March 24, 2008, 10:58 am
Filed under: Blogs, Viral | Tags: commercial, explosion, hot, wendy's

Per AdRants… what are your thoughts?

In case you haven’t seen it (though it’s a year old so maybe you have), here’s the “banneed” Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich commercial it’s creator claims he created but was not approved by the client. He says Wendy’s has nothing to do with it but we’re sure they’re quietly smiling over the videos growing popularity.

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Discuss the ad…in the ad?

February 12, 2008, 6:41 pm
Filed under: Media, Viral | Tags: ads, Blogs

Below is an article about a company that is adding a place for comments, ratings, basically blog activity before and after an ad you will find online. Take a look…

Chitika Launches Ad Unit with Live-In Social Features

The new unit

Blog advertising company Chitika has released a viral branding unit designed to get people talking about brands right inside the ad.

The unit acts as a vessel for banner ads or video. Components include tabs for commenting on the brand or product, and the ability to rate and share opinions across social networks of choice.

Additionally, the unit has targeting capabilities that perform well at the site, category and keyword levels.

Chitika provides detailed analytics reports that summarize metrics like impressions, clicks, number of comments and votes.

View a sample of the ad here.

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Mobile Webisodes

January 25, 2008, 6:10 pm
Filed under: Interesting, Viral

Attention Span Media Debuts ‘Dorm Life’ Webisode Series

by Tameka Kee, Thursday, Jan 24, 2008 8:15 AM ET

ATTENTION SPAN MEDIA IS SET to launch “Dorm Life,” a Web-based series that chronicles the lives of 10 college students all living on the same floor. Starting the week of Feb. 4, the creative and production studio will release four episodes of “Dorm Life” at www.dorm-life.com –with new four- to-five-minute clips rolling out each week.

In addition to the Webisodes, viewers will find new content posted to the Web site every weekday, including photos, character vignettes recorded via webcam, and items like thumb-tacked flyers–as the site is set up to mimic a corkboard in a college dorm. Users can also create profiles and post messages to discussion boards, as well as interact with the characters.

“We included the webcam clips and social networking implementations because we wanted to build an experience that went beyond just the 20-episode show,” said Brian Singleton, creative producer for Attention Span Media. “You can’t just take TV content and throw it online, so we brought all of those things into the creative process from the beginning.” Singleton said that the characters have presences on Facebook and MySpace, in addition to their “home” on the site.

“Dorm Life” is the first major effort to come out of Los Angeles-based Attention Span Media, the brainchild of Emmy Award-winning TV and film producers Garrett Law, A.J. Lewis and Peter White. In addition to its own content, the studio’s team of writers, directors and other creatives also develops content for online and mobile portals like The Huffington Post and MoGreet.

Law, who serves as Attention Span Media’s COO, says that the studio has also been in talks with interactive agencies for the development of content that integrates specific brand messages. The “Dorm Life” series, for example, is monetized through banner and Flash ads on the site, as well as an occasional few seconds of pre-roll video in the webcam vignettes. Still, Law said that the balance between ads and content–particularly short-form video on the Web or via phone–is a delicate one.

Singleton agreed. “The target demo for ‘Dorm Life’ is pretty ad-savvy, so they know when people are throwing ads in their face. The most important thing is to include ads in a way that doesn’t detract from the user experience,” he said.

The studio’s next effort is for MoGreet, a mobile video messaging currently in stealth mode, which Law says will have a wider demographic and demonstrate Attention Span Media’s content development range. “Mobile is an altogether different medium for production, because the medium dictates things like how you film, how you frame the characters, and the length of the clips.” Law said. “You have to have the writers and directors and marketing talent to be able to pull it off successfully. And we do.”

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Well, somebody had to do it.

January 25, 2008, 2:40 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Swiffer Video contest dames cleaner dust bunnies no kit

A few of us creative peeps upstairs invested a weekend and produced a youtube video for a swiffer contest. We had 2 rules, make it about “breaking up” with your broom, and use a one minute clip of music provded by Warner Music.

This is what we came up with.
Watch it. Share it. Make it viral.

In a few weeks, we can begin voting on them and I’ll come back and ask for that, but in the meantime, let’s make it one of the most popular views… do it. I know you can.

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All about Widgets

January 21, 2008, 12:17 pm
Filed under: Trends, new media

I know we talk about widgets all the time, but here is an article about the different things we can do with them. Like tracking, something I wasn’t sure we could do with a widget! Pretty cool stuff!

Published: January 21, 2008

By Erin Coker

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What’s the deal with widgets?

According to comScore, more than 87 million people — nearly half of all internet users in the U.S. — are using widgets. Combine that with the 49 percent of the U.S. adult internet population expected to engage in online social networking on a monthly basis this year, and advertisers have a strong lean-in opportunity for branded interaction.

To understand the value of using widgets in your rich media advertising campaigns, let’s first define what a “widget” is. For the purpose of an advertising campaign, widgets are applications with valuable or sharable content such as audio, video, games and animation and, to the user, are most interesting or valuable when that content changes or gets dynamically updated.

Examples of widgets are everywhere these days, such as those featuring live video feeds to events or those with new daily games or audio. Advertisers can distribute online widgets to audiences via a website, a rich media advertisement or even via another widget. Their inherent value lies in the fact that they keep the user continually connected to the advertiser. Widgets become even more valuable to advertisers when users are able to easily grab them and showcase them externally: in their blogs, their websites or perhaps, most compellingly, in their personal social networking spaces. This allows users to share and showcase their affinity for specific brands, products and causes.

Today’s most successful rich media and video ad campaigns allow users to engage, interact and then get rewarded; creative that features widget-sharing successfully accomplishes all three of these goals. Yet despite the popularity of widgets, many advertisers still do not understand how they work, how they can be measured and, most importantly, how they can be leveraged to improve results for the associated rich media campaigns. Applications with viral aspects are not new to the industry — many of the most successful campaigns have included some sort of viral aspect — but giving active target audiences the opportunity to display and share this content from within their own online venues is a new trend that deserves special attention. Widgets give advertisers a fresh new way to connect to their audience and build loyalty as well as a streamlined approach to measure and report on this viral behavior.

Planning a widget campaign

To most successfully seed the online community with your branded widget, you should make it available through multiple venues. Be sure to incorporate a place for users to easily grab the widget via your destination site, as well as from the rich media portion of your ad campaign, which will inherently reach a much larger audience than your mini-site alone. Embedding the widget directly into the ad will result in a higher number of widget downloads than offering this functionality only on your website. Additionally, to fully encourage and maximize viral behavior, plan for the widget to contain an instantly recognizable call-to-action, where other users can obviously grab the widget directly for their own use.

The payoff
Once the user encounters their first widget-equipped online ad and sees how easy it is to post this compelling digital content to virtually any social network profile or blog (e.g., Facebook, MySpace or Blogger), they may fill their sites with widgets of their favorite products or causes.

The benefits are two-fold: the advertiser’s message is automatically experienced more frequently by more loyal audiences, and simultaneously by more relevant audiences, as the widgets are voluntarily posted to sites or profiles that users have a personal relationship with, such as a coworker’s blog or a friend’s profile.

Another payoff for users is that these widgets allow them to “wear” brands or causes as a “badge” — a way of defining and reflecting who they are to their peers. In these “green” days, a user might embrace a widget of an environmentally-friendly cause or company, which allows them to reinforce their online identity as one who truly cares.

Implementation and optimization

To get the most information out of your next widget-equipped rich media campaign, you should demand tracking information on not only how many users grabbed and embedded the widget, but also how many impressions or views occurred with the widget and the full information on user behavior with the widget after posting. This information should be segmented by each of the social networking sites, so that you can easily determine which user base is driving the best results for your widgets.

This kind of in-depth behavioral information can be leveraged to optimize future online ad efforts. For example, you can prioritize social networking sites to appear first in your widget option list, so that you are encouraging posting to those sites first. Or you can optimize the ad widget and experience toward a particular audience’s profile and preferences. And remember, as you design the creative to show off your widget for download, the closer you put the “grabbing” functionality to the first interaction, the more embeds/downloads you will get. Always make it clear and easy.

Use dynamic and media-rich content

Dynamically changing data and media-rich content creates a longer-lasting relationship between the user and the widget, as it is always providing something new of value and is not getting stale. This also enables the initial user to share relevant, compelling content with others in a timely and appealing way. Recent examples include new rich media campaigns that allow users to browse online videos, create a playlist of favorites and share the videos by posting the widget to a variety of social networking sites (e.g., Blogger, Facebook, iGoogle, MySpace).

Widget campaigns are also a fantastic fit for entertainment clients who might have high-profile content, such as movie trailers, which have some repeat value for viewing or for forwarding to friends. Naturally some of these may have a shorter lifetime on the user’s profile, so it is best to provide a dynamic element to the widget, such as a countdown clock that displays how long the movie or trailer will be available.

The wonderful world of widgets features a wealth of opportunities for online advertisers, and today’s top rich media providers like the company I work for, EyeWonder, are making the technology behind all of this easier than ever for advertisers to leverage. Additional verticals and brands are reaching outside of the box to try something new, and successes are continuing to manifest in ways that weren’t originally envisioned. Successful widget-based ad campaigns engage, interact and reward the user, and technologies and tactics that continue to enable advertisers to meet or exceed expectations are sure to stay at the forefront of the online advertising world.

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The Absolut Machines: A Truely Pioneering Project From Absolut

January 15, 2008, 10:15 am
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Absolut Vodka Advertising Technology Machines

Interactive installations let online visitors create music with intelligent machines.

In early 2008 ABSOLUT is launching a project that explores what happens when cutting-edge technology meets the creativity of art, music and design. To emphasize its deep commitment to the subject, ABSOLUT turned to some of the greatest technology visionary teams of our time, and asked them to create THE ABSOLUT MACHINES. The result is two artificially creative and highly interactive music-making machines, as visually stunning as they are technologically pioneering.

This project marks the first collaboration between premium vodka brand ABSOLUT and cutting-edge visionaries from the world of technology. THE ABSOLUT MACHINES are designed by Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman, both with a background from MIT in Boston, and Teenage Engineering, a Swedish studio in the fields of media, art and technology.

“Technology is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives and is a key driver for contemporary culture. With THE ABSOLUT MACHINES, we explore how technology merges with creativity, and we are thrilled to have such fantastic visionaries with us on this journey”, says Ulrika Lövdahl, responsible for trend communications at V&S Absolut Spirits.

THE ABSOLUT MACHINES are currently being constructed and will be launched globally on January 31. Users from around the world will be able to interact with the machines over the Internet. The musical input from online users will be processed by the machines, which will respond with a unique musical composition – co-created by man and machine. The machines will immediately perform the songs, and their performances will be live-streamed to a global audience at absolutmachines.com.

For THE ABSOLUT MACHINES, Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman have created the “ABSOLUT QUARTET”, an automated multi-instrumental orchestral machine, which does not look like anything you have ever seen before. It is a large-scale electromechanical sculpture consisting of three instruments and thousands of parts, working together to create one piece of music. The main timbre is a marimba played by balls shot from a robotic cannon. Other components include a series of wineglasses played by little robotic fingers and an array of robotic percussive instruments.

“ABSOLUT has collaborated with great artists such as Andy Warhol, Tom Ford and Louise Bourgeois. ABSOLUT has the tradition of the past masters as well as the vision to do something new. Of course we were excited when they asked us if we wanted to be part of a project exploring artificial creativity”, says Dan Paluska.

Teenage Engineering has constructed the “ABSOLUT CHOIR”, a multi-channel robotic choir, made up by 10 singing characters of various shapes and sizes. It is an architectural installation with an advanced framework of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence software at the back end.

At absolutmachines.com you can follow the work in progress. You can also download high-resolution images, films, interviews, biographies, and find in-depth information about the project. After the launch, this is the site where visitors can interact and create music together with the machines.

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Interactive Bonafide

January 7, 2008, 1:58 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

Please post any ideas for extra interactive (games, widgets, etc.) here

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Webisode Ideas

January 7, 2008, 1:57 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

Please post any ideas, scripts, or results for the brainstorming and storyboard of the poultry party here.

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Poultry Party Ideas

January 7, 2008, 1:57 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

Please post any Public Relations or crazy ideas for the Poultry Party here. These should be thoughts or action items.