Seemingly unable to learn from their mistakes, Pepsi has relaunched its Pepsi iTunes Music Promotion using the same code-under-the-bottle-cap tactic which, early last year, people cracked and have again, this year, cracked. The promotion calls for people to use the winning code found under the bottle caps of 20 oz. and liter sized Pepsi products to redeem songs from Apple's iTunes Music Store.
200 million songs will be given away. Last year, people only bothered to download 5 million due to lack of interest and Pepsi shipping "problems."
Without the promotion having launched yet, websites are already abuzz with tips and tricks to scam the promotion. With a simple tilt of the bottle or a flashlight/tilt/reflect trick, the code under the bottle cap can, apparently, be seen allowing the person to get the redeemable code without having to buy any Pepsi product. Perhaps a good ol' cash register-produced, code-containing coupon would solve the whole mess.
 Twenty one years ago, Steve Jobs, to the tune of Chariots of Fire, introduced the world to the "insanely great" Apple Macintosh at the Cupertino Flint Center. We've all seen the commercial but many have not seen the birth of the Mac itself. In the video, Jobs pulls the tiny Mac out of its case, pops in a disk, and let's the Mac take over the presentation. It even speaks (hey, it was 1984). Along with witnessing the glory of the Macintosh being born to a standing ovation, it's one of the few times you'll see Jobs, out of his signature jeans and black turtleneck, in a suit and tie. Author Scott Knaster,apparently, had the only copy of the public TV broadcast and kept it for 21 years unseen by anyone else. It was tracked down by the folks at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft who, working with Knaster, cleaned it up and digitized it for all to see. In total, there's two hours of content on the video. Only the section where Jobs introduces the Mac has been released. Jason Kottke has collected several links to the video here.
CareerBuilder has just released the first of several spots in a campaign which will launch Super Bowl Sunday. In the first spot, a man on the phone with a customer can't carry on a conversation because he works with a bunch of monkeys who can't keep quiet. Not all that exciting. View the spot here and sign up to be notified when new spots are posted.
Fave agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, famous for Burger King's Subservient Chicken, Dr. Angus, Virgin Atlantic Porn, Mini Cooper Robot, Chicken Fight, farting grandpa and more is now getting the ultimate endorsement - a spoof website. Like Crispin Porter describes itself as "not exactly the same as Crispin Porter. We don't have clients. Or an office. Or a staff. In that sense I guess we could have called ourselves Like Grey Worldwide Canada. But we didn't.
Because we're Like Crispin Porter."
The site has section called Like Work which contains none, Like Bios which spoofs CP&B execs and Like Bush which makes odd reference to Bush tax cuts. Of course, knowing CP&B, they're behind it. The hosting site (theneep.com) has "B K (webmaster@theneep.com)" listed as its registrant. BK. Get it? UPDATE: While we love viral jokes and conspiracy theories, we are assured this site has no connection to Crispin Porter & Bogusky and neither does the poor soul whose phone number is listed on the WHOIS info page. So all of you who have been calling him can now stop.
Oh please. The dude who auctioned off his forehead on eBay found a company willing to pay $37,375. In a twist, the company that ponied up the money for the privilege or adorning Omaha resident Andrew Fisher's forehead is a company called SnoreStop. The company better not find Fisher snoozing and snoring on the job.
Maybe it's just us but we wonder if broadband phone company BroadVoice couldn't have made it's ad campaign and website just a little bit closer to an exact replica of competitor Vonage's website. From typeface similarity to the use of International flags to the duplication of page layout, there's something strange going on here.
Who knows. Maybe the two companies own each other but hat's for the financial media, not us, to worry about. For us, it's just wrong for two different brands to look so similar. It's confusing for the consumer. Vonage? BroadVoice? Ah, who gives a shit. There just phone companies. Is that the reaction brand managers of Vonage and BroadVoice want their customers to have? Perhaps it's all just a clandestine brand preference experiment.
BroadVoice. Vonage.
Writing in ClickZ, Pete Blackshaw reviews last year's Super Bowl fiasco in terms of it stealing buzz from advertisers which usually become the topic of water cooler discussion for days following the game. Sadly, last year Janet Jackson's boob stole advertiser's thunder. Blackshaw speaks to the power of consumer generated media (blogs, chat rooms, forums, etc.) and how monitoring these channels can contribute to brand metrics and buzz. He offers five steps every Super Bowl marketer should take in preparation for consumer reaction.
Canadian-based ihaveanidea Events Editor Brendan Watson, writing on organization's website shares how he and his creative partner, Jana, used some very inventive tactics to get noticed by those they wanted to work for. From Peanust paraphanalia to branded caffeine capsule packaging to self-created office space, Brendan and Jana got noticed and got hired. Now don't go copying their ideas but a resume and a book are useless unless they get seen. This creative team found methods that got their work seen.
 Choosing a more current pop culture reference certainly wasn't the strategy behind Amsterdam-based Selmore for its broadband client Chello when it chose to wink at the Brad Pitt movie Seven Years in Tibet with its Seven Seconds in Tibet spot. Humorous enough, the spot shows "Pitt" stepping off the plane, seeing the effects of local goat milk, thinking twice, and stepping right back on the plane. Perhaps the movie was just released in Amsterdam but for the rest of us, we say, "Huh? Seven Years Where? When? Who?" Other spots in this weeks' Ad Age TV Spots of the Week include a lavish looking, black and white spot for William Lawson Scotch featuring Sharon Stone which pokes fun at her Basic Instinct days; a spot by Minneapolis-based Colle & McVoy for Minnesota Tourism which promotes the frigid state by illustrating how much fun a bear can have when it doesn't hibernate; a weepy, somber spot set to cat Stevens' Morning Has Broken by Sydney-based DDB for McDonald's mourning the death of the late former CEO Charlie Bell - very well done; a spot by Modernista showing a family tobogganing from the top of a mountain to which their Hummer brought them causing Ad Age to , rightly, suggest the tagline for this ad could be "Hummer, The Vehicle of Idiots;" a Cliff/Freeman spot for Snapple which has Wendy getting a woman to say nice things about a mechanic who placed the woman's car in a junkyard; a spot for Quiznos by LA-based Siltanen & Partners featuring the talking Baby Bob; and a spot from Leo Burnett for Allstate which places its insured on mountain vista roadways to illustrate its rapid addition of customers in the past year.
adMarketplace, an auction-based market for buyers and sellers of graphical online advertising and seller of eBay keywords, has announced the launch of a new affiliate program for Web publishers. Through the Program, publishers can choose to add a link on their site that leads prospective advertisers to a co-branded registration page introducing the adMarketplace Network. Referring Publishers receive a portion of total revenue across adMarketplace's entire network for advertisers that sign up through this Program.
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