Pharrel vs McDonalds

While in Paris on a connecting flight, Pharrel tries to order a Big Mac while it’s still 6am – and the french staff neither know Pharrel, nor do they want to offer him anything but breakfast – and last but not least they don’t seem to know him and aren’t impressed at all by his musical performance:

McDonalds obviously has nothing to do with it:

A McDonald’s rep confirmed that the stunt wasn’t commissioned by the fast feeder. However, he was impressed with the publicity. The rep said: „We were surprised and entertained by the video of Pharrell performing [our jingle]. We certainly welcome him as a customer, and we appreciated his spontaneous and funky celebration of our food.“

And I wonder: what will McD do next, how will they appropriately (digitally) respond to this video, which gathered half a million views in only a few days?

(Found at Werbeblogger)

What is twittering?

People learning English have the possibility to receive „One Word a Day“ via email in order to improve their vocabulary.

The word of today is funny, I wouldn’t have thought that it makes its way into regular vocabulary so fast:

Your word for 20th March 2009 is

* * * twittering * * *

Please choose the correct definition and click the link.

a) whistling or humming the same tune over and over
http://www.owad.de/check.php4?id=2260&choice=1&sid=1181682

b) sending short electronic texts to let people know what you are doing
http://www.owad.de/check.php4?id=2260&choice=3&sid=1181682

c) nervously tapping the foot or leg as a sign of impatience
http://www.owad.de/check.php4?id=2260&choice=5&sid=1181682

Happy guessing!

So what do you think it is? 😉

WOMI – new ad idea for social media

There is a new ad idea for social media, called WOMI – Word Of Mouth Impression. Developed by a company with a name that says it all: Social Media.

It functions like a mini-application that spreads in my own social network of contacts and friends, and I wonder: does it do that automatically, whenever I interact with it? Here is the description of Techcrunch:

WOMI campaigns present visitors with ads asking them for some kind of input either though a multiple choice question or using a text field. SocialMedia then uses this input to customize ads which are shown to the user’s friends on the same social network.

For example, if an ad for Star Wars had a call-to-action asking if I was on the Light Side or Dark Side of the Force, it could take my response and then present my friends with an ad that said “Jason is on the Light Side, how about you?”. In turn, their responses are passed on to all of their friends, making this among the first kind of advertising with a viral element.

This is spooky, unless they definitely ask users before they present their friends with the answers to the multiple choice questions. It’s like a facebook app that spreads as soon as you launch it, without even asking.

If however, the user stays in full control, it could turn out to be rather interesting. Especially if you get to see all your friends responses later on, too. People love to see how they compare in polls and questionnaires. This can be a huge playground for brands. More effective than regular applications/widgets in a sense, because of the „classical“ advertising component: „pushing“ these polls onto the profil pages of friends and contacts, instead of just mentioning in some news feed „XYZ installed application ABC“.