AtomFilms and Alltell have teamed to launch a new contest in which people can submit videos shot on mobile phones to win between $1,000 and $5,000 as well as distribution of their video on AtomFilms. Of course the contest, Are You Circle Worthy, promotes Alltel's My Circle calling plan which is similar to the old MCI Friends and Family plan.
You know, all you designers really ought to be testing your Flashtastic creations on a "normal" computer with the cache turned off. After all, most people who will visit your site won't have reloaded the thing a million times thereby having it readily and speedily available for viewing. For example, this site for Pepsi called MyDaDaDa which capiltalizes on the song, took agonizingly long to load. And once it did load, it never worked smoothly. Apparently, you can send the song around to your friends, watch ads, put the song and wallpapers on your phone, send a pre-recorded message to a friend, get screensavers and upload your own videos to the site. None of it worked well. Of course, it could just be our crappy laptop. Oh yea, the whole thing wraps itself around the World Cup Football craze.
Well, we were going to tell you about this Folgers commercial that FishNChimps thought was way too happy happy but the Folgers site took too damn long to load. Humorously, the load page of the site says, "A website dedicated to making your mornings more tolerable. Not this morning, dudes. Speed up your site and then maybe, just maybe we'll watch your stupid spot.
New mobile service provider Helio, with help from StreetVirus and Alt Terrain, has launched an influencer marketing campaign consisting of in-venue pop up stores, a print magazine, a blog and sponsorship of local artists. The in-venue stores include a mini-lounge and employees are given Helio phones. Each store receives free ad space in the Helio magazine and become an exclusive retailer of the devices.
The artists sponsorship provides artists with hard-to-come by public mural space to showcase their work, financial support for their gallery shows, exposure in the Helio blog and the print magazine that is nationally distributed, and artists are provided a Helio phone of their choice. For a new company without a lot of money and one whose services appeal to the social networking needs of tweens, teens and twenty-somethings, Helio has headed in the right direction with this influencer marketing approach. You can see some of the artist's work here.
With video the online advertising meme du jour, ad network Bluelithium has launched AdRoll, a streaming video ad network with behavioral targeting capabilities. Much like Tacoda does with banners across its network of sites, AdRoll will allow advertisers to serve video ads, both pre-roll and in-banner, based on a person's navigation behavior across all the sites in the Bluelithium network, of which there are over 1,000 according to the company. The targeting capabilities will also include demographics and geography. If you've got video, it seems bluelithium has the right place to put it.
- Artie Lange's promoting his upcoming movie with a NSFW pinball game which is actually kinda fun.
- Just as marketers are beginning to spread their seed all over MySpace, Thought of A Technocrat analyzes MySpace Bulletins and reminds us it can be a very seedy place indeed.
- HBO is promoting the last season of Deadwood with an online virtual poker saloon and game called Dead Man's Hand.
AdJab calls to our attention the stupidity of some of the latest work from Mike's Hard Lemonade which involves a guy holding a bottle in front of the camera and making it talk. With the word "hard" in the name, there's far better things they could have done than this.
- Once again, IKEA has taken its retail locations directly to people, this time dressing up trains as if they were one's living room.
In a newsflash of epic proportion, Copyranter reports online dating site True has placed an ad on the Internet that, stunningly, does not show a woman wearing a bikini.
That Sasquatch just won't die. This time, he's alive and well for a Jack Link's Beef Jerky campaign that involves four TV spots, and online site and...please tell us this is going to stop soon...a MySpace profile.
Harvard University Pd.D. Candidate and all around spyware expert Ben Edelman has, once again, dug deep into the shady, clandestine side of online marketing. This time, he's examined Hula Direct, which, he claims, serves pops from spyware vendors, practices "banner farming," shows and charges ads without permission and engages in automatic page reloading to increase revenue. Since Ben's a Ph.D and we're not, we'll let you examine his findings first hand here.
As a tidbit of the insanity going on here and who's involved, this bit of Ben's article lends insight. "Hula's Yield Manager relationship provided Hula with the Vonage ad shown in the example above. Hula's Global-Store sent traffic to Yield Manager which sent traffic to Traffic Marketplace, which sent traffic to aQuantive's Atlas DMT, which sent traffic to Vonage. Payments flowed in the opposite direction." Certainly the notion of "you get what you pay for" takes on a whole new meaning here. Suffice to say, there's a whole lot of scamming going on and, to be clear, advertisers like Vonage rarely know it's occurring under their noses. Ben's analysis should be required reading for anyone even remotely involved with online marketing.
Tugging at our heartstrings, this commercial, created by Mullen, for online video game service GameTap urges us to feel for game character who don't see enough game time. We are urged to have a caring heart, pick up our game controllers, visit gametap.com and play on.
- Similar to Virgin's find the bands game, Absolut has launched a game in which the player has to find 82 bottles in a busy streetscape. It's sort of like that guy that wrote all those Busy Town kid books.
- Everyone's buzzing about Pepsi' interactive outdoor/transit ad which allows people to plug their headphones right into the poster to sample tunes from Pepsi Access.
- Adopt a kitten door sticker campaign copies begging children door sticker campaign.
- Well, this is one way to get a lot of attention for your average warehouse sale.
- Here's one ad campaign that doesn't paint Mexicans in a very respectful manner.
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