Last night, the Interactive Advertising Bureau held its sixth annual MIXX Awards to "recognize the brand marketers and agencies responsible for the most innovative and effective interactive advertising of the year."
This year, Best in Show went to HBO's True Blood and Digital Kitchen for their "Hacking Reality" campaign for the second season launch of the vampire series. The work integrated digital and traditional media, with online, outdoor, print, stunts and a series of brand partnerships.
The second season of True Blood was teased through a mix of media tactics including vampires in faux blogs and online editorials as well as in traditional advertising and editorial takeovers. The strategy included co-branding with products like Geico, Harley-Davidson and Gillette, a host of classified ads, viral videos and a serialized weekly Inside Edition-type show covering all things vampire.
The worked seemed to have paid off since it resulted in True Blood season 2, episode 1, being the most-watched show on HBO On Demand, with an average of 12.6 million gross viewers per episode for the season, up 62% over the previous year.
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- Samsung memory cards are strong. Very very strong. Shock proof. Water proof. Magnet proof. And idiot proof.
- Texting and Driving Don't MiRobin Landa, Professor at Robert Busch School of Design and her publisher John Wiley & Sons are asking students throughout the country to create a 30 second video or ad to dissuade people from texting while driving.
- Here's a commercial for Anna Sui cosmetics. There's nothing all that special about it but there's nothing all that wrong with it either.
- A silent auction and cash bar will be held this Wednesday evening, September 29, at Highbar in New York City to benefit Samantha Tuttlebee, an independent sales rep and former staff rep at 89 Editorial and BlueRock who is in dire need of a heart transplant.
- Two new commercials (one, two) for Windows 7 Phone. Yawn.
Maybe there isn't anything akin to the KKK in Belgium or maybe their whole outlook on race isn't so sensitive that they have to over analyze every last piece of creative before it goes out the door. Which is possibly why this Smart Car newspaper ad slid out the door without a " Wait, what?"
A newspaper ad taking the form of two adjacent columns asks readers to become a member of the white clan or a member of the black clan.
And as if to make some sort of riff on Ford Model T's classic color choice scenario ("you can have a car painted any color you want so long as it is black"), the copy reads, "white or black is probably the only question you still have."
The campaign offers a similar choice on a website as well.
Is this really a big deal or a creative means to offer up color choice?
Launched yesterday in Israel by Shalmor Avnon Amichay/Y&R Interactive, a giant "reality board" will house Big Brother winner Eliraz Sadeh and Survivor winner Natan Bashevikin who, each allocated have the living space inside the board, will battle to maintain their living quarters.
Breathing new life into an old medium, each contestant will perform assignments and tasks while living inside the board using Twitter, Facebook, smart phone applications, a website and SMS. The winner will have his living space increased and a partition will slide over decreasing the size of the loser's living space. The game will continue until one contestant runs out of living space.
The human inside a billboard thing has been done before but this takes it to a new level both in physical scale and with the inclusion of an actual social media-fueled reality game.
The public can watch live and participate right in front of the board or check out the action on one of three websites: a Yellow Pages minisite, Mako Channel 2 and Walla.
Worshiped like a rock star, George Nguyen, gets some love from some Vietnamese groupies. It's all to promote the new address of TBWA\Vietnam. And that's it. A dedicated Nguyen fan waits all day to see the man but, sadly, he never makes an appearance.
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A new print and outdoor ad campaign for Skyy Vodka depicts a woman clad in red leather tights and high heels getting...um...poked by a vodka bottled. Marin Institute watchdog Bruce Lee Livingston said, "This is just ridiculous, it's porn-a-hol. Underage kids will look at this and associate sexual prowess with drinking Skyy."
Well, duh. Alcohol does increase sexual prowess but we guess that's besides the point. Livingston thinks the ad industry can't regulate itself and said, "The FTC should be all over this."
Branding expert Steven Addis thinks the ad is crass and told USAToday, "It's just jamming a bottle in a woman's crotch,. A great ad uses heart or mind. This one's starting below the waist."
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An Arbitron and Edison Research study from April 2010 indicates that about 27 percent of U.S. online users, or roughly 70 million individuals, listened to online radio in the previous month. Seventeen percent, or about 43 million people, listened to online radio in the previous week. That's up from 33 million in 2008.
"Music forms the soundtrack to our lives and, increasingly, that soundtrack is being delivered digitally, often via the Internet," said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. "Advertisers have taken note of this, and marketers are incorporating digital audio into their campaigns across a number of significant verticals."
While the revenue stream may not yet have followed, radio has made a successful transition to the internet. We venture to say better than TV has done to date.
Brands seeking to gain Twitter followers can now buy their way towards a higher follow count. A new product, Promoted Accounts, will be announced tomorrow by Twitter COO Dick Costello at the IAB MIXX Conference according to All Things Digital.
The offering will allow brands to buy placement in the Who to Follow section of Twitter.com. With brands beginning the recognize the benefits of a Twitter presence, the offering should be attractive to marketers and bring some much needed revenue to Twitter.
Promoted Accounts will be targeted to specific Twitter users based on the same algorithm that determines the placement of Promoted Tweets. Reports are circulation Promoted Accounts will sell for upwards of $100,000. More details will surely follow after tomorrow's announcement. The session is scheduled for 10:10 AM.
Don't tell the client but you can create an iAd (or any other) in 45 minutes! With Sprout's AdVine, now you can whip out an ad in 45 minutes, bill the client for, like, 25 hours and spend 24 hours and 15 minutes playing foosball or flirting with the interns.
OK so maybe that's oversimplifying it a bit but this AdVine product is pretty cool. And we like any product that makes things easier and gives more time to flirt with the interns. Which, is exactly what we're going to go do right now while you watch this two minute demo video explaining AdVine.
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One might assume a woman who decides to play full on football while dressed only in football pads and lingerie would, by default, be a very social creature. After all, running around in front of thousands of people with one's boobs spilling out of a top and one's ass getting a wedgie might, by some, be considered very social.
But just is case you feel that behavior isn't very social, Adage Technologies, creator of the Lingerie Football League Fanzone, would like you to know the ladies are very social. Well, at least LFL fans are social with over 15,000 lingerie loving football fans having signed up since the site launched this summer.
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