I was delighted to see that after clicking the mysterious banner seen here I was taken to an even better experience on the site www.070829.com. The audio is particularly nice.
I'll let you all solve the site's puzzle yourself but here's what you are left with in the end. A silhouette of what looks to be a Nokia N81 (Nokia's iphone killer) and a countdown to it's release.
A quick Google search of "070829" reveals there was a lot of interest in this campaign. So I'd say it has been successful in generating buzz.
This type of marketing is also doing well for J.J Abrams new film untitled film codenamed "Cloverfield" with their site 1-18-08.com.
Here's one film that's generating lots of buzz by letting the fans imaginations go wild. As seen in the many blogs like Cloverfield Clues, Cloverfield News and Project Cloverfield. The guys at Paramount got this one right as everyone is doing the work for them.
If you need any more proof that this type of marketing brings out the nerds check this very nerdy Youtube analysis of everything released for Cloverfield. 350,000 views for this!? He sounds like Perez Hilton.
Also Ethan Haas Was Right is another recent promotion which I wrong stated was related to Cloverfield. It's actually for a new pen and paper based Role Playing Game Alpha Omega.
It's funny reading the comments in forums that people were actually disappointed it wasn't related to Cloverfield. And that the majority of the news coverage online linked it to Cloverfield.
B!X and his site OMGWTFEHWR was the first to uncover the link between EthanHaas and AO and covers the promotion quite well.
So let that be a lesson to all you experimental marketers. If you are going to go underground and do an ARG or mysterious promotion, make sure there is some link, even if tiny, to the product or service you're actually selling or risk having it attributed to something else and all your hard work wasted.
Have you seen any other good examples of this type of marketing? Please link it up in the comments.
In and effort to help EMI promote physical CD purchases and their artists we created Sleevage: The world's best CD cover blog. This is purely self proclaimed but we needed Google to index us properly. Why buy a book on the best covers which is probably out of date by the time it's printed when you can get the best online for free. We also wanted to go one step beyond the usual "10 best covers" or "10 worst covers" you see occasionally.
EMI's presence, they use the name Musichead in Australia as EMI represents so many labels, has been kept quite minimal right now and EMI artists have been interspersed with other labels releases. This is all integral to it's success, as support by the other labels is very important. Just as support by agencies is on Bannerblog, we didn't want this to be a Soap Creative blog.
It's growing organically and has been well received by the design and music communities. Also as with most blogs the longer its alive the better it becomes. Also search engine traffic is growing exponentially as more covers are posted. This isn't a 6 month promotion that will be abandoned it will become part of EMI Australia's online arsenal.
We're hoping to grow it above and beyond what Bannerblog has become and with a broad topic of music and design this should be easy. Although there is much more competition for the topic of "album cover design". We've seen two new ones pop up since we launched Sleevage.
This is the main reason updates to Bannerblog have been slightly slower as my attention has been divided.
Supervirals.com (terrible name made worse by the logo) is a new venture that allows brands to brief out "viral video" in exchange for prizes. They've signed up mambo, Krispy Kreme and Nudie juice so far.
They describe themselves better than I can so this is form their FAQ section
"SuperVirals is a new creative platform where you can win big prizes by creating and uploading original ideas for sponsor brands. Which means it's also the place to see the best new viral content on the web!"
The briefs are open enough to allow creative freedom but my cynical view on the world won't be banking on this taking off. It just feels too labored?. But I've been wrong many times before. I think 1% (read here) sums it up well.
I haven't hear much from Telstra's WotNext site but it still seems to be going so that's one thing. They also have Project Joystick which is asking for game ideas.
All comps require the user to sign over all IP with their winning entry. I guess this matter little to the general public but matters a lot to people who actually have talent.
It feels like another one of those promotions where you fill out your name and it goes into a big list that you can navigate. But instead of typing in your name and seeing your details on the biggest cross you part with $100 or so and buy your name onto the cross in the form of a tile. One of 7.2 millions used to make this 60 meter high monstrosity.
So the race is on for other religions to make the world's biggest something. Unless The Church of Scientology can just claim The Big Pineapple as their holy place (L. Ron Hubbard did like pineapple) then they have already won.
Below is an artists impression of the COS headquarters for SE Queensland.
But back to being all serious and stuff. It's amazing to see charities and religions take to the web so well. While some brands struggle to understand and use the web properly, religions on every side of the fence have been using it to great effect for many years.
Do check out AMC's new original series Mad Men. From one of the people who brought you The Sapranos.
The production, acting and story is multi layered and top quality. It's a sly look at not just advertising today and in the 60s, but on how we were as a society was back then. Well not me exactly I'm an 80s child but you get the idea. This before cancer, AIDS, computers, seat belts and other worries complicated our lives.
There's only up to episode 5 right now so you haven't missed too much.
Update: Looks like Channel 9 in Australia has picked uo the show and has episode 1 for free download. More info here.
From independent publisher Crikey.com.au, comes this leaked e-mail - although to be honest if you worked there, you'd probably want it leaked anyway. An apparently 'leaked' memo would get more attention than say a press release clarifying the original findings...
"Ninemsn CEO tells staff: we're still number one. Message from ninemsn CEO Tony Faure to all staff yesterday:"
All, You may have seen some media coverage of recent Nielsen numbers on the online news category. Some media have taken these numbers and used them in a naive comparison of apples and oranges. Claims that SMH has overtaken ninemsn as the leading online news source are wrong. While we don't dispute the data reported by Nielsen, the ninemsn news referred to in the Nielsen number is just that - only the ninemsn news URL. Nielsen's figure for ninemsn does not take into account the UBs for the news within other sections of ninemsn such as the homepage, sport, weather and entertainment. It also doesn't take into account the huge homepage news UBs, which are difficult to break out, but clearly very large. By contrast, the SMH news number quoted by Nielsen is almost their entire site including news, sport, weather, business, entertainment, Travel, technology and Life & Style. Our news publisher number - which takes into account news, weather, sport (still not everything that SMH includes) - would be higher. In this far more accurate and like-for-like comparison, ninemsn currently has higher daily and monthly UBs than SMH. Max and his team have been kicking some great goals with recent live news streams, getting the cadets up and running and as we all saw at the company meeting, our foreign correspondent Henri. We know we have the leading online news whatever numbers you look at, and we will be correcting this to the media in the coming days."
I've been seeing more and more of these lately—placements that went live even though they were screwed up. It likely attests to the lack of experience talent in the field, and the habit of media companies of throwing young, untrained employees right into the mix of complicated ad serving tools without much beyond the 1/2 day intro. Reminds me a little bit of radio in the late 70's / early 80's, except that then the errors were usually because the dj was stoned or drunk or both.
There has been one commenter who has been a negative force on Bannerblog for quite a while. His/her alias is MC. With no more than 32 comments each negative and harsh with a rare dash of actual constructive criticism.
Click here to read the full article and find the identity of MC.
IA of Japan have created a trend map (full map here) of popular sites and their proximity to each other. Read the full entry on their blog for info on how to buy it as a poster and other formats. Found via the CS blog.
Funny we were making fun of people using Web 2.0 by saying lets aim for web 2.5 and this map already does this.
I wonder how long it will be before other markets catch on and start calling themselves stuff like Bank 2.0, Automobile 2.0, TV 2.0. It sounds like marketing balony yeah? That's how we sound to everyone else by using that terminology.
