St. Louis, MO – October 12, 2022 – Yesterday I had a chance to catch up with a good friend for breakfast and we couldn’t help but share our mutual disappointment that the Cardinals season is now over. While I share most fans disappointment, I don’t get mad at the team for losing. It is part of the game.

Credit the Phillies for coming into Busch Stadium and sweeping the Cardinals. One thing you learn working in baseball for as long as I did is you can’t allow what happens on the field to drive your emotions too much.

Don’t get me wrong. While my heart is with the Cardinals, I see the game of baseball as entertainment. You buy a ticket or tune in to be entertained. Win or lose, you should find enjoyment in the game and recognize it is a game.

Baseball isn’t a necessity in life. It is entertainment. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to live without it. I’m just saying it isn’t healthcare or food. You have choices in where you spend time and money. And what brands get your discretionary entertainment dollar.

Major League Baseball provides extraordinary entertainment and I believe a sense of belonging that transcends other forms of entertainment. You feel a sense of fellowship with other fans in sharing a common goal and experience. We root not only for the team, but the players. Yadi. El Hombre. Waino.

I care as much about those individual players as I do for the team. I’m proud of what they accomplished and am grateful for all my found memories and our shared story.

And I will continue to feel a connection to them long after they walk off that playing field for the last time. #4 & #5 are retired. The players that is. I’m sure the numbers will be soon.

#50 or @UncleCharlie is still going strong. I hope he comes back. He is not only a great pitcher, but an amazing guy (and a good actor, which I will get to in a moment) and one my son Charlie’s favorite players.

As fans, we have a shared story with our favorite teams and feel part of the story of the players and teams we support. That element of storytelling weaves through everything. It was something I recognized when I was the chief storyteller (a.k.a. VP of Communications) for the St. Louis Cardinals. Great teams build a shared story that transcends typical marketing.

When I went to work for the Cardinals, I didn’t see them really as a “business” per say. They are like religion in my community. Why is that? I would suggest to you that it is our shared story.

Working for the team in communications, I was always thinking about creative ways to have fun sharing the story of the team. While I always say brand journalism as the foundation of the team’s video storytelling, I have always loved the more creative storytelling techniques from popular culture.

In alternative universe, I could see myself as a writer for SNL or a budding filmmaker. I’ve been writing scripts and doing films since I was a kid. I was the kid with a super 8 camera who convinced his friends to do silly things on screen. I was a TikToker before that was a thing or when that was simply the sound a clock made.

I would do stop motion animation and pixilation with my friends. I wrote my first musical in the 4th grade. Sadly, Sister Francine vetoed performing it.

With that as a background, it should come as no surprise that I brought that mindset to my job at the Cardinals. I convinced my front office colleagues to spell out #YadiYadiYadi with their bodies in the outfield at Busch when Vine was a thing (also long before TikTok).

When some front office colleagues wrote a silly parody song, they came to me to help create a music video because they knew that no idea would be too silly for me. From my vantage point, the brand of the Cardinals was a media outlet. We could create compelling video content that fans would enjoy and share.

The type of content could vary. Music videos. Movies. TV shows. You name it, if time and budgets allowed, anything is possible. I can see the gamification of storytelling and meta storytelling as being a viable way for teams to connect with fans.

Baseball in particular should be diving into more brand entertainment video and creative engagement efforts to capture the imagination, interest and attention of young fans. I can tell you from my own observation that they are losing young fans to other sports.

My son and his friends are much more interested in virtually anything other than watching baseball on TV. That is why I applaud the league for miking players, interviewing coaches and upping the production value of the game broadcasts.

I’ll share a couple of quick experiences of our efforts to do brand entertainment storytelling with video. The first is what I coined as project #NestFlix, my tip of the cap to how Netflix disrupted the paradigm of TV.

I found myself stuck at Spring Training an extra night because of a snowstorm. A colleague had told me about the Netflix app, so I downloaded it. It changed my view of the world. Up until the time, I saw Netflix as a mail order Blockbuster video.

Streaming video was unbelievable. I watched TV on my iPad in my hotel room. It was a game changer. When Netflix created House of Cards and picked up a few Emmy Awards, it occurred to me that the Cardinals could create content too.

As a brand, we could share streaming content our fans would enjoy and we could monetize.

We had 13.7 million fans coming to our website and growing numbers flocking to our social platforms. Our brand had the ability to reach a potentially enormous audience. If we shared great content, our fans would consume it and share it.

After we had run #VineTheVote – a silly video promotion to encourage fans to share videos urging support of voting Cardinals players to the All Star Game, I learned that Instagram was going to add video functionality.

I know exactly where I was. I was on the stair climber at Club Fitness, scrolling through my Twitter feed, when I clicked a link to read a story about Instagram adding 15 second video functionality to try to compete with Vine.

Vine was six second video. Not a lot of time. But 15 seconds seemed like a good amount of time to try to tell a story episodically.

I came to work that morning with the idea that we should tell a story using Instagram video. I wasn’t totally sure of what story, but I thought we had a chance to be first at trying to do something like that.

We had developed a PR committee that set a goal of trying to raise our Instagram standing in MLB. We were way behind most teams at that time. Out of 32 accounts in MLB (30 teams and 2 MLB run accounts), we were 27th.

To make a long story short, I was planning to coordinate a VIP visit and ceremonial pitch for Phyllis Smith, a St. Louis native who starred on the TV show The Office. I wrote a silly script called #TheFrontOffice and asked Phyllis if she would be game for filming a few “episodes” while she visited the team. She loved the idea of the parody of her show. And she was awesome to work with.

Once she said yes, I convinced the bird and David Freese to do it.

No idea was too birdbrained for our mascot, so I had Fredbird at hello.

David was all in as well given his affinity for Phyllis and The Office. Once they said yes, it was almost impossible for others to say no.

Before long, I had the GM, the team President, other players, a United States Senator, all the local TV Stations and my friend Andy Cohen all providing “episodes.”

Suddenly fans had a reason to follow us on Instagram and we were making Instagram history by being the first to tell a story episodically using their new video functionality.

We saw a dramatic uptick in our followers, moved up in the MLB rankings and had a lot fun. We also got a lot of buzz for what we were doing. I particularly appreciated the positive response we received from some of my counterparts with other teams. They loved it.

The “series” was entertaining and brand building. You can check it out on Instagram.

It tells a funny story about how Fredbird felt threatened by the Rally Squirrel because he made it onto the championship ring. He thought he might lose his job to a squirrel.

The basic plotline was Bob from Account Temps meets Tanya Harding. Candidly, it was also me having a little fun with my boss who put the Rally Squirrel on the World Series ring after giving me a hard time for scheduling a squirrel safari for the media the day after the squirrel made its debut that postseason. That media safari was one of several “beg forgiveness” moments in my career that paid off.

The year following #TheFrontOffice, we went on to produce #BirdToTheFuture and a few other branded entertainment projects over the subsequent years.

#BirdToTheFuture had a Hollywood director, financial sponsors and great production value. The parody of Back To The Future told the story behind how the Cardinals news museum acquired such a great collection (Fredbird built a time machine and went back in time to get the items). It was a fun effort that showcased the great sports who comprised our team.

It was also when I realized Adam Wainwright has an acting career following baseball. Check out his performance in #BirdToTheFuture to see what I mean.

We will share more in the future but suffice it to say that you can use brand entertainment to connect with your consumers in a fun and entertaining way that will grow your brand.