For its back-to-school campaign "New School of Thought," Adidas Originals went all hipster and whatnot. The company partnered with trueAnthem to create a widget that gives away free music by Ultraviolet Sound and 30 percent discounts on Adidas Originals gear. The widget also includes short Adidas audio ads mixed by the band.
The street-sassy shoe brand joins Converse, Gap, Cartier and even Vanity Fair in disseminating free MP3s to the masses.
Why this might be smart marketing: if iTunes listeners switch Coverflow on, listening to your track will expose them to your marketing message, along with the album art. And if the campaign music's been uploaded onto last.fm, then last.fm users expose their friends to your brand when they listen to your track. So go stimulate those white earbuds, you go-getters, you.
- Need to brush up on your dating skills? Head over to the Stop Hating Dating Game and engage in some choose your own adventure action. It's all to promote a book, of course.
- New York Festivals has formed a partnership with China's SiTV to showcase its International Advertising Trophy winners on XiYuan, China's show about advertising.
- What the James Bond Quantum of Solace theme song will be since Amy Winehouse ain't.
- "Harvey Marco, standing ECD at Saatchi LA, is confirmed to have resigned from his role, yesterday August 5th. This according to a Saatchi LA insider."
- Need a Doctor Who fix? 2 Entertain and gas Agency has it for you with an online quiz.
The beginning of this video touting the delivery company's online trackingvideo asks, "How best to grab the attention of office workers during their bust day and drive interest online?" This simple answer? Affix a cursor to the side of the DHL truck and drive it around the city. Hey, this is advertising, not brain surgery.
In addition to "nude" Olympian appearances in a recent Powerade campaign, Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard got "naked" for PETA in support of the organization's Don't Wear Fur campaign. Apparently her public appearance at a news conference in Bejing was too much for Chinese officials to handle who shut her down, reportedly, for safety reasons. She then moved to another location an unveiled the ad to the usual swarm of photographers and gawkers.
Likely, China isn't so accepting of PETA's freedom of speech-enabled mode of operation given that, according to PETA, Chinese fur farms aren't the greatest places for a furry animal to find itself.
So all those Verizon commercials with the "It's the Network" crowd showing up en mass have, in some way, become institutionalized and, well, boring. But, sometimes, boredom is the keystone of a long-running, successful ad campaign. Still, it's always interesting when a brand decides to shake things up a bit.
Now this is Verizon so don't expect Snickers bars shot out of a cannon by Mr. T but this new video is a welcome extension of the ongoing "It's the Network" campaign. In the video, a guy makes a call in a park and the network crowd follows him around. It's all staged, of course but it's a nice departure frokm the corporate looking television commercial versions of "It's the Network."
Teasingly, the closing tagline reads, "Where will The Network show up next?" This could become interesting. Especially if they do truly unstaged versions.Though it's sad this video has been on YouTube since July 15 and it only has 5,282 views. Perhaps they need some seeding expertise.
Like a mashup of country club elitism and Rastafarian grooviness, these new Mother New York-created videos from 10 Cane Rum are delightfully intoxicating and elicit a blurry, drug-addled fogginess. After two days at an ad conference, these videos perfectly identify with the current mindset. And even if you haven't just survived an advertising conference, you'll love where these videos take you; to that serene Caribbean world where everyone is perfect looking and the run flows freely on the warm, sunny beach while the bothers of the real world slowly slip away. Can you feel it? Are you there? Are you running to the store right now to buy some 10 Cane rum?
Tuesday night at ad:tech Chicago wrapped up with a keynote by author Clay Shirky, "Here Comes Every Customer: The Former Audience is Talking Around You."
The Big Idea, if intro speaker Drew Ianni is any authority: "The internet is the most important thing to happen to the human species."
That's a pretty high and mighty manifesto. Upon taking the stage, Shirky tried conveying the same idea with more precision -- and a much higher word count.
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There are three types of ad:tech session:
- Roundtables, which look like opportunities for Socratic discussion but are actually ideal hostage scenarios for greedy salesmen.
- Polite affairs where a moderator, charged with exploring a given topic, poses questions in hopes of getting cotton-mouthed executives to divulge things they're not supposed to.
- The kind where a moderator -- contemptible creature -- invites panelists to pitch the audience one by one, and the topic be damned!
" The State of Online Video: Going Beyond the Pre-Roll" was the third type.
Things kick off with Josh Chasin of comScore mumbling figures into the mic, followed by Smith Forte of Current.TV. Then Rebecca Paoletti, director of video strategy at Yahoo, takes the stage.
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Widgets are the rage! Widgets are the new, new thing! The new, new must-have! Widgets are web 7.0! Widgets! Widget! Widgets! The Chicago ad:tech panel, Widgets and Applications - The New Media Network, covered what's going on in the world of widgets. Panelists included Omniture Senior Director of Product marketing Chris Duskin, Slide GM Advertising Sonya Chawla, Gigya VP of Sales Ben Pashman, Avenue A Director of Emerging Media and Video Innovation Jeremy Lockhorn and Sprout Co-Founder and CEO Carnet Williams.
Lockhorn described the "old" ad world as Ad 1.0 or a world in which advertising was all about interruption and intrusion. He described the "new" ad world as Ad 2.0, a world in which people are not interrupted and that exists where the people are in an unobtrusive way. This, according to Lockhorn, is the world in which widgets live. So what are widgets?
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Last night after the first day of the ad:tech Chicago conference ended, UnsubCentral's John Engler organized a dinner at the Chop House for about 16 people including Powered COO Mark Drosos, Direct Response Technologies' Matt Haag, Frontline Direct Sales Manager Barbara Stratte and Marketing Director Cari McClure, Adconion Media Group VP Kristian Wilson and Account Manager Alexis Berger, Spiderbait Strategist Dante Montverde and StoryQuest's Tim Keelan among others.
Also enjoying some of Chicago's finest beef were Adrants' Co-Editor Angela Natividad and the ad:tech blogging team Paige Dzenis, Brent Terrazas and Krista Neher.
Like any dinner with 16 people across two tables in a loud restaurant, the discussion varied widely from work topics to wine selection. None of which, sadly, can be currently called to mind. The food was amazing. The wine was great and the people excellent company.
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