The key question triggering this whole study was: “how can marketing leverage word-of-mouth for products and brands?”

The answer, in short: empowered involvement, by offering choice and meaning, leveraging consumer competence, allowing for real impact by the target audience. The long answer: buy the book

Here is the video interview with Dr. Martin Oetting (in German):

The copy says: “on vacation with your staff car? There is a Sixt even in Alicante”

And the sticker mentions the theft-insurance included in the rental rate.

Well, here is what can happen if you let the Swedish Style take over the Oval Office:

Not sure about that

But starting in 4 days, people will have the chance to add their own suggestions. Apparently, an Oval Office planner will be up and running by then.

Don’t think, somehow, that Obama will react to that…

As with most guerrilla marketing campaigns, this one seems to have its main effect through the word of mouth it’s getting online, on sites like this one, but also here, here, and here, where i found out about it.

1. Wassup anno 2008
Disclaimer: Budweiser’s parent company, Anheuser Busch, which originally licensed the concept for five years from Stone, was not involved in the production of the ad

2. SFW XXX Party Invitation
Diesel’s naughty montage of 1980s porn films using cartoon animation to cover up explicit scenes, just, for its 30th anniversary

3. Kobe Bryant jumps over an Aston Martin
Nike’s clever “did he or didn’t he” actually clear a car. Probably not, but it got people talking, and watching

4. Extreme Street Football
Electronic Arts trickery masterpiece featuring kids with football skills – and parkour and capoeira – using a football like you ain’t never seen

5. Take it to the next level
Guy Ritchie directs this shot-in-first-person tale of a teen footballer’s hardcore ups and downs from being discovered to losing teeth to playing for a national team

6. Tiger Woods 09 – Walk on Water
When a fan of EA’s golf game pointed out a flaw that Tiger Woods could play a “Jesus Shot” from on water, the game manufacturer’s response was this viral featuring the man himself

7. Bean Counter
One of those Mac vs PC ads where Apple prods Microsoft over spending loads on advertising Vista when it should be fixing it

8. Samsung Omnia i900 Unboxing
Samsung spoof of the tech-fan trend of filming opening the box of a new gadget for the first time

9. Fate – Leave Nothing
Emotive Nike fare of lifelong rivalry of two NFL players featuring version of sound track from the Good the Bad and the Ugly

10. Adam and Eve
Insurance company ad featuring a gay Adam and frustrated Eve that found life online after being banned from TV

The idea is to build a camera setup, that makes speed of images visible. Hence they rebuild the zoetrope:

It’s 1834 and William Horner has just invented the zoetrope. Its rotating drum transforms still images into a single moving picture. As the Greek name suggests, it’s the ‘wheel of life’ (zoe ‘life’, trope ‘turn’).

Fast forward to today and Sony’s Motionflow technology, intelligently adding new frames to action scenes to make them appear smoother than ever. At 200 frames a second, Motionflow 200Hz is like a fast, fluid 21st-century zoetrope.

What better way to celebrate this technology than through the creation of BRAVIA-drome, the most technologically advanced zoetrope in the world. We’ll bring you breaking news of our Motionflow 200Hz event, as it happens. Stay tuned.

So they need something or someone really fast to demonstrate the uniqueness of this setup. The solution: the ad will feature brazilian football player Kaka:

Football’s speeding up: the players run faster, the ball travels further. It’s the ultimate test of Motionflow 200Hz, the world’s first technology which makes intense action scenes appear as clear and smooth as real life.

It’s certainly a challenge, keeping up with AC Milan player Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite, better known as Kaká. He’s one of the fastest players on the pitch with a speed that’s rarely matched, making him the perfect embodiment of sharp and fast Motionflow 200Hz technology.

Currently, they are still building the whole construction. You can follow their progress on the blog specifically setup for this.

(Found at adrants)

(found at brainwash)

• The long tail of search is longer than expected.
• Junglesmash is calling out for user generated ads – the first one is a competition to produce toothpaste ads!
• Karl long about an apparently dead wrong article about the dying blogosphere in the economist.
• Obama published a photo set of the night of the election on flickr. Somewhere I even read, that he will, in future, publish quite a lot of his life in the white house. (Unfortunately, I don’t remember where I read about that…)

Make it to one of the five finalists and winn $25,000. When voted as the favourite, your ad will get aired during the superbowl. An dif the ad gets to the top spot of the US Today Ad Meter, you win 1,000,000

You can think of any story you like, and should submit a video of not more than 30 secs. In the gallery, there are already 218 spots by now.

On the site, they even provide you with a library of Doritos material, such as product shots, music files and animated logo sequences usually used for the end of a spot by the ad pros. But the story items still need to be shot by the target audience.

While I always liked the idea of consumer generated content, it is stilla cheap means of cutting production costs – in this case to a possible max of $125kfor the finalists plus an undisclosed amount for whoever produced the site and manages the campaign. The 1 million will only be paid out if the spot makes it to number one of the US Today Ad Meter. I don’t know what the chances are in that, but I do know that advertisers can buy insurances for these kind of “risks”. So that the actual sum paid for the insurance premium that pays, in case the 1 million needs to be paid out, can by substantially lower.

(via ad rants)

Teaming up with the neuromarketing firm NeuroFocus and the branding consultancy MediaVest, Google conducted a study in which it measured people’s nervous-system responses – through brain-scanning skull sensors, eye tracking, pupil dilation, and galvanic skin response – as they watched YouTube ads.

There were only 40 participants, whose score for overlay ads was apparently above average:

Specifically, after fielding a study among 40 participants last May, InVideo ads scored above average on a scale of one to 10 for measures like “attention” (8.5), “emotional engagement” (7.3) and “effectiveness” (6.6). According to officials, a 6.6 score is considered strong. (Source)

Yet they worked best when in combination with banners:

The combination of overlays with companion banners also grabbed users’ attention more than banner ads alone, scoring a 6.6 compared to a 6.3 for just banners. (Source)

I can see that getting in-video ads right will be a huge leverage for YouTube to achieve sufficient revenue. And it’s probably one of the best ways to quickly and substantially increase revenue options on the site.

Yet I would prefer more creative and user relevant options for displaying the messages of my clients…

Another interesting fact is the news about the advanced neuroscience approach Google has taken to evaluate their overlay ads. Only 40 participants, but probably much more data available than you would get from 100 traditional focus groups.

And as you can see, in the fine print, it says that at airports Sixt charges an extra 19%, i.e. 153,31 Euros in total. Why not you might ask – and I agree, why not. Let them charge what they want, where they want.

But I do ask, why they put up a billboard with this fine print copy AT THE AIRPORT? Yes, I took that picture at the airport in Hamburg!

Why did they not simply put up a billboard with the “real” price for that location?

I’m working on remake of I Am the Media, so I asked one of our bright and diligent researchers to do a count of the last 4 months of print campaigns on Ads of the World. And the gut feeling was confirmed. 70% of them didn’t contain any URL.

70%? This is absolutely amazing. Out of 256 print ads, only 77 Ads had a URL for more information.

Seems like the other campaigns weren’t really interested in providing further information. But why?

1. A greater knowledge of digital space
2. More use of “pull interactions”
3. Leverage virtual communities
4. Agency executives using the technology they are recommending
5. Chief Digital Officers make agencies more appealing
6. Web 2.0 and social media savvy
7. Agencies that understand consumer behavior
8. Demonstrate strategic thinking
9. Branding and creative capabilities
10. Ability to measure success

There is some more detail to these points at the sapient website.

Milk producers in Quebec put milk cartons in refrigerators in ten appliance stores around Montreal to take advantage of the moving season.

Apparently, that similar story about diapers and young fathers (who have to stay at home on a friday nite) is not true.

(thanks)

As nice as the idea appears, it is (as it often happens in advertising) not a very new idea. May it’s the first time, the idea was used in a commercial. But on YouTube, there are videos of the “prangstgrup” that date back to August of 2006! See this clip here:

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But you don’t need to go very far away. Your next door neighbor might be part of a “click farm”. Even though he most likely never realised what he got himself into.

Just the other day I took a look at a site called OnlineTVRecorder.com (don’t want to give them any link credit). On that site you can record TV programms of any German TV Channel – most of which I wouldn’t even be able to access in this area of the country. You first record them, and then download and decode them. But you can only decode those that you “recorded” in advance. This makes it similar to any VCR/DVD recorder and hence (I guess) a legal way of recording shows via the web.

So far so good. However, the system only works for you, when you pay per download with so called “good will points”. If you haven’t got enough points, you can’t download or decode any files.

And how do you get these points? There are two ways. Either you donate money, or you click on some of their ads. Yes, that’s right: you can click on the ads to receive good will points! You get points for clicks that advertisers pay a lot of money for (on aggregate).

I guess most users on this site aren’t fully aware of the fact that each of their clicks contributes to ripping of advertisers. Note: I am not saying “poor advertisers” here! I am just saying that advertisers don’t get what they pay for when they signed the contract with these mediasites: intentional attention.

Clickworking is an interesting and positive trend, since it uses the minimal individual productivity of large crowds to achieve a large complex goal.

Clickfarming seems to be a dark side equivalent. Utilize the small contributions of a large crowd’s individuals who might not even (want to) realize that their few clicks are contributing to a large system of fraud.

I wonder how many other sites of this kind are out there? How much dubious content is paid for in this way? How many advertising campaigns bought on a pay-per-click basis have been corrupted by clickfarms like these?

If I was an advertiser and I saw one of my banners on one of those sites, I would ask my media agency or the publisher for my money back. And may be sue them.

This is the official reason why:

New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.

You can see a video each day, showing whatever he did during the day and night.

Anyway, in a good manner these days, you can of course join the facebook group (1,260 members) and you can be Marks friend on myspace (930 friends).

Mark seems to start a series of this kind of promo. He had also done the 171 Starbucks (visiting 171 Starbucks in a day, I guess they were all located on the same block – and did he have a coffee in each?)

Interesting fact: while I have seen/read about all of the good ones, I know none of the bad ones. So even while being over here in Germany, I know (about) the good ads. And I did see / learn about them through traditional media. Get it?