If for some odd reason you ever wanted to network with a bunch of university students or check out endless albums of drunk girls placing their hands on each other's boobs, but lacked the clout of a .edu e-mail address, congratulations, you now can. We all can. To couch the ever-present possibility of trauma stemming from this change, admins posted a thoughtful note assuring chafing co-eds that, despite complete loss of the site's appealing university-only exclusivity, the power is ultimately still in their hands.
As is typical of Facebook's community, students protested the change with a petition and a fairly straightforward student group called "I will quit Facebook if it opens to all Internet users," where all members pledged to leave the networking site the moment it goes public, which happened yesterday. The group boasts over 960 members, none of which have honored the vow. Big surprise. It's hard to leave behind those endless albums of drunk girls....oops...we said that before. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
The introductory caption to the current potato-talk segment of BenettonTalk tells us "Potatoes: you probably eat them quite often, but what do you really know about them?" and wins prominence on the homepage over other important topics like the Tripoli Six, deforestation and a little rant about airport security.
The illustrations are cute in a creepy sort of way. We also learn that one does not in fact grow more potatoes by putting a potato into the ground. Potatoes come from seeds. There's an impressive networking fact. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
To promote its new Princess fragrance, Vera Wang launched VeraWangPrincessBeauty, which features an interactive quiz that tells people what kind of princess they are. An apparently tech-savvy cartoon princess who wears her iPod in her bra walks would-be monarchs through the process.
The criteria is based on all kinds of obstacles the typical princess must navigate daily, such as which event invitation to accept and who to call on speed-dial while sitting in the bathtub. Hmm. To maximize stickiness, princess results can be turned into, yes, a MySpace skin or a printable pledge to be as fantastic a princess as possible. Oh, and also, to always wear Vera Wang Princess.
By the way, we took the test and Adrants is an "IT Princess" who goes to all the hip parties and travels the world. But, of course, you knew that about us already, didn't you? - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Apparently to tout the color choices of its vehicles, Susannah Breslin tells us Italian car maker Lancia has launched a site that lets you try out the colors....on the bodies of men and women by choosing a color and then a body part to color. The site's in Italian but Unscathed Corpse has translated directions. Have fun.
Following in Chevrolet's footsteps, Doritos has announced it, too, is asking people to create their own Super Bowl commercial focusing on how Doritos fit into a person's life. According to the promotional site, the process is simple. "Shoot it. Submit it. We'll pick the top five and from those, America will vote for its favorite. What happens with the winner? We debut it as a Doritos commercial on Super Bowl XLI." Who needs an ad agency anyway?
- Ad legend Phil Dusenberry and colleagues Ted Sann and Charlie Meismer created Don't Almost Give. Give for the Ad Council.
- Shawn Waite says Scion scratch off posters are a pain in the ass.
- Sneakerplay is a social networking site for smeakerheads. Who knew? Apparently, it's important because Nike has partnered with the site.
- The Truth campaign has earbed itself an Emmy Award or programming distributed via Advanced Media.
- At the MIXX Conference and Expo this week at Advertising Week, online video company VideoEgg announced its advertising offering which will allow advertisers to place ads within VideoEgg videos on Bebo, Dogster, hi5 and Tagged.
- Here's a little promotion from VitaminWater with Red Sx player David Ortiz called Who's Your Papi in which you can win a trip to the Dominican Republic.
- Tokion magazine is holding its Fourth Annual Creativity Now Conference October 14 and 15 at Cooper Union in New York City.
- This past Friday, Red Robin Restaurants launched a qtags-powered text campaign in all of its Texas area restaurants.
- The Word of Mouth Marketing Association is hosting a telephone briefing on the issues surrouonding social media disclosure as brought to light once again, this time, by the LonelyGirl15 thing.
In perhaps some sort of inside Advertising Week joke, Rupert Mudoch-owned New York Post is running ads for Mort Zuckerman-owned New York Daily News. Perhaps one of the two lost some sort of bet while comparing who had the hottest girlfriends and wives. Or, perhaps, there's a deal in place for one to buy the other and an over eager ad sales rep jumped the gun on accepting cross-media ads. Or, we're just dumb and there's a perfect good explanation for this.
During Advertising Week and with a seizure inducing online ad banner campaign, online video advertising firm Tremor Network has announced a rebranding and name change to Tremor Media to better describe its shift from online ad network to full blown "online video solutions" company for advertisers and publishers. You can catch the campaign in print on back covers of Adweek, Mediaweek, and Brandweek magazines and those siezure inducing banners online at Adweek, MediaPost, imediaconnections, MarketingVOX, MediaBuyerPlanner and, yes, right here on Adrants.
While our ad department, once again, "forced us" to run this campaign, there seems to be a nice tie in with the whole "tremor" thing. The banners say 'a seismic shift in advertising." Get it? Seismic? Earthquake? Shaking? Spasmodic banners? OK, forget it. That's a stretch. We're just trying to justify accepting their business. It'll all be over in a week.
Hmm. It seems today's edition of Adrants is turning into the all-sex edition. We had Paris Hilton driving drunk and sponsoring a wine-maker. We had girls on ponies playng rugby at the beach for Burger King. Now we have the most blatantly sexual story of all: actual girl on girl sex. Well, not porn-like actual sex but it's close enough and it's from our good old friends Independence Cigar who've always known the best way to roll a cigar. All videos contain nudity. You decide when and here to view.
Though acknowledging their individual goodness, this New Zealand Burger King commercial says rugby, beaches, ponies and girls in bikinis are better together just as cheese, bacon, chicken and barbecue sauce are better together in the Cheesy Bacon Tendercrisp sandwich. We can't argue with either.
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