Blingo, a search engine site - powered by Google - that offers searchers the ability to win prizes just or performing a search was acquired by prize king Publishers Clearing House back in June and is now upping its cache of prizes to cars, plasma TV and boatloads of cash. The site, already with 27,000 prize winners, will soon offer searchers the ability to gain free entry to Publishers Clearing House's big prize, the $10 million sweepstakes.
The site hopes to continue its growth with a pyramid-like referral program that encourages people to invite their friends to join. When the friend wins, the inviter also wins, taking home the same prize the friend did. Who knows how well this will work but if it's similar to using Google I'm going to try it and, in a shameless ploy to win as many prizes as I can, I'm inviting you to try it as well.
- Adding to project work, Deutsch has reeled in the GM corporate account perhaps requiring Donny to take that Speedo off, spend less time with the Big Idea and actually do some work. Oh wait, does he even go into the office any more?
- MySpace and Facebook aren't the only games in town. There's Piczo, XuQa, Hi5 and many more that are gaining ground. Marketers: leave them alone at least for a little while, OK?
- For his new book about America's rock and roll landmarks, Led Zeppelin Crashed Here, author Chris Epting has out together a "movie trailer" style promotional video up on YouTube.
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Classing up the GAP's cheesy Watch Me Change promotion, Talbots has launched a dress-me-up site to support its Classic Girls Getaway promotion which offers people a chance to win a trip to one of several locations for a three day stay and a $500 shopping spree. To enter, a 200 word essay is required to tell Talbots why the person should be awarded the trip. Oh yea, and you can play dress while standing in front of images of the Getaway trip locations. While we like the promotion, there's something about the accompanying music that is a bit more suggestive than probably intended.
In an interesting twist on Dove's Real Women Campaign, Secret gives "real women" (somehow better-looking than Dove's "real women") a chance to destroy someone's life, or maybe just their own. We already knew most of what they were thinking in their heads but now they can spout these social profundities for the aptly-named line of deodorant. (It's the untapped potential here that makes the campaign so promising.) While the revelations aren't all that revealing from "I want to leave my boyfriend" to "I kissed your husband" to "I don't think I'm getting married," we do like "I have obsessive compulsive disorder ... I hide it well." Yeah, isn't that what they all think?
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After receiving an email from Nick Denton telling us to check out his Gizmodo gadget site which turned out to be all red, we thought the Gawker Media publisher had struck a deal with that charity that paints websites red but no. Gizmodo has turned red because it's part of a sponsorship deal with TV-everywhere company Slingbox to introduce three new products.
Greenpeace has created a website that looks very similar to the Apple website expect for the fact this Greenpeace website wishes Macs were greener, The site claims Apple products contain hazardous substances other companies have abandoned. The site explains the hazards of toxic waste and its effect on recycling in a section called iTox + iWaste. There's also t-shirts and a tool to mess with a Steve Jobs speech. Nice work, actually.
UPDATE: It seems Greenpeace didn't have all its facts straight.
Add to the ever growing list of contextual fuckery this Pure Gum Spirits Turpentine ad which appeared directly next to a CNN story about a teen who drank turpentine to terminate her pregnancy. The kicker is the ads tagline, "Nature's Solvent." Yup, turpentine sure does make it easier to dissolve that fetus and make it really easy to slide right out into that trash can. Aside from the intellectually-challenged human idiocy that surrounds the use of these freakish remedies, the placement of this ad has to be the most freakish contextual placement fuck up to date. Can we possibly put an end to our own industry idiocy that causes these idiotic mistakes?
- O&M London is using a pressure washer to write ads on dirty sidewalks and the sides of buildings so as to avoid being labeled as an eco-unfriendly graf artist.
- Hood blimp crashes.
- Is it just us or is the combination of former Kiss bassist Gene Simmons and the elizabeth Glaser Pediatrics AIDS Foundation just a tad strange?
- Catherine Zeta Jones gets the boot from T-Mobile.
- Continuing its My Circle campaign, Alltel has "announced" five of its billboards have been vandalized with the word "Don't" over the headline, "Call anyone on any network for free."
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If for some odd reason you ever wanted to network with a bunch of university students or check out endless albums of drunk girls placing their hands on each other's boobs, but lacked the clout of a .edu e-mail address, congratulations, you now can. We all can. To couch the ever-present possibility of trauma stemming from this change, admins posted a thoughtful note assuring chafing co-eds that, despite complete loss of the site's appealing university-only exclusivity, the power is ultimately still in their hands.
As is typical of Facebook's community, students protested the change with a petition and a fairly straightforward student group called "I will quit Facebook if it opens to all Internet users," where all members pledged to leave the networking site the moment it goes public, which happened yesterday. The group boasts over 960 members, none of which have honored the vow. Big surprise. It's hard to leave behind those endless albums of drunk girls....oops...we said that before. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
The introductory caption to the current potato-talk segment of BenettonTalk tells us "Potatoes: you probably eat them quite often, but what do you really know about them?" and wins prominence on the homepage over other important topics like the Tripoli Six, deforestation and a little rant about airport security.
The illustrations are cute in a creepy sort of way. We also learn that one does not in fact grow more potatoes by putting a potato into the ground. Potatoes come from seeds. There's an impressive networking fact. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
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