DANA WHITE video blog UFC 129 day 2

Via Pop Loser. Before every UFC event, Dana White tweets his location and people can get tickets. For UFC 129 in Toronto this weekend, he was ready to give away 300 in Dundas Square. Skip ahead to the three-minute mark to see the chaos that ensues.

When people ask me about brand building and social media (I don’t talk much about my day job, do I? This stuff comes up.), I point to the UFC as the quintessential example of how to do things.

Sports uniforms by Hilfiger

I believe this would classify under the heading of What the H - E - double hockey sticks. ESPN asks Tommy Hilfiger to redesign some of sport's iconic teams. The results are... well, have a look.
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The Top Ten Moves of YOSHIHIKO

And people say Wrestling is fake...

Superbowl Ads

Living in Canada? You probably missed out on all the great Superbowl ads. Thankfully, Adblitz on YouTube has them all for you.

Beisubouru

Could you imagine if they advertised MLB games like this here?

Heritage Classic

So the NHL unveiled the jerseys Calgary and Montreal will be wearing at the Heritage Classic. Montreal didn't venture quite so far into their past for their uniforms. They "will sport the same jersey worn for home games between 1974-75 and 1995-96," according to the club's website.

The Flames on the other hand decided to go waaaaaaaaaaaaay back to 1920 and revisit the Calgary Tigers. It's hard for me to get a good gauge on these jerseys because depending on where you see it, the colours seem to be very different saturations. If you go to the Flames website, the jerseys appear to be really bright red and yellow reminiscent of Ronald McDonald. If you see the video on the NHL website the colours are much, much darker. Personally, I like the darker colours but overall I still don't like these jerseys at all. If I had a choice I would have kept the Tigers logo on the front and put the flaming C on the shoulders. That would make far more sense to me.

Air ball...

I love sports. I really do. I love to watch the competition and the drama of two forces going head to head to try and outdo the other. Sports logos on the other hand...

It absolutely drives me crazy how bad most of the identities in professional sports is. For some reason, the vast majority of bosses in the sporting world either have no sense of taste or have no clue what makes a good team logo. Does it not occur to them that if they have GOOD design that you could market it to people beyond your own rabid fan base? A few have done admirable jobs. The Milwaukee Admirals examined their fan base and where their gaps were and unveiled, in my opinion, a fantastic identity that a number of die-hards panned. It appealed to a wider market segment and in turn their merchandise sales went through the roof and into the stratosphere. Then you get logos like the Portland Trailblazers, New Orleans Hornets, Baltimore Ravens, Kansas City Royals and Buffalo Sabres. These are teams with multi-milliondollar payrolls and they can't shell out some half decent coin to get a good logo? Mind, you in the case of the Sabres, they reportedly forked out $200,000 to get their "Buffa-slug."

The minor leagues are even worse. Now, I understand that they don't have boatloads of money but it seems to me that if they spent just a little extra money on the brand they could do wonders in terms of team, community, and fan pride, support as well as the money in merchandising a causal fan might be willing to spend.

Which brings me to this. The Golden State Warriors announced their new look. Don't get me wrong, their old look was bad, but this... is not necessarily an improvement.

Brand New writes a column about why this is not so golden...

*sigh* Someone pay me obscene amounts of money to do this and I promise it'll be better than this