We might have a lead on where all those old Facebookers are suddenly coming from. Advertising Age reports that marketers, sensing the hype, are joining the Facebook bandwagon in droves.
These include Julie Roehm, who calls Facebook "a terrific networking site that has a social bent, which makes it more fun than businesslike."
Roehm is using the service to connect with "young family members" according to Facebook, while other marketing gurus are taking advantage of said "social bent" to demonstrate that they too have personalities - joining political parties, posting vids and sharing useless information in real-time via the status feature.
Ad Age's Steve Rubel, for example, is "enjoying a light frappucino."
We played with the thought of trashing all these people but unfortunately we're on it too, and practically log on compulsively to see if anyone has SuperPoked us in the last 8-10 minutes.
Alex Tew's Million Dollar Homepage has spawned another copycat. A boy named Graham (at left) has launched Million Dollar Wiki, an opportunity to own a completely customizable page for a mere $100 a pop.
So far we've found pages for buying a blogger, Fender guitars and letters to businesses. We can't believe this guy has already sold almost 300 pages. Guess we'll see if lightning can strike twice and the million dollar idea makes another millionaire out of another earnest kid.
Video game publisher 2K Sports has pulled digital firm EVB into its ranks to build a lifestyle marketing campaign called Football Resurrected.
A big plug for All-Pro Football 2K8, the virtual game boasts 300 pigskin "legends" including Jerry Rice and Barry Sanders, as well as a few familiar faces of underground hip-hop, including Hieroglyphics, Jurassic 5, Pep Love and even Rakim.
The site is pretty cool and the raps, which revolve entirely around "the resurrection of 2K Sports," are damn sound. It's all really clever and whatnot.
If the musical icons from our beat-banging youth aren't going to rap about their shoes or how cool they are or how lame haters can be or how love pounds you into submission, they might as well be rapping about football.
We're all just trying to get paid at the end of the day, right? Right.
If you're going to run a UGC campaign, you're inevitably going to get some entries that just aren't after your best interest.
We thought this entry for Heinz was awesome, mainly because it poked fun at the whole UGC idea, and also because it reminded us of when we were kids and thought everything had "that secret ingredient" (or a "secret ingredient" pesticide) in it - from Cheetos to Mountain Dew.
KetchupFriends, which created the entry, actually put together a whole series of equally subversive oeuvres for Heinz. This one's creepy as hell but you get the idea.
We're wondering if the "friends" behind the ketchup are actually enlisted by the brand in some way. If so, that's a risky positioning move that maybe wants rewarding.
We'll keep mum about your dark side, Heinz. Don't worry.
Remember that Slingbox concept from so-long-ago-that-it's-not-even-worth-the-recall? Apparently it's still around, and in an effort to rekindle public interest in the whole control-your-TV concept, they've given us a stiff, somewhat unwilling human version of subservient chicken.
The options for what he can do are limited and, because he seems so unhappy about life, continuing to force him to Macarena and Frug stems from a quality of sadism and not actual voyeuristic interest.
We were stalking the streets of NYC one night when we saw this compromised poster that said "Windorphins are like a ticker tape parade for your soul." A ticker tape parade is too exciting to turn down so we dashed drunkenly home and plugged windorphins.com into our browser.
After 10 or 11 tries we arrived at the site and discovered that Windorphins are a "natural byproduct of eBay" and are the hormonal result of a victory. The site features studies, celebrity comparisons ("Who's got more Windorphins?"), an opportunity to make your own "Windorphs" (like Weemees, except in your bloodstream!) -- and of course a place to conduct searches on eBay.
The campaign wasn't super-imaginative but we're fairly sure it's more successful than a lot of online efforts out there, mainly because eBay advertises outdoor. Which brings up a good point: just because you're running an online campaign doesn't mean you should only advertise over the internet.
While it's pretty obvious what a typical guy's hang room looks like, it's not so obvious what the hang room of those Alltel geeks would look like. ManCave helps us see into the world of geekdom. And yes, even geeks have bikinied babes skulking about their basements.
We were buggering around on some other ad sites when we came across this set of banners for Zipcar flashing at us.
Under the impression that Zipcar was offering us 350 hours for sex, we were scandalized and a little perplexed.
And then we realized it was giving us two facts. Apparently, according to some average out there in the ether, people spend 350 hours having sex and 420 hours looking for parking.
Armed with this new understanding, we were even more excited: using a Zipcar can nail us that displaced 420 hours (for sex)! Then we thought, wait. Driving a Zipcar won't win us more down-and-dirty time; it'll just ensure that we don't have to pay for that time (parking is included in the Zipcar deal).
Half-heartedly we thought, well, that's almost as good as sex. But no, it isn't.
Having unleashed its sexy new iMac yesterday afternoon, Apple flooded our inbox this morning with an ad for it that smugly proclaimed, "You can't be too thin. Or too powerful."
Yo. Are you calling us fat? Low blow, Steve Jobs. What would Rubenesque Ruby say?
Jeremy over at Pop-PR sent us a link to this alleged PSA, which takes place at Raphael De La Ghetto High School, where very scary things happen. (Really. It was like a lower-budget version of Pink Floyd's "The Wall.")
The purpose of the crunked-out video is to encourage disenfranchised youth to "read a mothafuckin' book!" Users are also led to Not a Rapper, the official website of Bomani D'Mite Armah, "the poet with a hip-hop style."
There are other important messages proffered by the PSA, including "Your body needs water, so drink that shit!" and "Brush your teeth, brush your teeth, brush your goddamn teeth!"
Word on the street is the video aired on BET and appeared on VH1's Best Week Ever. We sat through the whole thing for posterity's sake and, afterward, did indeed feel violently inclined to pick up a mothafuckin' book. Whether it so triggered the street hoods is another question.
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