This is an ad for Virgin, or at least had Virgin American’s involvement. Slightly surreal from Lisa Nova, with two women who carry around toy rabbit puppets. It’s all to promote YouTube Live, one of quote a few in the top rated videos this week, including one from Charlie The Unicorn.
There’s more Brazillian videos in the charts this week, following on from last week’s showing. This one is for Credicards from Citi Bank
Playstation are trailing their new Xmas campaign, nothing much to see here yet but two of them have made the top 100.
Dell and Vodafone have teamed up to provide you a new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook, which has wifi AND embedded mobile broadband, which I think is a pretty cool idea, even if it ties you to a supplier, but the deal is about the same price as some of their dongles
To help promote this, they’ve equipped LiveGuy with one of the netbooks and, from tomorrow, they’ve set him off round the UK to test out the service. He’s going to be giving away up to 4 of the Inspirons every day, if you can find him – 3 in person and 1 online. They’ve even got Lewis Hamilton in on the act
Liveguy is on a complete social media binge, with his Facebook, Twitter Feed, YouTube and Picassa images. You can follow him throughout his two week trip that takes him through most of major UK cities. Through all these channels plus the blog, he’ll be giving enough clues so you can track him down. They’re also linking with bloggers in each of the cities they’re going through, to drive up some local interest.
Liveguy from Vodafone (screenshot from site)
What I think
This is a pretty slick campaign, with all the right buttons pressed. They’ve got live action combined with digital with plenty of opportunities to win things, a good combination. The product itself looks like a good deal, assuming the connection speed works well and the netbook is useful enough. I like what they are plannign to do, now to watch the execution.
The Guardian have a write up of a new mobile site for the Royal Marines* (best viewed on a phone, but it still works in your browser). It’s a promotion tied in with the new James Bond movie, where in 120 cinemas they are offering a bluetooth message to go to mobile site to take a look at what you need to be a marine. It’s one of the richer mobile sites I’ve seen, offering the chance to sign up for more news, watch videos, download images and work your way through a whole load of FAQs. A good way to connect with the target audience.
Royal Marines State of Mind
*This came from my employers, but I had nothing to do with it, it was well underway before I joined.
James and Joe sent me a mail about their work for GT. This was their brief:
“Right-wing evangelical groups accuse gay people of having an agenda to promote homosexuality… What would it look like if this ridiculous idea were true? GT approached advertising agencies and asked them to work up some campaigns that would sell ‘Homosexuality’ as an unbearably appealing choice and recruit to the cause.”
They, along with other teams worked hard to produce the ads, to sell the ‘product’ of being gay. You can see the full set over on the Facebook page. I think James & Joe’s is definitely the most visually striking of the ads. Although the ad itself is not digital (they’re all posters), the GT, J&J and the other teams are using digital means to get the message out there.
I love this ad, it looks brilliant and I keep watching it and every time find new things. The facts behind it are pretty impressive.
The TV ad was shot using 200 Toshiba Gigashot Cameras: the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence
This particular technique, viewing looping action in 360 degrees, has never been done before
The rig was custom built weighing approximately half a tonne, including 200 cameras and electronics
The rig measures 14m diameter circle and 1.8m high
The 200 cameras were all triggered using a single remote control
Once the rig was built, four focus pullers spent three days focusing and aligning all 200 cameras
The time spent processing footage from 200 cameras was over four weeks – 24 hours a day seven days a week!
New offline and online editing software had to be specifically built for the job
In terms of data, this is one of the biggest jobs a post-production house has ever taken on – 20TB of data
But I’m not sure how the ad itself ties into the products it is advertising, which are ‘upscaling’ products from Toshiba, TV, DVD Players and laptops that take a standard TV signal and upgrade it to something close to high definition, so you can watch all the standard programmes a better way. A cool ad, a cool product, but how do they connect for you?
It’s all politics, lots and lots of politics but snuck into the middle of all those speeches, there’s this one from Windows, with Rashad Evans explaining about why he’s a PC in the Life Without Walls campaign. There’s also one from Gregg Gillis, Girl Talk, about a musician making music on a PC.
Then there’s Virgin America, with its walk through the experience as seen by a bunch of internet celebrities such as LisaNova and Tay Zonday. I’m not that sure I’d appreciate being called ‘bitches’ by a check-in person, though. It’s promoting a You Tube Live show, one of their many social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter.
There’s obviously something I don’t understand about this Brazillian ad for Colgate (I do love the local pronunciation though). There’s some stacking of the tags – I see nothing about a Wii or iPod in the video), so there’s obviously some behind the scenes ‘viral’ promotion; I’m guessing they call this one a success.
There’s other Brazillian videos in the list as well, this time 2 from Ford, with a visit to the Salão do Automóvel. I think YouTube have adjusted the algorithms controlling what I see when I log in!
Mitsubishi are currently running a pan-European contest to promote the launch of their new Lancer Sportback and Colt cars. On their site On Your Mark, you have to choose a place in your country, placing your mark on the interactive map. To get a chance to win the sporty car, you have to upload an image or video to express yourself. A jury of 3 will choose the best entries, who will then get cars delivered in the ‘most spectacular way’ – the intro video has the car being flown n by helicopter, so expect something like this. I’m not sure how it all works as interestingly I can’t find any rules! (If you want to see it in English, choose Nederlands, which has an English language option)
As well as the contest, they’ve also got some really silly games, all in the Japanese style, hosted by Koichi Koga. Here’s the Lancer Loop
Elsewhere on the site, you can book a test drive or download some pretty nice images.
Mitsubishi On Your Mark Host (image courtesy Mitsubishi/SocialMedia8)
What I think
It’s completely mad and completely fun. For some reason, car marketing always comes up with the wilder ideas and this is one of them. The game show host is way over the top and brilliant to watch. The mechanic of the contest is a bit different from the norm and they’re going to get a lot of PR if they come up with enough mad ways to deliver the cars.
I saw this on Technosailor this morning and it’s now gone live. Tropicana, the orange juice, are analysing the Twitter stream for election related tweets and assessing them contextually, providing a constantly updating assessment of where sentiments lie. The words assessed are being updated during the day and there’s this lovely little portable version of the tool (although I’m expecting this to go away after the election!)
It’s an interesting tactic, not something that I would immediately associated with a juice, especially as its target looks like the geek set (being seeded on a Tech blog definitely implies that). But if this niche audience is one of Tropicana’s target groups, then it fits well.
(I’ll move off election stuff soon, but that’s what is being sent to me!!!!)
the email below this one is a funny thing i’m sending my american friends… i know you can’t vote but i thought you would get a kick out of this… this is the essence of true viral video.
He’s correct, it’s got all the right elements to spread, it’s topical, relevant and personalised as well as extremely well done.
Way up there in the video listing is this sing-along commercial for the new Ford Focus. You follow the car from idea to delivery, with a song passed along the trail. It’s actually a Spanish ad, but the song’s English.
Free Credit Reports, a US agency, is running a contest and this is one guy’s entry. He’s been pushing it strong and pulling the views in. You have to film yourself miming to one of their ads/jingles and the most voted for gets into the final 10, which is then judged by a panel for a prize of $15k
Do you want to be a cooking star? Enter the Kraft food contest and you could win $1000. Choose one of their recipes, film yourself making it and see if you get picked. Kraft Cooking School has a lot of How to videos and now they’re extending the content to you. Channel 4 is running a similar kind of contest at the moment which is being advertised across the site, this one in association with the Gordon Ramsay Cookalong programmes.
