Google Maps and Heineken hooked up in a new advergame

von | März 28, 2006 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Online Advertising, SEO / SEA

Another campaign utilizing Google Maps: Heineken hooks up with Google Maps for Tapvat World Tour 2006.

In this microsite visitors are supposed to search the world for gigs from Dutch live band Voicst using Google’s satellite images. All within a certain timeframe while a radio signal leads you to the right spot.

The game is intuitive enough, which is good as I don’t speak any dutch. At the end I found the spot (why would the want to have a gig there?), but I didn’t understand what they wanted my address details for – surely it was for some kind of sweepstake, but who knows what else I might have signed up for?

Try it out, it’s interesting and kept me busy for quite a few minutes (I had to try twice to find the spot – and it’s of course in a different place every time).

New iPod Ad visible from outerspace? Or just a normal thing first seen on Google?

von | März 27, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, SEO / SEA

boakes.org apparently broke the news: Steve Jobs, the incredible Steve, won an abandoned mineral mine in remote western Australia during a poker game – and has nothing better to do than to build a giant iPod ad on it.
An ad that can be seen from outer space, as even adrants reports (err, quotes). If you look on technorati, you can find lots of posts on this matter – it’s the new Apple story, apparently. OK, it’s for the 30th birthday of Apple, fair enough. They might as well go big.

Yet, according to all the blogs I read sofar, I was probably the only one not zooming in on to the iPod, but zooming out to check out the area around it.

And while I like this story a lot, I couldn’t help myself noticing, that Steve Jobs is indeed building two iPod ads rather close to each other!! I suppose one is for the iPod video while the other one is for, well, any of the other iPods. It’s not finished yet, so it’s difficult to tell.

See for yourself:

You can find it here on Google Local.

(On second throught – what if these square areas are just something unusual that australian miners … no, let the story continue.)

Consumer generated media – in a podcast

von | März 26, 2006 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Digital News, Online Advertising

This is just a quick note pointing to one of my favourite Podcasts, „Across the sound„.

This time (and next time) Joe has invited Jackie Huba of Church of the customer, and Pete Blackshaw from Consumer generated Media.

So what could this podcast potentially be about?
Of course, one of my favourite topics – consumer (or citizen) generated media (or content). They aren’t so sure about the exact term either. This was episode Nr. 1, with episode Nr. 2 following next week.

I just wonder – why putting it live like broadcasting, in two chunks, one this week, the second next week? Why not upload all of it in one go and let us have the content „on demand“? As far as I understood, that second chunk is already sitting on Joes harddrive, waiting for publication until next week…!

Any way, it’s definitely worth checking out nevertheless.

Joga.com – „social advertising“ by Google and Nike

von | März 21, 2006 | Ad News, Blog, Digital Marketing, Online Advertising

Adverblog points me to it first:

Google and Nike have partnered to launch Joga, an online community for football fans „by invitation only“.

The site is Joga.com, as in Joga Bonito: „Play beautiful“.

Since it is, sofar, „by invitation only“, I have no idea what it looks like inside. And I haven’t found a blogger who has seen it. So here is the view from the outside.

As soon as I get my „invitation“, I will let you know more.

On the login page you can see a video with one of the soccer heros of the 90s, Eric Cantona, hijacking a german television station. (Shoving away two very boring sounding German anchormen – and I may say that, being German myself.)

His message in the video is clear: joga bonito! And while he preaches what will hopefully be the new mantra for the worldcup this year, you can see lots of nice tricks and gameplays in the background – mostly by brasilians, but that’s natural, isn’t it. Both in terms of reputation and sponsorship by Nike.

Very good idea, everyone will appreciate that call for beauty in soccer-gameplay this year.

But for Nike and Google it’s more than that:

Joga.com is a free network where members will be able to create Web sites and send e-mail, photos, and video clips, as well as access Nike content related to its sponsored athletes such as Brazilian superstar Ronaldino or U.S. soccer prodigy Freddy Adu

Writes Businessweek, and continues later on that page:

For Nike, Joga.com is the latest example of how it is keeping in touch with its core consumers: young males who increasingly get their information from digital sources. As evidenced by sites such as MySpace, young teenagers and college students connect online, communicate through instant messaging, and spend hours surfing the Web. Nike’s new soccer-marketing campaign, „Joga Bonito“ (play beautifully), is mostly aimed at reaching young soccer consumers through various forms of digital media.

A very smart move to surf on the worldcup tidalwave of this year to test new forms of engaging the target group. Because if this turns out well, Google and Nike will roll-out this kind of approach to other sports, such as basketball, baseball, etc.


A series of short videos (by Wieden & Kennedy) is also part of the effort. The first one on that site being the one you can already see at joga.com.

(via here, here and here.)

cool breath power – yeah!

von | März 21, 2006 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Online Advertising

A product I didn’t know about so far suddenly kept me busy exploring their advertising for a couple of minutes. The winterfresh microsite looks like a crudely drawn piece, but there are many nice things in the details (such as the clouds that float away from your mouse cursor or a UFO with an alien holding out a sign saying „buy winterfresh“ – the same written in the sand on the beach).

You can also click the flying winterfresh packages and get 50.000 bonus points (just for what, I don’t know).

And, since it seems to be a must for many advertising microsites, there are also a couple of clips to be watched. In the same crudely drawn manner…

(via adland)