To promote its new Harrison Ford family-man-in-peril (does he do no other?) movie, Firewall, Warner Brothers has launched Inside the Firewall, a site created by Pod Digital which introducs a game in which the player has to find his way out of a room using available clues. Apparently, the game's getting alot of buzzz in forums with players exchanging clues and hints. Us? We're just going to go see the movie to see how Harrison gets out of yet another one of his messes.
Perhaps we're just noticing it or perhaps it just occurred but those silly folks over at Pherotones have, apparently, kicked off a roadblock buy on Gawker, slapping their ad banners all over the front page of the gossip site. McKinney Silver is behind the campaign and some have opined it may have to do with their client Qwest or maybe Tom Cruise has just them to create an offshoot of Scientology. (Bertram, that's a joke)
Anheuser-Busch will use its Super Bowl commercial time to launch a direct-to-consumer network called "The Bud Screen." The network will offer all manner of programming, branded content and advertising delivered to the desktop or an iPod. The brewer intends the network to be long-lived and to eventually be named "Bud TV." We've said it before and we'll say it again, the middleman - the networks - just aren't needed any longer. When a brand or program producer can deliver content directly to the consumer, there's no need for the current TV network set up. Oh sure, big changes are years away but it's happening and it will continue to happen faster and faster as more brands and content producers realize they can have their own channel of distribution.
Calling it a first, CBS has announced it will make the hit reality series Survivor available for download from its site for $1.99 per episode. The episodes will only be viewable for a 24 hour period after purchase and we're told CBS will use some sort of digital rights management to prevent a downloaded video from playing after the 24 hour period. While other networks and producers are selling episodes outright for the $1.99 price, CBS, by asking a person to buy something for $2 and then taking it back a day later, isn't quite what we had in mind for this new on-demand world we're in. They'll call it renting. We'll call it a rip off, We'll stick with our ad-skipping DVR and our big screen TV over the laptop and a slow download.
While we've seen food-engraving advertising before, Advertising For Peanuts points us to EggFusion, a company which hopes to etch millions of messages on millions of eggs for millions of advertisers for millions of dollars to reach millions of consumers. It won't be long before PETA does a roadblock buy and every egg in the country is emblazoned with "Murderer! Don't Eat This Egg!"
In a commercial created by Dallas-based TM, Fabio will foist his romance novel persona upon us for Nationwide Insurance, the company's first Super Bowl commercial. The ad, which looks like a shampoo commercial, is replete with romantic cheesiness with Fabio dressed as a gondolier in Venice and over the top imagery of blooming flowers and white horses...all to sell insurance.
We all know spending $2.5 million on a Super Bowl spot is, well, not always the wisest marketing move but thankfully, we've got experts who know how better to spend $2.5 million. iMediaConnection has gathered 28 marketing experts who give us a bit of insight as to what they might do had they $2.5 million to spend elsewhere. You'll love AOL EVP Michael Barnett's completely self-promotional "spend it all on AOL" approach to answering the question. But you'll seriously love Word of Mouth Marketing Association CEO Andy Sernovitz' suggestion that the $2.5 million be spent to train customer service reps to be helpful, polite and sincere. Amen.
Entertainment site Heavy.com, last night, released 16 banned Super Bowl commercials that were intended (or not) by marketers to appear in this or last year's Super Bowl. Heavy.com Founder and Co-CEO said his site compiled the 16 commercials from the Internet and did not make any agreements with the marketers to show the ads. Have fun but, no doubt, you've seen them all already.
With four days to go before Sunday's Super Bowl, this million dollar homepage idea has to be the dumbest one yet. The page, called Be in A Super Bowl Ad, promises to show six pages of its site for five seconds each during a :30 in the game. That is unless, according to this not insignificant disclaimer on the site, "Because advertisement space for the Big Game is extremely expensive there is a possibility that the football ad can't be purchased. There will be no refunds and the standard advertising terms and conditions will be in effect," things don't work out in the next few days. Can you say scam?
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