To insure skiers and boarders hit the slopes in droves this winter, American Skiing Company, parent to Killington, Sunday River, Sugarloaf and others, has launched Skier Intervention, a viral site with characters that dish out tough love in hopes people will get off their butts, head North, buy a season pass, make American Skiing Company rich and...oh yea...get people to take up the winter's best sporting and leisure activity. After all, skiing's not just about sliding down snow-covered hills but enjoying warm fires, cozy condos, beer and cheese fondue.
Unfortunately, there's a big problem with this viral. It can't be sent unless senders enter name, address, city, state, zip code and email. That's a lot to ask of someone just to pass along fun little viral. The site explains the information is needed to send various prizes, earned based on referrals to friends, such as season pass discounts, accommodations drawings and free lift tickets. While we can't fault a marketer for collecting leads, there's really no need to collect that information until after a person has actually won. To make matters worse, deep inside the privacy policy, which no one ever reads, it says the collected information may be used for offline direct mailings from ASC or "trusted partner companies." Just what we need - more crap in our mailbox. It seems this online viral is just a disguised direct marketing database-building mechanism for future offline marketing efforts.
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Hollywood's only true spirit, Tony Pierce, sat down with UPN Love, Inc. star Busy Philips for an interview. Philips was previously on the tube in Freaks and Geeks and Dawson's Creek and in the movie, White Chicks. While no one's ever heard of Love, Inc. Tony says it's "a good old-fashioned sitcom. It's witty, it's funny, it's quick and it's packed full of hot babes." We just might have to tune in.
Steve Rubel says there are better ways to use RSS feeds than to stuff them with ads. He suggest using a deed as just-in-time inventory control which would ping an adserver to deliver a particular ad based on inventory. As RSS feed could be used to poll incoming links to a website and deliver ads based on incoming readership. An RSS weather feed could ping an ad server to deliver climate-appropriate ad content. This is just a start. Who has more ideas?
Negating the pain and suffering hurricane Katrine caused, to idiotic Louisiana lawyers are attempting to capitalize on recent events by requesting a patent for alcoholic drinks bearing the Katrina name. Andrew Vicknair and Harold Ehrenberg are the two kooks who applied for the patent September 4 which included a logo with the name Katrina, a satellite image of the hurricane and the tagline "Get Blown Away." Harold's website, on which he also refers to himself as a chiropractor might explain this weird move.
In the everything-looks-like-something-else and the over-sensitivity department, Muslim Rashad Akhtar claimed the design on the covers of Burger King ice cream cones resemble the Arabic inscription for Allah and finds it sacrilegious. Yes, an innocuous ice cream cone cover is sacrilegious. What's next? Will someone claim those signs with squiggly arrows that indicate curves in the road ahead resemble a devil serpent and cause their removal country-wide?
AdPulp points to a billboard for shopping site Bloom which shows a pan of muffins, out of which, one has fallen and crushed a car beneath. Now that's creative!
Writing on AdJab, Chris Thilk suggests agency reviews, rather than being closed door events relegating the losing agency's work to the Recycle Bin, should become a television reality show pitting 12 agencies against one another for 12 weeks. His premise calls for the public to vote for their favorite agency-created campaign and eliminate the agency-created campaigns they don't like. While we're sure the entire, incestuous ad industry would salivate over this like paparazzi after Jessica Alba's bikini-clad butt, we're not sure "regular people" would care. That is, unless it was done in a way that caused the public to take pity on our pathetic efforts to get them to buy our products. Reality TV's pretty good at conjuring up those endearing emotional moments and a shot of a pair of hot looking, 20-something creatives crying because their campaign was just shot down or a pompous account director berating an intern for ordering roll ups instead of Thai food for an important client meeting might do the trick. Mark? Mark Burnett? Are you reading this?
