Today marks the 25th anniversary of the first WrestleMania. That’s a quarter-century of tag teams, ladders, cages, broken tables and bizarre celebrity appearances.

I spent 15 years around the wrestling business as editor of a family of pro wrestling magazines, and while I’ll save my Pro Wrestling Theory of Life for another time (in a nutshell: absolutely everything in life can be explained through pro wrestling insider analogies), I can tell you this: The WWE, which was still the WWF back when WrestleMania made its 1985 debut, knows marketing inside, outside, forward, backward, sideways and with or without masks and foreign objects.

Looking for marketing lessons from the WWF/WWE? The Internets are lousy with articles and blog posts. Here’s one from 2009 talking about lessons for Internet marketers. Here’s one from 2007 talking about lessons for real estate marketers. And so it goes. Maybe the ultimate lesson is that bodyslams and elbowsmashes have the potential to vault you off the top rope toward a Senate seat.

I think the lesson to be learned from pro wrestling for most of us, though, is this: Identify the passions of your best customers and feed them relentlessly.

Vince McMahon thought big, in ways his father and other regional wrestling promoters never did. He tried lots of things and wasn’t afraid to fail. He experienced amazing success and weathered worldwide scandal (read: steroids).

But through it all, he focused as relentlessly on the fans as he did on the bottom line. Success is as simple … and as difficult … as all that.

David Berkowitz (the digital marketing one, not the Son of Sam one)  makes some interesting seasonal observations.

PaperRater.com is, as they describe on their site, “a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students … used by schools and universities in over 46 countries … combines the power of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, information retrieval (IR), computational linguistics, data mining, and advanced pattern matching (APM).”

But wait, there’s more: “Before we could offer PaperRater.com we had to overcome large challenges related to computational linguistic design and development, handling transliteration variation; ethnolinguistic identification; document classification and entity extraction; name parsing and regularization; duplicate document recognition, plagiarism detection, clustering, and prioritization; automatic entity extraction and entity resolution.”

Sounds pretty good, so I decided to give it a whirl by inputting the text to this blog post into their system and seeing what happened.

When I clicked on the results for “vocabulary words” I was told: “Excellent work! Your usage of sophisticated words is on par with other well-written papers! Not bad, I suppose, since the blog post had “STFU” in the headline and used “suck” or “sucks” a total of five times.

But the disturbing part was that PaperRater called me out for plagiarism: “This paper is most likely plagiarized. The percentage of original content in this paper is too low.”

So then I tried to use PaperRater on a chunk of text from a Hemingway story, “A Clean Will-Lighted Place.” Papa got nailed for plagiarism, too. More than that, Hemingway got nailed for his vocabulary: “Your percentage of sophisticated vocabulary words used is LESS than average.”

Somehow, that all makes me feel a little better.

I can’t help but wonder, though, if maybe there aren’t a few bugs left in the “computational linguistic design and development, handling transliteration variation; ethnolinguistic identification; document classification and entity extraction; name parsing and regularization; duplicate document recognition, plagiarism detection, clustering, and prioritization; automatic entity extraction and entity resolution” system.

Owtch.

From the article: “The studio blames the UK marketer’s strategy of limiting the opening to one theater to create buzz.”

Ya think?

(Thanks to BP for the heads up on this one.)

Takeaway for marketers: Sometimes a bad idea is simply a bad idea.

Today is Earth Hour day, which is not to be confused with Earth Day, which is April 22. National Geographic reports that 121 countries will go dark for 60 minutes between 8:30 and 9:30 local time. Here in Pennsylvania, the state capitol dome will go dark, though up in Syracuse the Kentucky-West Virginia game will be in full swing, so I expect participation here in the states to be minimized, at least in sports bars.