Snapple's in the Music Business Now

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Earlier this year, Snapple ran an ad to promote its new antioxidant-enriched water. It featured a guy leaping around in a bubblewrap world to the semi-infectious Cat's Meow by The Bad Eliots.

The commercial didn't exactly fare swimmingly, but Snapple's seed firm M80 claims it drummed up plenty of interest for The Bad Eliots in the blogosphere and elsewhere. So, partly to help them out and partly to make itself look more creatively robust, Snapple helped The Bad Eliots produce and release a snazzy new music video.

It's quirky and low-def, making it obvious blogger bait.

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by Angela Natividad    Dec-11-08    
Topic: Brands, Guerilla, Online, Promotions, Video



Print Ad Puts 3D Cabrio in Hands of Auto Fanatics

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This print ad -- which appeared in German car magazines last Friday -- is more than ink on paper. It's a magical holding tray for your own teeny-tiny Mini Cabrio.

See how it works. To try it, print the ad out, visit this site and install the 3D plugin. Webcam at the ready? Good. Look at the screen. YOU'RE HOLDING A WEE INVISIBLE CAR!

Twist and turn the page in your hand to check out all angles. "Augmented reality" technology provided by metaio. Such a playful way to build engagement and spark Mini love (which I now have in spades).

Par for the course, though. Mini Cooper has a habit of engaging customers in creative and fun ways. See billboards that talk to you and its White Rabbit banner ad campaign -- where users could follow a white Mini from one website to another.

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by Angela Natividad    Dec-10-08    
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Good, Magazine, Online



Becks Blogger Outed, NYT Taps Celebrities, Flickr Faux-Pas, Yahoo Slims Down

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- Angus Gastle outs the cheesy Becks blogger as a lackey for Euro RSCG. And a standup comedian. *winces*

- Celebs plug NYTimes.com -- which could use a subscription surge right now. At left is Chef Eric Ripert and Cynthia Nixon.

- Ad haiku wisdom.

- Flickr photo seized, 'shopped and repurposed into feature film ad. o_O Aren't there standards anymore? No...? Okay.

- Big cuts on Mad Ave.

- Plaid compiles holiday gift guide for creative people. Includes USB bracelets and subway tokens for your neck, which we actually want, actually.

- Bill Green sits in on Beancast. Listen closely: he's not just delightful in print.

- Yahoo cuts 1700.



PSP Makes Gamers Out of Far-Flung City Dwellers

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Diggin' these new ads for Sony's PSP.* Each unfolds from the perspective of a dude zombified by games like Socom, Motorstorm and Resistance 2, even as bright lights, big cities and poppin' soundtracks beguile him with distractions.

Experience sensory overload in Chicago, LA and New York (embedded below). This two-page spread features stills from all three. The unified, but starkly different, enviros tie nicely into the tagline: "Everywhere just got better."

Sassy stuff by Deutsch/LA.

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by Angela Natividad    Dec- 9-08    
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Commercials, Good, Magazine, Online, Television



You Oughtta Know About Inbound Marketing

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HubSpot's Rebecca Corliss and friends are out with a video slamming outbound marketing and hyping inbound.

Beginning with an out of touch supervisor throwing the yellow pages on her desk and exclaiming, "What the hell is this internet crap? If you're not dialing, I'm not smiling," Rebecca, to the tune of Alanis Morissette's "Oughta Know," tells us what we ought to know about inbound marketing.

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by Steve Hall    Dec- 9-08    
Topic: Good, Online, Social, Video



Shopping Mall Claims Holidays Are NOT About Spending Money

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Last night during Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!, Charlie complained about the flagrant commercialization of Christmas. If creatives ever felt the way he did, they're probably well over it out of professional necessity. I know I am, and I just blog here.

Adding to our jaded perspective of how things operate in Ad Land's warped universe, Cherry Creek North -- a high-end shopping mall, mind you -- worked with CULTIVATOR ADVERTISING & DESIGN/Denver to launch The Yuletide Project. Its goal is to remind holiday shoppers that the holidays are about more than frequent wallet molestation.

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by Angela Natividad    Dec- 9-08    
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Magazine, Online, Outdoor, Strange



At Crowd's Command, Getty Shoots a Dwarf. In Skates.

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To maintain its iron grip on the stock photo industry, Getty records searches and commissions shoots when enough people have searched for an image that can't be found.

To wit: a truckload of people recently queried "rollerblading dwarf." As promised, Getty had its photographers whip out the ambient lights and hunt down a highly mobile midget.

The result is at left. And because mass consumption of "rollerblading dwarf" images is just soooo quirky, agency Think Meets Do launched a Getty-whoring Facebook group in its honour: Search for a Rollerblading Dwarf on Getty Images.

Yeah, there probably could've been a better name for that.

Future shoots (those likely to be repurposed as an ad campaign, anyway) include shooting a crying lobster, and a llama in high heels.

by Angela Natividad    Dec- 8-08    
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Online, Promotions, Social, Strange



TremorMedia, ContentWatch Rain on Inappropriate Content's Parade

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Many people have derided the "blind network" practice in online advertising which, in a nutshell, gives an advertiser little or no control over where their ads appear. That's why you see Disney ads on porn sites and other similar non-sequitors.

Many people have lamented the occasional "odd" contextual ad placement which offers up placements such as ads for turpentine next to articles about teens who drank the stuff to terminate her pregnancy.

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by Steve Hall    Dec- 8-08    
Topic: Good, Online, Tools



Self-Lovin' Scents, Twitter Marketing Help, Designer Laptops, Knowledge Hustlers

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- A whiff of Hugo Boss Femme may put you in a self-adulating, decidedly Diddy state of mind.

- Twitter marketing toolbox. *twirls finger*

- Contemplating facial hair? Upload your likeness here. For Schick -- which may actually lose customers that may have otherwise grown mustaches out before realizing they looked like Super Mario. (And not in an awesome, sliding-through-the-magic-pipe kinda way.)

- Bob Knorpp contemplates the legal saga of the Bratz. Complete with at least three hooker jokes.

- This HP Mini 1000 is brought to you by Vivienne Tam. We find them semi-sassy.

- Hey Facebook, "your dreams of avarice are fucked."

- Just another world record-breaking stunt.

- Cab driver advertises MBA credentials to customers. One good thing you can say about this economy: it makes everyone a marketer.



The Cobalt: A Cred-Bereft Ugly that Can't Be Painted Over

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Snake Plissken, who sent us this lead, called the hip-hop-inspired Chevy Cobalt Labs subsite "an identity crisis in website form."

After surveying the features -- Tricked or Trashed (think Hot-or-Not), Mod Street (where you can visually vandalize your own Cobalt) and Track Challenge (where you can race other site visitors) -- we're inclined to agree.

We also wonder why Honda never tried anything similar with the rice-rocket Civic crowd. Unlike the Cobalt, which is stretching the limits of our imagination with this Pimp My Ride crap, that was a car kids liked to play with.

by Angela Natividad    Dec- 8-08    
Topic: Bad, Brands, Campaigns, Online