louis

Originally aired on Living St. Louis on the Nine Network (the St. Louis PBS affiliate) on January 10, here is the great piece that Ruth Ezell did on the creation of ‘Currents,’ our collaboration with Jill Downen that now lights up the atrium of the Center of Creative Arts in University City:

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

Eisner: Knowing what makes a good story is rare

This insight from the Wall Street Journal Magazine profile of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner (Edited from Alan Deutschman’s interview with Eisner) is interesting:

A lot of people can learn to write computer code and understand the inner workings of the technological revolution we’re going through, but if you’re going to be in content, I would rather you understand what makes a good narrative. To find people who can make you laugh or cry or smile or get upset or learn something about yourself. Those people are rare. They are rarer, frankly, than the others.

I’d agree, with this addition: it’s not just if you’re going to be in content. Or, alternately, everybody’s in content.

Either way, it’s both rare and important to be able to tell a good story.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

“We don’t serve those kind of drinks.”

My brother told me a story about a recent visit to a cool little restaurant in Philadelphia that not only brews their own beer, but they brew their own sodas. Sounds like a great storytelling opportunity for the servers, doesn’t it?

Well, some servers.

In response to the question, “Can my son have a Coke?”, one server was overheard replying:

“We don’t serve those kind of drinks. We only have homemade sodas.”

Another server, in response to the very same question, was overheard saying:

“We actually make all our own sodas from scratch here! He might like this one — it’s similar to Coke!”

As my brother said, which do you think went over better?

Being thoughtful enough to make your own sodas makes for some great mythology — but unless the experience you’re delivering lines up with that mythology, you’re stifling the potential of a great story.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

Five Guys, great burgers, plus no frills = advocacy

Inc. has an interesting photo essay examining the success of Five Guys Burgers and Fries. The second slide reads:

The Best Salesman is the Customer

“Treat that person right, he’ll walk out the door and sell for you,” Murrell says. “From the beginning, I wanted people to know that we put all our money into the food. That’s why the décor is so simple – red and white tiles. We don’t spend our money on décor. Or on guys in chicken suits. But we’ll go overboard on food.”

Founder Jerry Murrell suggests that FIve Guys’ décor is “simple” because they put all their money into the food. But it’s clear they didn’t put all their thought into the food.

Despite Murrell’s claims, that simple décor is a key part of the Five Guys story, which is this: Great burgers, no frills.

Of course, if they truly wanted no frills, wouldn’t the walls be all white?

The red and white décor effectively evokes an earlier era of burgerdom. It’s a nod to a time when the food mattered above everything, a time before McDonald’s was attempting to be both a café and a kids playland at the same time.

That décor works with the name itself to give Five Guys an everyman, red-meat vibe. However, if the burgers didn’t deliver — if the food didn’t align with this story — none of it would work.

But because they do, it does. And because in our post- (burger) war world, the entire Five Guys approach is such a refreshing change, they’ve made it easy for others to tell their story — for customers to become advocates, and to “walk out the door and sell for you.”

Case in point: Blogger Dan Holm, on his GreenEggsMarketing.com blog, tells a brief story about his first-hand Five Guys experience that reinforces the story that Five Guys is telling — that it’s really all about the food:

Today as I finished ordering my delicious Five Guys double cheeseburger, the cashier turned around to the grill guy (the grill is visible from the front of the store) to call out our order and noticed that there were 3 hamburger patties sitting on the grill. It was obvious that these burger patties weren’t too old, they just weren’t grilled “fresh” for a customer. So, with these simple words: “get rid of those” the cashier directed the grill guy to throw the 3 patties away and put fresh ones on the grill for our order.

Slowly but surely, Five Guys is defining the new “fresh”. What Five Guys does, that other fast casual restaurants don’t is this: they make their food, right now, for you. Who else does this? What other fast casual restaurant would willingly, throw food away to make something completely and truly fresh for the customer? ….

Five Guys is changing the game, and the results are simply remarkable. Better tasting food that’s made just for “me”. Juicy, delicious and the ultimate in satisfaction.

When even the cashiers understand the story you are trying to tell, and take action that aligns with that story, you not only make advocacy easy, you create opportunities for other people to tell your story.

And now I’m really hungry for Five Guys.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

Can an online personal finance tool tell a story?

Came across an interesting Q & A with Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer in the August edition of Delta’s Sky Magazine. One question and answer pairing in particular grabbed my attention:

What separates Mint.com from other online finance tools?

Never underestimate the power of user interface and good product design. Pixel-perfect design is something Mint is known for, and that is not exactly common in the financial industry, where most websites look like they were made in 1988. Finances can be a touchy subject. Everyone has mistakes they’ve made, debt they’ve accumulated that they don’t want to look at, so even the green color scheme in the background and the graphs you see on the home page, all of those things are very calming. They have a deliberate psychological effect.

Put another way, Mint has a challenging story to tell — they need to make people want to use their site, which deals exclusively with something people usually want to avoid dealing with.

To counter this natural resistance, they’ve made an effort to finesse the story people tell themselves — not about their personal finances, which will always come with a certain amount of angst, but about the experience of dealing with their personal finances using Mint.

Clearly, if people are to use Mint, the service itself must first make dealing with personal finances painless (or at least less painful). But Mint gets that the story is about more than the service. They know that if landing on the Mint homepage can have a soothing effect, or at least a welcoming one, the user can feel more comfortable and lower their resistance, which is likely to improve their experience. And they understand how design and usability help tell (and ultimately spread) that story.

Patzer also offers an interesting take on Mint’s approach to social media. Being a free online service, you might expect a certain reliance on or investment in social media to build and connect with their user base. But again, Patzer has taken an approach consistent not with the trends of the times, but with the story that Mint wants to tell:

It doesn’t seem like you relied much on social media to build a user base. How does social networking relate to Mint?

We have a lot of Facebook fans and followers—we use those networks in that way. It has never been a core value at Mint because your personal finances are just that—personal. The best we do is provide social comparisons or aggregate comparisons with other Mint users. But I don’t think people want to share their purchases with everyone else. It’s not cool to brag to your friends about what an awesome rate you got on your mortgage.

Mint’s functionality is clearly critical to its effectiveness and success. But the online personal finance space is crowded. I would bet that even more than functionality, the trust and user relationships that Mint built by leveraging its philosophy and story to connect with people are what enticed Intuit (Quicken, Turbo Tax) to buy it last year for $170 million.

Of course, Mint would probably discourage me from placing that bet, and suggest a nice, safe place for me to invest that money instead.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

With the iPhone 4 release, Apple doesn’t leave out the stories

There’s been lots of buzz about all the cool new features in Apple’s new iPhone 4, but one of the things I especially appreciated about how Apple promoted the launch was the section on their site devoted to Developer Stories.

The star of the show with the iPhone 4 is clearly the technology, with lots of cool new stuff that has many current iPhone users checking the status of their current AT&T contract (me included).

Yet Apple took some time — and judging by the quality and loving care with which these films were made, invested some money — to tell these developer stories, and put a human face on the technology.

(I found the story behind the Pandora app, told by Pandora’s Tom Conrad, pictured above, a compelling testament to the transformative power of the iPhone and the app platform.)

These stories may seem like a nice touch, or a cute little add-on, but to me they’re not extra, they’re essential — and they’re consistent with Apple’s ongoing commitment to telling a story about how what they do impacts lives, not just how they keep coming up with cool bells and whistles. The tech media may focus on the things, but Apple’s focus is on the people.

And I think it’s that ongoing commitment to the user, demonstrated by their ongoing commitment to story, that keeps Apple several steps ahead of the competition — not just in the power of their technology, but in the loyalty of their advocates.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

There are no throwaways

There are many unofficial act3 mantras, but one that has been gaining significance and relevance with repeated use is the title of this post: There are no throwaways.

By this we mean that everything is part of your story. You might think that if you spend the majority of your time producing beautiful, elegant work that it’s okay if one small thing you produce is sloppy and half-assed, but it’s not. What if that sloppy, half-assed thing is somebody’s introduction to you, the first thing they stumble upon?

If something you’re about to say or do or write or design or make does not align with the story you want to tell, think twice. Because there are no throwaways. Everything matters.

On the downside, this means that somebody might see your sub-par effort on that tiny little thing you did, and judge you on that. That might be your one chance, and thanks to that “tiny” little thing, you blew it.

On the upside, it also means that somebody might experience the above-average effort you put into what others might consider a tiny little thing, appreciate the hell out of the juice and the care and the thoughtfulness you put into it, and extrapolate from that.

Seth Godin (who, once again, seems to be reading my mind) has a great post today that inspired this one. An encounter with someone reading his blog for the first time illustrates the “no throwaways” principle nicely:

I was sitting in a coffee shop and watched someone (at the recommendation of a friend who didn’t realize I was within earshot) open up my blog and start reading it. Right there, out of the corner of my eye, someone was experiencing me (well, digital me) for the first time.

Here it was, my first impression writ large. No fair running over and saying, “no, skip those two, those two aren’t so good, go back a month or two and read the generous, thoughtful ones I wrote…”

It’s like DNA. One cell carries the coding for all of them.

That meal you served at lunch yesterday might be the first impression, or that comment you left on someone’s page or that customer service interaction with the new guy at your big client’s office…

There’s a riot of information racing by, and to survive, we snatch little bits and then magnify them into what we embrace as the full picture. Nuance? No time for nuance.

Every interaction might be the whole thing.

I would argue that there is time for nuance, sometimes, but I agree that you can’t assume everyone you want to reach is willing to take that time.

I’ll tell you one thing: that sure is a good reminder to make every blog post worth reading. Maybe on the surface, it’s “just” a blog post. But you never know who might notice.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::

On the death of Flash (and the importance of advocates)

There have been rumblings for a while that Flash is dying, a perspective that is starting to get louder and louder with the announcement of the iPad. Nobody’s quite sure what the alternative will be or how long it will take to figure it out, but people seem to be losing faith in Adobe’s ability to keep Flash from an untimely demise.

This chunk of Jeff LaMarche’s rant from a while back gives his take on why:

What will happen with Flash? Hell if I know. My current level of confidence in Adobe is not very high. The management team there has somehow managed to take a customer base who were rabidly loyal and turn them into customers who feel trapped and desperately want an alternative. This has happened in less than a decade. Talk about spending political capital! Somewhere along the line, Adobe stopped being a company that did, first and foremost, what their customers needed, and instead became a company that looked to make the most money they could with the least expenditure. It’s a short-term strategy taught in many business schools (including Harvard) using impressive-sounding phrases like “maximizing shareholder value”. Yet, it’s a strategy that anyone with any common sense (aka not an MBA) knows is completely and utterly moronic. In the long-term, rabidly loyal fans are far better than great salespeople. They’re better than good advertising campaigns, slogans, or even Superbowl ads. They’re better than product placement in a summer blockbuster.

And you can’t buy them for any price.

There is a price to be paid for neglecting your advocates.

:: Posted by Ben Kaplan ::

There are numbers in the record books, and then there are stories

Speaking Tuesday on ESPN about Mark McGwire’s completely unshocking revelation that he did, in fact, take steroids, Tim Kurkjian was asked about whether Roger Maris’ single-season home run record, which McGwire shattered in 1998, should be restored.

Kurkjian suggested the record should stand, citing some of the other questionable numbers and statistics that still stand in baseball’s offical record book, including the championship won by the 1919 Cincinnati Reds, “who won the World Series even though the other team, the White Sox, intentionally threw the World Series” in the infamous Black Sox gambling scandal.

He continued:

“What we do is we connect a story to these records, and explain to people what happened here. Then we leave it up to our best fans to decide what they think here. The thought that Roger Maris’ legacy is gone forever is absolutely ridiculous. Roger Maris’ legacy has been enhanced by all of this.”

Baseball cherishes its numbers more than any other sport. But the numbers do not act alone. The Maris stories that came back into the public consciousness as McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased his record in that memorable summer of 1998 became as much a part of the mythology and the experience as the number itself, just as the stories (and controversy) about McGwire are now as much a part of his mythology and the experience of those who remember that summer as his magic number.

:: Posted by Eric Ratinoff ::