Pop quiz: What gets 29,000 college students to sign up for a credit card company's loyalty program in a four week period? Free bicycle rides around campus. That's right. Working with Trashtalk! Outdoor (gotta love that name), financial institution Chase placed branded bicycles on 17 college campuses and offered students rides from 9A to 3P while urging them to sign up for a Facebook group where they could enroll in Chase's credit card loyalty program. Now that's way more fun than getting handed a boring flyer while passing by the student union, right?
To promote its mixed martial arts December 2 pay-per-view event, entertainment company Bodog is introducing the BodogFight Red Light Fight series, mini fights that will take place in the back of flat bed trucks which will drive around New York City and several California cities. Complete with round card holding Bodog Girls, fighting will commence each time the truck stops at a red light. It ought to make for some interesting entertainment but we feel sorry for the girls in bikinis who, by November 19 when the promotion starts, could face some less then pleasant temperatures at least in New York. We'll be watching for them though.
UPDATE: If you want a sneak peak at a prototype of the truck, click here.
Not quite like Axe helping a small male-heavy town attract women by spraying the town with deodorant, Microsoft has, apparently, completed an aerial software drop over the town of Willow Springs, IL to promote its new Office Accounting software. In perhaps an attempt grab share from Quickbooks, the small business software arrived from the sky on a CD attached to a miniature parachute which netted the usual "news footage" now "found" on YouTube. While one might assume there's laws against this sort of thing,
The aerial package also directs people to the IdeaWins site on which the software and a free download are promoted on the basis that everyone's got a big idea therefore they need accounting software to manage that big idea. Hmm. Well, that line of thinking might work for, say, software that actually aids the development of an idea rather than account for it but, then again, even accounting needs creative assistance at times.
- While some attribute recent visitor loss at MySpace and Facebook to seasonality, others, including members themselves, attribute it to the increased level of intrusive advertising on the sites. It's off to Second Life we go.Watch out residents.
- Cynopsis reports TBS and MySpace have partnered for an online comedy competition called The Stand Up or Sit Down Comedy Challenge which invites amateur comics to submit videoes. The winner will appear in a George Lopez-hosted special on TBS November 18.
- The girls over at street wear brand Married to the Mob don't like the apparent girlishness of the new man and are slapping "Men Are the New Women" stickers on the backs of unsuspecting guys.
- The Weinstein Company is placing a Truth ad is its DVD release, the first being Clerks II.
- Somehow this whacked YouTube video is supposed to promote The Filter, an iTunes add on which automatically creates playlists based on what you listen to.
- With the tagline, "A World Without Science is a World Without Discovery," InterSpectacular has created four new promotional commercials for Discovery's Science Channel.
- Datran Media and the Ad Council have launched a public service advertisement email campaign across the U.S. on behalf of the Environmental Defense's Fight Global Warming campaign.
- Blah, blah, blah....a Dove Beauty spoof.
- On Tuesday, Toyota sponsored the showing of a 2-minute, 20-second trailer of the upcoming season of Fox TV's action-thriller 24 in New York's Times Square where viewers could hear the audio via one of 5,000 radios given away by street teams clad in CTU uniforms.
- More contextual idiocy. Actually, this one is just plain non-sensical.
- Here's an interesting ambient campaign for road safety which, by placing a wall hanging that stick out from university hallways, students where reminded of the dangers of speeding as they walk right into the thing on the way to class.
- Adidas has launched MLSmashups, a mash up of MLS soccer team players and the "hottest local underground musicians." Yea, we didn't get it either.
- Over in Sydney, they're all excited about the upcoming TV1 Stupid Stupid Man show.
- A new book, BOOM: Marketing to the Ultimate Power Consumer -- the Baby Boomer Woman, by brand strategists Mary Brown and Carol Orsborn, Ph.D., argues that marketers focused on the 18-34 age bracket may be missing the most lucrative demographic: Baby Boomer women who are now age 45-60.
- Former GE CEO Jack Welch and Hill Holliday ad agency founder Jack Connors are putting together a group of local business people to make a bid on the Boston Globe..
So you're commuting, right, reading a magazine and minding your own business, when you look up and - oh, man - realize you seriously dig the look of that bus strap against your wrist. In fact, you want one really, really bad.
Riders in Berlin, Germany get to try IWC's Big Pilot's watch mid-commute because bus straps have been fashioned into samplers by Jung von Matt/Alster. Neat. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Sort of like Warren Beatty who, facing racial tension in the movie Bulworth said, "If we all fucked each other, we'd eventually end up the same color," this campaign for Belgian weekly teen magazine HUMO presents a culture mash-up to deliver the message that culture mixing makes everyone nicer. As CoolzOr comments, the poster portion of this campaign didn't last long as teens an college kids "borrowed" them for the bedroom and dorm room walls. The campaign appeared in HUMO magazine itself and as wild postings next to posters for candidates running in an election that occurred earlier this month. Belgian agency Mortierbrigage created the campaign. Three other posters can be seen here.
Adrants reader James Gardner snapped this camera phone shot of a street promotion that's part of the currently running VdubRocks Volkswagen campaign. The vehicle in the picture was outside a guitar store on Boston's Boylston street and guitars were hooked up to the car just as they are in the ads. Noting the bright orange parking ticket on the windshield, the Boston Police Department didn't take too kindly to the promotion blocking the sidewalk.
We're all used to people accosting us on the sidewalk to sell us the latest piece of crap but we don't usually expect street-based billboards to shock us into submission.To promote its new show, Afterlife, Britain's itv is scaring the shit out of people with billboard that, well, watch the video and experience it all for yourself. For you widget heads that will comment, "Yawn. So and so did this eons ago," save it. We still like it and think it's very effective in getting notice.
Coast Medical Care, a Canadian organization that helps the mentally ill with housing, employment and emotional support launched, with help from Grey, a campaign that centers around the invented word, psychosiphobia. The campaign consisted of local newspaper ads, radio, television and a street campaign. The street campaign involved painting the word psychosiphobia on the pavement at a Vancouver intersection that is the dividing line between a business district and a troubled neighborhood rife with homelessness, drugs and prostitution.
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