Co-founder Biz Stone wrote a blog post that elaborates on a suggestion he made earlier about monetizing Twitter. The crucial stuff:
"Twitter will remain free to use by everyone--individuals, companies, celebrities, etc. What we're thinking about is adding value in places where we are already seeing traction, not imposing fees on existing services."
So businesses already using Twitter can chill: they won't be charged extra for what they're already doing. Stone seems to be saying -- and we write that tentatively, because he leaves a lot of room for interpretation -- that only add-ons will cost anything, unless he means Twitter plans to bring ad support to high-traffic areas. (Hot hash tags and Summize search results look prime for this.)
"[We] hope to begin iterating on revenue products this year," he added.
Sounds like Jeff Bezos et al. are starting to tap their watches.
Guerrilla Comm and Silicon Alley Insider scooped us on this Onion spoof on Sony: its complex, overambitious product line, and utopic rape-your-eyeballs ad strategy.
Imagine all that in a news brief coloured by the profane angst-rage you suffer once you finally get that "motherfucking time vampire"* home. (Oh yeah, language NSFW.)
"Maybe the Onion was inspired by 'BD-Live,' the confusing and ill-advised plan to integrate Blu-ray disc watching with instant messaging," said Alley Insider. And the sad part is, that crazy POS was real.
more »
Two days ago we mentioned Radiohead was donating one of its songs to a homeless shelter. Last night we got the footage.
The song is Videotape from In Rainbows, but the ad itself is called "House of Cards" -- the name of another In Rainbows track. Only the melody is used, adding an urgent tempo to a panning shot of a city, where a number of homes and skyscrapers are composed of cards that slowly begin to plummet.
more »
Then again, LA Gear has never been the sharpest tool in the marketer shed.
more »
Oh how we just wanted to let this one go. Really, we did. And we thought it would just go away like every other occasional unveiling of an agency's always-embarrassing internal workings.
As idiotic, far-fetched and plain absurd as the Arnell Group Pepsi document is, anyone who's ever worked in the industry knows this brand blatherific crap is the norm when it comes to a renaming/rebranding/logo project. It's. Just. The. Way. It. Is.
We're not defending the document's overblown inanity but pick up any creative brief or major rebranding document you've ever written and read it. Then multiply the idiocy you just read by about 100 and it makes perfect sense, given the size of the Pepsi account, the Arnell/Pepsi document is as hilariously verbose and mind-boggling as it is.
more »
- George Parker is out with his new book; The Ubiquitous Persuaders. Buy it now!
- Moo Tags. Yea, me too.
- Here are five must-have ingredients for any Steven Segal movie. It promotes the recent release of one of his DVDs. He still makes movies?
- Here's a parody of The New York Times Weekender commercial featuring Paul Rudd.
- And yes, like everyone else, we have to air Arnell Groups dirty laundry in the form of their hyper-pretentious, buzz word-happy, brand blather-filled brief for the work it did on the new Pepsi logo. Please Arnell, tell us the whole thing was a joke and you're all laughing at us now. Please?
more »
So, ya know, you're strolling down the beach like one of those idiots with a metal detector - which is just an excuse to ogle sunbathers in bikinis - and suddenly you see a dude decked out in ski wear sliding up the beach. Huh? Then one falls out of the sky and lands on your head. Huh?
Yes. Mammoth Mountain just got closer thanks to the addition of one hour flights from Los Angeles. From bikinis to moguls in one hour flat. Not bad at all.
Yes, the Super Bowl is Over. Yes, all those Doritos ads seem to have garnered all the love they'd hoped to achieve. And, yes, there are still a lot of consumer-generated Crash the Super Bowl commercials floating around. Here's one from Lavirale which makes fun for former President Bush's relationship with pretzels.
It's pretty clear why this one wasn't chosen for Super Bowl airing. Or why it's not even listed as a contender on the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl site.
Big tech geek fantasy: when clicks fall from the sky and deluge him with traffic, burying his torso and filling his mouth, each depressed pointer button a little piece of validation.
Like MacTeague's wife and her pile of gold coins. (Or, if you weren't an English major, like Scrooge McDuck and his swimming-pool vault.)
That's the imagery Vancouver-based hosting firm Peer1 channels in "Slacker," a video ad where a lazy techie fails to equip his company website for a click-through deluge. Enter said "deluge." The piece concludes, "Peer1: Fully scalable hosting solutions."
Problem, solution. Simple.
more »
When was the last time you saw a homeless person? Do you even remember? And if you do remember, you probably just walked right by, right? On behalf of the Weingart Homeless Center, LA-based agency David & Goliath set out to change that all too common behavior among the non-homeless.
The agency, along with photographer Ewan Burns, photographed 12 of the 70,000 homeless people in Los Angelos holding a cardboard sign on which each of them wrote, "Before you turn away, put yourself in my place."
The agency then made life-sized cardboard cut outs with the face removed and placed the cutouts near shopping centers in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica.
Admirable work. Check out the video overview of the project.
|
|
