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…

Target billboard

Here’s the sequence of events. (1) Last January Target mounted a billboard campaign in Times Square that showed (among other, more innocuous images) a young woman spread-eagled on the retailer’s bull’s-eye logo.

(2) Amy Jussel, the founder of ShapingYouth.org and writer for that group’s blog, placed a call to Target to ask about the female objectification in the image, adding in a blog post that as an ad executive, she couldn’t understand how the image passed through layers of approval without being flagged.

(3) Three days after her call, Jussel received an e-mail from Target saying the company was unable to respond to her request for more information about the ad because “Target does not participate with non-traditional media outlets. This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest.” more…

Tide

The temptation is probably hard to resist. You’ve developed your creative idea for the Super Bowl. You’ve storyboarded the spot and seen the idea through to execution. You’ve signed that big fat $2.7 million check for thirty seconds’ worth of the national attention span. Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy the limelight. It’s Miller time… or rather, this being the Super Bowl, Budweiser time.

But Tide wanted its first-ever Super Bowl commercial, for the Tide to Go instant stain-remover pen, to do more than simply provide a first-quarter laugh. So the Procter & Gamble brand used the ad, from agency Saatchi + Saatchi, as a springboard for a much fuller and more engaging online campaign. more…

Anti-smoking cartoon

You know the ads from Truth, the youth smoking prevention effort funded by a big 1998 master lawsuit settlement between the tobacco majors and 46 states? Since 2000 they’ve been educating young people about the dangers of smoking by publicizing tobacco industry marketing memos and analyzing the actual contents of cigarettes for elements such as ammonia and arsenic. Necessary work—but also necessarily grim.

So for its 2008 campaign, Truth has opted to lighten up and speak its piece through musical numbers and cartoon characters. Needless to say, the “Sunny Side of Truth” goes heavy on the irony, with TV spots feature use dancing leprechauns and speculate that 5 million tobacco-related deaths around the world in 2007 may just be a typo.

The campaign also relies heavily on online components to drive viral spread: so much so, in fact, that for the first time Truth isn’t including any print in its media buy, just TV (primarily cable channels such as MTV, VH-1, Fuse and ABC Family) and the Internet. more…

Pleo

A two-part study of how some online brands are using social media to build customer loyalty finds that friendship can involve a lot of work—and some companies just aren’t putting in the time.

Online marketing agency OneUpWeb started before the Christmas shopping season by singling out a dozen brands that seemed either to have social communities in place around their products or appeared to be poised to build them in time for the holidays. The study analyzed the potential each brand could maximize by using social media of various kinds, from social networks and virtual reality to blogs, podcasts, consumer reviews, user-generated video and interactive tours. more…

Much to the surprise of everyone except some New York die-hards, an actual football game broke out last Sunday while viewers were trying to watch some very expensive commercials.

Budweiser

By now you’ve seen all the write-ups about which TV spots scored and which ones fumbled. Both Nielsen and USA Today’s Ad Meter anointed Budweiser’s “Rocky” takeoff as the game’s most popular ad among live viewers, while E-Trade’s barfing baby and Pepsi’s Timberlake torture scored highest with TiVo’ers.

But another way to look at the ad contest is to see who did the best job of driving viewers from those pricey $2.7 million 30-second spots to a more engaged relationship with their online sites, either. Marketers had the chance to build on the buzz a Super Bowl ad draws by creating a site or Web page that spoke specifically to their ad content, driving viewers to that Web location through their ad creative, or using search marketing to deliver pay-per-click text ads on the terms game watchers would be most likely to search online. more…

Everyone can point to disappointing sequels that failed to re-capture the excitement of the original: “Fantasia 2000”. “The Two Jakes”. “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”. When you’re creating a product for popular culture, it’s just hard to put that second bottle of lightning up on the shelf.

Apparently Office Max and the agencies behind the “Elf Yourself” viral campaign haven’t heard about the sophomore slump. The team scored a big holiday 2006 viral success with the campaign, in which users get to download their face to a spindly elfin body and then shake their groove thing for e-mail friends. So when the holiday season rolled around again in 2007, OfficeMax, ad agency Toy New York and digital content company EVB decided to up the ante to four elves per e-mail and add some showier dance moves and voice capability but essentially keep the rest of the campaign the same. more…