And goes to show, the best marketing = performance.

When a team (any group of people) does something extraordinary, the word spreads like orange + blue wildfire.

--

When they won, I had friends text me who’d never watched a b-ball game.

Same thing with NYC at large.

Meet Manhattan, an island where 1.6 million men and women live like islands -- each in their own little worlds.

In no other city does a “home team” feel more loosely connected to the populace.

And nowhere is our era of “media fragmentation” more apparent. NYC might be the most fragmented market in the world.

And yet, walking around today, I see more orange and blue than ever.

Heck, even my mom, who doesn’t know a pick-and-roll from a parking meter and couldn’t name a single NBA player last week, now knows more about Jalen Brunson than I do c/o People magazine.

And all this not from some shiny Q3 media plan.

But from winning.

--

Sure, sports = media now.

And media = marketing.

The arena, its own studio.

But somehow, folks at the local bodega aren’t talking about the Washington Wizards today.

Old friends on IG aren’t posting misty-eyed tributes to the Sacramento Kings.

Distribution only amplifies what’s already there.

And:

- Being exceptional in your field

- Accomplishing something rare

- Showing underdog resilience

- Coming back from being down

- Wringing victory from the jaws of defeat (e.g., pulling off the largest comeback in NBA Finals history)

- Keeping your head down while everyone (including your own fans at times) is trash-talking

Do these long enough and well enough and, well...

People notice.

Performance cuts through.

--

And “storytelling?”

Yep, key.

But not in some laminated brand deck sense.

Performance, effectiveness, and consistency are their own form of narrative.

We’re talking about Brunson and KAT and OG’s tip-in and ‘73 and MSG not because the Knicks marketing dept spammed everyone with a new “asset.”

The team told the story, arc and all, through the work itself:

Comebacks. Bruises. Near wins. Big shots. Doubt. Ugly wins. Beautiful wins. A pinch of luck. Ultimate victory.

Nothing wrong with great marketing.

But great performance, stellar ops, steady execution?

Enough to turn an uncaring world into unpaid media.

--

KNICKS!!!

And don’t worry: despite being a marketer, I’m not gonna turn this into a case study about how a 1932 coffee promo campaign somehow led to 60 million copies of the Maxwell House Haggadah. That miracle can wait.

--

Early in the Seder comes a line worth digesting: “Let all who are hungry come and eat.”

It appears before the big cinematic stuff -- before Charlton Heston parts the Red Sea, and before a pack of ravenous six-year-old second cousins starts rummaging through grandma’s sock drawer like skibidi matzah bandits.

But the line lands. Especially now.

A resonant refrain à la “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land.”

It’s the ethic behind the epic; an invitation to inclusion in the broadest sense...

--

An invite to what, you ask? (NOT one of the 4 FAQs -- I mean, questions.)

At the very least, to welcome the stranger.

To scoot down and make a little room for difference.

To give varying views a “seat at the table.”

Doesn’t mean agreeing, or pretending we’re all on the same side -- of whatever.

But it might mean acting vaguely civil and hearing them out.

Seeing others as people, not hashtags, worthy of sharing the ancient ritual of breaking bread -- err, the opposite of bread -- and together, at long last, kvetching about the room temperature.

Wishing all celebrating a restful + thoughtful Pesach.

As "The Complete Unknown" plays in theaters, introducing a new generation to the revolutionary singer-poet, Kendrick tells the Super Bowl audience: "The revolution 'bout to be televised."

If Dylan was the archetypal protest singer, Kendrick strikes the same chord — down to a simulated live protest so raw, Fox cut the feed.

Both won Pulitzers for their lyrics — dense, layered, cryptic yet cutting, laced with wordplay, symbolism, and trenchant double meanings. Both demand exegetic close readings and probe the same themes: race, civil rights, America’s fault lines.

Neither follows protocol to play nice; they adapt tradition to say something.

They speak — to the times; to the tensions beneath America’s skin — in a similar vein: both ironic and prophetic. “Voices of their generation.”

Now streaming: TikToks dissecting Kendrick’s show; each image, each verse.

Other videos? Mocking the backlash:

“What is this? What’s he even saying? This isn’t music.”

This — from the same Boomers who once sang every word to “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to the bafflement of their own parents.

Flashback to ‘65. Dylan’s “Dont Look Back” [sic] tour.

In the D.A. Pennebaker rock doc, a TIME reporter — The Establishment™ — presses the poet to explain himself.

Dylan smirks: “Are you going to hear [the concert]? It’s going to happen fast. And you're not going to get it all. And you might even hear the wrong words..."

Cue to millions of American households post-halftime, wondering what just hit them, shaking their heads at the electronic “noise” of hip-hop.

Kendrick saw it coming.

Samuel L. Jackson, as Uncle Sam, warns him: “No, no, no… Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto. Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game? Then tighten up."

(Cue Pete Seeger and Newport folkies, pleading with Dylan to ditch the electric and play “real music”; to play along.)

(Kendrick, ventriloquizing America: “Turn his TV off!”; the ‘65 crowd: “Pull the plug!”)

But Kendrick doesn’t play the game.

Or rather, he plays at the juncture between pleasing the crowd and defying it.

Kendrick’s Uncle Sam breathes easy with a silky pop duet with SZA (“Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about. That's what America wants, nice and calm.”)

Dylan returns to the Newport stage with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”; softly melodic, acoustic.)

Both flirt with mainstream success — but never at the cost of artistic integrity.

And “Not Like Us”?

It’s Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” — disestablishment diss-track — reborn.

Both angry, funereal, cryptic; and as Internet sleuths have pointed out, both sampling the same Ray Charles melody (“I Believe to My Soul”).

Fans even speculated Kendrick might bring out Dylan — or at least Chalamet as Dylan, fresh off their Super Bowl promo.

Would’ve been poetic.

But unnecessary.

The lineage is already there.

The same spirit “inside [their] DNA.”