Category: NBC

business, entrepreneurship, NBC, social entrepreneurship

Shine A Light Competition – Your Chance to Help a Small Business Doing Great Work in Their Communities

Christa Avampato

Hi all,

Just a quick note to tell you about Shine A Light, a great on-line competition that is currently running to provide a $100,000 grant and American Express marketing support to a small business doing good works in their community. It only takes a minute to vote and can make a world of difference to a small business. Personally, I voted for Beacon Paint because of their dedication to New York City public schools. If you’re interested in voting, visit Shine A Light’s website.

The finalists are:
Beacon Paint has been on the same street for 109 years. They are proof that longevity alone does not always tell the story. Their warmth and hospitality is well known in the neighborhood. They are proud of their generosity and community minded spirit, particularly among the NYC public schools in their neighborhood.

Sacred Wind Communications (SWC) is a for-profit telecommunications company with 40 employees and has a non-profit educational arm of the corporation which serves the Navajo people in New Mexico.

HAPPYBABY organic baby foods launched on Mother’s Day 2006 with 5 products in 5 small NYC stores. The business is the brainchild of a social entrepreneur who wanted to make a difference using business, support sustainable agriculture, provide our children with the best start to instill eating habits for a healthy happy life, and simultaneously provide basic nutritional needs for less fortunate children simply trying to survive.

This competition is made possible by the partnership between American Express and NBC Universal.
community service, NBC, volunteer

My Year of Hopefulness – Everyone Has Something to Offer

Christa Avampato

Tonight’s Making a Difference segment on NBC featured Coach Tim, a man who grew up in the Compton neighborhood of Los Angeles. Compton is now known as a haven of drugs, gangs, and violence. When Coach Tim was growing up, he played baseball in Compton – on a baseball diamond that was abandoned decades ago. He returned to the neighborhood after years of his own troubles – drugs, alcohol – to revive that baseball diamond into his own field of dreams for kids growing up on the same streets where he was raised.

The segment was enough to make any viewer choke up with emotion – and then, the real kicker. Coach Tim is homeless. For two years, he’s lived in his car. At night, he watches Dodgers games on his portable TV and reads the Bible for strength to get through another day. He could go to a shelter, though because he knows he got himself into his situation, he wants to get himself out of it without public assistance.

Those kids on his baseball team serve a larger purpose in his life – they give him a reason for being, for getting out into the world. They give him a way to do some good in a neighborhood that is faced with so much difficulty and saddness and loss. He’s keeping those kids from going down a path that he and so many of his childhood friends took simply because they didn’t know any better.

Coach Tim’s story made me think about how much we all have to offer, regardless of our situation, means, and history. Or maybe, like Coach Tim, we all have something to give precisely because of our history and situation. To make a difference in your neighborhood, visit Volunteer Match, Serve.org, or United Way.

art, comedy, humor, NBC, television

I Might Be Liz Lemon, and So Are You

Christa Avampato

I’m a little late to the party on this one – 30 Rock has already won several Emmy’s and is in its 3rd season. I’m just now getting into the series on DVD. Hilarious. And comedy writing is not easy – I’ve tried it and I was terrible. I laugh out loud at the ridiculous behavior of those characters and marvel at how often I think things at work that they say freely to one another. If only all workplaces were that honest, we’d have greater job satisfaction. It’s the passive-aggressive behavior, the simultaneous smile and toss under the bus that kills morale. 


Liz Lemon, Tina Fey’s character, is someone I relate to immensely. She is a single 30-something who lives on the UWS, just a few blocks from me. Works hard, sometimes to the detriment of her personal life, makes impossible relationships a hobby, and eats as much as I do. She’s nerdy and independent. We love our humidifiers. While she has this dream job, she’s constantly worried that she will be reduced to teaching improv at the Y. She’s all our unsavory features rolled in to one sympathetic, funny shell. We don’t love the character because she’s perfect or well-balanced or someone we aspire to be. She isn’t any of those things. We love her because she is who we are, warts and all.

30 Rock is proof that we can do something original in an over-crowded field. It just requires that we put aside our egos, stop looking to others for “copy-and-paste” ideas, and just be exactly who we are and say exactly what we think, funny, nice, meaningful, or not. And for goodness sake, we need to learn to laugh at ourselves and those around us.      
Christmas, Disney, FAO, movie, Muppet, NBC, retail, shopping, Today Show

The Muppets are Taking Back Manhattan

Christa Avampato

When I went out to Los Angles to call on Disney in June, I spent some time in the archives digging through old Muppet memorabilia. Like a kid in a candy store, I sat for a few hours with those materials wondering why in the world the brand has been dormant for so long. I grew up on the Muppet Show — I think at my very young age, it was a large influence on my interest in theatre that led to my career in the industry two decades later. I loved the idea that an audience could we watching a show on stage and then having an entirely different drama unfolding in the wings. I was entranced by the idea of illusion. As I sat in the archive I wondered, aloud and to myself, why on Earth Disney had let the brand go dead. As it turns out, ideas, big ideas, were brewing. 


My buddy, Dan, and I wondered in to FAO Schwarz a few weeks ago. As Dan sang the Muppet theme going down the escalator (and received spontaneous public applause, thank you very much), we rounded the corner to find “The Muppet Whatnot Workshop“, a make-your-own Muppet boutique. Choose the color, eyes, nose, hair, and clothes. You name it, you can make it. It’s a clever twist on the make your own trend tied to a beloved brand that is seeing a resurgence. You can also design and purchase on-line at http://www.fao.com/catalog/factories/muppets.jsp# (As an aside, FAO Schwarz will open toy boutiques at 200 locations inside of Macy’s stores across the country for the holiday season. It will be interesting to see what kind of merchandise they choose to stock and how they will set up these stores.)

In other Muppet news, there is a new movie that will be released in 2009 featuring our Muppet pals. Details about the film are few and far between. Jason Segel of Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall fame is the lead writer. And in my limited research findings I stumbled upon a blog that tracks the latest Jim Henson News – “The Muppet Newsflash” – that has some information on the picture. 

In addition, the Muppets will be taking over the set of the Today Show (NBC) tomorrow morning, November 13th, for 30 minutes during the 8:00am hour. It might just be the best day Matt Lauer’s ever had at work. And with all the depressing news about the economy these days, we could all use a little Muppet humor. So grab your morning coffee, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.   
Beijing, NBC, Olympics, sports, television

NBC’s Olympics website

Christa Avampato

I’ve started to have discussions with some companies and non-profits about the possibility of integrating social media into their marketing plans. Originally when I considered this type of consulting work, I thought the issue would be content creation. What I’m finding is that it’s about commitment and organization – the same two issues that companies struggle with in many aspects of their business. 


For the past week, I’ve been obsessed with watching the Olympics, and like so many people across the world, I am most keen on women’s gymnastics and the U.S. men’s swim team. I want to see Michael Phelps get his 8 gold medals in Beijing and I wanted to see Nastia Liukin win the all-around. Michael’s got 7 and Nastia surprised everyone, including herself, with her win in the all-around. 

I was so excited to see that NBC had created so much incredible content and integrated so much functionality into their Olympics website. Sadly, the organization is so frustrating that after a few visits of endless clicking, I’ve all but given up on trying to figure out the televised schedule. And that’s the trouble with an abundance of great content – all of a sudden the management and organization of it becomes just as critical as the information itself. 

I was surprised that NBC didn’t think through the site design more thoroughly. NBC had so much time to plan out how they would cover these games that the expectations of fans skyrocketed, mine included. I wanted it to be a piece of cake to navigate the website and find exactly the content I was looking for with barely any effort on my part. If anything, I’ve had to spend much more time sorting through the site and rarely find what I am looking for. I guess the network doesn’t hold simplicity in very high regard.

I take my hat off to the content creators of that Olympics website and to the many reporters who are contributing to the coverage; what the network really needed was a simplicity expert who actually understands how to use new media. With a once-in-a-lifetime event like these Beijing Games, it’s a shame that the executives didn’t see that for themselves.  It’s not abut throwing as much information in there as possible – this isn’t a flea market or a treasure hunt – and they certainly had enough money to do it right. Here’s hoping that they’ll learn from this error in time to make adjustments for their 2010 and 2012 coverage.