While we certainly don't need any more useless widgets clogging up our precious and limited laptop memory, apparently some do and Crew Creative, with work for TNT's The Closer, is filling that need with downloadable desktop kitty in a nod the the show's lead actress Kyra Sedgwick's reluctant affinity to kittens. To wallow in desktop cuteness, click the kitty on the lower, left-hand side of the site.
While we've never watched the show, our two seconds of research leads us to believe this show is watched by an older crowd, not exactly the crowd which loves to clutter it's desktop with functionless widgets. We could be wrong. We could just be in a cranky mood right now. Or, we could be completely clueless and this cat will become the Internet's next Star Wars Kid.
Like stunt marketing run amok but not really, since, hey, everyone's doing it, St. Louis ageny Schupp Co. - which sounds more like a beer company than an agency - purchased a bunch of billboards for its client, the St. Louis Cardinals, then proceeded to steal the cardinal cut-out portion of the billboard. The agency, following stunt marketing protocol, created a fake MySpace (is there no other?) profile under the name of Bird Napper whose favorite activity is...wait for it...stealing birds from billboards. The profile contained other witticisms such as listing "Celebration" and "The Heat is On" as favorite songs - former pep songs for the Cardinals and for favorite movie, "anything but the last 20 minutes of Fever Pitch" - a nod to the Cardinals losss to the Red Sox in the 2004 World Series.
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B to B advertising always gets sloppy seconds in the media so we're going to send some clean love to Hanft Raboy & Partners which created this interesting print campaign for its security software client Fortify Software. The print ads feature a forward looking time line highlighting less than desirable results based on a security breach. From the simpler loss of job and, as a result, having to live in one's mother's basement to full scale SkyNet-style Armageddon, the campaign, while exaggerating the extremes, clearly illustrates what can happen in a world run by computers. See all the ads here.
JUXT Interactive has created a site for music channel fuse called Just For the F of It, a co-branded site in participation with cable providers that will help cable ISPs reach a younger demographic by leveraging fuse content. Content will include featured bands, fuse programming highlights, and the musings of Mark Hoppus, the former Blink 182'r who has built a huge fan base in the blogosphere. It also introduces future web stars Francois the French Ferret and the Fugly Fairy, and offers desktop icons, downloadable stickers, and Easter-egg music downloads. While the site's interesting, it, unfortunately, is no MySpace killer yet. But that's really not the point. It's goal is to provide an actual reason for someone to go to their usually dreadful looking cable ISP's site.
This is just freakish but we love it. It's a campaign for Bubblicious created by Duval Guillaume in Brussells. See the other ad here.
Shell, in a seemingly innocent effort to give away a free phone card valued at $2 to students away from home during the Chinese New Year, has, according to Tian, distributed promotional pieces around the Arizona State University campus. In order to redeem the offer, students must fill out a web form including email address, name, address and some other optional demographic information. Certainly, this information is needed to send the actual card, however, the promotion's Terms and Conditions state the cards are only available first come first serve causing one to wonder why Shell needs to collect the information from any person who signs up after the cards run out. Surely, Shell knows exactly how many cards it has to give out and could very easily terminate the promotion once all cards have been claimed rather than continue to collect information up to an arbitrary end date thereby building itself a nice fat database of names for future use.
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It seems not everyone likes the new Curious George movie and Defamer posits a few angry parents rebelled against this "mindless crap" from Hollywood and decided to add a bit of their own creativity to this billboard. Defamer has a bigger image of the board here.
It's All Advertising has collected a few links of some inventive and funny consumer renditions of Nintendo games and music. The level to which it's taken is impressive but not all that surprising given the pervasiveness of gaming in today's culture. In one video, a group on stage acts out a game. In another, a choral group does a pretty good rendition of the music. In a third, a dude plays some classic Mario on an 11 string electric bass. That's some serious brand love. As It's All Advertising properly points out, Nintendo might consider leveraging this brand love somehow in its marketing. We're not just talking slapping a few consumer-created video clips into an ad but rather, something far more sophisticated, embedded and participatory. We'll leave it to you marketing whiz's to figure out just how to do it.
We have vague memories of those Bugle Boy Jeans ads where the women check out the guy's jeans rather than the guy and ask, "Are those Bugle Boy Jeans You're Wearing?" Apparently motivated by seeing someone wear these fashion faux paus, What Would J.Crew Do wrote three versions of a Bugle Boy ad as if they were to be on the air today. Funny stuff.
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.
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