Gawker has a post about levis jeans looking for Bloggers as Models. I ask myself the same question as probably most people out there: why? Do they just want to jump onto the blog-bandwagon? Being „cool“? Will it be cool, just because it involves bloggers?? Or what is their objective?
I am curious to see how that develops and what kind of blog-posts I will find around the web concerning this marketing gig. Will keep you „posted“.
An interesting tip I found at Lifehacker: the Gmail Drive shell extension. Now you can use the 1GB of your Gmail account as a normal drive on Windows, using this little app to access it like any other drive on you PC. However Lifehacker warns not to store any sensitive information.
The plus-point: you can access 1GB of your data from anywhere on the web, no matter what internet cafe your sitting in…
And if you don’t know anyone who can invite to Gmail, look at this other tip from Lifehacker.
Amazing. I have seen the movie „lost in translation“ and wondered about the main character played by Bill Murray going through such a drag just to make a commercial for Whiskey. I just found Japander.com which shows a lot of commercials with western celebrities, and while I watch those, I cannot resist thinking of these people sitting in a dark hotel bar just like Bill Murray did in the movie…
Blogs will become increasingly important for companies in ways that still have to be prioritised.
Some might try to influence the blog community by trying to feed some advertising information into this viral-style communication channel.
Other might just want to be able to monitor what’s going on in order to be able to respond to current consumer debates, which are quite often publizised by blogs.
For these companies, Adrants writes, there is now a company offering blog monitoring services.
So the lincolnfry really is a fake blog. Funny.
I wasn’t paying much attention to this blog, just wondered about it’s high ranking at blogdex and only had quick look into the blog a couple of days ago.
Well, yesterday, during the Super Bowl, when they also showed an ad about this, they called the whole scam off and put in a link on the website to a rather clearly McDonalds branded
Flash-Site.
Now they sell it at a yahoo auction (why not ebay? does anyone know?) and it’s currently at $21k already!
Somehow I really like this campaign idea, even though they tried fool the blogging community for some time (though I wonder how they got this blog so high up on the blogdex, but I guess that was set up, too).
[21st Feb Update: the lincoln fry sold for around 75k in the end – purchased by the GoldenPalace, who already bought the cheese toast with Marie on it… WHY??]
Just to add this little piece of info to one of my recent posts: Alloy to Promote Sulake’s Habbo Hotel writes Adweek. This article says they’re in the US since October, but only now they will do a large push, trying to reach 90% of the teens, as Alloy claims.
…says John Hayes of American Express about the future of marketing. I highly recommend this Interview with him. Even though it’s a few months old, John Hayes says a few things that I agree on, and of which I hope that he continues to be right about.
What really got me to write this was a post, that I found: Gareth Kay wonders about a $200m product placement deal of VW.
NY Times has a story on it. VW can place its cars in movies of Universal, TV shows of NBC and sibling networks, and can even promote its cars on DVDs and in the Universal theme parks.
But no one expects product placement to replace traditional corporate advertising campaigns in the foreseeable future. „The classical communications tools like advertising will always be there and we will always need them,“ said Dirk Grosse-Leege.
[…]
„But product placement is gaining much more importance,“ Mr. Grosse-Leege said, noting that some of the money to pay for the deal with NBC Universal will come from the budget for traditional advertising.
Notice the way it’s going? Of course, traditional campaigns are not yet a thing of the past. But spending $200m on product placement, while the overal advertising budget of VW and partners is roughly $600m – I call that quite a big step…
Apart from maybe the Super Bowl, where quite a few people aparently TiVO the game (in this case: searching for the ads, skipping the game, instead of vice versa, for which the „verb“ TiVO is now used), the traditional „I TELL YOU!“ advertising is decreasing. Now it’s more of a „let me tell you“. Meaning advertisers are more and more trying to find listeners in places and channels where they are more inclined to be receptive to the message. Or story – because that’s where advertising, in the case of VW, is trying to find its place. Within a set story.
Ford’s British division also paid the author Carole Matthews to mention the Fiesta, a model sold in Europe, in two novels. (Also from the NY Times article)
It’s a general trend, that the big advertising $$ are put into other than the traditional media, trying channels that have so far not played such a great role in advertising.
Think about BMW Films or the American Express Seinfeld Episodes (which don’t seem to be online any longer). Several minute long films, that sit happily on the web waiting for users to find and enjoy them. And the story isn’t even about the car. The car is only one accessory of the story.
Or think about Online Games. PepsiCo chose to launch its soft drink, Mountain Dew, in Finland almost exclusively through Habbo Hotel. This was more of a sponsorship, I think, but the trend of ads in online games is huge, as online games outgrow traditional single-player desktop games.
The media landscape is continously fragmenting with the target audience increasingly in control. And while this statement isn’t new, I think we still haven’t seen the least of this development. John Hayes of American Express said last year, that they now only spend 35% of their budget on TV, coming from around 80% a decade ago.
Wait for more exciting announcements of big companies shifting their advertising budgets, as the consumer is all-ways on.
Wo ich sonst so bin...