We won't fight the notion TV needs all the help it can get when it comes to program development so we're holding out high hopes for The Storyteller Challenge, a TV pilot competition presented by MySpace, FOX and the Producers Guild of America. The competition, hosted on MySpaceTV (which currently makes no mention of the competition), will award two winning entrants $25,000 and a chance at an development deal with FOX. MySpace members will comment on the 5-7 minute entries, vote for their favorites, suggest plot lines and generally play television critic.
First it was Doritos commercials. Now it's full blown TV shows. What's next, movies? Oh wait, we had Project Greenlight and that didn't go over so well.
- Christiania Spirits is hosting a billboard competition. Finalists will be judged on the company's guiding principles known as Purism. OK then.
- A recent ad in the Economist promoting South Korea's Gwangyang as a business center used the Calgary skyline to do so.
- AOL has plans to acquire behavioral ad network Tacoda. The company will use Tacoda's targeting capabilities to improve its advertising offering.
- On the eve of Saatchi's new red pigtail guy commercial, Improv Everywhere is staging a faux protest claiming the ads unfairly represent red heads.
- AdFreak says Microsoft's new Live Derby 2007 game which promotes Live Search doesn't do much more than prove Microsoft is uncool and is still good at crashing.
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There's a storm brewing over Virgin Mobile's use of a Creative Commons-covered photographs from Flickr users in a recent Australian print campaign. While Virgin Mobile clearly notes in the ads, created by Glue Society, where the photographs came from, some are concerned the people in the ads should have been given the chance to sign a model release and the Flickr users and photographers should have at least been asked permission to use the photographs.
With everything just a right click away, the issue of fair use, attribution, copyright or whatever name you want to apply, is a slippery slope indeed. Three days ago, one Flickr user who, apparently, has legal connections says he's sent a cease and desist letter to Virgin Mobile but has not yet received any acknowledgment regarding the letter. Flickr users, including the older brother of one of the girls who appears in one of the photos, are debating the issue here.
We've contacted Glue Society for comment and will report any response we receive as soon as we receive it.
UPDATE: Following an avalanche of complaints, Virgin Mobile has canceled this campaign.
Joining the "we don't give a shit whether or not our burgers have three million calories, clog your arteries and turn you in to a lazy couch potato with no interest in accomplishing anything in life other than clicking your Wii" trend, Wendy's has introduced the Baconator, a one half pound, six bacon strip monstrosity possibly bigger than the Paris Hilton Bentley Burger.
To promote the burger's beefy, bacon, cheese, ketchup and mayonnaise-slathered massiveness, Wendy's is "inviting America to create "burger music", musical pieces that incorporate the vibrant sounds associated with preparing and serving a great hamburger" whatever that may be.
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Ever vigilant, Factory sent us more mash-ups of the Jonas Moore thing it's doing. These guys, Humans Out Of Control, created a whole YouTube channel for the effort. And these are The Marvis. Their mash-up involves gratuitous use of some woman named Ananke, who says things like "A woman's work is never done!"
We thought the "Vietnam: The Game" billboards around modern London were a nice effect for illustrating the premise. At this point though, all the mashups-cum-trailers are just kind of coalescing. We feel like we've seen every image at least three times. Just hurry and give us the first episode already.
For Wednesday's Keynote Roundtable, held the second day of ad:tech Miami, Advertising Age's Laurel Wentz gathered together a collection of the finest minds in the Hispanic and Latin American market places to discuss the changing relationship between consumers, content and control. On the panel were MTV Networks VP of Digital Media Luis Goicouria, VOY Group Chairman and CEO Fernando Espuelas, Batanga Chairman and CEO Rafael Urbina-Quintero and NBC Universal, Telemundo Network Group Senior VP Digital Media Peter Blacker.
Among all members of the panels, the overriding acknowledgment that consumers have the keys to content kingdom was agreed to though not to the exclusion of well-produced content. Content is still king as has been said. It's simply being created and consumed very differently than it was just three or five years ago. The panelists agreed the explosion of consumer generated media has forever changed the media landscape and will continue to do so in ways even the best minds can't yet imagine.
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We suppose you can fault a clean energy organization turning to the general public for creativity. After all, non-profits don't a have a lot of money. So with that notion, SmartPower held a video competition on YouTube and recently chose its winner, 19 year old dan Shepard who took home the $10,000 prize for this creation. Be nice.
A new Effie ad asks the industry to cast there vote indicating where they think "next year's most effective idea will come from?" With comic-laden choices such as "Alex Bogusky and the inventive powerhouses of advertising" to "David Verklin and the pioneering media agencies to "A consumer or someone else you've never even heard of," the ad points people to a site on which they can place their vote.
While the votes currently point to the consumer, we voted for Alex because, well, he's just so cool and we're a huge trend whore we couldn't help ourselves. Oh wait, that trend is over, right?
Last month, Samsung launched its Upstage Contest which asked people to submit videos of themselves lip syncing Melody Club's Destiny Calling. The judging will begin next week and the lengths to which peole will go to win a video contest is impressive as indicated by these two submissions. Nice work. See them here and here.
Um, yea right. This YouTube video of an Altoids transformer which claims to have been captured on the cell phone of a dude who visited his brother, employed at the special effects company for the movie Transformers, was clearly planted by the marketers behind the movie or the folks behind Altoids. While the video's description apologizes for the "bad quality," the quality is far from poor. In fact, the second half of the video displays vivid slo-mo action, something a cell phone just isn't capable of producing.
As usual, the person posting the video joined YouTube the day the video was posted. So lame. Yawn.
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