Future Marketing Summit Explores Advertising's Outlook

On Thursday, February 23, Remote People will host the Future Marketing Summit at which the evolving advertising industry will be explored and sessions of the future of advertising will be moderated by Naked New York's Paul Woolmington, Anomaly's Justin Barocas and VCU Adcentre's Rick Boyco. The Summit will be followed by the Future Marketing Awards which used to be called the Viral Awards.

Contest Offers Free Ride to Clio's For Young Creatives

The Clio Awards and advertising intellectual archive ihaveanidea are launching The Clio Awards Future Gold: Young Creatives Program to find the best junior creatives from around the world and send the 12 best to the Clio's all expenses paid. The contest launches January 16th and winners will be announced on April 1, 2006and is open to junior copywriters and art directors from advertising agencies around the world. To be eligible to participate entrants must hold full-time employment as a junior art director or a junior copywriter in an ad agency. Fire up your portfolios and check out all the details here.

CBS to Air Pontiac-Sponsored Micro-Series During Ad Breaks

Making sure to ward off criticism by calling it an experiment, CBS will launch an advertising-sponsored week-long "micro-series" titled The Courier on Tuesday, January, 24 in the first act break of CSI: MIAMI after 9:00 PM EST/PST. The serialized short film, sponsored by Pontiac and broadcast about the same time each night in seven short episodes, will premiere as a 60-second installment with subsequent editions running for 40-seconds.

more »

Google Maps Super Charges Rooftop Advertising

Boing Boing digs into digg and finds MIT Advertising Lab talking about advertisers discovering the value of Google Maps and placing large ads of rooftops for those using Google Maps to see. Target's done it. Realtors are using Google Maps to their benefit as well by letting home buyers examine maps, zoom in on house and view selling details. Yes, Google does rule the world.

Google Expands to Radio, Buys Radio Ad Management Company

Cnet reports Google will acquire radio digital services provider dMarc for $1.13 billion. dMarc helps radio stations manage ad inventory, deliver song/artist/station text information over broadcast and help advertisers manage their radio campaigns. Pressumably, Google will us dMarc to deliver its AdWords text ads over the system dramatically extending the search giant's reach into another medium and to many more ear/eyeballs. Maybe the day will come when a media planner can "buy the world" at the touch of a button.

Unentertaining Video Promotes Sprint's Mobile Entertainment

Hoping to cash in on a bit of Numa Numa and William Hung viral fame, Sprint has launched a knowingly goofy video clip in which a bunch of guys get all jiggy with themselves in an attempt somehow...that's it...sell phones! That's right. Sprint has seeded the goofy video which points to gothookedup.com, a site that promotes Sprint's mobile entertainment services it feels are far more entertaining than lame online video clips. It's a nice sort of nudge-wink effort that does it's thing without being clandestine about it. Whether it goes anywhere, only Sprint will know.

Anti-Advergame Slams FedEx Kinko's

Random Culture points to Disaffected, an anti-advergame of sorts in that, rather than lauding a brand, it pokes fun at a brand. It was created by Persuasive Games to show distaste for the apparent lack of competence displayed by FedEx Kinko's workers. As described on Persuasive's site, "Disaffected! gives the player the chance to step into the demotivated position of real FedEx Kinkos employees. Feel the indifference of these purple-shirted malcontents first-hand, and consider the possible reasons behind their malaise - is it mere incompetence? Managerial affliction? Unseen but serious labor issues?"

While there are plenty of brand hate sites out there, Persuasive Games created the game to demonstrate that all advergames don't have to be all about brand love. We haven't played the game nor do we know if this is a first but we do like the idea. Gotta love dissent.

Absolut Rebrands With Older-Focused Iconic Imagery

We aren't normally a fan of iconic brands drastically changing their image, logo, tagline and overall marketing but we've taken a quick look at the new Absolut campaign from TBWA/Chiat/Day New York and we like it. We really like it. Gone is the bottle, mostly, and gone is the print heavy focus. TV has been added to the mix showing iconic imagery such as an image of Steve McQueen with the tagline, "The Absolute Man," an image of the Statue of Liberty with the tagline, "The Absolute Welcome" and an image of the moon rover with the tagline, 'The Absolute Road Trip." Clearly, the over crowded, hipsteresque vodka landscape has required a different tact for Absolut to set itself apart. This just might work.

VNU's BuzzMetrics Acquires Intelliseek to Form Nielsen BuzzMetrics

Online consumer conversation measurement companies BuzzMetrics and Intelliseek, along with its BlogPulse blog prtal, have combined to form one mega-metrics analysis company called Nielsen BuzzMetrics. BuzzMetrics parent company VNU has been on a buying spree lately scooping up linguistics analysis company Trendum, BuzzMetrics and now Intelliseek. With the acquisition, VNU hopes to create "the new global standard for measuring and understanding word-of-mouth behavior and influence."

For those who don't know what these companies do or why you should care, the press release puts it quite succinctly explaining the companies "mine publicly archived online sources including blogs and discussion forums to collect and transform large volumes of unaided conversations into actionable consumer insights." In other words, they find out what people are saying about your brand and they package it up with a nice bow on top for your review.