To promote themselves in the new market and as a tie-in with the World Cup, Best Buy are running a pretty cool contest to win everything in their ‘man-cave’. Although focused on the male football fan, the prizes on offer would be great for anyone, including 2 Samsung TVs, a HTC Desire phone, a netbook and plenty of beer and pizza. All you have to do to enter is add a comment to the video, saying what else you think needs to go into the room. Simple contest, great, great prize.

They were called out for being heavily influenced by Taijin Takeuchi and his video Wolf and Pig. The connection was eventually acknowledged and it seems to have had a happy ending as Taijin has directed a new video for the agency and Olympus, this time taking the idea BIG and to the streets.

As a story, I think the first video has the edge, but I am quite taken with the idea that all the billboard ad models have secret lives, it makes me smile.

This is the new Sony Ad for their 3dTV, the obligatory football ad. I’d love to know if it actually works if the ad works in 3D if you have the glassesm meanwhile it just gives me a headache. There’s going to be up to 25 matches from the World Cup broadcast in 3d this year and Sony are going to be busy providing venues for you to watch the games, according to their Facebook page. They’re definitely going for the early adopters…the glasses themselves cost £99

As far as I can see, there’s no other digital marketing around the product, just the TV ad and mentions on the Facebook page, plus content promotion on the main site, although with a distinct lack of prices. Looks like they’ll be available just in time for the football though.

Nice little video from The Viral Factory to support the Samsung Jet, funny idea which really demonstrate a key benefit of the phone, its camera speed. I like it when there’s such a clear link as it’s not always found when creating this distributed content.

They’ve got the Facebook Group and the YouTube channel promoting their next event. Cue dramatic music and a call to action – be at Traflagar Square in London 30th April at 6pm to see what they have in mind.

Update: there’s seems to be some desire to flashmob the flashmob. I’ve suggested taking signs for other networks, others like Chris are suggesting something more

Update2: It happened and looking around it seemed to have been fun. T-Mobile brought along the singer Pink, performed karaoke with the crowd and the big screens . So the new T-Mobile advert with Pink, Trafalgar Square and ‘you’ will be shown on Saturday at 9.

Samsung Football (image from email)

Let’s see what’s wrong with this.

• The only contact I recall having with Samsung is when I registered by new TV. Although I ticked the ‘send me news’ box, the sending of a a football based email suggests to me their segmentation is not brilliant. (I could be wrong about this; I;ve written about Samsung a few times before so I may have given them my email for a different sign up)
• The email asks me to ‘click here to enter’. I do and get taken to the generic welcome page for their fan section ‘The Terraces’, with an autoplay video. Where’s the competition? If you want me to click through, take me where I think I’m going.
• Click on the most obvious video and I get a 30second promo (I guess by some footballer) talking about uploading images. But where?
• Eventually work out that at the bottom of the page is a series of images and a form to submit my own. But the calls to action, the call to upload images, the sell about the prize, the reasons why I may want to do this are all missing. I landed on this page and had no idea what I was supposed to do. Putting the briefest of messages in a video puts a barrier up. Maybe I have no sound, nor the time to watch it. Having the call to action in text is always a better option than video alone.

Don;t get me wrong, I think this is a good competition and prize for someone who loves football and Chelsea, but I just think it’s missing a lot in the consumer journey from email to site that would not take too much to fix the next time.

Samsung Football (screenshot from site)

TurboTax has Tay Zonday, of Chocolate Rain fame, pimping out the brand’s Super Status competition as well as his latest song

Nordstrom, a new name to me for online videos, have this one about boyfriend jeans. This video is not your usual type to be highly viewed, so I’m guessing there was an ad buy to promote it.

The Blackberry Bullet is the hero of this ad, taking on Apple, or rather an apple. This is a repost, not from the original brand