New Jerseys Possibly Leaked Online.

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Jmble
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Joined: Tue Feb 12, 2019 8:33 pm

Re: New Jerseys Possibly Leaked Online.

Post by Jmble » Mon Apr 19, 2021 3:45 pm

MeatHeadbengal wrote:
Mon Apr 19, 2021 3:36 pm
Jmble wrote:
Mon Apr 19, 2021 3:22 pm
orange_black wrote:
Mon Apr 19, 2021 10:46 am
the only thing i dont like is the leg strips on the white leggings. other than that, these look great.

FYI Burrow's knee looks weird..... :/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CN2N-03Ld8L/
I think you are just projecting your worries into trying to find something wrong. Regardless of the looks of his knee, he still isn't healed yet. By all accounts he's on track for when we need him, which is all that matters.
His knee however is obviously still swollen some. I have no doubt he'll be ready when it's time.
Yes! I don't know if he's earned it yet, but for some reason I believe in this guy more than I've believed in any guy for any team I've rooted for since Kenyon Martin before he broke his leg for UC in the Conference Tournament in 2000. God, I hate being a fan in this city. lol

Jmble
Posts: 1194
Joined: Tue Feb 12, 2019 8:33 pm

Re: New Jerseys Possibly Leaked Online.

Post by Jmble » Mon Apr 19, 2021 5:24 pm

If anyone is interested in what went on behind the scenes when the jerseys were leaked and what happened from then onto today, there's a nice article in The Athletic. Nothing newsworthy, just a nice look behind the scenes.
CINCINNATI — The Bengals had not changed their jerseys for 17 years. The first meetings about the change unveiled Monday began almost three years ago.

Every detail meticulously pored over. The stripes. The font. The outline. The colors. The Paul Brown signature.

Every aspect of the rollout would be specifically plotted. The announcement. The player reaction tease. The promotional video blast requiring they build a throne for Chad Johnson to sit on and smoke a cigar.

The Bengals core staff leading the redesign was enjoying a weekend reprieve from the grinding execution of this months-and-years-long plan on a sleepy Sunday afternoon in early March. Then, the unfathomable happened.

The retail version leaked on eBay.

“My heart sunk,” merchandise manager Monty Montague said.

This wasn’t just about the jersey ending up in the wrong hands and posted to the Internet due to a leak outside of their organization and outside of their own control (two other NFL jerseys were leaked at the same time, to less fanfare).

It was the way it happened. In a moment designed to serve as the latest multiplier in a brand makeover restoring the young, cool factor to the Bengals, this represented the exact opposite of the desired effect.

“I thought it looked like a bad flea market knockoff,” equipment manager Adam Knollman said.

The jerseys draped awkwardly off a plastic white hanger against an off-white wall, crooked, likely taken with an iPhone and the lighting was bad.

“Bad lighting! What lighting? What lighting!” Bengals director of strategy and engagement Elizabeth Blackburn said, emoting back into the awful moment once again. “Did you have a flashlight with one battery on? At least straighten out the hanger. Good lord, just spill some ketchup on it, too, while you are at it. OK, thanks a lot, eBay.”

The jersey sale eventually was forced down, but the damage was done. The screenshots taken. The moment viral. The internet then commenced doing what it does best: Hate.

As the speculation and storm swirled online, the Bengals public relations and content team needed to figure out an answer to the question hanging over this nightmare scenario.

What are we going to do?

What director of communications Emily Parker did was quickly learn how many people you can add to a call on iPhone.

“We were moving so fast, I didn’t even have time to set up a Zoom, it was just, how quickly can I get everyone on the phone?” Parker said. “It was just Add Call, Add Call, Add Call. I was up to about six. I felt like an operator. Each time you would merge, I would get the whole group together, then say, ‘Hold, please,’ as I get the next person in.”

The core group included Blackburn, Knollman, Parker, Montague, director of content Seth Tanner and sales manager Brian Sells.

“I was about to go into a restaurant,” Tanner said. “I walked in and said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to go.'”

The conversations would weave through options for 30 minutes, take a break to make calls to the NFL, Fanatics and other essential parties, then reconvene.

“You just go into that mode of when your brain knows you should be so angry and emotional, but you are like, ‘I don’t have time for this,'” Blackburn said. “Just buckle down and work through this problem to make the best out of the solution. That’s all you can do. It’s a little minicourse on leadership training and crisis management. I was just glad our team was so responsive. We were on the phone immediately. It took us hours to hear back from the league. That was really frustrating.”

This cycle went into the evening and essentially put three options on the table.

One, find Joe Burrow, throw a jersey on him and go put it out there ASAP. Wait until later in the week when you can fly a few more players in for a photo shoot, then do the release at that point. Or, stay the course for mid-April.

Before anybody went to bed Sunday, the decision to stay the course had been made.

“We all talked sense into each other and ultimately, we were all on the same page that we waited so long for this,” Blackburn said, “don’t shortchange it.”

Tanner and the social team dropped a tweet that Monday morning, pretending they dropped their phone in a hot tub over the weekend and asking if anything happened. On April Fool’s Day, they posted a photo of a black and orange striped fur coat on a white hanger against a poorly lit white wall in a tweet about the uniforms.

“We wanted to acknowledge it without giving it away,” Tanner said. “And I got a really cool tiger fur coat off eBay out of the deal.”

Outside of those two mentions, to keep their messaging of staying self-aware, they kept the launch calendar the same.

“One of those things you kind of expect it, you hope it is a little bit closer to launch so you can adjust a little bit more,” Tanner said. “But there was no adjusting at that point in time. This is all planned but planned for a month down the road. You can’t make an adjustment because we haven’t captured any content, we don’t have anything to display. We didn’t even have the capability to do that. It was definitely one of those moments you take it as it is and roll with it.”

The Bengals may have made their decision on this response, but meanwhile, the Internet had made theirs.

That is, until a select few Bengals fans ended up in a vocal minority pointing out what many were ignoring in the burst of jokes and rage. These are not what these jerseys will actually look like. The odd cut without even so much of a mannequin involved much less how Joe Mixon, Tee Higgins or Sam Hubbard will look.

A fan who goes by the name The Bengalorian — he dresses for games, and at Monday’s jersey release, in a full head-to-toe Mandalorian suit — was among those standing up in defense of them. This was as close to the single fighter taking on the army on horseback meme from “Game of Thrones” as you will see.

“I was ready to fall on my sword for it, I really was,” he said. “That’s the whole reason I created that because I’m trying to be that annoying, infectious, positivity online that creates this air around the Bengals of, oh, they DO have fans. They defend their team and their players.”

The turning point in that defense came as the Photoshop wizards got involved. Taking the prototype and performing jersey swaps for photos allowed the real way the jersey would look in a game to be visualized.

The positive response that followed changed the dynamics surrounding the leak.

“Then I stopped sweating it,” Tanner said. “We are good. I was totally good as soon as a lot of people started Photoshopping it.”

So, the Bengals proceeded with the player photo shoot that included Johnson wearing No. 85 smoking a cigar on a giant throne. Burrow confidently sat there with the scar from his ACL surgery exposed for the first time. The players flexed and posed in front of a live plant wall with all the cool factor of an album release.

This was always what the Bengals had in mind. What any team would.

“We felt for the fans, really,” Montague said of the initial leak reaction. “We do all this for the fans. I have a vested interest, I need to sell a lot of jerseys to make numbers but we do the jerseys for them, we want them to like them. We took them into account when we made the jersey. But everyone likes a surprise.”

Maybe not quite like this, but this is the reality of today’s media landscape.

“With any jersey reveal anymore, there is a leak somewhere down the line,” Knollman said.

As for what happened this time, the NFL won’t divulge details but is well aware of what occurred and is addressing the matter.

While the Bengals ended up with the biggest surprise of this whole deal March 7, they had one more planned as a thank you to the fans who first stood up for them and helped quell the storm of negativity that surrounded the leak fallout.

The team reached out to a group of seven, including flying three in from out of town, to give them a special experience over the weekend leading up to the release. It included being on the field, going through an “Inspiration Room” filled with design concepts and background that went into this process, first views of the jerseys, with a few for them included to wear for photos on the throne. Then a catered dinner to wrap it up before being part of the official media release Monday.

“It’s because of you and your positivity we got to do the jersey reveal the right way, so we want to do this as a thank you,” Parker said of the message to the group. “The comments they made about what that experience was like was totally awesome.”

Adding this event for the small group of fans was the only major change the team made to their plans, scratching another event they were going to have in its place.

“They really helped confirm for us that we made the right call in waiting,” Blackburn said.

A sense of validation circulated throughout the group as the curtain finally pulled back Monday in not letting the leak dictate the terms of their project. Of course, as this process has proven to be the entire time, what would Monday be without another hiccup as NFL UK accidentally released the jersey photos early after messing up the time difference.

So, with another quick decision, Blackburn and the Bengals also hit the button early and off it all went.

A fitting end, without question, but a footnote to a more grand takeaway in their mind.

“Even despite basically multiple leaks at this point, what people are going to remember in a year, five years, is the major stuff,” Blackburn said. “That’s what we can control. At the end of the day, I’m very glad we did it the right way.”

Even if the added stress of that Sunday still stirs the emotions.

“It’s just crooked on a hanger against a white wall and door,” Blackburn said. “You really couldn’t have come up with a worse way to see something.”

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Mag
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Re: New Jerseys Possibly Leaked Online.

Post by Mag » Mon Apr 19, 2021 8:47 pm

Just got mine. They look great. Big improvement.
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Bengals1
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Re: New Jerseys Possibly Leaked Online.

Post by Bengals1 » Tue Apr 20, 2021 12:41 pm

orange_black wrote:
Mon Apr 19, 2021 10:46 am
FYI Burrow's knee looks weird..... :/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CN2N-03Ld8L/
ZIM (@zimwhodey)
Joe says ,”If I died without scars that just means I did nothing worth fighting for”. I Heard a lot of chatter about his ACL scar yesterday. He seems to have answered that.
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Exile
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Re: New Jerseys Possibly Leaked Online.

Post by Exile » Fri Apr 23, 2021 7:55 pm

If I was more skilled with internet stuff, or our board was easier to paste images onto, I wouldn’t have to retype this, but it is what it is and I am what I am. Anyway, thought this was a funny tweet:
Joe Burrow: please... I need line help.
Bengals: we got you a new line...
Joe Burrow: oh thank god
Bengals: ... A NEW LINE OF CLOTHING! HEYO! HOW SICK ARE THESE UNIFORMS!?
Joe Burrow: *whimpers softly *

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