For brands looking to extend their awareness to the ad-averse generation, Adland points us to user bars, graphic images which people can add to their forum signature or other online presence. User bars, which have been around for some time and are available all over the place, and are grouped into categories such as hobbies, cars, games, TV, movies, sports and, yes, brands. Adidas, Coke, Converse, Corona, Nokia, Nike, Snickers, Sony, Playboy, Pepsi, Reebok, and yes, cigarette makes such as lucky Strike and Marlboro since its about the last place they can advertise. Many users create their own user bars along with those that have been created by forum owners. User bars are a great way to reinforce a brand to those who are forum addicted and advertising averse.
Taking over for Nicole Ritchie and DJ AM, the cast of MTV's Laguna Beach will be featured in the Spring 2006 ad campaign for fashion label Bongo. Cast members Alex Murrel, Jason Wahler, Lauren Conrad, Stephan Colletti, Kristin Cavallari and Tallan Torriero will begin appearing in print ads in Seventeen, Teen People, Us Weekly, Star and Teen Vogue among others. Online will accompany print.
Dari Marder, Creative Director, BONGO, explains the campaign, "The Bongo demographic is the MTV viewer, so we could not think of a better way to reach our consumer. The concept behind the campaign is a party. So we rented an amazing mansion on PCH in Santa Monica, hired an Orange County band, 'The Colour' and let the gang do what came naturally. Alex, Jason, Lauren, Stephan, Kristin and Tallan had a blast on set and it comes through in the campaign. Alex who has an album coming out this spring got on stage with the band and sang, while the boys got a little carried away by pushing each other in the pool."
Perhaps we should consider being a bit less jaded around the Adrants offices since it seems to be causing us to ignore what, at times, turns out to be a pretty good story. A day or two ago, like many other people, we received some strange images of Brooke Burke with the Burger King king and we figured...screw it...just another one of the hundreds of pieces of crap passing through the bloated Adrants Inbox so we, religiously, deleted them and went on with our day. Now, we see AdFreak put one of the pix up and has pointed to some sites that have combined the images to hokey music. Well, once you have more than one offbeat image it simply has to be...yup...yet another Burger King viral effort from the beloved Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
Because of our overly jaded viewpoint, we apologize for bringing you sloppy seconds but, even Adrants has to suck once in a while, right? So enjoy. There's are image/music collages here and here. And here's a collection of the images over at Buzznet. We promise to check our jaded pompousity at the door each morning now and be sure to look twice when we receive these witty viral teasers. Of course, we could have been right all along and this really is just a bunch of random Burger King, Brooke Burke pix.
We make no claims as the the recency of this little clip promoting Village Voice classifieds with a bunch of hipster wannabes but we were a little freaked out by the masked, dancing fat guy at the end. The "Click Right. Think Left" tagline is great though.
Surely, you've already seen the new AT&T/SBC campaign at least 300 times on TV. You know, it's the one in which the world looks like it's being attacked by two luminous alien vehicles. Well, that campaign, with $500 million behind it, is about to take over the Internet. AT&T isn't saying what percent of the $500 million will be allocated to the Internet but, beginning Monday, January 9, they do plan to reach 137.8 million unique monthly user, nearly half of everyone who goes online in a given month. So be prepared for banners, banners and more banners everywhere along with page takeovers, interstitials, sliders, dog ears, video ad units and all manner of online creative. We wonder if they've heard of these things called blogs. Apparently, they have.
The wafting odor of the elder generation is diffusing online at an increasing rate according to a report from BURST! Media featured on eMarketer. The report says online users over the age of 54 are spending more time on the Internet and less time with offline media sources. While the over 54 crowd are still big consumers of offline media such as newspapers, many are finding valuable information online they can't find in traditional offline media. eMarketer has all the smelly details.
Visa has teamed with the NFL in an AKQA-created online campaign, called Know the Metaphors, which uses cartoon images of New England Patriot players standing in as metaphors for the Visa card's security features. In individual videos, each of the five selected players, Brandon Gorin, Tom Ashworth, Dan Koppen, Russ Hochstein and Matt Light use their football prowess in humorous ways to deter criminals and highlight Visa security features. It's a nice way of making boring credit card features like identity theft, fraud monitoring and that little three digit code on the back of the card seem interesting.
Created by Goodby-Silverstein and GREY Direct, Adobe will, on January 9, launch a new online campaign called "Faces of InDesign" to promote the company's Creative Suite 2 which launched earlier this year with the tagline, "Everything but the idea." The campaign will feature the images and personal stories of designers, art directors and ad execs as they go through their day using Adobe products. One of the creative elements in the campaign can be seen here.
Locked up for 364 days each year, the poor Pennsylvania groundhog has nothing better to do other than go mad Jack Nicholson-style. To help promote Groundhog day and following last year's Groundhog Chase, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office has launched Grounhog 202, a series of videos that mirrors the film, The Shining. Currently, a trailer for the series is up on the site. Beginning on January 9, installments of the film will be posted on the site weekly, leading up to Groundhog Day itself. Starting January 9, the site will offer an RSS feed so that viewers can be updated when a new video is posted. There's also email notification. The campaign runs alongside the state's Cabin Fever promotion.
So far, we like this one better than last years as the whole 'Shining' thing aligns itself to the situation much better than last year's kooky and seemingly random groundhog chasing. Of course, it was his shadow he was chasing but still.
The Wall Street Journal reports MTV's VH1 will, on January 13, launch "Web Junk 20," a show featuring video clips found on MTV-owned iFilm. MTV hopes the show will drive viewers to the company's online channel, Vspot. Unfortunately, as with other MTV online efforts, Vspot does not work with Firefox and visitors using that browser are met with "We're Sorry. PC Users with Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox: you need to run Internet Explorer to use VSpot." Idiots. Those most likely to be interested in Vspot content have a clue and those who have a clue use Forefox, not IE. Please get a clue, MTV and screw your deal with Microsoft.
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