As the Red Bull press release states, "Mission Accomplished."

About 7.3 milion people were watching Sunday as Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner reattempted and nailed the Red Bull Stratos extreme skyjump, freefalling more than 128,000 feet to Earth at 1,342.8 kilometers per hour. He broke the sound barrier but no bones, and garnered congratulatory tweets from NASA and fellow daredevil Richard Branson, and an amusing tribute from Nestle's KitKat. (Update: YouTube reported more than 8 million concurrent livestreams, smashing all previous records, resulting in about 12.6 million viewers including Discovery Channel.)

Red Bull summed up its record-breaking, and latest, extreme sports stunt:Continue reading...

"I hate them. They are built for thin guys. It makes me look like I have big old love handles." So complains Alex Boone, a 300-pound starting guard for the San Francisco 49ers, complains about the NFL's switch from Reebok to Nike's more form-fitting uniforms this season, to the Wall Street Journal.

The uniforms were pitched as "Fast is Faster" to the NFL, but to heavier players it might as well be "Fast is Fatter," it seems.Continue reading...

With its recent decision to join the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) for all sports except football, Notre Dame finally put to bed speculation surrounding its athletics programs and the independent status of its football program. Courted by other conferences such as the Big 12, Notre Dame has joined the University of Pittsburgh and Syracuse in their recent defection from the Big East conference, of which the latter two schools were founding members.

Over the past couple of years, many argue that conference realignment has been influenced heavily by big money television contracts, as collegiate conferences negotiate long term contracts with networks on behalf of their member schools. The exceptions to the rule are Notre Dame, Army, Navy, and more recently, Brigham Young University. Notre Dame has such a following for its football program that it has maintained for years an independent status and currently has a contract with NBC to air its football games on national television. In college sports, Notre Dame is about as big a brand as they come.Continue reading...

When your sports league has lost Rob Lowe, you're in trouble. When your sports league loses ESPN, you're really in trouble.

That's what happened Monday night to the NFL. The sports TV giant, a Disney-owned channel that will cheer loudly and despite any fan criticism for anything even resembling a sport — like spelling bees — turned on the NFL Monday after a debacle of a game that was more or less an inevitability. With the NFL using replacement referees during labor disputes with its regular officials drag on, the game that everyone eventually expected happened between the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks.

The next 48 hours could very well come to be taught as a case study in crisis management at every MBA school in the nation. A case study in brand power.Continue reading...

Long before the London Games kicked off in July, the International Olympic Committee made it very clear to big businesses and small that you don’t want to mess with them, that they would come after anybody who used the Olympic name or image or implied an affiliation with the Olympics.

The IOC- and LOCOG-empowered ambush marketing squad of branding police got busy, so a small café once called Olympic suddenly became the Lympic and a British florist and shopkeepers were made to take down the bras and window displays set up to look like the sainted Olympic rings.

Areas were designated around all Olympic sporting venues where only official sponsors of the Games, all of which had rolled out barrels of dough, were allowed to show off their logos.

Leave it to Nike, the supposed founder of guerrilla marketing, to break through, though, with not only a rules-testing "Find Your Greatness" TV campaign that featured everyday athletes going for the gusto in other Londons around the world as well as track shoes that were worn by a number of gold medalists and given a bright greenish-yellow chartreuse hue that “the human eye is most sensitive” to, according to NBC News.Continue reading...

LeBron James has had quite a summer. He snagged his first NBA championship and NBA Finals MVP as well as his second Olympic gold medal with Team USA. So what else can the 27-year-old do before getting back to work with the Miami Heat?

He can figure out if his brand is strong enough to sell limited-edition sneakers close to the $300 mark. It came out this week that Nike would be putting out a new pair of sneaks branded with the name of James and would possibly ask consumers to pay out $315 for the honor of owning them, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But there was general outrage -- $315! – and a Nike spokesman let the world know that it was just a big misunderstanding and not that way at all. The sneaks would only cost $290, the San Antonio Express reports. If you want a real “deal,” the paper notes, the so-called LeBron X, will also be sold in a “stripped-down, no-frills version” for just $190. Continue reading...

Put all that talk of concussions and what Joe Paterno knew and when and just how Tim Tebow is going to fit into the New York Jets offense, real football is coming soon. Actual bodies wearing actual pads in actual games will soon be filling up America’s TV screens and you can be sure that marketers are getting ready for some pigskin action.

Fantasy football from Yahoo! got underway today and big brand names were all over it. Citi, Miller Lite, Snickers, Toyota, and Visa all found ways to get their names onto the Yahoo! Fantasy Football pages in one way or another, whether it is the Toyota Hall of Fame: Legends of Fantasy Football or the Visa Stat Tracker. Snickers and Miller Lite have both selected to sponsor content that is “personalized” to each individual fantasy user. They’ll all benefit from Yahoo!’s attempts to push their fantasy users to keep up with their teams across a variety of platforms, including Connected TVs and mobile devices, a company release notes. Continue reading...

Back at the start of the year, when consumers were asked what brands popped to mind when they thought of the Olympics, Nike was the number-one answer. Of course, it didn’t matter that Nike wasn’t actually an official sponsor of the event, but why quibble with such trivial details? In fact, Nike did a good job keeping attention on them during the Games themselves with the brilliant pushing-the-rules ad “Find Your Greatness.”

The point is, brands can shell out truckloads of cash to be involved in and event organizers can employ hundreds of “brand police” to ensure their paid sponsors aren’t getting screwed, but that doesn’t mean that when the Olympics end, people aren’t left saying, “I really should drink Coke more often!” or “Wouldn’t it be great to have a little more Panasonic around the house?”

YouGov BrandIndex, a daily consumer perception research service of brands, insists that only two of the partners for London 2012 “broke through in any significant way in consumer perception while a few had “very modest or no significant movement” or even “went backwards,” according to a company release. Continue reading...