Archive for March 4th, 2008

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