Victoria Beckham in Chinese Charity Ad

Victoria Beckham will appear in a commercial for the Shanghai Charity Foundation, a group which helps raise awareness of children with leukemia. The ad will urge Chinese citizens to show more care for those with the disease. Foundation Spokesman Ma Zhongqi says the charity has raise $7 million and hopes to invite other international celebrities to participate in the Foundation's efforts.

Macromedia Enlists Diving Penguins For Holiday Card

As the holidays draw near, the amount of Flash animation holiday cards reaches a feverish pitch. This time, it's from Macromedia which has put together a penguin diving contest complete with judges and snide commentary. It was fun once we actually mastered the art of the dive.

Spread Firefox Places Two Page New York Times Ad

The Mozilla Foundation along with Spread Firefox placed a spread ad in today's New York Times to promote the Firefox browser and to thank the 50,000-strong Firefox community of supporters, developers and evangelists who created and promoted the product to over 11 million users. As Steve Rubel points out, this is an entirely consumer-driven marketing effort. If a group of people can get together, create a product and successfully get 11 million people to use it, "real" marketers should start looking over their shoulders in their own industries. View the full size ad image here.

Television's Savior: Place Shifting

Recently launched Sling Media believes programming and content be accessible on any digital device anytime, anywhere. The company plans to tie together the explosion of digital devices with an "embrace - not replace" approach to digital content management.

It's first product, due Q1 2005 and called the Slingbox Personal Broadcaster, is an intelligent device that allows people to enjoy live TV from any device, via any network, anywhere in their home or around the world. The Slingbox connects to and "placeshifts" content from any cable box, satellite receiver, or personal video recorder. The device,which falls into the growing home media server category, will attach to home entertainment systems, connect with programming received through cable, satellite, over the air or from a DVR, and deliver it via the Internet to other digital devices such as a computer, PDA or cell phone. The device will retail for $250 and will have no subscription fees.

For television, this could be the crutch medium been looking for. If this pans out, Sling Media, along with other media servers, will make it possible for television programming and, presumably, advertising, to be seen by a broader audience or at least, make it easier for the same audiences to "carry" their favorite shows around with them. TiVo and Replay have features where programming can be forwarded to a friend but Sling Media's approach appears to go further. It adds the anywhere component to TiVo's anytime feature.

Pam Anderson Makes Appearance in Chinese PETA Campaign

AFP Photo

While there have been recent cultural advertising blunders in China by some Publicis campaigns, we're assured by our Chinese insider this new PETA anti-fur campaign featuring Pam Anderson is culturally acceptable. We'll know for sure when PETA launches a billboard campaign, featuring the semi-nude Anderson, in Beijing and Shangai soon. "Im perfectly happy to bare my skin if it will help save animals skins," said Anderson. "With so many fashionable and comfortable fur alternatives available today, there's no excuse for killing animals and stealing their skins." PETA is targeting China because, as the country's economy grows, the group claims it has become the leading exporter of fur clothing to the United States accounting for 40 percent of US fur imports.