Jinx Marketing

Don't let the image of Alan Shearer scare you. This video is actually about a campaign that some people ran for Swedish football club AIK, in which they went through an elaborate exercise of jinxing their fierce and less-loved opponents IFK Göteborg’s city with ill-luck charms (black cats, broken mirrors...the works). Watch the video to get details about the outcome.

Jinx Göteborg from Awkward on Vimeo.

What is interesting to know is that someone actually thinks that this was a great marketing campaign and the whole effort is being spoken off with fulsome praise and packaged as marketing nous rather than tons of fun and an accompanying laugh track. On the other hand, reports of Black Magic used by African teams in football are usually met with curiosity or on at least one occasion - arrest.

Having said that, the club (or whoever was behind the orgainzation of the jinx) is entitled to take credit for this innovative idea in the space of Fan Connect endeavors. The execution was also well handled, with fans being a part of the process in selecting and donating the objects. Could not find reports on how the exercise impacted ticket sales, viewership, merchandise sales etc. but in the very least there seemed to be some excitement.

Will we perhaps see IPL teams go beyond the ordinary in Fan Connect exercises?

Wanted - A 177.38 cm Footballer

Because that's exactly how tall an average Barcelona player is. That and other such fun stuff has been found by The Professional Football Players Observatory in a demographic study for 2011. Some results of this study have been listed and analyzed in this good read in The Guardian.

Only for your comfort, am listing down below some highlights:

• The average height of a footballer in Europe is 181.96cm, up 0.28cm on 2008 with the Premier League the seventh tallest. Barcelona have the shortest side in all of European Football.
• There is an overwhelming tendency for the 11 most picked players in a squad to be shorter than their team-mates
• Manchester United is the most stable club, with players staying an average of 5.71 years
• In 24 of the 36 leagues studied players stayed longer at the four highest ranked clubs than the other sides in the league.
• Only Cypriot clubs have a higher percentage (72.3%) of expatriate players than English clubs (58.4%)

Whether this data will be used by Managers to select players that are ideal or one of Roman or the Arabs will just ask their scientists to use this information to create a footy-monster with ideal demographic characteristics are yet to be seen. But these things are sure fun to know.

The Right to Six Balls An Over

If you have successfully survived Ten Cricket's broadcast of the South Africa - India series and have been left more familiar with Sangeetha than Shrisanth, then you may want to get into this discussion on Cricinfo. Trying to find out who exactly benefits from Ads popping up everywhere including the bowler's behind as he runs to deliver the irrelevant piece of action before the next commercial, Harsha Bhogle has assembled an impressive panel:

• Sambit Bal: Editor Cricinfo (representing the view of the fan)
• Peter Hutton: ex Ten Sports
• Raghu Menon: I&B Ministry
• Hiren Pandit: Group M, Media Planning
• Rajiv Shukla: BCCI and MOP

Bhogle, regains his touch off-air and magically illustrates that a panel discussion can actually be enlightening, something that may not go down too well with the good people at the News Channels. Though even Bhogale cannot get Rajiv Shukla to add any value other than entertainment. To hear Shukla hilariously emphasize that BCCI is viewer-friendly as it has ensured that they get to watch all six balls of an over (repeated a thousand times to drill into your head, BCCI's bounty), you will have to listen through till almost the end of this longish feature, but if you have the time and inclination, then this will be worth it.