So Halo 3 is out. Everyone's happy. As part of the promotional fun, Pead PR held an event called Halo 3 Ice Block Buster. The promotion placed a one ton block of ice in Queen Elizabeth Square in Aukland which gamers, who were lined up at midnight yesterday to get their hands on the game could squirt water pistols at the block until it melted. Inside the block were 50 numbered tokens which awarded such prizes as Samsung LCD TVs, Xbox 360 consoles and Halo 3 games. It took four hours to get all 50 coupons out of the block. Game on.
OK. Pay attention. If you are a marketer or an ad agency that markets products and services to tweens, teens and twenty-something females you owe it to yourself to spend some time viewing these videos from 3iYing, a New York based "all girl creative agency" which has filmed hundreds of girls reacting to ads for a series called Adflip. In each of the videos, girls tell us why the ads they hold in their hands cause them to flip the page and get ignored.
Commenting on the ridiculousness of many of the ads twenty year old Rosaura sees in her favorite magazine, she says there are "orgasm faces everywhere. It looks like they're climaxing right there on the page." One tween wonders why a Lot29 Juniors ad features a giant breasted girl in the ad saying, "I'm a junior and I don't look like this. What does she stuff everything in her bra?" Explaining why a Dodge ad got the flip, one girl says, "to market a car it's not like once it matches my lipstick, oh, of course I'm going to go and buy it."
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After a 4:00 AM dash through the dark, followed by a five-hour bus ride, followed by an eight-block trek with a Streetwise Manhattan map, I've crossed the threshold of the Paley Center and made it to the Promised Land: Advertising Week 2007 in NYC.
Paley's squeak-shined glass windows have become giant YouTube stations. Beyond the lobby, thoughts about marketing by great men and civilians line the walls. The whole set-up fills my eyes with De Beers quality tears. (This may be less of an emotional reaction than exhaustion resulting from insomnia, and the fact that I haven't eaten.)
Apparently members of the press were only able to pick up their passes yesterday morning. This is disappointing. I call Blake the press pass guy. Blake is warm, pleasant and, in fact, female. "I'll bring you your pass around 1:00," she says.
Bummer. It's 10:00 AM, my first session's at 2:30, and I've still got a gigantic duffel bag with me. In a sea of suits I am the one jean jacket. And I'm sweaty and gross, and did I mention I've got a gigantic duffel bag with me?
I look, quite frankly, like an asshole. It's like a scene from Pretty Woman but 10 times worse.
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Before we even comment on these video supplements to the Nissan Rogue campaign which broke on Heroes last night, we truly hope its real. Not in the sense that it was passed off as something that came from the brand but didn't because it did. Nissan is all good with transparency here. Rather, we hope the stunts filmed in the videos are genuinely real and not altered with post production foolery.
Borrowing a bit from the Rayban Never Hide videos and the Axe Girlfriend comes this video campaign for Nissan's Rogue from TBWA\Tequila in LA. In the videos, the "Maze Master" shows us his skills with a marble maze game. In the first video, Maze Master and friend perform stunts with a marble just the Axe video did with quarters and the Never Hide videos did with sunglasses.
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If there's any category of marketer who has dramatically altered the way they market their product, it would be book publishers. Publishers have jumped head first into what online marketing has to offer. From using blog, to social networking sites to video to dedicated websites, the category has forever left behind its formerly staid marketing practices. Surely, they are not alone but they tend to stand out more so than others.
To market the book The Electric Church, a science fiction novel about eternal life via brain transplant into cyborg avatars (or something like that), has launched a BlogAd campaign and a site that takes you inside the church in a freaky sort of way. The creative includes interactive elements from the site. It's definitely simple but simple is more often than not all it takes to deliver a message.
Leopold Ketel & Partners have created a campaign for the Oregon Humane Society to encourage the last 1/3 of the petless Oregonian populace to adopt. Campaign imagery reads, "End Petlessness: a pet for every man, woman and child." More prints here and here.
And if you have :30 seconds to burn on something that will make you go "awww" for as long as you can exhale and make noise at the same time, watch the TV spot, which looks like it would be more comfortable on CuteOverload.com than on gritty public TV.
Taking pains to stay relevant, MTV and Tila Tequila join forces to give us the cheesy, farcically sexy, undoubtedly watchable A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, which the PR hounds are rabidly touting as "the first bi-sexual dating show!!!!!!!111"
To help address any confusion Tila might have about her revolving sexuality, MTV has decided to help her find love by throwing 16 straight guys and lesbians at her.
Finalists will move into her mansion (is this beginning to sound familiar?) and vie for Tequila's sunrise as she narrows them down.
The show premieres October 9th at 10 pm ET/PT. We'd say we can't wait, but that would be lying.
Think Facebook is worth $10 billion? It will prove worth that and more if Microsoft decides to take a 5 percent stake in the company for $300 million to $500 million.
Word of Microsoft's intentions has also got Google sniffing back up the ass of everybody's favourite social network. Not bad pickin's considering Facebook is expected to suck in $150 in revenue this year, of which $30 million will be profit.
Talk about fiat value. Here's to Facebook, which isn't so much "connecting" people as it is printing its own scrilla-scratch-dough.
For a dollar, you could get a Digital Panhandler to shit-talk somebody in an audio email. (As a courtesy to patrons, your identity will remain anonymous.)
Ain't technology great?
For other sackcloth-sporting brethren the premier Panhandler lends these words of encouragement: "Remember Digital Panhandlers you are not alone. Where ever you may roam in the matrix you will find a fellow Digital Panhandler."
In the end, that's all these ad-supported new-media-buzzing VC-hustling widget-builders are doing anyway, right? And why not? At least one guy's freshly-plush off the hype.
Copyranter directs our attention to yet another gratuitous use of ass in advertising. With absolutely no relation to its purpose, the Technical University of Munich career forum chose to find hot booty, photograph it and display it purely to attract attention. Oh wait, that sounds like we're complaining. Because we're not.
Oh but wait! We are. We have to. It's out job. We simply must rail against the objectification of women (and their amazingly beautiful asses) in advertising. It's despicable. It's shameful. It's Neanderthal. It's a blight on the fine, upstanding morals of the advertising industry and absolutely will not be tolerated! It sickens us to think a fabulous piece of ass like this would be reduced to an OMFG-inducing ad.
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