- Artie Lange's promoting his upcoming movie with a NSFW pinball game which is actually kinda fun.
- Just as marketers are beginning to spread their seed all over MySpace, Thought of A Technocrat analyzes MySpace Bulletins and reminds us it can be a very seedy place indeed.
- HBO is promoting the last season of Deadwood with an online virtual poker saloon and game called Dead Man's Hand.
AdJab calls to our attention the stupidity of some of the latest work from Mike's Hard Lemonade which involves a guy holding a bottle in front of the camera and making it talk. With the word "hard" in the name, there's far better things they could have done than this.
- Once again, IKEA has taken its retail locations directly to people, this time dressing up trains as if they were one's living room.
In a newsflash of epic proportion, Copyranter reports online dating site True has placed an ad on the Internet that, stunningly, does not show a woman wearing a bikini.
That Sasquatch just won't die. This time, he's alive and well for a Jack Link's Beef Jerky campaign that involves four TV spots, and online site and...please tell us this is going to stop soon...a MySpace profile.
To call attention to the upcoming Word of Mouth Marketing event June 20-21 at the Hilton San Fransisco, coBrandiT, independently and without association with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, has mixed an old interview of Bob Garfield with some new comments he made about word of mouth marketing. The result is a humorous collection of babble. By the way, Bob was in on the joke just so you all don't think we're trashin' here.
UPDATE: The video has been removed. WOMMA was none too pleased. CoBrandit accommodated.
UPDATE II: See our ever so apologetic apology to Bob Garfield here,
Harvard University Pd.D. Candidate and all around spyware expert Ben Edelman has, once again, dug deep into the shady, clandestine side of online marketing. This time, he's examined Hula Direct, which, he claims, serves pops from spyware vendors, practices "banner farming," shows and charges ads without permission and engages in automatic page reloading to increase revenue. Since Ben's a Ph.D and we're not, we'll let you examine his findings first hand here.
As a tidbit of the insanity going on here and who's involved, this bit of Ben's article lends insight. "Hula's Yield Manager relationship provided Hula with the Vonage ad shown in the example above. Hula's Global-Store sent traffic to Yield Manager which sent traffic to Traffic Marketplace, which sent traffic to aQuantive's Atlas DMT, which sent traffic to Vonage. Payments flowed in the opposite direction." Certainly the notion of "you get what you pay for" takes on a whole new meaning here. Suffice to say, there's a whole lot of scamming going on and, to be clear, advertisers like Vonage rarely know it's occurring under their noses. Ben's analysis should be required reading for anyone even remotely involved with online marketing.
The Human Rights Commission has subpoenaed 16 executives at New York agencies to probe their supposedly poor history of hiring black people at public hearings during Advertising Week September 25 through September 29. A nifty strategy by the Human Rights Commission but one question that doesn't seem to have been addressed publicly surrounding this issue is how many black people actually want to work for an ad agency. Currently, in the 16 agencies the Commission is looking into, nine percent of employees are black. In New York, blacks represent 25 percent of the population. It's the gap between Nine and 25 that have critics steamed.
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While the stunt has been known for some time, many videos of people dropping Mentos into bottles of Diet Coke are flooding social networks and one of the marketers is loving the publicity. Commenting on the 800 or so videos online, estimated to be worth $10 million in marketing value, Mentos VP of Marketing Pete Healy said, "We're tickled pink any it." On the other hand, old-fashioned marketer Coca-Cola really doesn't get it. In a statement that sounds like it's out of a 1950's marketing text book, Coke Spokeswoman Susan McDermott said, "It's an entertaining phenomenon. We would hope people want to drink more than try experiments with it." OK, first, who cares if the crap gets consumed. People have to buy the stuff to do this stunt. It's money in the bank for Coke no matter what. Second, there's this thing called free publicity. Maybe Coke hasn't heard of it but many marketers think it's a really good thing when people talk about and use their products a lot.
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