Actress Jamie Lee Curtis has signed a deal with Hasbro to become spokesmodel for the game maker's $5 million fall campaign which will promote 12 games with the tagline "Games make great gifts." Curtis, a mom and children's book author will extol Hasbro's games a a way for families to spend time together.
"This is a mom-targeted message and we decided the best way to reach them is to find a celebrity with a focus on helping children develop," said Mark Blecher, svp-marketing at Hasbro Games, Pawtucket, R.I. "Jamie Lee is a children's book author and a mom, and games are a big part of her life. She really believes in this."
Grey New York created the campaign which will air on network and cable TV.
Accompanying the recently launched online game for the upcoming Court TV show Parco's Watching, San Francisco-based Venables Bell has created additional campaign elements including posting on ATM machines, in laundromats, on bathroom mirrors and on bar coasters along with taxi tops, bus posters and wild postings. The phone kiosks have slogans that say "Because Vinnie Parco was watching, I went from successfully cheating on my wife to living with my mom." The bar coasters say things like "Would you want this conversation you are having to be overheard?" The work can be viewed here.
To promote a new Court TV show, Parco PI, NightAgency has created an engaging, online game, called "Parco's Watching," where visitors can dive into the underbelly of Manhattan and collect clues. To collect clues, players engage a person and either flirt, bribe, or muscle them into giving up the desired clue. Making the right choice progresses the player closer to solving the crime. There's also a chance to win $10,000. We didn't make it all the way to the end so we leave it to you enterprising readers to tell us how it ends.
Without her involvement or consent, Hilary Clinton is getting promoted as a candidate from president in 2008 via an ad campaign created by a Florida-based Gay rights group, called Hilary Now!, run by Bob Kunst. The campaign consists of an animated television commercial showing Hillary driving a "Bush's Mess" garbage truck. In the ad, Hillary is seen emptying into the truck trash cans in front of the White House labeled "Iraq," "War on Terror," "Health Care" and "Budget."
The campaign will air on New Hampshire cable news networks in the cities of Manchester, Portsmouth, Concord, Nashua and Salem.
Capitalizing on increasing consumer involvement with content creation, ESPN and MasterCard will launch a program this fall where sports fans can submit self-created videos and images of their goofy sports moments which will be displayed on the web for visitors to vote for favorites. During the voting period in September and October, submissions will be displayed bracket style with the first place winner receiving a sports room makeover and the second place winner receiving $5,000 in MasterCard credit. The program, created by GSD&M, will be promoted on ESPN and ESPN.com with four 15 second shorts.
After a lashing by Jon Stewart, leaving CNN's Crossfire and finding a new job on MSNBC's The Situation with Tucker Carlson," the promotional staff behind Carlson's new show decide to go for inside humor by promoting the show on Stewart's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Animal Magazine publisher Bucky Turco made his way out to the Palms Resort in Las Vegas for the unveiling of the official HBO Entourage suite. Turco reports, "This branded suite on the 51st floor of the Palms boasts a black-jack table, comes pre-stocked with: Absolut and Jack Daniels, Ben Sherman gear, and two Xbox's playable on large flat screen TV's. Additionally whoever checks into the Entourage suite gets keys to a Mercedes M-Class SUV, massages, and a complimentary Motorola razor phone. To kick off the promotion HBO brought in the whole cast and lots of scantily dressed ladies. This ultimate bachelor pad is available for the next 6 months, groupies not included." Check out images from the event here.
AdJab points to a post by Craig's List founder Craig Newmark in which Newmark says current.tv, the new Al Gore, community-created, viewer voted content cable channel, should make commercials part of it's communal approach by allowing viewers to give thumbs up or thumbs down to commercials.
While this might be a fair indication of whether or not a spot proverbially "resonates" with the viewer, the system lacks one important element: why. Why are the ads voted off or blessed as acceptable content. As Newmark writes in his post, "The devil's in the details..." and developing a system like this that would truly deliver feedback marketers need in an abuse-free manner is, certainly, a tall order.
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By now, you've all heard Al Gore is behind the year old operation called Current, formerly known as INdTV. The thrust of the new cable network, to be piped via cable to 20 million homes in August, is people-produced content. The network, through its Current Studio, will provide support to those who wish to create content which will be segmented into Current Soul, Current Gigs, Current Fashion, Current Lies, Current Tech as well as news supplied by Google.
Nick Mathisen, writing on The Ill Quill, likens this approach to blogging and calls it Blog TV. It's an apt analogy and Current is enabling the spread of consumer-created content to another medium: television. While it's unlikely the country will completely ween itself from the likes of 'Desperate Housewives,' 'Lost' or 'Grey's Anatomy' but the content offered through Current will be dramatically new, different and certainly intriguing. And no, just like the Internet, Al Gore did not invent Current either.
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