“Selection Sunday” has always been one of the most exciting days of the year for me and I suspect for millions of other college basketball diehards across the country. As a kid, I scrambled each year to fill out my homemade bracket as Greg Gumbel announced the teams that had been selected for the NCAA Tournament. With pre-filled brackets online, I no longer have to write furiously to keep up with the live announcement, but I’m filled with the same level of nervous excitement as I was back then.

Like others, I had no expectation that the matchups announced on Selection Sunday this year would be the precursor to the most unpredictable, thrilling Tournament in years – perhaps ever. As soon as the games started the following Thursday, the upsets started coming in waves. Georgetown, Kansas, Syracuse – some of the most storied programs in college basketball all fell to defeat much earlier than any rational person would have expected, and even fans of teams that had been upset – like me, a fan of first-round upset victim Georgetown – couldn’t help but be drawn in by the drama.

As the original field of 65 teams started to diminish, an intriguing story was developing. Butler University, a tiny school located in Indianapolis, was knocking out the giants of the college game. Going into the Tournament, Butler was branded as a “mid-major” – a not-so-subtle euphemism for small schools without major resources and the accompanying media attention. Because it plays in a conference outside of the traditional “power conferences” like the Big East or ACC, Butler was seen by most as a solid team that could win a few games in the Tournament, but certainly not as threat to win a championship.

As most know by now, Butler enjoyed a stirring run to the Championship Game, knocking out Syracuse and Kansas State to reach the Final Four, then defeating Final Four-regular Michigan State to reach the final game. The team’s underdog story and its Indiana heritage spawned countless references to the movie “Hoosiers.” My bracket with my predictions for the Tournament’s 63 games was in shambles, but at this point, I didn’t care, because the story was so remarkable.

Only an excruciatingly close missed half-court buzzer beater in the Championship Game against Duke separated Butler from the most unlikely of championships in NCAA Tournament history. When Butler’s Gordon Hayward’s shot rimmed out at the buzzer – and the millions watching the game could finally exhale – fans took a step back to consider how impressive their run was.

As significant as the team’s run to the Championship Game was for the program’s long-term prospects, just as – if not more – important is what the Butler athletic department has done since then to ensure that the Butler brand emerges from its “mid-major” chokehold and begins to be classified as a sustained college basketball power.

Butler clearly understood that the days following the Championship Game were crucial to seize upon rather than to passively bask in the glow of their achievements. The athletic department’s first task was to ensure that the program’s greatest asset – Brad Stevens, the team’s baby-faced 33 year-old coach – remained with the team for the long-term. Butler’s run vaulted Stevens into the position of hottest young coach in the country, and big-name schools were lurking to snap him up with the promise of more highly rated recruits, more money, and more media exposure. It took just two days for Butler and Stevens to agree to a 12-year contract extension, instilling confidence in the program’s future and striking a blow against the myth that Butler wasn’t “big enough” for a coach of his stature.

At the press conference announcing Stevens’ contract extension, the coach laid out a long-term vision for Butler basketball, with the clear intent of elevating its status in the college basketball world. He announced that the school’s athletic department hoped to solidify a regular season series against Duke, the team that had defeated them in the Championship, but also the gold standard of college basketball programs. Not only would this guarantee Butler more media exposure – a significant recruiting tool in their effort to attract talented players – but it would also place the school in the same conversation with Duke, with all of that associated elite branding.

Clearly, the Butler basketball program believes – with good reason – that it should be mentioned among the top programs in the country. As with any branding effort, being considered among the elite is something that has to be cultivated and sustained over time. Continued excellence on the court and high-level recruiting will help to eliminate any memory of the “mid-major” tag in time, but the process is well underway.

Perhaps the best indicator that the Butler brand has undergone a remarkable alteration came on the day after the Championship Game, when Stevens appeared on “The Late Show with David Letterman” – (a notable appearance given his team didn’t win the championship).  In the interview, Letterman offered Stevens a year of his salary to coach his alma mater, Ball State. While Stevens deflected the question diplomatically, I couldn’t help but think that there was no way Ball State could compare to the strong, on-the-rise brand that he has developed at Butler – and he would be foolish to give it up now.

Posted by: Sami Ghazi, Account Executive

I still remember it as if it was yesterday. Sitting in the end zone in Miami during Super Bowl XLIV watching Tracy Porter jump the route and intercept Peyton Manning, running it back for a game clinching touchdown that gave the Saints their first Super Bowl in franchise history.  I, like the thousands in attendance, found myself jumping up and down because this was indeed a Cinderella story that makes our jobs as publicists all the more rewarding.

Everyone has heard all the sayings…”This is why you play the game,” “Anything can happen in a 60 minute game,” “Games aren’t played on paper.” All true.  Sports fans will not forget that February 7 evening for a long time.

DKC is fortunate to work with Warner Home Video, the distributor of NFL licensed DVDs.  The Super Bowl is always one of our biggest events of the year since the Champions DVD is among the top-selling sports titles annually.

Everyone seemed to be rooting for the underdog Saints. But did anyone really think they could beat the high-powered Colts?  The Colts lost only two games all year and even then, it was on purpose (you’re welcome Jets fans).  The DKC DVD team thought we would end up in Indianapolis, again working with the Colts to coordinate numerous PR events in support of the Super Bowl Champions DVD.  But there was the sweet hope of a trip to New Orleans.

And there it was. One interception and we’re gearing up for a trip to the Big Easy.  Very quickly we had to organize a record number of events.  Over the course of three days, we had to secure a venue and players, arrange for the DVD Premiere Screening and handle all the logistics and media for four DVD signings at major retailers. We needed buzz.  We needed to tell the Super Bowl story again.

Time was critical. DKC began infiltrating New Orleans media from all angles. We secured a radio partner to promote all five events and in return provided them with tickets for their listeners to attend the private VIP screening with the players. As a result of the overwhelming demand, our promotions actually crashed their system three times due to high volume.

From a TV perspective, we utilized all four networks and secured morning show segments promoting our events for four consecutive days.

We arrived in New Orleans on Sunday, March 7 ready for a whirlwind tour for the next three long days. At the airport, my colleague Matt McNichol and I stopped to pick up a copy of The Times Picayune and both looked at each other in awe as we saw the DVD preview story on A1 of the paper. Welcome to New Orleans! What a way to start the trip.

Monday stared very early, especially for Matt, who went live on the local ABC morning show to explain the events planned for the week. With a 4:30am arrival, they ended up conducting four live shots throughout the 5-7am hour. At the same time, I was at the Fox studios for a segment with Saints hero Porter.

Later that afternoon, we went over to the Prytania Theatre to get everything set for the premiere. Even though it was raining and more than three hours away from the screening, there were hundreds of fans lined up outside the theatre without tickets who just wanted to catch a glimpse of their beloved Saints.

I had seven Super Bowls behind me but I have never seen a city get behind a team like the fans in New Orleans. The contrasts were striking.  The city remains in many ways broken, with scars of Katrina visible everywhere.  Yet there was a sense of hope and pride, something New Orleans always had but now it was almost physical. You could touch it. It was beautiful to see and a pleasure to experience firsthand…even as a Patriots fan.

The DVD screening was a huge success.  Our goal was to secure media to help with sales.  But something else had happened.  We were not selling DVDs, we were providing a City with a sense of celebration, with an opportunity to applaud its accomplishments.  We had to work hard and juggle thousands of moving parts but it was almost like  New Orleans was doing the work and we were the beneficiaries.  Everyone had a blast, including the press.

As a publicist, Tuesday was as good as it gets. For the second time in three days, we secured A1 of the paper. This time, we had 2/3 of the cover with a headline that read “From Green Turf to Red Carpet: Hollywood has nothing on the premiere of the Saints’ 2009 Season DVD.”  Not bad when you’re the lead story over President Obama’s Health Care speech.

These DVDs tend to be regionalized on the publicity side but we went into this knowing we had a great “feel good” story. We were able to utilize some out-of-the-box thinking to generate some non-traditional DVD press.  I was able to land a feature in USA Today on Tuesday with a photo of the DVD, four different AP stories that were picked up all over the country along with video clips that we were able to secure on Yahoo!, AOL, SI.com and ESPN.com, among others.

The trip was a great success.  On a personal level, this is the third time I have been to New Orleans post Katrina and it was great to be back.  The city continues to amaze me and I was thrilled to jump on the Saints bandwagon for the week.  One of the most rewarding experiences was witnessing the sheer joy on the faces of the fans when they saw their heroes in person and relived the Saints’ historic season at the DVD Premiere.  Thanks to a football game, New Orleans was back and happier than ever.  On a professional level there was a huge sense of accomplishment. All the pieces came together.  A note a few days later from Brett Martel at the AP could not have made me feel any better:

“You guys at DKC really understand promotions and the needed give-and-take with the media that’s needed to make it work — better than about anyone I’ve worked with in nearly 14 years for the AP and a couple years at a newspaper before that.”

Posted by: Phil Crimaldi, Vice President

As the New York Yankees take the field in a four-game home series against the Boston Red Sox this Thursday evening, I share with you some life lessons from the toughest rivalry in professional sports.

I was born in New York City in 1968. Eight years prior, my parents had made the southward migration to Manhattan from Boston, settling on the almost up and coming West Side. Every summer from birth until I was 14, I escaped New York to my grandmother’s house on Cape Cod for about 10 weeks. The salt air of the Cape offered a wonderful respite from the sweltering streets of a city that for many of those years was in rather dramatic decline.

In the summer of 1977, my three best friends on Cape Cod were all neighbors, all from working towns outside of Boston and all named John. We were a little pack of freckled kids who weren’t old enough to know about girls and cars; so we talked about and played baseball all the time. We were great pals, albeit for a significant and for quite sometime not-discussed difference of opinion as to who qualified as the best team in baseball.

Backyard baseball in Massachusetts was a highly partisan affair with pretty simple rules. The three of us and about 15 other kids from the neighborhood would choose sides. A coin was tossed to determine who got to be the Red Sox. The team that lost the toss could be any team but the Yankees. I seem to recall the Cincinnati Reds were often the second choice. I’m not sure if this was because the Reds beat the Yankees the year before to win the 1976 World Series or because one of the older, more athletic kids would force the other team to be the Reds; this would enable him to replicate Carlton Fisk’s dramatic Game Six, stay-fair home run trot from the 1975 Red Sox/Reds World Series (which the Sox lost in Game Seven). Frankly, the cynical side of me always considered simpler reason: the Reds were only an “o” and an “x” short of being the hometown heroes.

On the surface, it didn’t really bother me that I was a Yankee fan living amid the fervid youth division of what would be labeled the Red Sox Nation. The innocence of Cape Cod shielded me from an infamously rough summer in New York City. News video, the occasional call from my father and some AP coverage in the Cape Cod Times or Boston Globe were the closest the Son of Sam, the city’s fiscal crisis, the blackout and the historic wave of arson fires that swept the Bronx ever got to me.

Ironically, amid this safe, idyllic seascape setting, it was the Red Sox kids who turned out to be tougher in many ways than whatever perceived mean streets of New York I was missing. Thirty-two years later as I come to work at the top of a large and diversified public relations firm, not a day goes by that I am not reminded of something I learned that summer. I cannot say that I have always acted on those lessons as quickly as I should have – life as a 41-year-old executive is more complicated than that of a nine-year-old boy – but they certainly helped shape me as an adult.

Lesson Number 1: When you are in a hole, stop digging.

My mother used to caution me that Red Sox fans are exceptionally passionate. My dad put it more simply. “They aahh cert-ah-fy-able; that means nuts, so keep ya mouth shut around ‘em with that Yankees talk.”

I heeded the caution and knew that when it came to being a Yankee fan in Massachusetts a “don’t ask – don’t tell” policy was best followed. I kept true to maintaining my silence and even developed great variations of Fisk’s catcher’s stance (that was my position and I was good at it) and could awkwardly twist my leg in the batter’s box just like Dwight Evans. I was living a lie but, frankly, who needed the aggravation.

I seem to recall, during an afternoon game, one of my uncles told me to swing like Reggie because it was hot and they needed the breeze (the infamously arrogant and outspoken Yankees right fielder, Reggie Jackson, was having a little trouble connecting during the first half of the 1977 season). One of the Johns asked why my uncle said that. Instead of keeping quiet or passing off a potentially innocuous heckle as simply that, I made some defensive statistical analysis of Jackson’s batting average based on baseball card information. John proceeded to tell all the guys I was a “wicked lose-ah, Yankee fan.” The secret was out and not on my terms.

In my 19 years in the public relations business, I cannot count how many times we have been brought into a high-profile crisis that had previously been made exponentially worse by a cover up, by saying too much or an otherwise knee-jerk urge to do something – anything.

I am typically a proponent of being proactive in a crisis; but being proactive requires a smart, strategic approach, not an off-the-cuff reaction. As my lame defense of Reggie Jackson demonstrates, it is tempting to very quickly take action when in a high-stakes jam; but don’t do anything until you have played out at least most of the options and looked at all the potential outcomes. Sometimes less is more – at least in the short term.

Lesson 2: Don’t feel badly for bad people.

As predicted, when it came out that I was a Yankee fan, the day-to-day quality of my summer life went into a rather steep decline.

My alleged act of treason quickly made its way to an older kid named McCreedy, an odd introvert who always closed one eye when he spoke and who I thought was crazy. McCreedy, who preferred to be called exclusively by his last name – possibly because it sounded like a psychiatric institution – repeatedly threatened to tie me up and throw me in the ocean. One time he brought a rope. Seriously, the guy was crazy.

I was routinely beaned by inside fastballs, called the ‘Bronx Bumm-ah,’ intentionally walked and, for a brief while, not picked despite the fact I could peg a guy off second base like a nine-year-old Thurman Munson.

I was even challenged to a fight by some older kid – a stereotypical bully and friend of McCreedy. Unbelievable… I was actually summoned to what amounted to a duel during which my loyalty to pinstripe blue was to be defended via fisticuffs. After avoiding the guy for about a week, I ended up squaring off with him in my friend’s back yard. He pretty much started kicking my butt right away. After a few minutes of taking blows to the face, I got mad enough, tackled the kid and started pounding him into the ground. As I was getting the upper hand, the kid started squealing. I somehow felt bad for the guy and let him go. He got up, turned around and broke my lip wide open.

I have made the same mistake in business. On several occasions, for one reason or another, I gave the benefit of the doubt to an individual who I knew deep-down was trying to hurt our company. I have learned that in the working world, as in life, this behavior is typically a pattern, not a one-time event and there is little upside to a wishy-washy approach. Compassion is important, especially in a high-pressure business, but if you know someone is bad news, don’t ease up on him or her.

Actually, there is a lesson 2(a) here – don’t put off confrontations. I knew this guy really had it in for me but I made the mistake of trying to avoid him. Putting it off only ensured that every kid within two miles of my grandmother’s house knew about the upcoming donnybrook where the New Yorker was hopefully going to get pounded back to Central Park.

Lesson 3: Before you do anything that involves the public, look at absolutely everything that could go wrong and re-evaluate it. Do this several times.

That September, my father took me to Yankee Stadium to see my team play the Red Sox. Things were looking good for me. Reggie had come alive and the Yankees were rapidly closing in on their second American League title in two years.

Just after they announced the starting lineups, Bob Sheppard in his baritone voice asked us to please stand for the national anthem “as recorded by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops.” The place instantly erupted into a cannon of boos, followed by a shower of empty beer cups that eventually worked into a rabid crescendo of 55,000 chants of “Boston Sucks.” We didn’t know the national anthem was over until the players took their positions.

I asked my dad if he could believe the crowd actually booed the national anthem. He said anything was possible in the Bronx but he was just glad he wasn’t the guy who made the decision to play that version.

I’m not sure if someone in the Yankees front office thought the Pops anthem would be a funny irony or a tweak to the visiting club. Regardless, I recall more than 20 guys were arrested and the booing made the news in New York and Boston. The whole Ballantine-fueled affair served as an anarchic precursor to Howard Cosell’s “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” declaration several weeks later during Game 2 of the World Series.

This past year, our sports group worked alongside the New York Mets and Citi to open up Citi Field. The account team, Citi and the Mets staff worked very smartly to build anticipation for the new stadium and all its great amenities without offending fans or traditionalists. By planning extensively and troubleshooting the rollout, the group created tremendous excitement without any disappointments, uncontrolled mad dashes or sense among fans that the new stadium was bigger than them. Passions run deep in big baseball towns; so playing out the strategy over and over was not only the best way to do right by the fans but proved invaluable when it came to the smoothness of the opening.

Lesson 4: Believe in something

One afternoon during that 1977 summer, as I was preparing to go home to New York City, I tried to apply rational thought to a discussion about the relative superiority of Yankee baseball.

I mentioned to one of the Johns that if the Yankees were to go on and win the World Series, it would be their 21st World Championship (albeit the first since 1962), compared to the Red Sox’ lone 1918 World Series victory. John quickly dismissed me by saying it didn’t matter how many times the Yankees won the World Series, “Boston has the Green Monster and Brigham’s Ice Cream… so there.”

There was nothing more to discuss.

John, like all his Red Sox buddies, was a true believer and that was never going to change. Years later, I remembered this as some of my fellow Yankee-fans jumped over to the National League when the 1986 Mets exploded and eventually won the World Series (I won’t rub it in by referencing the losing team).

In an industry where people typically change jobs every 18 to 24 months, I have stayed at the same company for 18 years; two of our managing directors have been here 15 years and the average senior executive has been here eight years. All of us have had great opportunities to work out with other clubs, but I believe with every ounce of me in the company where I work and am proud to be surrounded by a group of individuals who share this belief.

I don’t know what happened to any of those kids I played ball with on Cape Cod but I have to assume two things: 2004 and 2007 were probably better than average years for them; and in 2008, Madonna’s ability to distract third basemen gained her three fans named John.

Posted by: Sean Cassidy – President of DKC