Get Ready with James Ready 5.5 - Monkey Generator

Here's a whacked, little microsite for James Ready beer that involves monkeys, an image of your face and lots of monkey noises. It's all promoting cases of James Ready 5.5 which are available for $24. Cundari created the work.

Bud Light Photo Contest Offers Trip to Hawaii, Free Beer for A Year

Riffing off its recent "I'm Just Here For The Bud Light" campaign, Anheuser-Busch has launched Here 4BL, a website that encourages people send in pictures of themselves holding a "I'm Just Here For The Bud Light" sign. Pictures will be judged and the winner will be awarded a trip for four to the "Ultimate Bud Light Party in Hawaii. Fourteen weekly winners will receive free beer for a year. Of course, there's already women in bikinis and Hooters waitresses. Anyway, check it out here.

Advergirl Writes American Express Ad For Starving Creatives

Advergirl has the perfect American Express ad for advertising agency people. "To take them out to dinner and pay their bar tabs that are more than my rent, I use American Express. It's the purchasing power I need to make it to my next expense check. My life. My card. American Express. Read the whole thing here.

MSN, Sprite Launch Social Site 'Exposure'

Our spies tell us StrawberryFrog has created an online campaign for MSN and Sprite called Exposure. It's a site the agency created to highlight work from three different groups of kids: graf artists, a basketball team and a band. Each person is making a video (or it's being made for them) about who they are, what they do, what they stand for, how they think. The video are then edited and placed on the site. We're told new content will be added to the site over the next six weeks. It's sort of a cross between reality TV, documentary-style video and a blog of sorts. Each person has an MSN Spaces blog as well.

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HBO's 'Entourage' to Give Away Cars in MySpace Page Promotion

This MySpace page, set to launch Wednesday, created by Deep Focus and promoting the news season of HBO's Entourage is about the most tweaked out MySpace page we've ever seen. In fact, except for the MySpace URL, you wouldn't know you were on a MySpace page. While other companies have co-opted MySpace for commercial gain, this is, by far, the most elaborate we've seen. The page is still in the test stage with many non-working links but there's a contest that calls for entrants to create a MySpace page featuring the member's own "entourage" and then publicize it through the member's network of friends. Not a bad way to get HBO's Entourage message in front of a ton of MySpace members. The motivation to create a page comes in the form of a chance to win a car four each of the four people in the member's entourage. Other prizes include trips to LA with $1,000, Xbox 360's, Samsung cell phones and Entourage DVDs.

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Memphis Thunderstorm FAA Video Makes Perfect FedEx Commercial

John Brock sent us this video someone made of FedEx planes making their way around thunder clouds as they, and the thunderstorm, head into Memphis. It's hilarious, really, but amazing as well to think that activity is just every day normal life to plane pilots and airport flight control staff. Brock thinks FedEx should turn this into a commercial. We couldn't agree more.

1984 Re-Mixed, PETA Plays Dead, MySpace IMs

- George parker comments on "UberScam consultancy Pile and Co's" In House Agency Forum. It's not pretty.

- AdFreak's got a re-mix of Apple's '1984' commercial featuring the Jill Sobule song II'm Gonna Be A Supermodel. It's really not that good.

- CoolOr features some images from a project called The Antwerp Miniature City one of which features a miniature mobile billboard truck.

- Friskies used real bird food to sell its bird food in this outdoor installation.

- PETA is wrapping live humans who are playing dead in grocery store meat containers to make their "don't eat meat" point.

- MySpace has launched ad-supported IM.

- We have no idea who this is for but, hey, it's weird, it'a about a guy who lost his beefer to aliens and, no doubt, it will be revealed some marketer is behind it.

If you care, the seventh and last Adicolor film is out. This one is called Black.

Consumers Replace Ego-Infested Whack Jobs

Leveraging consumer generated content, or whatever silly buzzword you want to throw at the notion of people creating stuff - as if that were something new, ViTrue Inc., following its acquisition of video sharing site Sharkle, is formalizing the process of random people created ads for specific brands. ViTrue, which has been playing in the people-powered ad space for some time, will introduce a process where marketers and their agencies can post a creative brief, solicit work, review and approve the work which will then appear on Sharkle and, perhaps on television.

On one hand, one could say it's just dumb to outside the industry to find new creative because no one outside the industry could possibly understand what makes a great ad. On the other hand, one could say our industry is an insular, ego-infested closet full of whack jobs who have been following the same lame formulas and creating the same boring ads for so long simply to win awards rather than sell product, anything would be an improvement. We're kinda thinking the other hand has the right idea here.

Nike McFly Sneaker Activist Interviewed On Spacecadetz Myspace Blog

In February of this year, a blog called Spacecadetz launched. The purpose of the blog is to highlight some of the best MySpace content from profiles to videos to new features to events. Currently, the blog has an interview with Al Cabino, the man behind a petition that asks Nike to bring back McFlys, the sneakers featured in the Michael J. Fox movie Back to the Future II. Cabino, who's coined the term "sneaker activism" doesn't want to wait until 2015, the year rumor has it Nike will, perhaps, introduce McFlys to the public. Cabino wants the kicks now and has launched a vigorous campaign to get Nike's attention.

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Shopping SIte Adopts Wiki Format

Just launched ShopWiki, a search engine that crawls 120,000 stores to create its index of products, is using the anyone-can-edit Wiki format for the site's buying guides. In this manner, we suppose ShopWiki has jumped into the social media space. While it's not that different from a bunch of Amazon reviews, the Wiki is a single, ever changing document as opposed to a collection of individual comments/guides written by users and manufacturers. While we do like the concept of this shopping meets blogging concept, we wonder just how fluid we want our product information.

ShopWiki claims its search engine, which crawls the retailer's site rather than relying on a data feed, is more accurate and can provide better results to complex queries. Currently in beta, ShopWiki plans to go global in Fal 2006.