Created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners San Francisco, produced by RSA, puppeteered by Stan Winston and digitally tweaked by Brickyard VFX, Comcast has launched another of its DSL attack spots. This one, however, reverses the argument and say DSL is just perfect for the Slowskys, a turtle couple featured in the spot. The points to TheSlowskys.com, a character blog on which everything slow is celebrated with glee. Whether planned or not, the blog is slower that a Flash site trying to cram itself through a 56K modem. See the ad here.
Boston agency Hill Holliday has tossed its traditional site and launched a weblog. No, they didn't just add a blog to their already existing site, they ditched it entirely. Well, almost. They've done a wonderful job incorporating some of the usual capabilities and portfolio items into the header of the blog using Flash. The beauty of this approach, what many agencies still need to discover, will catapult Hill Holliday into the "conversation" about advertising. The site will get natural Google love, Technorati love and proliferation throughout the blogoshere's link-fest, something a static agency site can never achieve. And, most importantly, potential clients will get to know how HH thinks rather than how well they write website copy.
Other agencies such as W+K have great weblogs but we're not aware of any other major (yes, smaller ones have) agencies that have gone the all-blog format. We think this is great and we welcome HH to the conversation.
A press release rolled across our screen today which claimed a supposedly controversial video supposedly leaked virally last week was supposedly "under fire" from a Muslim group because the video supposedly poked fun at Muslims. The whole thing's a sham. Pokershow.com is behind it. They invented the cause group Muslim Media Watch under the guise of a plainly fake Blogger blog which just launched Feb. 17 according to Whois and the fact the blog has nearly no content. It's amateur hour again in poker marketing land. Of course we just did exactly what they wanted - give them publicity.
Like stunt marketing run amok but not really, since, hey, everyone's doing it, St. Louis ageny Schupp Co. - which sounds more like a beer company than an agency - purchased a bunch of billboards for its client, the St. Louis Cardinals, then proceeded to steal the cardinal cut-out portion of the billboard. The agency, following stunt marketing protocol, created a fake MySpace (is there no other?) profile under the name of Bird Napper whose favorite activity is...wait for it...stealing birds from billboards. The profile contained other witticisms such as listing "Celebration" and "The Heat is On" as favorite songs - former pep songs for the Cardinals and for favorite movie, "anything but the last 20 minutes of Fever Pitch" - a nod to the Cardinals losss to the Red Sox in the 2004 World Series.
more »
Joining the conversation, brewer Guinness has launched a weblog created and written by the company's marketing staff. After reviewing the site, Hugh Macleod over at Gapingvoid wrote, "The good news is, the marketing team decided to do it themselves, not hire the job out to an ad agency. Otherwise I'm sure the results would have been utterly disasterous." Sadly, that is very true. Many blogs created/produced/written by agencies for clients just don't seem to gel. It's not that every client-created blog with either but the closer the blog is to the humans creating the voice, the truer and more realistic the blog will sound. To check out the blog, just say you live in England from the drop-down list. Some legal crap disallows your visit if you are not from a particular list of countries.
ad:tech, which hosts three major national online marketing conferences, is launching a new conference series called IMPACT, a ten city, one day show kicking off February, 28 in Seattle then moving on to Phoenix, LA, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Boston, Toronto, Cincinnati and ending with Fort Lauderdale April, 6. The shows, as does the three big shows, will focus on all thing online marketing from planning to buying to analytics to search engine marketing to campaign optimization to ad formats to blogging to consumer generated media to behavioral marketing.
The day's events will consist of keynotes, separate tracks with sessions of differing topics, presentations from service providers/vendors, mini expo session where attendees can explore exhibitor offerings and an ad:tech Connect LIVE! Session, an interactive Q & A jam session. We'll be attending the Seattle and Boston events.
Taking advantage of this generation's mad text messaging, LocaModa has launched technology that takes all that social blather and slaps it up on a screen for all to see. Of course, LocaMode describes it more verbosely calling it the world's first in-location blogging platform for what it calls "The Web Outside" which enables in-location messaging, social networking and blogging along with entertainment applications for use in out of home networks cafes, bars, clubs and other public places. This technology, StreetMessenger, coupled with something called Wifiti (cute) which LocaModa lovingly refers to as "wireless graffiti," takes all this communal socialization and displays in on a large flat panel display at the location and also onto the web for others to vicariously experience whatever's going on at the location.
more »
If you've been in advertising for a while, you've certainly been to your fair share of trade shows, conferences and seminars but we're pretty sure you've never been to an advertising conference held on a cruise ship. Well, that could change for you very soon. While, you've no doubt heard of or been to other conferences that focus on how the weblog medium can help your marketing, PR and advertising, the Blogonmics conference, held aboard Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines' Enchantment of the Seas will be very different.
more »
The bow's untied. The password protection has been removed. Today, Gawker media launches another gossip blog, this time, focusing on Silicon Valley. Called Valley Wag and described as a tech gossip rag for Silicon Valley tech types who are too busy changing the world to have time for "sex, greed and Hypocrisy" but who Gawker knows needs, like everyone else, some good dirt. The blog is written by West Coast newcomber Nick Douglas who, because of his newness, won't be burdened with having to be polite to anyone unlucky enough to find themselves maligned on the pages of Valley Wag.
Perhaps we're just noticing it or perhaps it just occurred but those silly folks over at Pherotones have, apparently, kicked off a roadblock buy on Gawker, slapping their ad banners all over the front page of the gossip site. McKinney Silver is behind the campaign and some have opined it may have to do with their client Qwest or maybe Tom Cruise has just them to create an offshoot of Scientology. (Bertram, that's a joke)
|
|
