So we get this email from some dude who said he received an email from a "friend" who wrote fervently, "WTF!!!!!! Have you seen this yet? Someone's lost their fucking mind! Better download them now, before they take them off the server. http://68.178.246.54/test2.html. Um, yea right.They might as well put out a press release saying, "VH1 is promoting its daily news show Best Week Ever with a series of quirky videos to imbue the decidedly odd character of the show." Anyway, hurry up a view them now because (gasp!) they may not stay online for long!!!
UPDATE: In a very encouraging sign, VH1 has owned up and acknowledged to us they could have handled the release of these video is a less "OMG, check this out" manner. There are no hard and fast rules anymore regarding the so called "correct" way to release a promotion. Especially when there's so many bitchy bloggers like us ready jump all over people who are simply trying to figure out how to get their message out in a media landscape that is changing hourly. So go easy on them. We're all learning here. Well, not too easy otherwise there's be no point for this website:-)
It's not a Miller Light ad but it might be a good one if it weren't for that damn Bud Lite banner in the background. Oh, and the crappy resolution, the overtly overused sexual overtone and the boobs. Beer ads should never have boobs is them. After all, that takes the attention away from the beer, right?
"What the fuck was all that about? Why do people in management talk shit all the time? You're in the communications business, stop talking like a fucking Power Point presentation." Those are the words of George Parker after he was leaked an internal Lowe NY email from agency head Mark Wnek who babbled on endlessly trying to rally his troops after AdWeek awarded the agency a D+ in its latest report card issue. Parker is right. The business-blather laden email could have been boiled down to a simple, "We suck. Or at least AdWeek says we suck. We've hired some new people to help get our shit together. We need to win more accounts. Please don't quit and go to another agency." Oops...looks like the defections have already begun.
 We Think We Know Her Since we're only "almost-sorta-cool," we have no idea what Gorillaz Demon Days Live is (Ed. Silly, it's a game/music/tour thingy) but we do know Motorola is sponsoring it and is offering "Motoglyphs" (wallpaper for your mobile), games, images, videos and other cool stuff for people who know what the hell this is. Oh, look at the URL...it's out friends over at NightAgency. Who knew?
Errol Smith tells us, "In response to all the chatter about Jack Trout's comments on word-of-mouth marketing, Jack Trout invited a group of "buzz evangelist" to face off with him on his radio program. Steve Rubel and Rick Murray of Edelman, Emanuel Rosen of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, Seth Godin, Joseph Jaffe and Errol Smith (me....producer of Trout Radio) sat down to deconstruct the buzz around word-of-mouth." Listen here.
Hmm. The last two times Lee Clow and Alex Bogusky got together, the results was mindless puffery. This third video outing, an AdCritic interview video series, actually contains some meat. Of course there was a bit of puffery from Clow who talked about advertisers being cultural artists versus ad guys and how he decorated the city of LA during the 1984 Olympics for Nike but Bogusky brought it all back to Earth. Bogusky mentioned how he had initially modeled CP+B after Clow's agency attempting to mirror Clow's success but then said "it was a really bad idea." Bogusky correctly posits the future of the ad agency business shouldn't be the result of agencies banding together to create a new, similar model because that would simply put the industry back in the same bad place. The message is be different. Do your own thing. Acknowledge and learn from the successes of other but don't copy them.
So now there's Ratvertising. 1-800-Got Junk, a junk removal service, has hired a bunch of rats to scare the crap out of people and the crap out of people's houses by unleashing the varmints which, of course, make people scream, which, of course, make people pick up the phone and dial 1-800-Got-Junk. Well, sort of. They don't actually release the rats, they just act out this scenario in a couple commercials created by Vancouver-based Rethink, produced by the always excellent Reginald Pike. See the ads here.
On the heels of Chevy Apprentice, Kodak is joining the consumer-created commercial club with Your Kodak Commercial letting people upload five of their favorite pictures which then get turned into a :60. The promotion riffs of the company's commercial which did the whole kid, historical image emotional weepy thing. Now the company wants everyone to make their own weepy commercial. We' d love to tell you what we think of the promotion but after three attempts at uploading images and being presented with "The connection was reset," we figured it wasn't worth it and moved on. Fell free to try yourselves.
UPDATE: It now works for us. Apparently, it was entirely our fault as we tried to load images that were either too large or gifs instead of jpegs (guess we didn't read the instructions too well...our bad). We'd like to commend Kodak's David Kassnoff who emailed us immediately after we published this to help us get it to work. David and Kodak, we apologize for our idiocy. You can view our submission here which we are absolutely positive Kodak will not like:-)
A couple days ago when we offered our insight on the Chevy Apprentice make your own ad site and wrote, "We think there are some voices inside G.M. that understand social media very well and knew this would happen," we felt strongly, we were right. "This" being the collection of anti-GM, anti-SUV ads people created. In today's New York Times, our assessment was proved correct when Chevrolet's Milisa Tezanos was quoted as saying, "We anticipated that there would be critical submissions. You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space." Exactly. This space is very different from old, ordered, one-way traditional media spaces of yesteryear and to expect new spaces to behave the same was is just plain dumb. Rock on GM. Now just makes some cars people want to buy and you'll be all set.
On this week's episode of The Apprentice, Donald Trump, with his usual "listen to me speak because I don't give a sit what you say" style, fired home builder Bryce, pretty much the most level-headed, well-grounded apprentice in the bunch. His team lost a challenge in which they had to develop a jingle for Arby's new like or natural chicken sandwiches. While we're not so sure why that's such a differentiating factor since we've never met an unnatural chicken - except perhaps in a bucket of fried KFC, the Arby's execs wanted to drive home the point their chain is the only place to get natural chicken. I wonder if they's ever heard on Boston Market or any other restaurant that serves chicken. Now, if they mean organic, hormone-free chicken that isn't slammed against a wall to kill it like PETA so loves to show us in its videos, that might be something to hang the "only" strategy on.
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