Parading and Proofing
The only appropriate way to wrap up my seemingly endless string of Phillies-related blog posts this year is to talk about Friday’s victory parade.
It was a day I never thought I would see during my time as a Philadelphia sports fan, and no amount of imagination prepared me for the scene. When we emerged from the subway station in South Philadelphia, Andrea and I could not believe the sheer mass of people stretching as far as the eye could see. All the way up Broad Street, for more than four miles, people were stacked at least 10 deep off the curb. The crowd was so large that the parade route — which was expected to take just under 2 hours — ended up taking more than four hours to complete. The horse-drawn carriage and flatbed trucks used to transport the team never went faster than one or two miles per hour on the street as they tried to not run over any of the estimated 2 million-plus fans who gathered in Center City.
Fortunately, thanks to a friend of mine who couldn’t make it down from New York City, Andrea and I had lower-level tickets inside Citizens Bank Park for the celebration and rally that followed the parade. After winding their way through the millions of people on the street, the team stopped at Lincoln Financial Field to greet 60,000 fans there. They then made their way across to the ballpark, where 45,000 more fans were waiting for them.
The hour-plus rally at the ballpark was incredible. The players paraded around the field in convertibles, carried the World Series trophy around, and nine players actually spoke to the crowd at the park, and thousands listening on the radio and watching on TV. That is where things got interesting.
After six or seven players spoke, Phillies all-star Chase Utley took the microphone. Now, it seemed apparent from our seats that many of the players had partaken in a few celebratory alcoholic beverages, so maybe that was to blame for what came next.
Utley, who is usually very quiet and reserved, said quietly, “World Champions!” Then screamed, “World [expletive deleted] Champions!”
The entire crowd roared, and then looked at each other in disbelief. Radio stations and TV stations, which were airing everything live, apologized to listeners and viewers for airing the word. And Utley took a little bit of heat from parents and the media.
In this case, the players were speaking off-the-cuff and everything was unscripted. At Dynamic Digital Advertising, those kind of things NEVER happen. Sure, the talented actors in our actors network are free to adlib if they see fit during a video shoot, but everything is so carefully written and proofed by our degreed copywriters that no bad words — or grammar and spelling errors — would ever find their way through. Even completed videos, which have already had their scripts proofed and been checked over by our video specialists, are checked ONE MORE time before they go out the door.
Of course, no one at DDA ever uses those kind of words to begin with (right everyone?), so it’s never really a problem. But whether it’s a word you can’t say on TV, or a simple spelling error, you can be sure that our thorough proofreading process will catch it before it goes out the door.
And if Chase Utley happens to star in any DDA-produced videos, we’ll remind him to tone down the language.
Entry by: Steve