New work from agency Fi for Microsoft touts Explore Touch, a site that lets consumers use touch gestures to mix audio files and create original sound tracks with the swipe of their fingers. The experience centers on an original sound track from singer, song-writer, and producer Blake Lewis. Watch the :60 spot. And also check out the agency demo’ing this site itself.
When you’re on a roll, you might as well keep rolling. And that’s exactly what Oreo is doing. As part of its Cookies versus Cream campaign, Widen + Kennedy has created a video that features “physicist and copywriter” David Neevel, who has designed the ultimate Oreo cookie separator.
It’s oh-so Rube Goldberg-esque and Neevel, who is actually a copywriter at W+K, delivers his lines with perfectly droll aplomb. The brand, which capitalized on the power outage during the Super Bowl with a real-time ad, plans to release additional cookie separation videos in the coming weeks.
This week, McCann London released a new ad for the Sony Xperia Z smartphone. The ad, shot by director Tarsem and accompanied by David Bowie’s Sound and Vision, aims to recall how Sony has been a part of people’s lives for a very long time.
The ad opens on a group of people watching the moon landing on a Sony TV. Next, it cuts to a shot of two rollerblading beauties in LA listening to the original Sony Walkman. The Sony Handycam is the focus of the next shot as it records the fall of the Berlin wall. Then the shot depicts two teenagers deep in concentration playing the first PlayStation console and finally, the viewer is left with a vivid explosion of colour as we see a couple experiencing the Festival of Holi in India through their Sony smartphone.
It’s really quite beautiful.
Native advertising company Sharethrough today announced the launch of Sharethrough Sponsored Stories, a native advertising solution that helps brands promote articles, posts, reviews and more across the web. With Sharethrough Sponsored Stories, marketers can extend the reach of their content beyond owned and earned placements across Sharethrough’s network of publishers.
Land Rover is one of the first brands to use Sharethrough Sponsored Stories in its content marketing programs, along with Pop Secret and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
The Sponsored Stories product can function as a stand-alone distribution platform for a brand’s original editorial content or to help spread a new video campaign.
The sponsored stories carry a headline, a short description, an image thumbnail and share buttons along with a notation its a sponsored story. Ads can be targeted to various demographics or contextually to content on the publisher’s site.
Launch partners include Land Rover, National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s “MS Connections” Campaign and Pop Secret Labs.
Of their partnership with ShareThrough, Land Rover Digital Marketing & Social Media Manager Kim Kyaw said (or more likely, was asked to say), “Creating compelling original content is a core part of building the Land Rover brand online. New methods of distribution such as Sharethrough Sponsored Stories, which allow us to promote our content in an integrated way, are appealing to us. We’re focused on reaching audiences on their terms while providing entertaining yet informative content. Sharethrough has helped us to drive engagement for our content online.”
So while Advertising Age is critiquing the $1.6 million commercials that ran during the Oscars last night, we thought we’d take a look at something a bit less expensive and a bit more inventive — the real-time newsjacking that occurred last night during the broadcast.
Newsjacking refers to the practice of capitalizing on the popularity of a news story to amplify your sales and marketing success. The term was popularized in David Meerman Scott’s book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage.
Check out the full list here in an article we wrote for HubSpot.
In my years as an agency media director and account director, I worked with many different personality types – including one long-term client who, for many years, wouldn’t respect me or my work. One day he angered me so much I screamed at him for five minutes straight, telling him I knew exactly what the hell I was doing and he should shut up and listen to what I have to say.
While I certainly don’t recommend letting your anger get the best of you or screaming at your clients, in this particular case my years of attempting to placate, coddle and generally bend over for this particular client never worked. It wasn’t until I stood up to him with the same forceful authority he always commanded that he respected me. And from that point on, our relationship was wonderful.
Read the rest on the Central Desktop blog.
While it would certainly be amusing to stand at a bus top, visit a mobile site and then be picked up by a super cool sports car or a dog sled or a bus filled with carnival characters but how exactly does all that sell Qualcomm mobile services? If, in fact, that’s what this stunt is trying to sell. Because we have no idea since we were distracted by all the stunt’s hoopla.
This makes about as much sense as the brand’s keynote at CES.
Marketing pranks come in all shapes and sizes. Some better than others. Most are innocuous and playful. But this stunt from German deodorant maker Nivea pushes past what most would consider acceptable limits. Of course, that doesn’t detract from the fact it’s an epically awesome stunt.
While travelers await flights and busses in terminal, actors secretly snap shots and use them in TV reports and newspaper stories. Tese reports and stories paint the picture of the unsuspecting traveler as a “wanted suspect” who is “armed and dangerous.” In addition, loudspeaker announcement are made within the terminal.
Naturally, craziness ensues. Watch the video. Over 4 million views since February 12.
When you drink a Schweppes, do you feel the schweppervecence? Does it make you want to tumble down a 10,000 foot mountain? Roll through the forest? Plunge over a waterfall?If you’re in a George Patterson Y&R Schweppes commercial it sure does.
Anyway, stop daydreaming and get back to work.
In some of our past coverage, we’ve touched upon the changing nature of professional experience needed to form effective creative and marketing teams, how those teams should be structured and how agencies are reinventing themselves as the market has shifted away from the traditional agency of record model.
Add to that the notion of pi-shaped talent which, like T-shaped talent, describes a person with broad knowledge in all areas but adds capability for both left-brained and right-brained skills, and you have a dramatic shift in workforce expertise.
This shift toward a workforce that possesses a multifaceted skill set begs the question: are specialists endangered? I think not.
Read the rest on the Central Desktop blog…
