We're tipped to the fact Wieden + Kennedy is a bit miffed Nike jumped ship for another agency to promote its new Sasquatch driver. Apparently, Nike didn't think W + K could cut it and went to New York agency Trollback, which has done work for Nike before, to create a promotional video/commercial for the new driver. The commercial will air on NBC and on the Golf Channel throughout the month of October. You can view the work here. Oh for the days when clients clients weren't fickle and didn't jump ship every few months. OK, so that's exaggerating a bit. Clients go elsewhere for project work all the time but, for the the agency of record, it's never a pretty subject.
In a recent issue of Wired, Hitachi placed an ad with an attached drink coaster. In the back of the coaster it ask people to sketch plans for a new device based on Hitachi hard drives, fill out an actual patent form on the back of the full page ad and "toast to your brilliance." Whether any patented inventions come from this insert or whether this coaster inset ever finds it's way into a bar, we may never know. You can't have enough drink coaster, though, so you might as well make use of Hitachi's. Images from Tian.
Not that coaster marketing is anything new but Renegade Marketing wants you to know they did a similar thing earlier this year for Inside TV.
On Wednesday at OMMA East, GMD Studios CEO Brian Clark, whose agency does work for Audi, said, on a a panel, that 29 percent of traffic to a site created as part of a recent Audi A3 campaign was generated by advertising on the BlogAds network. The kicker is that 29 percent was achieved with just one half of one percent of the overall media budget. Let's say it again, advertising on weblogs deliver Audi 29 percent of all responding yet took just on half of one percent of the budget to do so. To drive the point home even further, McKinney + Silver, on its A3 timeline site states, "The media cost for the entire blog ad buy was less than the cost for one banner ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo!" Of course "one banner ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo" is a nebulous statement at best, however, again, 29 percent of traffic to an A3 promotional website came from on half of one percent of the budget. Shall we say it again?
Snowmobile maker Artic Cat has launched Moose on the Run, a quirky microsite with all sorts of tips for moose hunters. There's the usual game, moose translator, mini movies in which moose ride snowmobiles, moose pictures, moose profiles, a moose trap contest (which is closed) and, unlike some other non-transparent marketing efforts, an actual link to the Arctic Cat website. It's good work.
We don't really understand all the details and legalities but this really big Canadian company, CBC, is having this thing called a lock out which, for some weird reason, has put everyone out of a job. Someone said it has to do with some kind of contract negotiation but that's not what's important. What is important is Pedro the Locked Out Gnome. Rather than appear in people garden's as most gnomes do, poor Pedro, who used to work for CBC has been forced to hit the street and appear in pictures with other equally unfortunate souls including, for some odd reason, Hooters waitresses. Oh well, this is advertising after all.
While we've seen this in our inbox before, somehow, we neglected to share it. In support of the U.K.'s Leukaemia Research efforts, RefuseALunch taunts marketing folks into donating by first, in jest, of course, announcing, "All Marketing People Are Scum," then quickly recanting to, "All Marketing People Are Not Scum." The effort encourages people to, during the month of October, refuse lunch invitations and ask that the money that would have been spent on lunch be donated to the cause. Worthy enough. After all, most business lunches are just boondoggle excuses to spend the company's expense account fund.
We'd never viewed this before and we kind of like it. ESPN is set to launch its second season of "Off-Mikes," audio drawn from banter between ESPN Radio’s morning drivetime personalities, Mike Golic and Mike Greenberg and accompanied with animation from design studio ANIMAX
The first 10 episodes of "Off-Mikes" premiered last May on ESPN.com. Expanded "Director's Cuts" versions of the original episodes launched on the site at the end of the summer. The shorts were also available as mobisodes from ESPN Wireless via Verizon's V-CAST.
Each program runs about a minute in length and uses actual dialog from exchanges between Golic and Greenberg as heard on the "Mike & Mike in the Morning" show, which airs on the national sports radio networks. ESPN producers select bits from tapes of the broadcasts, then the ANIMAX creative team chooses a segment for production in Flash. The animation is then synched back to the edited audio tracks of the original radio broadcast. A very interesting repurposing on content.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) announced today that it hit the 200-member milestone 11 months after it began accepting members, a growth rate that, according to the organization, shows word of mouth marketing has become widely recognized as an important part of the marketing mainstream. Time, shifted marketing dollars, the final demise of the :30 and growth of future conferences will tell.
Most of you have heard of this thing called blogging but that's because you work in areas where blogging is commonplace. However, regular folk, the folks we, in advertising, sell to day in and day out don't have a clue as to what blogging is. At least in England. A recent study among taxi drovers, pub landlords and hairdressers found that 70 percent had never heard of blogging. Most thought the survey was asking about dogging, the practice of watching couples have sex in semi-secluded spaces. Hmm, blogging as a perverted sex fetish. Not exactly what the blog elite and the blogebrity had in mind.
This research confirms the notion we've supported for a long time. Weblogging is just a really easy way to publish a website that, because of the platform, gets easily distributed and picked up by search engines.
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Dell has gone all out to promote its semi-new Dell Ditty, a USB MP3 player with 512MB of storage, with dozens of slow loading, bandwidth-hogging videos featuring a goof Mitch Ferrins who attempts to teach dance steps K-tel style. Oddly, there's so many videos, it's unlikely they could all fit on the device being promoted. Yea, we know Dell is going for Kitch factor here but nothing's funny when it takes eons to download.
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