Remember that one time we thought a serial killer was out to get us, but the threat turned out to be a customizable online promotion for Showtime's Dexter?
That promotion just won Best use of Viral Marketing at the BIMAs this year. Put together by Ralph & Co., London, it generated 300,000 unique Dexter emails and over 750,000 pageviews.
See the UK campaign, Ice Truck, or the US campaign, Slice of Life TV.
Gotta love a viral campaign that makes your friends feel like they're the targets of an unhinged, virtually un-catchable sociopath. We know it gave us a happy rise.
Back in the day a guy named Aarif Smaks (or not) was a famed dance instructor. In Finland. Far, far from Studio 54. Diesel has taken (or created) this bit of geriatric disco fever and created a sneaker ad out of it for the brand's Diesel Freezy Sneaker.
Complete with seemingly planted comments like this, "love it... I danced the same way until I put my back out many years ago doing the disco boogie woogie will try again once I get to the diesel store that sell those sneakers. I'll tell my dance troupe on Facebook... love you," the video has achieved 11,768 views on YouTube since being posted yesterday.
Anachronistic video footage + catchy old-school dance music gone techno = seemingly successful viral video.
We've seen an endless parade of methods calling attention to HIV and what can be done to prevent it and fight it but we've never seen anything like this GI Joe-themed video from The Viral Factory and The 7th Chamber. Complete with bush, crotch cannon, fisting, brass eye, backdoor and more, this gem leaves no innuendo unturned.
BBC, to promote its upcoming music event, electric proms, has launched two digital efforts. The first is an image puzzle in which you try to find the 80 bands in the image who will be performing at the concert. This sounds very similar to another effort we saw about a year or tow ago but now can't remember who it was for. Virgin?
The second is a song name writing competition called Live Song which asks people to come up with song names. Five winners will have their songs written and performed by bands that are part of the electric proms event.
The campaign was created by Fallon and Hyper Happen. Rubber Republik handled viral distribution.
What's a meatball sundae? It's the unfortunate result of two good ideas smashed together -- and the topic of Seth Godin's next book, which is generating much buzz on Hype Street at Advertising Week.
We couldn't go anywhere last night without hearing about it. Marketers describe Meatball Sundae as an invitation to approach web 2.0 as an opportunity to enliven company culture, even as passion begins to make way for bureaucracy.
Alternatively, Godin claims to see web 2.0 as a chance to "transform" the organization. Two sides of the same coin? Read about the book from the meatball-loving mouth itself.
The college-bound doll at left is going for a steal at $19,995 on Marry Our Daughter, where families can safely sell stone-footed girls for a price soothing enough to eradicate in-law strife.
Harking back to arranged marriage in the Biblical sense, the site's a publicity stunt orchestrated by women who actually were sold into marriage. They hope to shed light on the mail order bride industry at large, and on loopholes across the nation that enable minors to marry, says Newsweek.
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Oh the lameness that passes as advertising because, well, we all love a good fart joke or a high school cafeteria food fight. It's the latter General Mills, with help from mono, has gone for in launching The Good Food Fight. On the site there are recipes which you can forward to your friends who can view them but as they view them, they are visited by character who throw food at them. So, send one to that shit head boss of yours just for laughs.
There's an Italian viral effort floating around called Save the Text Save the Words. Could it be a promotion for Heroes? We have no idea. There's a video on YouTube that features a guy named H725 who claims to be from the year 2059 and says text and all written words have disappeared. He's returned to ask our help in saving the text which he says began to disappear this September 27. He says a person or organization he refers to as Bright.ly started it all and he's returned to hunt the entity down and eliminate it.
H725 returned from the future with a screen-like device that allows him to show the progression of words disappearing. He uses the device in the video to show the missing letters of words. One commenter to the original post on the campaign's (well, what else are we gonna call it?) blog posits its got to do with advertisers usurping language and even mentions the Mike Judge film Idiocracy in which the future has been completely dumbed down by technology and the erosion of culture. Whether or not that has anything to do with this we know not.
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- DraftFCB...in need of anything good these days...has landed the $200 million 2010 U.S. Census campaign. We can only imagine the creativity that'll come out of this one.
- This is over a year old. Don't know how we missed it. Although, knowing us, we didn't miss it and have simply forgotten we covered it. Anyway, watch Will Video For Food's Kevin Nalty take on the role of viral video broker and lampoon the early days of big brands misunderstanding YouTube.
- Copyranter has what he's been told is the CP+B script for Al Gore's not-yet-released Climate Project commercial.
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We're a little late on this one, but it's worth mentioning anyway because finally there's a way to express the impact and meaning of Web 2.0 without verbally fumbling with "blogs," "collaboration," "synergy" and other bullshit buzz we've been hammered with and hammering others with so relentlessly.
After some trial and error, anthro professor Mike Wesch has perfected his text-based thesis on the evolution of the word, technology and ourselves in Web 2.0.
Definitely worth the watch. The progression from paper to text is a little painful if you've seen it 34598349058 times like we have, but it's nonetheless an elegant process and the ending is still pretty moving. Thanks Lee Hopkins for tipping us off.
Now Wesch can roll up his sleeves and start on his next project: Web 3.0, a web far more tangly than the one we've just finished weaving. But it isn't just around the corner, it's pretty much already here.
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