Because Chemistry.com can no longer poke and prod at any blatant sexual discrimination on eHarmony's part, it's decided to produce a banner about how eHarmony's still a bigot, even if it's been forced to launch a homosexual dating site.
Chem, get over yourself.
Oh, and in case anybody forgot: Chemistry.com is a Match.com company. From the moment it launched, it would appear its entire raison d'etre is to kick shins without making Match look bad. And that's not to say eHarmony doesn't deserve a little shit for making life harder for our same-sex-love chums; that's to say this ongoing haterade campaign had its day, and the day's done.
Hyatt's running a sweepstakes called The Big Welcome, where you can win a bunch of free nights in Unspeakably Awesome parts of the world.
That's cool and all, but the effort's being promoted with two wristslash-worthy attempts at irony.
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One of the biggest complaints about CP+B's wacked-out Gates/Seinfeld campaign was that it didn't really do much to push the product. In fact, it didn't mention the product at all.
As you recall, that effort was fast followed by "I'm a PC," which did mention the product, but not in any technical or deeply informative way.
Here's the latest suite of MSFT fumbles, labeled "Laptop Hunters." In this installment, an incredibly smug human being called Giampaolo shows us all how precious, how picky, how tech he is(n't especially) -- while on a quest to find the perfect (MSFT-subsidized) laptop.
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One of my favourite Marketing 2.0 talks, besides the Paula Berg stuff, was by Scott Monty, Ford Motor Co.'s social media man.
The guy's been alternately lauded and lashed, but I think he's the real deal. It's not even just that he's a nice guy; he's not afraid to express a scathing truth from top-of-mind, even if it stings. Social media's all about that: finding out who people really are, before they can terrace their images.
I didn't take any video (bummer), but I'll let you in on a priceless moment during his Q/A, when Sandrine Plasseraud of We Are Social asked about ROI tracking for social media campaigns.
Monty scoffs and goes, "ROI is a campaign metric; social media is a commitment. [...] What's the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?"
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On April Fool's Day, patrons of France's SNCF train service were greeted by the voice of Homer Simpson, who spouted frothy inanities in lieu of the feminine voice that normally makes arrival/departure announcements.
Eight major stations throughout the country were audio-penetrated by the Duff guzzler. Random prattle included stuff like, "The train from Alaska is waiting on platform 7. Watch out for bears!"
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This session razed the Richter Scale of Awkward for too many reasons.
To start with, I don't think reps from Facebook and MySpace were supposed to speak together. They were placed on the same panel in the interest of saving time.
Everyone was anxious for lunch -- which, it turns out, was more of an appetite-whetter than a satisfier; moderator Fred Cavazza spent most of the panel talking about other stuff; Damien Vincent of FB expressed a Freudian allegiance for the other team; and -- oh yeah! -- Cavazza conducted makeshift photo ops during the presentation.
MySpace's Olivier Hascoat was cool though, except for that moment where he reluctantly poses for an iPhone shot while Vincent's talking. Way to be a sport.
In the event that you didn't catch all that, take an audio/visual tour:
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Maybe it's true what they say about Paris: You get a mite more existential while here.
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Marketing 2.0 took place at ESCP-EAP University in Paris this year. It spanned both Monday and Tuesday.
I moderated a few panels and the wifi was down both days, so there was no way to cover the event in the detail I would've liked. Before my camera died though, I tried this thing where I just recorded random snippets of speaker talks.
This post is devoted entirely to Paula Berg, Manager of Emerging Media at Southwest.
I don't have particularly strong feelings about Southwest, but seeing her discuss its approach to consumers -- in both good times and bad -- made me wanna do the cattle call after all. She's good people, and it seems like she addresses situations with humility and openness instead of just reacting. Her presence at Southwest speaks more for its corporate culture than for any social media strategem.
See the goods below.
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Liberty Mutual continues its ongoing Responsibility Project with this :60 ad. You get the gist: a kid talks about doing the right thing while a melange of intimate family images scroll by in soft light.
See previous work, which is equally sappy but for the most part well-produced. We may be over this idea, but LibMu's commitment to the Responsibility Project will probably go a long way toward making it the Coca-Cola of insurance.
Really. Give it a couple of years; it may be a one-way conversation, but for work like this, consistency is key.
Work by Hill Holliday in partnership with Harmony Korine, which -- oddly enough -- wrote and directed Gummo, another film with a sympathetic kid whose environment may or may not convince you to invest in a little bit of insurance.
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By now, you've all seen the Boost Mobile television campaign in which things are, well, just wrong. and, in some cases, really gross.
It is with great relief we share with you another phase of the campiagn that is, well, not gross at all and, in fact, makes a whole lot more sense than the television campaign. With a 180LA-created 3D transit campaign in Chicago, Boost Mobile is getting to the heart of the matter; it doesn't do contracts. And the shelter installation illustrate that by shredding actual phone contracts before our very eyes.
Now that's way kinder than subjecting us to visuals of a coroner dropping his lunch into a corpse and a girl riding a bike who hasn't shaved her armpits since she was born.
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