Steve Rubel points to a brand's worst nightmare, Buzz-O-Phone, a service that collects opinions "about a product, service, brand or company? You know, something you either really, really love or really, really hate?" Basically, it's a centalized bitching center that converts the bitching into a podcast for the world to subscribe to making it even more difficult for brands to anachronistically attempt to control their message.
The service was created by Matt Galloway as a means to explore word of mouth. While some brands may initially suffer from pinheads who have nothing better to do in life than complain, it won't be long before brands in the know begin to game the system seeding it with oh-so-glowing commentary on their brand ot product.
Adverbox highlights a pretty inventive magazine ad for Wonderbra that interactively illustrates ehat a good bra can do for a woman's cleavage. See all the images here.
Boing Boing points to a story about a college student whose idea of placing a magazine in a removable label of bottles has gone into production. The student, Joanna Wojtalik came up with the idea to bypass traditional distribution channels and formed ModernMedia Concepts to bring her idea to life. The company's first magazine, iLove will be female focused and affixed to bottles of water sold in convenience stores, grocery stores and gas stationsaus throughout Australia.
Flickr user Monkey River Town spotted this billboard on Highway 35 in White Bear lake, Minnesota. Crack masters The Crack Team, headed by Mr. Happy Crack claim "A dry crack is a happy crack." That's actually not true in every instance. See the full image here.
Proving there's a cause group for every single topic in the world, The Privy Group, with help from Saatchi & Saatchi has created an outdoor campaign which consists of a life-sized cut out of a guy taking a piss in various parks throughout New York City. Advergirl has the story.
Advertising For Peanuts points us to yet another creepy Burger King commercial in which the King convinces is to sample his meat in a not so G rated manner. Crispin, if they are behind this as this is a UK spot, has truly taken the Burger King brand to new heights though we wonder if these height aren't moving them into the Hooters category of restaurant chain.
Boing Boing points to an act of lunacy on the part of Miller Brewing which hunted down a person who used a throwaway email address to enter a contest the brewer was hosting so she could avoid future marketing messages from Miller. Apparently, Miller didn't like being tricked, found the user presumably through some sort of IP tracking and sent her this email which read, in part, "We have performed an electronic change of address to update our records so that we can continue to send you special offers, promotions and announcements via email." We'd like to speak with the person at Miller who actually wrote and/or approved this to se just what it's like to be so disrespectful to one's customer.
UPDATE: Ad-Verse takes a detailed look at this, offers more details on how Miller supposedly does this, why they do it and why he calls this crap sociopathic marketing.
Just because the United States of America has a few perception problems in other parts of the world, doesn't mean the country should go and change it's name to something that exudes a friendlier perception. Just because everyone refers to Australia and "down under" doesn't mean the country should adopt that name. Just because Iraq caught some crap from the rest of the world, the country isn't running out to change it's name so we all think differently about it.
A county's name is steeped in history and isn't something to be toyed with like a brand name but that's what Al Ries would have us believe. Because Guatemala seems to be suffering some perception problems among the rest of the world's populace who don't realize it's the center of Mayan culture as opposed to Belize, El Salvador and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula who've co-opted the culture, Ries, aside from disliking the country's new slogan, "Soul of the Earth," thinks the country should change its name to Guatamaya. Yea, you heard that right, Guatemaya. That's like calling Australia Kangaroo. Or Brazil Bootyville.
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Rapping about babies and quirky coffee moments are the subject matter in two hilarious promotional commercials (1, 2) for BBC Three's new comedy sketch series Snuff Box. The series is written and performed by Matt Berry and Rick Fulcher. Since we don't live in England, we have no idea who these guys are but if their show is as funny as their promos, we're sure it'll get a few viewers.
To introduce its New Megane and the vehicle's hands free key system, Renault has launched a commercial created by Publicis Net Paris that illustrates just how pissed off one can get when it's so cold the key won't fit into the door lock. This commercial makes getting your tongue frozen to a light pole child's play. The commercial is in French but it works in any language. To view the spot, go the the New Megane website, click the first link under "Entrer," wait an insufferably long time for the Flash site to load then click the image on the left hand side. Or, just use this direct link we just happily received.
Sunil Shibad points to a funny spot from language training and translation company Berlitz in which the difference between sinking and thinking become extremely important.
When one is hoodwinked, the natural reaction is to get mad and start calling people names but we're not going to do that because we think this hoodwink was one of the best marketing stunts to come around in a long time. As we reported in late January, a helicopter with a naked guy hanging from it was spotted at New Zealand's Big Day Out but the stunt went wrong and the guy fell to the ground and was injured. We also received a taped conversation between what was assumed to be a representative of New Zealand's Civil Aviation Authority and a person at DDB, the agency thought to be behind the stunt in which the CAA representative was trying to obtain details of the event.
None of this happened. While we were skeptical at the time and knew New Zealand site Nzgirl had something to do with the stunt, we couldn't get anyone to confirm or deny anything. As it turns out, Nzgirl, which has a reputation of doing crazy, stunts, wanted to top everything they'd done before so they decided to do nothing...except tell a few people they did and let the rumor mill run with it. A dozen people were hired to spread the story about the helicopter and the nude guy and that was it. New Zealand media bit and reported the story as if it had happened albeit with a bit of distrust. Nzgirl reaveals all here.
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