Archive for March, 2008

Sony PSP3, Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360 may get all the ink in the business press, but when it comes down to choosing where to place in-game advertising for the next four years, most marketers are going to turn to the browser, not the box.

Web-based casual games rather than gee-whiz dedicated consoles will be where the action is in in-game advertising for the short term. That’s the basic finding of an analysis done by marketing research firm eMarketer and published earlier this month. more

A story in this week’s Hollywood Reporter announced that Pepsi will launch an original Webisode series sometime this summer promoting its Mountain Dew brand. And “in a twist”, as the report has it, viewers of the videos will be able to choose from diverging plot lines at various points in the story, fashioning a kind of “Choose Your Online Adventure”.

If so, it’s a twisting that another Web video series is also wringing mileage from. Tassimo, a hot beverage system marketed at retail by Kraft Foods, has launched a microsite www.WhoHiredBob.com, about the misadventures of a middle-management goof who spends more time doing less useful work around the office than anyone else. more

Let me pull back the curtain and admit that sometimes I get more interviews under my belt than I have print space for. As a result, I sometimes wind up talking to very interesting companies and then having to wait a good while to write about them.

Last July I spoke with Neil Perry, acting CEO of XLNTAds, a start-up that brings together companies that want online ad content and video makers looking for a creative challenge. The company was founded in early 2007, just as the trend in user-generated ads was beginning to build momentum thanks to mass-media exposure such as the Super Bowl Doritos TV spot. more

That chart above is what political disaster looks like as reflected in the blog community. Specifically it tracks the volume and tenor of the posts about Eliot Spitzer, the now-former governor of New York, in the days immediately following his outing at “Client No. 9”, the Emperor’s Club VIP customer who met with a prostitute in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. more

The video, it has to be said from the start, is damn funny. Three WASPs, decked in seersucker and pink polo shirts but carrying thug attitude, get their groove on, give a shout out to “MV—Martha’s Vineyard’, and start rapping about the joys of how good it feels to be a “New England gangsta”.

Straight outta Cape Cod

We’re keepin’ it real

We’re gonna have a party makes the ladies squeal

We’re gonna turn it on

With our parents’ riches

We’ll serve Smirnoff Raw Tea and finger sandwiches.

Think Newport With Attitude.

The “Tea Partay” video, for a new Raw Tea product line from Smirnoff’s progressive adult beverages (PAB) division, hit big in the summer of 2006 and picked up 3 million hits on YouTube, along with a Cannes Golden Lion award and other commercial honors. more

Common wisdom has it that we’re fragmenting as a media audience, and that the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards are the only major unifying “event” TV left on the annual schedule. After those, it’s believed, we start breaking up into smaller niche interest groups: the NCAA Final Four, the American Idol season finale, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, and so on.

The common wisdom may want to head back to school for some adult ad courses, because while the Super Bowl hit its biggest audience numbers ever this year—97.5 million viewers—the Academy Awards show turned in its lowest viewership in history, 32 million.

That’s still one-third of the U.S. population, of course, and the price of $1.8 million for a 30-second spot during the Oscars broadcast reflected the fact that it’s hard to gather that many people in front of the TV anymore. But in contrast to the Super Bowl, where marketers tried harder than ever this year to extend that half minute of audience attention by leading viewers to engage with them on the Internet, Oscar advertisers gave a pretty poor performance when it came to search marketing their TV spots, or simply enabling them to get found. more

“We want you to build an interactive promotion around snow. We want it to be viral. And oh yes, it should involve video. Now, go to it.”

Basically, that’s all the instruction The SuperGroup Creative Omnimedia, an Atlanta-based digital marketing agency, got when they were approached last year by The Weather Channel.

How do you make “snow” viral? And those of us located above the frost line and thoroughly sick of winter might add: Why would you need to?

Because some people associate the white stuff with more than wet feet and buried cars, and The Weather Channel wanted to tap into that audience, says Chris Wallace, interactive leader for the agency. more