Today, PR Newswire announced The Ernies, a community-chosen award program that will honor excellence in earned media achieved through the use of social media. Oh joy. Yet another set of awards agencies can clamor over and point to during new business pitches.
The Earnies are open to individual practitioners as well as brands and organizations and will focus on approach and strategy used to implement a campaign. Hosted on the AGILITY@work web site, all submissions will be reviewed by an independent panel of social media gurus...uh...thought leaders. Currently on the panel are David Armano, EVP of Global Innovation and Integration of Edelman Digital; Matt Johnston, CMO of uTest; Tim Moore, SVP/Social Business Architect of Maximum and CEO of CrushIQ; Liz Strauss, co-founder of SOBCon and owner of Successful-Blog.com and Deirdre Breakenridge, CEO of Pure Performance Communications. From a shortlist of finalists selected by the panel, final winners will be determined by community voting through social media.
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For its third outing of the Samsung Boosted campaign, Barbarian Group has created Secret Sites, a scavenger hunt that drops clues to a URL which leads to a site on which the first person who visits can win a Samsung Series 7 computer. Clues to the Hangman-style URL are dropped on Twitter and Facebook. Several sites will be part of the campaign. ScracthAndSnifWebsite was the first.
Check out the Boosted Secrets contest site to see what it's all about.
Alfa Romeo UK hired stunt driver Terry Grant to drive an Alfa Romeo MiTo through 2,500 water balloons in an attempt to break a world record. It seems he succeeded with only four balloons left unpopped.
Further capitalizing on the stunt, the brand has launched a Facebook-based contest which will allow people to guess which four balloons went unscathed. Visitors can look at a map of the balloons and if they identify the correct grid in which a surviving balloon was located, they will win a day at the track where they can race the Alfa Romeo.
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Remember breakdancing? Or, more correctly, breaking? Of course you don't. You'd have to be over 40 and no one in advertising is over 40, right? Anyway, breaking, a form of street dancing, is still around but a bit less popular than it was in its eighties heyday.
HandVibes, a company that makes collectible, rubber-like rings has, with help from nkown lab, created Finger Breakdance, a video that, as the title suggest, features breakdancing fingers. Back in our DJing days (yes, we had a life prior to advertising), we witnessed all manner of toprock, downrock, power moving and freezing so this little video brought back a few memories. Most specifically, a night when campus cops broke up a rather large outdoor dance party because, well, we really don't know why. A fight or something.
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- Mariah Carey hologram appears in five countries to celebrate Christmas courtesy of T-Mobile.
- Ouch!
- AdWeek's list of the ten best commercials of 2011.
- Amtrack WiFi campaign combines iconic regional route symbols with WiFi symbol.
- Yawn.
In a shocking development, Carl's Jr., aka, the brand with the "that's the just the way it is" response to people's concern's about it using sex to sell, has launched a new campaign that's devoid of boobs, branded bikinis and famous socialites washing a Bentley while clad in a bikini.
Yes. There is no cleavage, no gratuitous shots of bootylicious gyrating ass and no slow motion slithering of the camera's eye across the curvaceousness of Audrina Patridge. Nope.None whatsoever.
In this David & Goliath-created ad we have the far from bootylicious Harold, a retired ice cream man with a long history in the business of scooping ice cream. One night, Harold suddenly wakes up and realizes there's something very different about the ice cream business. Yes, Carl's Jr. is out with it hand-scooped Oreo Ice Cream Sandwich.
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It seems a an increasing number of people are opting for the couch versus the crowd come Black Friday. IBM's fourth annual Black Friday Benchmark study which gauges online shopping found year over year Thanksgiving Day sales were up 39.3 percent with Black Friday sales up 24.3 percent.
Mobile devices accounted for 10.2 percent of Black Friday shopping with the iPhone and iPad topping the mobile device list with 5.4 percent and 4.8 percent. 9.8 percent of all online Black Friday sales were completed through a mobile device. Although sure to increase in future years, social networks accounted for 0.53 percent of online sales.
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To celebrate its tenth anniversary, Belgian gift voucher brand Bongo has launched Bongo Bingo, an online and offline contest that will result in 30 people having the chance to win a trip for two to the Maldives. The thirty people will gain entrance to the Brussels-South train station where 5,000 Bongo Bingo boxes have been affixed to the ceiling. One box contains the gift certificate.
Participants can begin by signing up at Bongo's website. Sharing the contest through social networks online and buying other gift certificates offline will improve a participants place in the cue to enter the Brussels-South station December 3, the day of the physical portion of this promotion. Liking and following the brand on Facebook and Twitter will further improve a person's position in the virtual cue.
The campaign, created by Duval Guillaume, is a nice mix of the physical and the virtual, offers the brand increased exposure in social media channels and build revenue and customer base through the purchase to participate element of the campaign.
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If you're a brand that's linked to the fashion industry you can do pretty much anything you want to promote your products without anyone blinking an eye. After all, what's really left to say about a fashion brand? You either like it and will buy it or you don't and you won't. It's a purely subjective purchase decision.
Knowing that, fashion brands have long abandoned any rational approach to marketing and have, instead, decided to...well...do whatever they hell they want. and never before has that "whatev" approach been better illustrated than in this Bjorg Jewelery ad. The company feels they can sling necklaces and pendants with this over-the-top content.
Or, argued another way, fashion brands dispense with the mundane and, instead, latch onto political, social or, in this case, religious notions to pimp product. Either way, it's a parade of strange. But we like it. After all, how many lame-ass, conventionally derivative ads can you watch in one day?
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The great Advertising Standards Authority has spoken. If you hadn't heard, the organization recently banned a Lynx campaign which featured Lucy Pinder in a series of, some say, sexually suggestive videos. Reacting to an army of complaints, in this case, 15, the ASA asked the brand to pull the campaign. Praise be the power of the vocal minority. Yes, just 15 people lodged official complaints and those 15 people got an ad campaign pulled.
Not one to sheepishly drag its tail between its legs for too long, Lynx produced yet another video featuring Ms. Pinder apologizing for...well...whatever it was she did to get 15 people to complain. In the video, she returns the props she used in the video campaign while dressed in a baggy top that reveals zero cleavage.
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