OK, we're back from ad:tech San Francisco, their biggest to date, and we've got piles of backlogged bits for you so here we go, once again. machine gun style.
Exopolis has created a funky website for the Nicktoons Network Animation Festival. It's a busy page with all kinds of things to do but that's what the kids love.
The Dairy Farmers of Canada have launched Mobiloke, karaoke for the the cell phone. It's part of a campaign to make milk hip.
Apparently, this is to promote Honda's new civic hybrid and references London's congestions charge.
There's a new film coming called Art School Confidential staring John Malkovich which proves to look very weird but probably not far off from real art school.
Zugara has created another site for Reebok's "I Am What I Am" campaign. Each country's version of the site will feature different athletes and artists specific to that region. For example the U.S site (www.rbk.com/us/iawia) features Mark Zuppan and Carolina Kluft while the U.K. site (www.rbk.com/uk/iawia) features Amir Khan and Ryan Giggs.
Somebody's filed some sort of patent for an Advertising Box that seems to make it easier for marketers to create online ads and for consumers to change and interact with them.
Oxygen Network is promoting it's new Ivana Young man reality dating show with a cheesy video featuring Ivana Trump.
We have no idea what this is but we're sure it has to do with some sort of heartwarming organ donor list thing. We could be wrong.
Ad archive site Ads of the World has launched a forum section.
Lethal has launched a campaign in London for the Honda Civic Hybrid that involves the hanging of air fresheners from trees around the city to connote the vehicles environmentally friendly emissions.
Allegiant Air is allowing its planes to be wrapped with logos and commercial messaging. InterAir Media is behind the move.
Here's an ad from a tech retailer called TekServe that used $60,000 worth of iPods dominos-style to deliver its message.
Dieste Harmel & Partners has taken Gold at the 2006 FIAP show in Buenos Aires for an Anheuser-Busch spot titled "Mini Mouth."
For you art directors with some spare time on your hands, a site called TheBroth is a place where multiple players can move 1,000 colorful tiles to form collaborative mosaic artworks.
It's not exactly the most beautifully produced commercial, but this PSA advocates the hiring of those with disabilities and makes the argument that doing so is better for all involved.
Apparently, Subaru felt the need to respond to the VW My Fast ads.
It seems queers need financial advice too.
At ad:tech, ad serving company Atlas had a Truth Booth into which conference attendees would share their inner secrets which would be edited and emailed back to them. Wexley School for Girls created.
Here is a seriously whacked video promoting a cereal called Jelly Filled Frosted Sugar Balls. Actually, it's a twisted promotion for Mercury's twisted The Neverything.
We have no idea what this is. We're too lazy to find out. But, someone sent it to us so it must be something. Oh, it has something to do with advertising during the World Cup in Germany.
This thing promotes Sprite 3G...and a woman lays an egg. Don't ask, just watch.
This ad does a really nice job demonstrating the human touch Toyota imbues on its vehicles. A little too much human touch for us though.
Jeff Kling has a new book coming out. We think.
Ford' Your Ticket 2 Drive has Music 2 Drive 2. Good tunes.
Captains of Industry has created a podcast series for its client Arbor Networks that brings radio-style drama to the podcast. It's all about securing the net.
No doubt there are a multitude of political angles to Cape Wind's desire to place a bunch of giant windmills off the coast of Cape Cod the generate energy but this video from Greenpeace showing Senator Ted Kennedy paying whakamole with the windmills because they might alter the pristine view he has from his Hyannis mansion is, well, just funny. Apparently, Kennedy has buried an amendment into a Coast Guard bill that, if approved, would kill the Cape Wind project.
This isn't really new but it's worth noting The Weinstein Company, formed last October by Miramax founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein, has embraced the whole social media/online video thing and is promoting its movies on YouTube. Deep Focus handles the account. Up now are two trailers for Lucky Number Slevin, a trailer for Clerks II and, just added, a clip that includes the first eight minutes of Lucky Number Slevin. There's no need to rely on a studio website or movie trailers in physical theaters when you can get your trailer hundreds of thousand of additional people as in the case of Clerks II which has, to date, been viewed 217,505 times. Of course just one showing of one trailer on one day across, say, 2000 theaters with 150 theater-goers gets 300,000 views but hey, they're getting 217,505 more views then they might have had they not posted the trailer on YouTube.
As Adverblog ever so appropriately says, "To promote milk you can either say it's healthy and good for your bones, or you can go viral." Friesche Vlag creamers chose to go viral and you can just imagine where it ended up.
We suppose putting up a site called Morningwood and covering it with bikini-clad women makes it perfectly OK to make a site that takes over three minutes to load. Yes, three fucking minutes just to...oh wait....you mean we get to squirt water on the girl, get her t shirt just wet enough so that it falls off? Well that's what we thought until we waited the three plus minutes only to be presented with "You Pervert!" It's an April Fools joke and a very late on at that. So if all you want to do is listen to a single from Morningwood's upcoming album, by all means, play the game. If not, you can skip this one. There's no happy ending to this game. But....we do give them kudos for keeping idiots like us drooling long enough to listen to their song. So after all that crap, we might just have to go out and buy their friggin' album. We don't know whether to thank or hate Adverblog for pointing us to this one.
Unilever's Sure Sport is getting Football (soccer) fans all worked up with a new video clip featuring all manner of wild animals and site that has anything and everything a football fan cold possibly wish for. Spend some time with it.
This video promoting a text messaging service is extremely stupid not to mention it making viewers wait way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long for the punchline which, itself, is also very stupid. Yea, yea, we know it's a riff on that Beautiful Agony site but it's a bad one. Whatever. It's from the UK. They like this stuff.
So we get this email from some dude who said he received an email from a "friend" who wrote fervently, "WTF!!!!!! Have you seen this yet? Someone's lost their fucking mind! Better download them now, before they take them off the server. http://68.178.246.54/test2.html. Um, yea right.They might as well put out a press release saying, "VH1 is promoting its daily news show Best Week Ever with a series of quirky videos to imbue the decidedly odd character of the show." Anyway, hurry up a view them now because (gasp!) they may not stay online for long!!!
UPDATE: In a very encouraging sign, VH1 has owned up and acknowledged to us they could have handled the release of these video is a less "OMG, check this out" manner. There are no hard and fast rules anymore regarding the so called "correct" way to release a promotion. Especially when there's so many bitchy bloggers like us ready jump all over people who are simply trying to figure out how to get their message out in a media landscape that is changing hourly. So go easy on them. We're all learning here. Well, not too easy otherwise there's be no point for this website:-)
After viewing all the humorous, consumer-created SUV-bashing Tahoe ads born out of the Chevy Apprentice make-your-own ad promotion and reading some think GM is making a mistake with this, we thought we'd share out opinion that, lame as this might have been seen at first, it is, if left unedited, one of the better consumer-created marketing promotions. We think there are some voices inside GM that understand social media very well and knew this would happen. We're not surprised at all and we're not surprised they've left the negative ads up. If all we saw on that site were glowing praises of the vehicle, the promotion would simply be seen as just another lame attempt at capitalizing on a trend and a giant corporation trying to thrust it's twisted version of reality upon us.
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Just in time to combat worries Chinese built Lenovo computers sold to the U.S. government may contain software to spy on government agencies comes this must-be hoax called The Lenovo Tapes, a site with three video showing laptops doing amazing things like sending out holographic images, automatically cleaning up coffee split on the keyboard and even mini rockets that prevent it from hitting the floor too hard if dropped. The guy who apparently wrote the site claims he was leaked the tapes from an acquaintance. The thing that really tells us this is a joke is the cheesy Geocities-like site design. I mean come on. Who would hand code when they could place this all on a blog? Why didn't the guy upload these to a YouTube account? Why is this, while the site's been around for a while, just appearing now, soon after Lenovo gets bad press? Whatever.
