Make An Ad for a Brand Competitions

Posted on Friday, December 04 by Jill

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Is it user gen or pros working on spec?

A number of prominent film festivals are running "make-an-ad-for-a global-brand" competitions. The project is an initiative of MOFILM who describe themselves as follows:

MOFILM is a privately funded company with offices in Manchester, London and San Francisco. Started as an artistic project in early 2007 with the Sundance Institute and GSM Association, MOFILM has grown into a global community of filmmakers working with world-leading brands and distributing content to much of the globe. MOFILM has pioneered 'made-for-mobile' content working with leading filmmakers such as Kevin Spacey, Robert Redford, Isabella Rossellini and Spike Lee to highlight and champion talented MOFILMers from around the world. MOFILM also run the world's largest mobile film festival in Barcelona, Spain once a year in conjunction with the GSM Association, as well as working with leading film festivals, including Shanghai, Cannes, Sundance, Locarno and London.

MOFILM's mission is to allow creative people from anywhere in the world and with any background to 'Get Creative - Get Noticed and Get Famous!' using the MOFILM platform as a base to run 'Make and Ad' and film competitions to showcase talent. Currently MOFILM works with mobile operators in over 50 countries around the world to distribute content to mobile from within the MOFILM community, sharing any revenue 50/50 with filmmakers.

The Barcelona and Tribeca Film Festivals have upcoming competitions. London had one in 2009 and you can see the winners work on the site -- they definitely feel like ads, but they are pretty good. There's also a Pepsi Short Film Competition (download the brief if you're interested) and an American Idol/Warmart video competition (among the prizes, a $5000 Walmart gift card and the chance to "Attend Walmart Saturday morning meeting").

What do you think? Are you grabbing your camera and shooting for fame and fortune? Or do you need a contract before you start work?

Skype's Phone Box in the Middle of Nowhere

Posted on Friday, December 04 by Jill

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Skype has a cool interactive ad running at the moment to promote their cheap long distance charges to landlines. They've sent trilingual actor Rob Cavazos to god knows where (Cavazos claims he doesn't know where he is except that he landed in Spain) and now, he's answering your phone calls.

The campaign is called the Phone Box Experiment and is a great example of how far advertising has strayed from its roots lately. It's also interesting because Skype really can't control the message. Here's an actor camping in the middle of nowhere -- entirely alone with no handlers -- who has been given license by the company to speak on their behalf. He doesn't need approvals up the line to three vice-presidents before he speaks. That's amazing and entirely necessary for a project like this to work. It's also part of what make the project so much fun; ht's a real person and therefore unpredictable.

There's something compelling about watching and listening to Rob as he answers calls and chats with people. He is genuinely surprised by how many people are calling him and thrilled and interested in talking to people. Unfortunately the sound is not entirely brilliant, but that is one of the truths about Skype. Which is not to say I don't love Skype because I do and I admire some of the chances that the company is taking with their marketing.

Let me know if you call him and what he says. From the sounds of things you may have trouble getting through because on the live web cam below the phone seems to be ringing off the hook! (btw don't phone for a while, he's about to take a nap!)

Read about the original phone box in the middle of nowhere on Wikipedia.

Prius iPhone Stunt

Posted on Friday, October 30 by Jill

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Toyota developed an iPhone app that lets you interact with the features of a new car they are selling. The app also has a sketching feature which was part of promo to get people to download the app. Users could put their iPhone sketches up on a Times Square Billboard. Pretty cool.

The billboard is live again tomorrow - October 30, 2009.

Zack 16

Posted on Thursday, October 01 by Jill

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Brought to you by... Tampax. More here.

The iPhone Is So Yesterday

Posted on Monday, December 15 by Jill

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Here's my next phone: the Pomegranate. It makes coffee!

Who needs Shazam when your phone is a razor, projector, global voice translator and a harmonica!

Okay, so the Pomegranate isn't ready to ship yet, but it is an awesome example of branded entertainment. Can you guess the product?

Lessons from AdTech

Posted on Monday, November 10 by Jill

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Online advertising is a big business. The evidence:

AdTech is a massive conference -- the New York version last week was at the Hilton on Avenue of Americas. The exhibition hall took up thousands of square feet on three floors and it was packed full of people. Inside there, you would never have imagined that there was an economic melt down outside.

AdTech New York is only one of many AdTech conferences taking place during the year. They are also held monthly March to November rotating through an impressive list of cities: San Francisco, Sydney, Paris, Miami, Singapore, Tokyo and London. Not only is this big business, it's international.

Despite the fact that Google Ads seem to dominate the market, there are 350 ad networks. That's a big marketplace -- sustaining giants like Google ads and hundreds of others.

$25 billion was spend on digital ads this year.

The speakers at AdTech -- in fact everyone I've spoken to in the ad and marketing world -- is expecting spending on print and conventional media to shrink. But they all expect the digital spend to continue to grow.

Unilever spends 2% of $2.2 billion ad budget on digital.

The big brands are doing very cool things in the digital space.

Nike is offering a virtual soccer bootcamp.

Japanese clothing company Qlo has the very strange and cool Uniqlock.

Companies like Unilever, Kraft, Saturn, IKEA and MacDonalds are running digital campaigns with such things as web series, casual games, utilities and ARGs.

Representatives from the brands and their agencies say they are looking for the innovative and new.

Digital marketing is proving successful:

The Uniqlock has had 180 million viewers in 240 countries.

The diamond Shreddies campaign claims 800000 views for their videos on YouTube.

Many feel Obama's use of the digital space had a huge impact on his campaign. In fact, he is AdAge's marketer of the year. His Yes We Can video shows 13 million views on YouTube alone. He has a 125,000 followers on Twitter and a presence on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Digg and LinkedIn and many more.

Resources:

AdTech's blog and podcast.

AdAge

AdRants

MarketingVox

AdGabber, a social network for the ad biz.

1 Tim Street


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