ICON Advertising Solutions, an online ad sales company has signed a deal with Marvel.com, the online division of comic giant Marvel Enterprises, Inc., under which ICON will act as an online ad sales representative for the interactive division of the entertainment company.
Marvel.com features interactive information and activities for many of Marvel's comic book titles and characters such as Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk. Marvel.com claims reach of 18 million impressions to 750,000 monthly unique users, mainly in the male teen and young adult demographic.
Reuters has partnered with GE in a sponsorship deal which will place the American maker of all things in a premiere sponsor position on the Reuters Interactive TV channel. The sponsorship will center on GE's "ecomagination" campaign which touts the company's environmentally friendly products.
As the premier sponsor, GE will run 30 second post-roll video ads. While the video ad plays, a banner ad is also displayed on the left-side navigation which clicks through to a GE branded sponsor page. OMD Digital NY was responsible for the planning and buying of this campaign.
MarketingVOX reports Nickelodeon has launched a new broadband internet channel called TurboNick. The "channel" will contain 20 hours of original programming including SpongeBob SquarePants viewable on visitors own time schedule. Unfortunately, Nickelodeon appears oblivious to the fact all the cool kids use Firefox crippling TurboNick to work only with Internet Explorer. Perhaps now that Google has acknowledged the existence of Firefox with its introduction of the Google Toolbar for Firefox tomorrow, the rest of the slackers will finally catch up. IE is dead. Firefox is the only way to view the web.
OK, so we did fire up IE and can confirm the video quality on TurboNick is TV quality and the program selection is great. A cool concept. TurboNick is hip to the cool kids' viewing habits. Oops, viewing full screen crashes IE. Oh well.
Steve Rubel points to yet another not so well timed contextual ad placement. Today, London was selected to host the 2012 Olympics. In a Yahoo story announcing the news, a New York City Olympic bid ad appeared embedded within the article. Not that anyone's to blame as you can't always time your ad campaign to breaking news but it wasn't looking good for New York for quite some time.
New Line Cinema, like every other movie distributor has a website promoting its upcoming movies. But, for the release of its Owen Wilson/Vince Vaughn comedy, Wedding Crashers, New Line has added a twist and created a section of the movie's website where visitors can "crash" the movie trailer. Visitors who enter their name, a friend's name and their head shots will appear atop the bodies of their characters in a "re-cut" version of three minute online trailer. Once the "re-cut" trailer has been completed, people will want it to be seen so, of course, they'll send it out to their friends. It's a very simple, yet ingenious way to get the movie's site spread virally.
Unilever has launched a site called Introducing Domestic Donald which features a cartoon body topped with Donald Trump's head. Spouting off Trumpy one-liners, The Donald wanders about a kitchen responding to requests to do the laundry, wash the dishes, prepare dinner, wash clothes and mop the floor. The whole thing's a sweepstakes offering for a "Luxury Weekend With Donald Trump" that requires the entry of a code found on stickers affixed to promotional packs of All detergent.
This is the kind of online promotion we like. Simple. Uncomplex. Moderately amusing. And quick enough to get through without having to waste too much time. And painless enough to be done with before becoming annoyed
To promote its new book called Countdown to Crisis, Crown Publishers has placed a series of blog ads that contain the usual, gushing quotes from those who love the book but, unusually, they also include quotes from those who hate the book. Rarely do advertisers call attention to the negative aspects of a product or service, choosing to highlight only the positive. While nothing is perfect and everyone knows it, the continual positive-spin, adver-blather most ads spew forth just falls on deaf ears after a while.
People are intelligent and enjoy being treated intelligently. In the case of this book ad, pointing people to a negative review is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps after reading the review, a person considering the book might think the reviewer's opinion simply isn't relevant to their mindset or book buying consideration set. With people armed with endless sources of information regarding any and all advertised product, hiding or glossing over the truth is pointless. Crown Publishers knows this.
It's been reported that Yahoo is testing a behavioral ad program using targeting technology from Revenue Science which places Yahoo text ads on pages based on user behavior. Two pilot sites, dogster.com and catster.com are running the tests. A third site, photo sharing site tinypic.com, though un-announced, also appears to be part of the program based on a peak at the site's source code. Intriguingly, while many of the pictures on the site are garden variety, a sizable handful fall into the porn category. We're talking soft here. Nothing horrific. Just basic nudity.
A tipster wonders what's going on writing, "There is little relevant context in porn, but behavioral can give them the ability to target ads based on past behavior. Interesting question would be whether they are tracking and retaining the users surfing on the porn for future targeting on other websites."
TinyPic clearly states no nudity or offensive pictures are allowed but, obviously, a few got through. Likely, they will be quickly removed.
With contextual advertising everywhere, even in RSS feeds, one has to wonder when an advertiser will get sick of bad associations and simply go back to good old demographic, phychographic, human-controlled targeting. Not that Sony has a problem with drug rehab but these contextual associations do get fairly humorous at times.
With two funny movies, Martini is promoting an inflatable pool on the shape of their logo, BlogFonk reports. The campaign was created by Doorn $ Roos Advertising and is part of a larger Martini Mansion promotion.
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