village Voice is Into Whatever You Are

We make no claims as the the recency of this little clip promoting Village Voice classifieds with a bunch of hipster wannabes but we were a little freaked out by the masked, dancing fat guy at the end. The "Click Right. Think Left" tagline is great though.

AT&T to Attack Internet

Surely, you've already seen the new AT&T/SBC campaign at least 300 times on TV. You know, it's the one in which the world looks like it's being attacked by two luminous alien vehicles. Well, that campaign, with $500 million behind it, is about to take over the Internet. AT&T isn't saying what percent of the $500 million will be allocated to the Internet but, beginning Monday, January 9, they do plan to reach 137.8 million unique monthly user, nearly half of everyone who goes online in a given month. So be prepared for banners, banners and more banners everywhere along with page takeovers, interstitials, sliders, dog ears, video ad units and all manner of online creative. We wonder if they've heard of these things called blogs. Apparently, they have.

Old Farts Fart More Online Than Off

The wafting odor of the elder generation is diffusing online at an increasing rate according to a report from BURST! Media featured on eMarketer. The report says online users over the age of 54 are spending more time on the Internet and less time with offline media sources. While the over 54 crowd are still big consumers of offline media such as newspapers, many are finding valuable information online they can't find in traditional offline media. eMarketer has all the smelly details.

New England Patriots Highlight Visa Security Features

Visa has teamed with the NFL in an AKQA-created online campaign, called Know the Metaphors, which uses cartoon images of New England Patriot players standing in as metaphors for the Visa card's security features. In individual videos, each of the five selected players, Brandon Gorin, Tom Ashworth, Dan Koppen, Russ Hochstein and Matt Light use their football prowess in humorous ways to deter criminals and highlight Visa security features. It's a nice way of making boring credit card features like identity theft, fraud monitoring and that little three digit code on the back of the card seem interesting.

Adobe to Launch 'Faces of InDesign' Campaign

Created by Goodby-Silverstein and GREY Direct, Adobe will, on January 9, launch a new online campaign called "Faces of InDesign" to promote the company's Creative Suite 2 which launched earlier this year with the tagline, "Everything but the idea." The campaign will feature the images and personal stories of designers, art directors and ad execs as they go through their day using Adobe products. One of the creative elements in the campaign can be seen here.

Pennsylvania Groundhog Gets Case of Stephen King's 'The Shining'

Locked up for 364 days each year, the poor Pennsylvania groundhog has nothing better to do other than go mad Jack Nicholson-style. To help promote Groundhog day and following last year's Groundhog Chase, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office has launched Grounhog 202, a series of videos that mirrors the film, The Shining. Currently, a trailer for the series is up on the site. Beginning on January 9, installments of the film will be posted on the site weekly, leading up to Groundhog Day itself. Starting January 9, the site will offer an RSS feed so that viewers can be updated when a new video is posted. There's also email notification. The campaign runs alongside the state's Cabin Fever promotion.

So far, we like this one better than last years as the whole 'Shining' thing aligns itself to the situation much better than last year's kooky and seemingly random groundhog chasing. Of course, it was his shadow he was chasing but still.

Consumer-Generated Content Hits TV, MTV Continues IE-Only Stupidity

The Wall Street Journal reports MTV's VH1 will, on January 13, launch "Web Junk 20," a show featuring video clips found on MTV-owned iFilm. MTV hopes the show will drive viewers to the company's online channel, Vspot. Unfortunately, as with other MTV online efforts, Vspot does not work with Firefox and visitors using that browser are met with "We're Sorry. PC Users with Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox: you need to run Internet Explorer to use VSpot." Idiots. Those most likely to be interested in Vspot content have a clue and those who have a clue use Forefox, not IE. Please get a clue, MTV and screw your deal with Microsoft.

Sprite Commiserates With Frustrated Intern

Sprite, along with the Jun Group, has launched Marcus Hates His Job, a series of three short films that follow the life of a guy starting an internship that doesn't go a smoothly as he would like. Firts, he gets hired by someone who, upon his first day of work, does not work at the company any longer. His interaction with the boss is not encouraging. His visit with the IT department to get an email address where he is met by a paranoid IT guy who demonstrates the usual office administration insanity we all have to go through from time to time. The whole thing, while supposedly promoting Sprite, just gave us a stomach ache reliving our own early days in advertising struggling to get a nut.

While we'd love to say it's all just another online video bandwagon jump emanating from a "Dude, we gotta do online video" creative jam session between iPod-carrying, file-sharing junkies, we can't. We actually like it.

Samsung Embraces Mobile Phone As Video Medium

We're told Samsung Mobile has launched AnyFilms.net a site, created and implemented by Margeotes Fertitta Powell and The Barbarian Group, which features serial and interactive videos under the auspices of Ubiquitous Films and exec produced by Broken Flowers and Alexander producer Jon Kilik to highlight the cell phone as a rising video medium. The first serial film section of the site features two films. The first film Across the Hall has been directed by Alex Merkin, starring Entourage actor Adrian Grenier while another, "GiGi" was directed by Mark Dippe, the director of the feature film Spawn. Across the Hall was engaging enough to keep us watching until the end.

The second section of the site is really interesting and provides six icons that can be dragged into different sections of a grid which then reveals portions of previously shot footage, featuring ten characters and a mysterious suitcase, that make up a mystery. The mystery can be solved by sliding the six icons into enough different positions on the grid enough times producing enough different footage to offer clues. We spent a good amount of time with it but didn't want to go through all 11,000 permutations and combinations. Suffice to say, it kept us wanting more.

The site officially launches December, 24 but is live now. While the site purports to be all about dowloadable video, oddly, there seems to be no obvious means to download any of the content. No matter. We'd rather watch it comfortably at home rather than hunched over a cell phone fighting off angry commuters on the MTA. Oh wait. They're on strike.

The site is being seeded and promoted across weblogs by HyperHappen, an agency whose website, in a stamp of approval of the medium, is a weblog itself.

Top Five 'Viral' Ads of 2005 named

Eatmail.tv's Emily has put together the top five video clips of 2005 which include the Citroen C4 spoof, the Nut Bra, the Guinness Good Things Come to Those Who Wait ad, the Bill For First Lady political ad and Axe Deoderant's Ravenstoke Alaska news clip.