Siemens jumps on the advergame bandwagon with Stain Art. The object is to stain a shirt with a sadistic palette that includes babies, chocolate, grass and eggs. Soil is especially fun. The best shirt gets put in an ad and the winner receives a Stain Removal washing machine.
Interesting idea. What would be even better is if your shirt got replicated with all those disgusting ingredients and the guy from Cheer appeared at your front door to wash it in a Stain Remover washing machine, which he then gave to you along with a magically clean shirt. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
We want to say no, it's not weird to see genitals in nature, but photographing them and putting them all together does vibe slightly weird. And calling the whole thing Nature is Sexy? It completely warps the meaning of "tree-hugger."
We're a little worried somebody at the office is going to come up behind us and catch us looking at ...
... at what? Fruit? A gaping hole in the ground? What? - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Because we're all scrambling to work out what to do about all these nebulous algorithms wrapped around SEM, SEO and other components of search and neo-'net advertising, Ad Age has done us the courtesy of releasing a free 52-page guide.
The Search Marketing Fact Pack includes a ranking of search advertising agencies, detailed SEO strategies, ways to extend the life of a :30 second spot, and the definition of that elusive and confusing marketing phrase "golden triangle."
Swoop up that bad-boy right here. We doubt it will make your job less guessy, but you'll at least sound like you know what you're talking about. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
It's called Karma's Quest. We wonder if Canadians are doing anything else these days besides playing other promotional puzzle games and posting pets on the internet. We're going to guess that no, they're not. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Coffee and Manipulation points us to some virals for Blendtec, a company that hawks ordinary-looking blenders that are apparently not so ordinary. We were mesmerized in a pathetic sort of way when the man in the white coat fed a rake to his blender on the :90 second soup cycle.
We suspect these virals strike a chord because they speak to a desire to put things that will create fatal shrapnel in contact with swirling kitchen blades. But hey. It's not like videos go viral because they're deeply profound. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Remember the sandbox? In the sandbox it was a big deal to find out who spit further and who could destroy who at mercy. In business things aren't so different.
With the creative help of McKinney in Durham, NC, CEO Tom Tiller of Polaris challenged the CEOs of his industry competitors to an ATV duel. The object was to find out who's better at building ATVs. Polaris won by forfeit, meaning everybody else bitched out (3 declined, 3 acted too cool to answer).
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Because Napster, MySpace, iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody and countless others are perhaps missing something that these people aren't, we announce the arrival of Haystack. You can register as a listener or an artist and toss around really savvy words that we're sure indie purists use all the time, like "tastemakers" and "music stuff."
Haystack even gets all Shakespearean on our asses and makes up its own buzz words: a "stack" is vividly defined on the homepage so there won't be any confusion about why anyone would cognitively pair "haystack" and "music."
When we finally grasped the concept we thought, "Guess every roll in the hay deserves a soundtrack." But we're not sure that's what they were shooting for. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Sure it's cool to have a send-to-a-friend feature on your site but when it take 30 to 60 seconds just to load, it's really not that much fun when a simple browser File > Send Link action will do just fine not to mention much faster. Yea, the creative and graphics on this Mini site are cool and all but sometimes practicality gets lost on one of the scraps of paper left on the floor of the creative conference room during concepting.
The funniest part of this whole feature is the copy which reads, in part, "Type in your friend's email address and the message you'd like to send. And wait for the smoke to clear. Like all things MINI, make it quick." Well, we'd love to make it quick but all of us don't have optical T1/T3/whatever Internet connections nor the site loaded into our cache because we've been obsessively viewing it over and over to make sure our creative work is perfect.
It seems a lot of businesses in this world need a slap in the face when it comes to the double meanings their company names and logos connote. First, we have pediatric doctor's office signage that alludes to pedophilia. Next, we have get rich quick wackos who like to embed their sexual preference in their logos. Now, we have a store in Brookline Massachusetts that likes to create visions of a certain bodily fluid with its unfortunate name KumOn. Perhaps everyone really is as bad at proofreading as we are.
Leveraging a little James Bond action, this promotional video for Jewish online social network Koolanoo from Keta Keta hits home literally and figuratively. This clip is a follow up to the initial clip which featured a bikinied hottie by the pool getting assistance from one of her "brothers." This second clip is playful and engaging enough to keep interest long enough for the payoff.
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