Their ad buy has obviously changed, because even though they’ve been on TV somewhere for most of 2008, all of a sudden, the Shamwow late-night TV spots are intersecting with our networks. In honoring the host of the Shamwow commercial, Vince Offer, with October’s ‘Gamey’, we honor a couple of great American traditions: Late night TV spots made on the cheap but with an aesthetic we have come to appreciate as its own kind of pulp genre…and the pitchmen moving the merch. The ginzu knife demo’ers and the guys who suck bowling balls with vacuum cleaners and Suzanne Sommers, and Richard Simmons, and Ron Popeil and Ed McMahon, and Vince McMahon and Jim McMahon — there should be a special wing in the TV Hall of Fame for these characters, and for their fictional counterparts like Willy Wonka, Willy Loman and Professor Harold Hill. Vince Offer, wearing the headset that is just as mandatory to a boardwalk hawker like him as a face mask is to a hockey goalie, is a classic of the breed. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘GameChanger of the Month’
GameChanger of the Month, October 2008
Monday, November 3rd, 2008GameChanger of the Month, July 2008
Thursday, July 31st, 2008Sigh. The post about Paul Polak got swallowed up by WordPress (and I didn’t have it backed up). So if anyone out there saved the lost post in a file, please send it along and we’ll re-post.
Meanwhile, here’s the re-construction, in abridged form:
Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises and the author of Out of Poverty, has been battling poverty in development countries for 23 years by helping poor farmers eke out a better living off the land. IDE operates on a local level, dealing with grass-roots problems and building markets for locally-manufactured solutions. This self-sustaining model has resulted in cleaner drinking water, better efficiency in agriculture, improved health and better standards of living for millions of people around the world. (more…)
GameChanger of the Month, June 2008
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008When it comes to feature filmmaking, Hollywood used to be the only game in town. The Hollywood game is still the highest stakes table at which a player can sit, but there is a lot of alternative action available to indie filmmakers today. Some of that action is happening at the IndieGoGo table.
IndieGoGo, based in Berkeley, CA, and launched in January, 2008, is an online business that matches film projects with contributors who can put up any amount of money they choose for stories and filmmakers they believe in. It was co-founded by Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin and Eric Schell, who are seeking to, in their words “democratize film creation.” (more…)
GameChanger of the Month, April 2008
Thursday, May 1st, 2008It’s only the most valuable brand in the world these days, so in one sense any kind of accolade, even one as prestigious as the GameChanger of the Month Award (”The Gamey”) with its winning prize of this blog post, is pretty obvious and lame.
What’s not so obvious or lame is how Google’s culture is built on fundamental concepts of improvisation. (more…)
GameChanger of the Month, March 2008
Monday, March 31st, 2008
YOU THOUGHT I JUMPED THE SHARK WHEN I DID MY ‘BIG MOUTH BILLY BASS’ THING ON LENO, DIDN’T YOU? WELL, I WAS JUST GETTING STARTED, BABY. THAT WAS THE MOVE THAT BROKE ME AWAY FROM YOUR OLD SCHOOL FISH LIKE YOUR CATFISH, YOUR CRAPPY AND YOUR MUSKY. I’LL ALWAYS BE GRATEFUL TO JAY FOR GIVING ME A SHOT. ‘BIG MOUTH BILLY’ WAS MY ‘MATERIAL GIRL’. ‘DON’T WORRY BE HAPPY’ WENT PLATINUM WHEN I COVERED IT AND GAVE BOBBIE McFERRIN A WHOLE NEW AUDIENCE. AFTER THAT PEOPLE BEGAN PAYING ATTENTION. (more…)
GameChanger of the Month, February 2008
Saturday, March 1st, 2008When I began my career in the media business, it was accepted as doctrine that if you had a mainstream news story, the New York Times or one of the big Manhattan-based publications led, and everyone else followed. This began changing with the advent of the Networked World, until it seemed that no one was leading and everyone was following, that the news came from everywhere, all at once. (A classic improv saying goes: “Follow the follower.”) No one understood these new realities better and faster than Matt Drudge.
After Drudge (’Web A. D.’ ) the constellation that was American newspaper journalism, shook, shifted and re-aligned, with Himself as one of its stars, and other web sites like the Huffington Post, Politico and Gawker joining the Drudge Report as new centers of gravity. (more…)
GameChanger of the Month, January 2008
Monday, February 4th, 2008In the dotcom era of the mid to late 1990s. I thought often of my grandmother. Specifically, I began to wonder if the folkways she possessed — like how to douse for water with the forked limb of the peach tree — were just a tiny splinter of a lost body of knowledge. Whether there were others out there in the world like her, who possessed different splinters of that knowledge and its practices. And whether those splinters might somehow, because of the internet, be re-assembled and put to some new purpose.
When I’d bring this up in conversation with my fellow dotcommers, people would stare at me like I’d just said I expected beanie-copters to be making a big comeback soon. Douse? How un-real. How un-important. Nobody lives on the land any more.
We walk on dead skin through insulated, ventilated, carpeted chambers, through grottos of polished glass and granite, into cocoons of silicon and fiberglas and stainless steel, and we are seldom in actual physical contact with the Earth, the very entity that sustains us. That is simply the way the game of life is played, and how most people choose to behave in order to derive productivity and wealth from it.
Today, quite suddenly, we have the ability to change the way the game is played, and Wild Blue Communications is one of the agents of this change. (more…)
GameChanger of the Month, October 2007
Thursday, November 1st, 2007So you’re a salarygirl from Tokyo and one Friday night after many rounds of beer and sake after work, you get off your train at the wrong stop and find yourself walking down a dark street in the city’s notorious Kabukicho neighborhood at two A.M. And then…a couple of blocks away, you see them. Young men coming your way. Twirling nun-chuks. Wearing black masks. They look like they’re up to no good. What are you, a mere green belt in karate, going to do?
Or let’s say you’re a third-grader on a school outing in Fukagawa and wander away from your group and are suddenly confronted by some big boys from the Sumo School. You know if they spot you they’ll eat your rice cakes, no questions asked. What will you do?
You’ll put on your Hiding Clothes of course…
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Tokyo fashion designer Aya Tsukioka, in an homage to the old Superman in the Phone Booth gag (well, half of it anyway — you go into the booth but don’t come out) has designed a line of clothes that convert into vending machines. The New York Times and photographer Torin Boyd broke the story in the U.S. in mid-October and it quickly went viral.
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