This decade's "It Startup," Twitter, has finally incorporated ads on the pages of its website. The rather unobtrusive text ads are cutely marked up as dictionary entries and appear in a sidebar below a user's stats and above their thumbnail mosaic of followed users. Currently, the ads are not present on mobile or desktop Twitter apps...yet.
The ad space first appeared on March 16 (right in the middle of South by Southwest Interactive) containing promotions for Twitter's search function and branded widget; however, by March 23, the space contained ads for third-party apps: Tweetie (an iPhone app), Twittervision, and ExecTweets.
The marketing community breathed a collective sigh of relief heard the blogosphere 'round: At long last, the Twitter team had settled on a business model.
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New York Mets base-grabber Jose Reyes makes an appearance in "Instinct Fast," a new spot for sports label Under Armour.
Put together direct-to-client by Shilo, the piece is sober, slow-moving and taut. Its objective is to promote the Heater lightweight cleat to aficionados of baseball, a word we never hear independently of "steroids" anymore.
Under Armour's carved a niche for itself as the athletic label with a flair for the theatrical, but bon mots from Shilo creative Noah Conopask suggest the vibe's infectious: "We wanted it to feel like a battle, where Jose and the pitcher both had their fingers on the trigger. We wanted you to see it in their eyes, in their body language, and we wanted to subtract everything out of the world they were in, no bleachers, no fans, no scoreboard, only the moment..."
Heavy.
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- "It's so clean you can't even see it." That or it's some really good post-production work.
- Every Monday, PSFK will be syndicating Media Arts Lab's weekly newsletter, Media Arts Mondays, featuring highlights and insights from the worlds of media, culture, and branding.
- Spankvertising! Ouch.
- Mullen is launching the Bread Art Project, an integrated social media effort for the Grain Foods Foundation to raise money for Feeding America. There's a Facebook page and a Twitter account.
- More idiocy from the truth campaign.
- Enfatico pitches Vonage. Now there's an unlikely pairing.
Since you're probably a postmodern hipster, it's highly likely you love yourself some Flight of the Conchords.
Well, that's cool, we do too.
To promote Season 2 of the show, HBO partnered with Deep Focus to launch the Flight of the Conchords Lip Dub Video Fansterpiece. It's about as grand as it sounds, and one-time creators of fan fiction will probably relish the opportunity to reinterpret FotC's "Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros" with their own wincey music videos.
And they are admirably wincey. (Okay, maybe not as much as that one time Jemaine dressed up like Labyrinth Bowie and appeared to Bret in his dreams.) Fan or not, feel free to relish in this most awkward pool of self-conscious exhibitionism.
According to Deep Focus, Facebook outreach generated about 470 comments and about 5400 "likes." The two top videos were edited into a single mumbo-jumbo one and incorporated into a Flight of the Conchords ep -- and yeah, that's on cable TV, man.
See Final Fansterpiece below.
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Messing with old movie clips for use in advertising isn't a new thing so here's more of that from Good Magazine to hype World Water Day. The premise is there's a lot of dirty water in the world doing a lot of harm to a lot of people. And yea, nice job titling the videos "(dirty version)" on YouTube.
There's a Psycho version, a Cool Hand Luke version and a Crocodile Mile version.
Their downfall? Their all too long. The message drags. Except, of course for the Cool Hand Luke version featuring a woman washing a car Paris Hilton-style.
Have you ever pictured your own funeral? Not a pretty thought, right? Well that's what Holland funeral company Monuta, with help from THEY, is asking people to do. (Spots here and here) And, of course, the two funerals envision in the two commercial are, well, somewhat elaborate. Why? Because simple funeral don't make funeral companies a lot of money.
Oh you think we are being crass? Well yes we are. Sorry. We just feel that way right now. And, besides, what's wrong with a cardboard box. It's just a body. The soul is already gone, right?
Gad knows we've seen more than our fair share of Never Hide videos by Ray Ban, but "Super Chameleon" had us going "Is that real? Is that REAL?!" all over again.
To the disturbingly appropriate Eat My Bear by YUKSEK,* a slow-moving chameleon changes his stripes according to whatever shade of Wayfarers is set in his path -- and there are some pretty ugly options to choose from. Easter egg blue! Cammo! But in the context of watching nature in action, as opposed to destroying our fine facial aesthetic, those shades suit us just fine.
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Come on! Do people even bother to do the tiniest bit of research be fore making a first, best only claim? Apparently not. Even our sieve of a brain could come up with an example of what Woo Agency, here, claims to be a first.
The agency has just launched the "world's first customizable video clip" which allows people to...wait for it...place an image of their face in a Matisyahu video. Oh really? Seriously? Dudes, customizable video has been around for EVAR!
Even without doing research, the simplicity of this would have at least casued you to thing, "Damn, this has to have been done before.," right
Um..what the what, what? Are we missing something here? We're all for a good cause but we've looked at this Chi & Partners-created ad for the UK's Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation for quite some time and all we see is an empty bed.
OK, so yes, we get that the empty bed signifies a person who's no longer with us but, really, this add is so clinical it could be for a hospital bed manufacturer.
Could we have a headline? Tagline? Some heart string pulling copy?
Or are we just too stupid to grasp the simplicity of this message? Yea, it's probably that.
Remember this? No? Perhaps it was the distracting imagery that took your attention away from the product advertised in the ad. Something about really big, fake breasts as a metaphor for the increasing fake-ish world we live in and how wonderful and counter to that are New York Fries.
Yea, big breasts selling stuff. Who knew?
Well now we have an Elvis impersonator attempting to draw the same metaphor albeit in a much less curvaceous manner. Does it work? Do you care?
This one comes to us from zig.
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