With help from the disarming Alice Anda (and the kind indulgence of Massive's Cassandra Nuttal), ad:tech's blog crew crashed last night's Battle of the Agency Bands, a Guitar Hero party sponsored by Massive.
Suited up like charming schizophrenics, agency bands played a random Guitar Hero song for a crowd composed of their own cohorts. I wish I could attach the agency name to each of these videos, but we were in and out in two shakes -- too quickly to info-gather. One of them is MediaVest; and creatives from Ogilvy performed, but I didn't catch footage.
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As you prepare for the upcoming post-election pre-Christmas/Super Bowl ad madness, check out what Tropicana did during the election on An Orange America. They mapped voters with the terms they were discussing most. Cool visual aggregation ensues! (Read more about how it works here from Simon Owens who worked on it.) Tropicana did this in a way that connected red and blue states with their product by bringing it back to the color orange. (To check out other forms of visualizationosity online, go here.)
Publishing in the Digital Age -- Context is King.
It's odd that an ad:tech panel about publishing need reiterate the importance of context. Even before digital blew our minds or whatever, wasn't that still the case? Great newspapers were forged in the fires of noteworthy current events. Great books exploit widely-felt (but little-articulated) sentiments.
Context has always been king. Tactical marketers have always fed on that: This is my message. How best to package it for Demo X? Where is their mind? Can I speak to a shared passion or crisis?
This sesh gives a fresh coat of paint to a trusty old model, with the crucial addition of being whiplash-worthy. (That is, encourage some hardcore rubbernecking.) Highlights below.
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Okay, maybe I a idiot. Pretty sure I know my way around an Xbox/PS3, but this Exploration Week site by Arcadium for National Geographic felt like it took too long to get in and just start playing. That's me though, because I've always been an impatient gamer. Screw the start-up mission short film sequences: I wanna blow stuff up and I wanna blow it up now. The site reinforces the theme of exploration, lets you customize things, and the Flash work is great. My gripe is bigger picture: Why does it seem like the one thing the internet has failed to deliver on is a gaming experience on par with the real world? While a lot of that rhetorical has to do with bandwidth issues, the Matrix-Borg Second Life OMG Experience® we've been waiting for hasn't materialized yet.
Maybe it'll be included in the release of Web 5.0.
While not as busy as Monday or Tuesday night, Wednesday at ad:tech New York offered up quite a few things for ad:tech attendees to do after the day's panels ended. Wine Library's Gary Vaynerchuk gave a "motivational speech" to several hundred people at The Volstead but it didn't turn out quite as planned. Even with a few hundred people there to hear Gary speak, the club refused to turn down the music in favor of serving the eight people in the club not associate with the Mashable event.
Gary, ever the resourceful one, was not to be deterred so he asked the crowd to follow him out to the sidewalk where, on a milk crate, he gave his talk to those who chose to stay. Gary never lets a road block stand in his path.
Before the Mashable debacle, ChaCha held an event right after the day's panels ended in the Hilton's Bridges bar. Several hundred attended and were treated to free drinks. After a long day at a conference, who can complain about that? Right and no one did.
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New work from Lowe NY for Aruba Tourism has a sassy new tagline: 90,000 Friends You Haven't Met Yet. I mean, really, it's Aruba. How hard is THAT place to sell: "Aruba-definitely better than where you are now." Anyway, the work features comic Lewis Black as well as a host of locals who went for the peace-and stayed for the huts!
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SantaClaraNitro out of Sao Paulo, Brazil did this pretty interesting outdoor experiential thing. As you text the answer to the question "Is Rio happy?", the smile on an outdoor increases based on the overall number of calls received. Of course, since I live in a town of about 439 people, no smile would be happening anytime soon. More like, toothless grin.
(+ Enlarge to see how the sequence of events goes.)
Stare with scornful rue too. TDA Advertising & Design out of Boulder, did some guerrilla signage designed to turn streetlights into pneumatic tubes. At first, you're probably going, why posts? But shhhhh, chill. It works in the context of the campaign theme "Mobile banking. Available everywhere."
Check out what Plaid did for the latest release Mantis for the band Umphrey's McGee. Basically, pre-orders of the CD include loads of bonus content. But not just a free extra track either. Alternate studio recordings. Never before released historic recordings. Remixes. Experiments. The Brand Spankin' New part?
The more fans that buy the release, the more bonus content Umphrey's will unleash.
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Here's what happened Election Day while you people were online:
Sorry Drudge. CNN.com was the most visited website on November 4 among the media/political websites, receiving .61% of all U.S Internet visits. Visits to CNN.com increased 146% vs. Monday.
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