Behind the Brandi Chastain interview

I just posted an interview with Brandi Chastain, "Tips on how to be a great soccer mom" and found it to be a very fun project. I hope you'll read the article, share it, tweet it, and find her to be as charming as I did.

In general, I shy away from interviews with stars and athletes who are representing a commercial product (in this case Chastain is working with Electrolux in their Kicking and Cleaning campaign). In some cases, celebrities just go on auto-pilot, spouting the talking points given to them and unwilling to interact like a genuine human.  Ugh.  What makes a worse interview?

Brandi Chastain

But Chastain is a San Jose resident and the people I know who have met her describe her as genuine, smart and warm.  The PR team at Sullivan and Partners LLC (with whom I was working) were incredible, hard-working and personable. When I couldn't make the audio portion of the interview work they put together a way I could do a video interview with my questions showing up as slides. 

Anyway, all that is a long way of saying that my respect for Chastain and the PR team was very high, but still, I  half-dreaded the prospect of getting canned answers.

Instead, I found her to have a disarming charm.  Yes, she promoted Electrolux (a lot and well) but she did it in context, and she gave a lot of herself to the interview. She talked like a real person, she had interesting insights, and though she's probably been asked these same questions 1000 times, she answered with a freshness that made the video fly by.

The other reason I'm happy it worked out is because the Electrolux campaign invites parents to go to  facebook.com/electrolux and share a proud parent moment which will benefit the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.  My eldest sister died from Ovarian cancer, so the cause is near and dear to my heart.  I hope if you know a soccer mom, you'll send the article to her so that we can have millions of responses to the proud parent moment.