HALLS OF FAME What kind of person goes to considerable effort and expense to preserve the contributions to American society of the pork industry, and exactly how can we hope to measure the cultural impact of “The Other White Meat?” Whose pilgrimage to Mecca is realized with a visit to The Greyhound Hall of Fame – are they a fan of the dogs or the buses?
What community is home to The Cockroach Hall of Fame, and does it even know? Questions such as these have answers, and the weekly, half-hour series Halls of Fame journeys across America to find them – in these cases, to halls and museums in Clive, Iowa, Abilene, Kansas, Plano, Texas and Cooperstown, New York (yes, Cooperstown has that other hall, too).
These glimpses into the American psyche are accessible and available to nearly everyone. No need for families to blow the kid’s college money on an expensive trip to an exotic locale – Halls of Fame gives viewers travel ideas that are often just a short car ride away. And no need for marketers to blow their entire budgets on commercial time either – Halls offers affordable, ongoing integrated product placement and marketing opportunities for less than the average 30-second national spot.
LEGACIES Nursing Homes are in just about every community in America, and they make many Americans very, very anxious. Fact is, most cultures revere their elders. Too often, America ignores them, warehousing the elderly in nursing homes where they will die of boredom, loneliness, and broken hearts.
That’s why nursing homes are where the battle to change such attitudes must begin.
Legacies is an ambitious, interdisciplinary, cross-generational project that sends high school and college students into local nursing homes to videotape oral histories for a monster, online, keyword-searchable database. The best interviews will be culled for quarterly broadcast television specials both as entertaining programs in their own right as well as public awareness pieces for the project.
Legacies will deliver many assets: unique and effective learning opportunities for students, television specials, valuable historical archives, and a powerful sense of legacy conferred to elders who might otherwise feel abandoned. But perhaps the best outcome is the long-term goal – to flip the definition of senior communities from human trash heaps to treasure troves of wisdom and first-hand experiences of historical events.
TRADITIONS A series of documentaries that tell the stories of the best college sports programs in the country, Traditions is patterned after the successful Michigan Football Memories program. These are not “jock docs” that appeal to only hardcore sports fans, but rather a series of documentaries that tell the stories of tradition-rich football programs like LSU, Penn State, Wisconsin, Texas, Texas A&M, Florida State, Miami, Oklahoma, Nebraska – just to name a few. Featuring interesting, poignant, funny and, at times, inspirational stories, the programs will not just be good sports history, they’ll be good history. But this never-done-before program concept is just one piece of the plan for the Traditions project. The principals of Nice Work and their partners on Traditions, 45° North Productions, have developed an innovative distribution and sponsorship/marketing package that creates local and national synergies at every level for everyone involved – sponsors, broadcasters, cable networks and the universities themselves. If you’re a fan of college football, you’ll love Traditions. And if you’re a marketer looking for new, carefully-integrated ways to reach your customers, you’ll like it even more.
