Driving down the streets of Paris

Adfreak points me to a nice Nokia Advergame. You are the driver of a French Lady who apparently needs to take care of some dubious business in Paris. So you drive her around the beautiful city:

Instead of re-creating the city using computer animation, they shot actual footage on the Ile St. Louis. While you’re driving, you can fool around with Nokia’s car kit by using its GPS features and changing the music.

On the site, it takes ages until the game has loaded…

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And the game controls seem a little sluggish – but maybe it’s just my PC.
And it’s well worth it. The  grafics are brilliant, and having lived in Paris for a year, I actually recognised most of the spots.

Google will distribute videos with adverts

Google has partnered with Sony BMG, Condé Nast and Dow Jones & Company to distribute video content to third party sites. At the same time, these videos will show adverts. Here is a short description how it would work, found on the NY Times Website:

On the financial news site StreetInsider.com, for example, videos from The Wall Street Journal, a Dow Jones property, are running within ads on the site. In one, Emily Friedlander, a Wall Street Journal reporter, narrates a video feature on the TKTS booth in Times Square; Sam Schechner of The Journal speaks about marriage in TV shows; and Jonathan Welsh visits a motorcycle show.

After the three videos, a commercial from Pantene Pro-V, a hair conditioner, appears. In that case, Google shares the ad revenue with StreetInsider.com and Dow Jones.

This is a step of Google to move away from pure text and image based advertising to the segment of big money: TV adverts. And quite possibly, a first test of acceptance since they’re probably still working on all sorts of ways of how to monetise YouTube.

Founded as a text-based search company, Google’s early advertisers were smaller companies and advertisers who bought ads to generate direct sales rather than to build brand recognition.

Large brand advertisers still spend the bulk of their money on television advertising, but Google sees potential for them to spend more online through the use of video ads.

(via here and here)

Mini (Cooper) Movies

Mini apparently steps into the path of the no longer existing BMWfilms.com by producing its own little clip series. They are a homage to the old starsky&hutch series, as adweek writes, and are directed by Todd Phillips, who directed the movie in 2004. Here is a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGrrPReQaOE

The website is hammer&coop, where you can find further movies. Three episodes are already online, the other ones follow one each per week.

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Jeep and Marvel at online comics.

Here is a nice little idea: Jeep and Marvel Comics have started a „user-generated-comic“ campaign. They have launched the below website:

jeep.jpg

The first couple of chapters of this comic are already available online. The next chapters wait for content input by the users – that is us, all of us. A professional comic artist will then put these ideas into this comic strip. And i assume, he’ll always make sure that there is a Jeep somewhere within the story.
And whoever participates gets a printed out version of the comic later on – or so it says on Adverblog.

I never guessed that there was such a big target group overlap between Marvel and Jeep. Or are they targetting the kids of Jeep drivers?

AdJab blog retired…

One of my favourite advertising related news sources has retired. The blogs network Weblogs, Inc. has retired adjab.com.

It has been a good source of advertising and marketing input for me. Sometimes I could hardly catch up with all the posts that they put out everyday. And especially after not having read the blog for quite a few days (which is why I only found out now) I had expected more than only 30 unread posts – it already made me a little suspicious…

Shame. But, as it is written in a post of the 1st of February:

It’s important to point out that a blog retirement is not a blog failure. Here at Weblogs, Inc. we are continually honing our network to be the best content engine for readers and bloggers both. In part, that means figuring out how to divide our resources that, sadly, are not infinite. We have changed tremendously in the last three years, expanding wildly at the start into a sort of bulk publishing model, then refining and contracting somewhat into a leaner machine. We have more bloggers than ever before, and fewer blogs. That means a dazzling concentration of minds and voices in our chosen fields of publication.

Many thanks to you guys, I enjoyed the show.

On a side note, it seems like a few blog networks are consolidating. I know of at least another one in Germany, that stopped a few of their blogs. Anyone heard of any others? Does Gawker still run all its blogs?