Not to be outdone by his American counterpart, British entrepreneur Richard Branson will launch his own reality series on FOX. Temporarily called "Branson's Big Adventure," the series will follow Branson and six contestant around the world for six weeks as they face various challenges. The loser, rather than being fired, will, appropriately, be left on the tarmac as Branson and the winners fly off to the next destination on one of his Virgin airlines planes. The winning price has not yet been determined.
Kinja, creation of Nick Denton and Meg Hourihan, has launched. Kinja is a site that pulls together content from many weblogs into a website that is customizable by the user. Denton explains the site is designed for those who do not know or care to know about RSS, a method of pulling content from many blogs into a desktop program or website. Kinja provides a easy to understand layout with simple categories to click into and browse. Or, one can create a custom layout pulling posts from weblogs of one's choosing. It's an admirable effort to bring weblog content to the masses.
Starring Revlon spokeswomen Halle Berry, Julianne Moore, Jaime King and Eva Mendes, director Scott Hicks has created a two minute mini-movie for the cosmetics company. In the movie, the four women are shown in narrative segments with Revlon products playing a role.
The Movie, another in this increasingly long line of adver-movies, will debut in New York by the end of this week then roll out on the Internet and in movie theaters.
View the Adver-Movie here.
Fashion Designer Tommy Hilfiger has launched a new "Style Rx" website that functions like an offline catalog where pages can be flipped. But it goes further providing the visitor the ability to page through various tops and bottoms to find matches that meet a visitor's sense of style. Refreshingly, there's no distracting hot models; just the clothes making it easier to picture them on oneself rather than being depressed knowing most will never acheive the hotness quotient of a fashion model.
As if with a giddy school girl's "like ohmigod, isn't this cool" excitement, the recently very much in-the-news advertising group, The Association of National Advertisers, will publish two weblogs. The first, called "ANA Marketing Musing," by President-CEO Bob Liodice will contain as many as two to three posts per week on major industry issues. The second, with the oh-so-cool blog-like name "ANA Regulatory Ramblings" by Executive Vice President-Government Relations Dan Jaffe will be an even timelier blog with as many as one post per week on legal and regulatory issues.
Blog snobbery aside, it is with high hopes that these weblogs become a forum for insightful industry commentary and not simply a platform for the Association's political mission. Strangely, while Liodice says he would welcome user posting and feedback, the ANA has not enabled the "comment" feature on either of the blogs. If participation is truly encouraged, one might assume there to a be a link to the blogs from the ANA home page which there is not.
UPDATE: The ANA informs me that the Comment function has been turned on. Let the conversation begin.
A recently released study from the Cable & Television Association for Marketing called "Tracking the Evolving Use of Television and Its Content, which examines television viewing habits, revealed most (64 percent) in the study still make an "appointment" to watch a particular show at a particular time. Most in the study also have favorite channels that they return to over and over.
