Because News Corp. is salivating over the potential millions in ad revenue advertisers eager to reach 60 odd million MySpace members may dump in its lap, the company is cleaning up MySpace, removing racy profiles and "offensive" images. It may all be for not as teens and twenty something will likely say "screw it" to News Corp's attempts at cleanliness and move to other social media spaces or create ones none of us has heard of yet. MySpace became a guerrilla overnight. It could fail overnight too. These days, it's too easy for people to gravitate to a place where they feel comfortable rather than put up with corporate censorship simply to please advertisers. It's the advertisers who will have to adjust rather than the corporations.
more »
This is whacked - as in whack-a-mole. Calling attention to its Adicolor customizable sneakers, Adidas, working with ad agency Idealogue and seven directors has released seven colorific videos, the first featuring none other than Jenna Jameson and her saline balloons.
Objectifying women as only Lynx can and reducing them to a click on drooling guy's clickers, the company has teamed up with Har Mar Superstar to somehow tie all this clicking into a Click Chick contest to win a night in a five star London hotel along with stretch limo and a trip to a top London club. Hey, we supposes that's prize enough for navigating through the Flashturbation site and suffering Har mar's attempts at humor.
Acknowledging that data can be pretty boring and suck the life out of anyone who has to live with it for their job, retail data company Trade Dimensions has launched Data Addicts Anonymous, a site the offers help for data dweebs who can't get their heads out of a spreadsheet. With a video that has a Dad locking himself away from his family to poor over data, a six step program for "data healing," motivational posters and treatment options, the site brings some levity to an extremely boring topic. We especially like the pixelated image on the site that speaks directly to a data hound's inability to "see the forest through the trees."
The site will be promoted within the retail industry with a print campaign and direct mail postcards. The work was created by Via Worldwide.
Miller Brewing has put a bit of money behind its Mickey's beer brand in the form on a new website that takes a bit of an opposite approach by telling visitors what not to do when it comes to drinking beer, talking about beer and clothing. Of particular educational value is a video in the What Not to Say section in which one guy says in response to a hot girl they see on TV, "My Mom's way hotter than that." And speaking of hot, what would a beer site be without the requisite hottie in the form of wallpapers, screensavers and buddy icons. Perhaps best of all are the points of advice given by Mickey's Vice Chairman Norwood Browne McManus IV. It's far better than most other beer site.
New York University student-run ad agency Sparkplug has created a promotional campaign and event called Make Room for the Fit which promotes Honda's new subcompact Fit. The agency created a mocrosite that contains a rap-ish video that's so bad it's good or so good it's "bad." We can't decide. It all promotes an April 6 event at Gould Plaza where students can check out the Fit, grad a pizza from Mercato and crank up on Red Bull. If you're in the area, stop by and see what Sparkplug came up with. We'll will say it's far better than our lame college print ad for some Dodge we, or should I say my teammates, came up with.
We were optimistic, though we're not sure why, the the McDonald's McMornings might be something special but the first thing we were greeted with was The Excuse Generator 3000, one of those lame, so five years ago, excuse letter generators for people without enough spine to stand up for themselves when their boss asks them why they were late to work. Of course that could all be due to some ingenious use of cookies automatically landing anyone coming to the site after, say, after 9A in a given time zone on that page.
more »
To help promote its free music site/show, Stageside, Coca-Cola has signed a deal with Billboard R&B fave Ne-Yo to be the first feature artist on the the show. Subsequent episodes will feature other artists along with live concert footage and interviews. Each show will be subtlety branded by Coke. The segment with Ne-Yo is interesting enough but whether or not it gets peope to buy rather than file share his music is another story. Still, it's a good way for Coke to get its name in front of a hard to reach audience.
As if Citibank didn't already have enough problems with security breaches, it's now also suffering from contextual corrigendum (go ahead, look it up. We had to) and appears to be offering Brian, a visitor to a MySpace group about fibromyalgia, chronic pain and fatigue a credit card in the form on an ad that reads, "Chronic Feetigue." In reaction to seeing this, check out the suggestions Brian sent Consumerist for future contextual corrigendums such as AIDS - Annual Interest Depression Syndrome. Gotta love contextual advertising.
To both promote their community and to make members happy they joined in the first place, social site Tagworld has launched a program whereby members can apply to have their Tagworld site featured on an outdoor billboard the company has bought to promote its service. Here's one lucky Tagworld member that was pretty excited his site was chosen to be featured.
|
|
