Daily Buzz 7/26

It’s becoming clear that Fabio isn’t just going to swoop in, shoot a handful of Old Spice ads, and leave. Wieden + Kennedy is cooking up a whole rivalry between him and Isaiah Mustafa—including some sort of online “duel” that will apparently take place Tuesday at noon ET/9 a.m. PT. What’s more, it appears Fabio is now doing his own personalized response videos to people around the Internet—a real-time gambit that Mustafa made famous. Fabio doesn’t care—go ahead and ridicule him as a caricature of masculinity. He’s been down that road before. But let’s hope he doesn’t elaborate on his blurted-out comment, “Mine is a horse.” More videos after the jump. (www.adweek.com)

Last week, an American blogger living in the China reported having stumbled upon three phony Apple stores in her hometown of Kunming. Now, Chinese officials have ordered some of the stores to close—but not for the reason you’d think.
Of the five Apple stores found, only two of them were told to shut down. The stores aren’t being forced to close because of piracy or copyright concerns but because they didn’t have an official business permit, reported Reuters. The counterfeit Apple store featured in BirdAbroad’s blog will be allowed to stay open, according to a government spokesman, and is applying for a reseller license with Apple.
“Media should not misunderstand the situation and jump to conclusions. Some overseas media has made it appear the stores sold fake Apple products,” said Chang Puyun, spokesman of Kunming government’s business bureau. “China has taken great steps to enforce intellectual property rights, and the stores weren’t selling fake products.” (www.adweek.com)

Fans who tune in to watch the “World Series of Poker” on ESPN won’t see ads from two big sponsors that long bought commercials for the tournament.
That’s because their top executives are under indictment.
In April, the U.S. government indicted executives of PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker and another poker site for bank fraud, money laundering and operating illegal gambling operations. The poker sites and the individuals deny the charges but the government crackdown has stopped the sites from doing business in the U.S. and they’ve since halted their poker-tournament sponsorships in the States.
In the past few years, at the height of the boom in televised poker, the top Web poker companies paid tens of millions of dollars a year to support more than six regular programs on major TV networks, including ESPN, News Corp.’s Fox Broadcasting and Fox Sports Net and Comcast Corp.’s NBC.
The support included buying ads but in many cases the poker sites wholly paid for shows, creating tournaments that they aired in arrangements known as “time buys,” say people familiar with the deals. (www.wsj.com)

Netflix Inc. reported a 57% jump in quarterly profit, but its shares plunged as much as 10% in after hours trading as it said a recent price increase for its online movie service will sap near term subscriber growth.
The Los Gatos, Calif., company said the price increase, aimed at improving the financial health of Netflix’s declining DVD rental business, will result in only modest growth between the second and third quarters in the number of U.S. subscribers to Netflix. (www.wsj.com)

The NHL Jets unveiled their new logo Friday, and a “sky-to-ground perspective of a silhouetted CF-18 Hornet on top of a stylized red maple leaf forms the centre of the team’s new mark,” according to Tim Campbell of the WINNIPEG FREE PRESS. (www.sportsbusinessdaily.com)

ACC Commissioner John Swofford, saying that college athletics has reached a crossroads, joined the chorus of administrators calling for reform yesterday during his address to the media at ACC Kickoff in Pinehurst, N.C. (www.sportsbuinessdaily.com)

Online analytics firm ComScore and Facebook set out to answer an old question once more: What’s a fan worth? Their answer: A fan is worth the sum of its friends.
For example, Facebook mega-brand Starbucks reached 8% of all U.S. internet users in May through unpaid posts and the majority aren’t even fans of the brand.
How’s that work exactly? When Starbucks posts to its Facebook page, only a portion of its 24 million fans are actually online or paying attention to their newsfeed to see that post. About 3% of all 216 million U.S. internet users were in that camp in May, according to Comscore’s new social-measurement tool based on its 2 million-person global panel. When those fans like or comment on Starbucks’ post, their friends — an additional 5% of all U.S. internet users — see the brand pop into their newsfeed and, boom, Starbucks gets even more eyeballs without having to cajole their friendship in the first place. (The average Facebook user has 130 friends.) (www.adage.com)