It's interesting to see how a product is launched in two test countries at the same time. The case is Coca-Cola BlaK.

(Big images in post - continue reading more inside!)

It seems that doing film festival ads is the latest way to get some great work done. Wong Doody has teamed up with FAD to create these three spots for the Seattle International Film Festival. The song's lyrics are great and the original music was composed by Downtown Composer Collective. Superadgrunts, check them out inside.

The information age has become an attention economy. Michael H. Goldhaber states: "If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as "the information age" suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions - stars vs. fans - and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality."

How can internet marketers tap into this attention economy? Well, one surefire way of capturing the attention of millions is to implement a "hoax marketing" strategy. In SEO terms, a hoax marketing campaign can generate thousands upon thousands of quality backlinks; which, as I'm sure you know, is a prerequisite for a high PageRank.

Hoaxes are also excellent fodder for viral marketing campaigns. People go nuts for a weird or controversial story; they feel empowered because they are privy to a gem of secret knowledge. Inevitably, they then feel compelled to pass on the message via word of mouth/mouse. Within no time the knowledge of the hoax has mushroomed.

Hoax marketing campaigns have been popping up all over the net recently. An excellent example would have to be the one orchestrated by the graffiti site stillfree.com:
(more inside)

1. Be wary of agencies owned by a Holding Co. Be particularly wary of those Holding Companies whose stock price is either perpetually falling or precariously hanging around pre-pubescence.

2. If the Creative Director utters something like, "We really want to turn the work around. We feel we're poised to do just that. We're just a key player or two from making this happen. The clients are on board, too," immediately terminate the interview.

(more inside...)

The new Sony Campaign, created by McKinney-Silver, Durham, NC is a classic example of a small, literal idea, wrapped with a bushel of dough, just like an overpriced mold begotten burrito. Let's see. The product bennie is simple enough: the digital camera is equipped with anti-blur technology. Nice. The ad campaign is not so nice. It's not mean. It’s just, well, beat. Flat. Zzzz.

The concept: The camera takes such clear pictures that it unleashes the picture taker's muse. Formula: "Unleash your inner muse." The campaign follows the logical next step, which is, to show the muse being 'unleashed'.

Frankly, it's lame ideas like this that give advertising a bad name.

CNN/Money reports that Geico is filing suit over a :60 radio ad for Tri-State Consumer Insurance Co. of Jericho, N.Y. Why? Because Geico claims that the ad "misappropriates Geico's gecko trademark, confusing consumers into thinking that Geico's gecko is associated with Tri-State."

Ok. But, when you read what the ad is about, you have to stop and wonder, exactly how stupid does Geico think people are.

Trying to get to an article on Adage.com over the weekend was unsuccessful as the site was down for maintainence. The reason? A redesign which launched today. Scott Donaton gives a sum up about the redesign and the reasoning behind it. It definitely has much more of a "blog" feel to the layout now compared to before. One new plus is not having to be logged in to read the front page news. They have also added the ability to add comments to news stories. Currently their opinion poll for the site is split down the middle between "it's worse" and "it's better." Hopefully they will work out the kinks in the design, such as overlapping columns (in what I'm guessing is css) on some of the pages.

With large billboards and newspaper ads SAS advertises their direct flights from Gothenburg to sixteen different destinations in Europe. On a map of Europe the destinations have been renamed, to Gothenburg neighbourhoods to illustrate. A pretty funny idea, if these neighbourhoods had been positioned somewhat like the neighbourhoods of Gothenburg actually are. Västra Frölunda (West Frölunda) should be out west, naturally. (read more).

You know it's April 1st when you read a story abut *any* brand branding the Moon.

Google plans to brand its logo into the surface of the moon so that it is visible from Earth.

The search giant will pay the US government an estimated $1bn for the rights to the lunar land.

"You've heard of Google Mars and Google Earth, where we show you maps of those planets? Well this is Google Moon, where we become the world's biggest brand," said an unnamed source at the company.

Yeah, right. It's going to be carved into the cheesy surface too huh? If this is VNUNET's April Fool's, maybe they need to spend some time next year coming up with an original idea.

Related though, Google "launched" Google Romance. Now that is a bit more original.

It's definitely not a case of badland, but when I first saw Adidas' new spots for their a3 Gigaride I did experience a bit of deja vu. I instantly thought of Gyro's GBH's Puma campaign from the beginning of last year. In one way it's a bit odd as these ads are not your usual Adidas fare. A tiny bit of digging, and I found that both Adidas and Puma are owned by brothers but not by the same parent company. So perhaps that's it. Could it be some subliminal way to tell the world they are linked? Nah.

More spots inside for you SuperAdgrunt folk.

Adidas a3 Gigaride - Rhinos

The blog Things that suck touches on the design industry, politics, and American life in general.

It's perfect timing really, as just this week I came across an announcement (thanks Ronnie) concerning what I have on my own list of 'Things that suck' - unethical spec competitions.

The United Way Logo Contest for Toronto is, in my opinion, a spec contest.
(more inside)

Yesterday Adweek pointed out FCB Chicago's new ad for KFC's Buffalo Snacker. The twist? You have to play the spot in slow-mo to get the "secret code" which will get you a coupon for a free sandwich. But not everyone has a DVR. So they have made the spot viewable on their website as well.

Could this be the wave of change to allay DVR fears?

I've been saddened to see the Wikepedia spammed even more often these days by shady people who wish to push their own agenda, political or advertising wise. It's not a new phenomenon of course, a big place that anyone can edit will be edited by anyone, including marketers, although most of the latter might not want to admit to doing it. Except McKinney & Silver in Durham, North Carolina. They frankly, seem proud of their achievement as if they were the first to think of spamming anything.

I will not link your million pixel scam
I will not link them
Dabitch, I am

I will not link them here or there
I will not link them anywhere
I will not link the million pixel car
I will not link the million pixel bar

I will not link the million pixel room
I will not link your million pixel doom
Startup copycats, sitting on the pillion pixel tomb
Lagging behind, hoping for a million pixel boom

I would not link them, even when the pixels Alex&Trump mock
I would not link them, even the superbowl pixel schlock
I will not link your million pixel scam

Previously we wrote about the Ad Free Blog banner a that we had found at Stay Free Magazine, where we also spotted the No Ads Ring. The writer and friends of utopianhell have thought long and hard about the business of being ad free.

Pete Blackshaw of recently merged Intelliseek/Bzzmetrics asks today on ClickZ "Are You Asking the Ultimate Marketing Question?".

In some ways it came as a big relief to hear one of WOMMA’s founders talk about the use of Reicheld's Net Promoter Score (NPS) to actually predict business growth by measuring customer recommendation rates, particularly as WOMMA's WOM Unit metric was a little weak on the ROI front.

However, as Walker Information's Chief Research Methodologist Doug Grisaffe points out "there are several critical logical, conceptual and statistical problems with Reichheld's proposition" (read more)

A NYTimes article titled Advertising Is Obsolete. Everyone Says So. reports on the WOMMA conference held at the end of last week titled "Word of Mouth Vs. Advertising". And as usual, WOMMA is telling people "Don't advertise."

First off, isn't word of mouth a form of advertising? Why, yes, yes it is! Well, imagine that. Even on WOMMA's blog, people have been arguing the fact that WOM is advertising. So why even bother pitting the two against each other? One word: buzz.

And second, word of mouth cannot work solely on its own. To say so is just stupid. WOMMA seems to think that they are the magical marketing and advertising solution. And the sad thing about it is that it tarnishes the entire image of word of mouth.

CTA Tattler tells of their encounter with a blue faced US cellular walking ad-man where his blue face and annoying habit to yap loudly on a mobile phone while in transit is paid off with "Talk Until You're Blue in the Face, with U.S. Cellular." written on his backpack. Apart from the terrible pun, how annoying isn't it when people yap loudly on a mobile phone on the buses and trains?

AT&T has rolled out the biggest ad campaign in the history of AT&T and SBC Communications. The national campaign with the slogan "Your world. Delivered." is expected to run in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The ad campaign which pits the telco against cable operators who already sell telephone services debuted on TV on New Year's Eve and may prove to be the first mistake they made.
See sarcastically headlined Oh boy! Now at last AT&T offers blogging flickr photos and venom posted in blogs - the poster which reads "Blogging delivered" is causing laughing fits all over the web. AT&T can kiss my RSS says horsepigcow who also has a photo of an AT&T printad which reads "Your delivered". Yeah "Your delivered" not You're. Eff knows what it's supposed to mean. Perhaps AT&T can explain?
I guess the "blogging delivered" one - apart from piggybacking on current hype - is meant to mean that they deliver the net to you, therefore they deliver the blogging you do to you. I want to see "Spam delivered" and "Viruses delivered" posters now, while they're at it, taking credit for shit they don't do.

AdScape is a web-based project investigating ad creep in public spaces and how ads reflect the socioeconomic environments in which they are displayed, created by Parsons student Alexis Lloyd.

Alexis has walked around East Harlem, SoHo and the upper east side documenting the advertising smog . One could plot some pretty graphs with all this data, and here you can see just how many ads everyone can see each day, even if they never turn on their television, or read newspapers and magazines.

All these ads are traditional media. Shop window signs, flyers and guerrilla marketing stunts not counted in this project.