oy I love this post. Every single bit of this. The Checkers are a WONDERFUL client. Nobody on earth has more heart than a minor league hockey team. Everybody from the President on town, bust their ass in this organization. It seems like team shows an operating loss each year, and I’m pretty sure it’s because they keep handing out those large cardboard checks to charities. They’ll donate half the gate in a heartbeat. I can’t say enough wonderful things about this organization.

Anyway, here’s there latest press release. Go Checkers!

CHECKERS HAVE THREE OF ECHL’S FIVE LARGEST CROWDS

Charlotte Helps League Raise Attendance in 2007-08

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The Charlotte Checkers had three of the five largest crowds in the league and finished third in attendance with 215,215 and 5,978 per game. The Checkers had the second-largest crowd with a team record 12,256 on Feb. 23, 2008 and the third-largest with 11,879 on Mar. 8, 2008. In the last two seasons the Checkers have had six crowds over 10,000 and nine others in excess of 9,000.

“The Checkers staff has continued to expose new people in the city of Charlotte to hockey. We are extremely proud about breaking an attendance record for the second consecutive season. Hopefully, the increase in attendance will lead to an appeal to younger kids in the community to get involved at the youth level,” said vice president of ticket sales, Shawn Lynch.

Bolstered by 51 sellouts and with 11 teams increasing their attendance, the ECHL celebrated its 20th season by being the only minor professional hockey league to raise its attendance in 2007-08.

The third-longest tenured professional hockey league behind only the National Hockey League and the American Hockey League, the ECHL averaged 4,174 per game. It is the fourth year in row and the 16th time in the last 18 years that the league has averaged over 4,000 fans.

The Premier ‘AA’ Hockey League welcomed 3,756,191 fans, marking the fifth straight season and the 11th time in the last 12 years that it has exceeded 3.75 million fans. The 51 sold out crowds are the most in the last five seasons and mark the fourth time in the last five years that the ECHL has had at least 40 sellouts.

“While we had hoped that the increase would be more significant, the fact that there was an increase is a credit to the efforts of management and the teams across the league,” said ECHL Commissioner Brian McKenna. “We look forward to continuing these efforts to increase in growth in attendance and revenues for the 2008-09 season.”

Cincinnati and Victoria led all of professional hockey in attendance increase with 36.8 percent and 14.7 percent, respectively, while Augusta was third in the ECHL and ninth overall with 10.9 percent. Cincinnati had a capacity crowd of 9,615 for its last home game on Mar. 28 eclipsing the team record of 7,584 on Nov. 29, 2002. Victoria had its second sellout crowd in history with 7,006 for its final regular season game and the Salmon Kings set team records with 175,354 fans and an average of 4,871 per game.

In its first season Elmira led the league with 14 sellouts followed by Charlotte with 12, Idahowith nine and Florida with six. The Steelheads lead the league in regular season sellouts the last five years with 38 followed by Charlotte with 33, Florida with 31 and Alaska with 20. The Jackals averaged 93.2 percent of capacity (3,525 per game) at First Arena which was up 2.9 percent from the previous season. Elmira had sellout crowds for seven consecutive Saturdays from Dec. 15, 2007-Mar. 1, 2008 while Idaho, which raised its average to 4,389 per game, had standing-room-only crowds on Friday and Saturday for three straight weeks.

Seven teams set the record for their largest crowd: Bakersfield (8,895 on Nov. 24, 2007), Charlotte (12,256 on Feb. 23), Cincinnati (9,615 on Mar. 28, 2008), Elmira (4,187 on Nov. 9, 2007), Idaho (5,631 on Jan. 19), Johnstown (4,238 on Nov. 30, 2007) and South Carolina (10,565 on Jan. 19).

South Carolina’s crowd of 10,565 broke the team record set Jan. 18, 1997 and was the second sellout in the last two years for the Stingrays, who have raised their attendance each of the last three seasons.

Stockton led the league in attendance for the third year with 239,337 fans and an average of 6,648 per game while Florida was second with 217,185 and 6,033. The Thunder, who have had 12 sellouts in three seasons including four sellouts in 2007-08, are the first team to lead the league in attendance three consecutive years since Florida which led the ECHL for a record five straight years from 2000-05.

Returning after missing two years in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi had its largest attendance since 2001-02 with 3,753 per game, an increase of 9.6 percent from 2004-05 when the Sea Wolves last played.

Gwinnett had four crowds of more than 10,000 and raised its average for the third year in a row to 5,656 per game. The Gladiators have now had a crowd of 10,000 seven times in the last two years and 11 times overall, including four sellouts of 11,355.

Alaska had two sellouts this season including a team record tying 6,451 on Mar. 29. The Aces have had 20 regular season sellouts in their five seasons including seven crowds of 6,451.

Dayton raised its attendance for the third year in a row while Reading raised its average andFresno had the largest crowd of the season with 12,590 on Feb. 9, 2008 and the fourth-largest with 11,582 on Mar. 22 and the sixth-largest with 10,669 on Jan. 11, 2008.

ECHL

Celebrating its 20th Anniversary in 2007-08, the ECHL is the Premier ‘AA’ Hockey League and the third-longest tenured professional hockey league behind only the National Hockey League and the American Hockey League.

ECHL began in 1988-89 with five teams in four states and has grown to be a coast-to-coast league with 25 teams playing 900 games in 17 states and British Columbia in 2007-08.

The league officially changed its name to ECHL on May 19, 2003.

The ECHL has affiliations with 26 of the 30 teams in the NHL in 2007-08, marking the 11th consecutive season that the league has had affiliations with at least 20 teams in the NHL.

There have been 355 former ECHL players who have gone on to play in the NHL after playing in the ECHL, including 99 in the last three seasons. There have been 210 former ECHL players who have played their first game in the NHL in the past seven seasons.

There are 15 coaches in the NHL who have ECHL experience including former Wheelingcoach Peter Laviolette, who is head coach of the Carolina Hurricanes, and former Mississippicoach Bruce Boudreau, who is head coach of the Washington Capitals.

The ECHL is represented for the seventh consecutive year on the National Hockey League championship team in 2007 with Anaheim assistant coach Dave Farrish, players Francois Beauchemin and George Parros and broadcasters John Ahlers and Steve Carroll.

The ECHL has affiliations with 26 of the 29 teams in the American Hockey League in 2007-08 and for the past 18 years there has been an ECHL player on the Calder Cup champion.

In each of the last two seasons there have been more than 225 players who have played in both the ECHL and the AHL and there were over 800 call-ups involving more than 500 players. In the last five seasons the ECHL has had more call-ups to the AHL than all other professional leagues combined with over 2,000 call-ups involving more than 1,000 players since 2002-03.

Further information on the ECHL is available from its website at ECHL.com.

For more information, please contact

Jason Shaya

704-940-4081

Jshaya@gocheckers.com

Naming a product, service, concept, company, or child is often difficult. There’s no way around it. The hardest part is building your criteria. When are you done coming up with ideas? How do you recognize the perfect name when you find it. And, more importantly, how good is good enough?

If the answer is, “I’ll know it when I see it”, then you’re in for a world of pain. We have a long-held alliterative belief around here that human beings are fickle, fallible and foible-ridden. Your mood, my mood, everybody’s mood swings. And by saying, “I’ll know it when I see it” is kind of like saying, “I’ll pick the first thing that catches me in the right mood.” Which is nice if you’re buying a candy bar. But if you are committing to the name of a company or a product — we’ll that’s some thing that you have to live with for a while. It requires commitment.

The Most Important Thing

The most important thing to remember is that a name is made by what a person, company or product actually does. A rose by any other name would, in fact, be as sweet. And no amount of naming (or artfully draped models) is going to make this car not suck . Would it really matter if the Pacer had a different name?

This is why so many companies are named after their founders. For example, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Arthur Guinness’ beer and Henry Ford’s automobiles. And this is a fine way to go. If you can get away with it. Splash out the shingle with the your surname on it and go. Avoid the quagmire of naming. It can take a lot of time, money and energy. You can develop a name you love only to find it’s taken. And naming can make enemies of friends. Gah.

But let’s say you press on…

Brave soul that you are. Perhaps you have a new product. Perhaps you have a company that is conceptually difference that you want to communicate in the name. That’s why this post has a part II.

This is part of a series of webisodes that we did for Patterson Pope. It’s interesting to note that every time they sent out an email blast featuring these spots, their website traffic jumped nearly 40%

It’s also worth pointing out that this is all one, continuous, perfect, GLORIOUS take.

When you take a good look at almost anything, it gets weird. Profoundly weird. Like if you stare at the word weird too long. You start too wonder if it’s really spelled that way.

Anyway, the way people interact with technology, especially home entertainment technology, is no exception to this rule. In fact, it’s quite fascinating. And here’s what blowing my mind. People feel inferior when they can’t make the technology work. Very few people, if any bother to ask, “Could this possibly the bad product design?”

To put it another way. People used to feel dumb because they couldn’t set the clock on their VCRs. Maybe dumb is not the best word. Maybe that feeling is best described as inadequacy. But these same people a) knew what time it was b) knew how to set a clock. They lived up to their end of the bargain.

The clock setting function on a VCR is clearly bad design. But, because it was consumer electronics, everybody gives it a pass. That’s weird.

The controls are horribly designed.

Seriously. If you’re good a driving one car, you can get in a completely different car and you’re pretty good in that car as well. But if you switch from one system to another. Or merely from one remote to another — WHAM — you wrap the whole thing around a telephone poll.

That’s also pretty weird.

One of the things that sets me apart is that I have a pretty good understanding of story. In fact, I devoted a whole other website and podcast to experimenting with it. It’s called the Seanachai (which is an Irish word for Storyteller) and in 2005, to see if I was equal to the task) I wrote a short story or essay each week, recorded it and shared it with the world.

And today I received this email

I am a final year journalism student in Dublin City University and I am
currently doing a thesis for radio on Seanachaí and their history, the stories
they tell, the people they affect and storytelling in general.

I would be very grateful if you could assist me in the thesis as I’ve
found your website to be extremely interesting and unique. The fact that many of
the old tales and some new ones have managed to keep up the pace with technology
as podcasts is very interesting and would like to hear your opinions on other
ways to keep this important tradition alive.

Also any contacts in the seanachaí world or your own input would be much
appreciated!

In my response I wrote this: Story is the code through which we communicate information about how to live. Facts are impossibly dull. But wrap a story around facts, or a moral point and suddenly it spreads like wildfire. And it is a fire that can burn for centuries.

I believe that there are only two things that shape organizational culture. Stories and Incentives. Another way to say that is there is what you reward or pay people to do ( a powerful motivator ) and then there’s the myth of “how we do things around here.”

There’s a pretty fascinating book about all of this called Made to Stick. http://www.madetostick.com/

“Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” (Chip Heath, Dan Heath)

This is part of a series of webisodes that we did for Patterson Pope. It’s interesting to note that every time they sent out an email blast featuring these spots, their website traffic jumped nearly 40%

We love new business. Best kind of business there is.

We’ve been tapped to name and brand a high-end home theatre and consumer electronic store. The charge is to make it the Apple Store of Home Theater. Oh yeah. This is right up our alley. More soon.

This is Patrick thinking away on the whiteboard. Take that whiteboard!

General George S. Patton said, “Give me an 80% solution right now, rather than a 100% solution too late.” And in a business that spends too much time triple- and quadruple- guessing itself, this kind of thinking is very refreshing. Let’s say it another way:

Give me 80% of a good idea rather than 100% of a mediocre idea.

Most marketing communications come from a bad idea that a company threw money at. The hope is that a high production value will somehow make a crappy idea better. But it never does, because, as anyone who has fallen (or been forced into this trap) can tell you — You can’t polish a turd.