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Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year

How many days left till Christmas?!

I want to wish everyone that stops by here a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, and thanks for taking the time to read the posts.

We'll be resuming with everything in the new year, so
hope to hear from you in 2006!

3-D Ads

Here are some cool 3-D ads that don't require any glasses, to be placed in bars and clubs:

"Ads are placed on flat-panel screens in bars and nightclubs and appear in 3D. Special glasses aren’t required to view the ads. The program, called NightVision, was recently featured in Media Life's Alternative Media Report.

The ads comprise 50 percent of a two-and-one-half-hour loop. The other half is devoted to enterntainment, such as movie trailers and clips, and promotions for the particular nightspot, such as drink specials, upcoming acts and ladies' nights.

Only the ads are in 3D. They are 30 seconds in length and are played 15 times during the loop. Advertisers can sponsor the network, including the entertainment segments.

Creative can be modified from existing television ads or can be developed specifically for the venue.

The auto-stereoscopic technology makes ad content appear to float 2 feet to 4 feet in front of the screen." (read more) via adverlab

More good ideas from ihaveanidea

A little late in posting these funny spots from Toronto-based ihaveandidea.org, produced with Taxi.

It's been a great year for the site, and we want to personally thank them for the inspiration and guidance in 2005.

All the best in the new year, Jay and Ignacio.

Spare Links

British Airways to introduce SMS marketing
Reuters video service for affiliates
If Not TV, Then What? (Clickz)
Advertising and technology trends for 2010

Jazzier Print Ads?

This is not the first time reading about blinking/singing, enhanced print ads, and they still sound pretty irrtitating:

"As more advertisers turn to sexier means of brand building, such as guerrilla marketing or more interactive forms of communication, the appeal of a product on a page pales in comparison.

But increasingly, advertisers are appealing to magazine readers through sight and sound. Later this month, ads for the ABC reality competition Dancing With the Stars will appear in Time Inc.’s People and Entertainment Weekly where a dancer will pop up and twirl. And in January, Wenner Media’s Rolling Stone will use sales brochures that will include a sound clip of the classic song “On the Cover of Rolling Stone” to promote its 1,000th issue." (read more)

Cross-Media, the Tickle U way

From the outset, the world of Tickle U was envisioned as a dual experience of TV shows paired with a Web site. It was created, Cahn says, as a collaborative effort between the TV programming division and the new media department. The site is promoted frequently on-air, and it's thematically very similar.

"The goal was to have the screens be almost seamless," Cahn says. "What they see online is not dissimilar to what they see on TV, at least in terms of layout, color, and play patterns."

Sherri Glass, supervising producer for Tickle U online, says the new media department met early on with the show's creators and watched all the episodes.

"The goal was to keep the child's experience in mind," Glass says. "Kids become obsessed with one particular character or show, so we wanted to be able to have them go to that page and feel immersed in that world."

The online games and activities also had to make sense with what kids saw on TV. "The packaging of the show had to be reflected online, and we had to make sure the games and activities reflected the show."

Cahn now wonders whether the TV is directing kids to the site, or vice versa. "We used to assume TV was the driver, but frankly I'm not convinced that's the truth anymore." (continue reading)

Death of Advertising

Good way to think about the death of advertising, I guess:

"When the Internet exploded with political blogs and Napster destroyed the music business, people argued that information wanted to be free. Unfortunately, the people who create information want to make as much money as possible. So when a guy with 12 million listeners figures out that he can make more by directly charging his customers, the old, annoying, inefficient advertising model of interrupting our programming with diaper ads — whether we had a baby or not — is in big trouble.

At this rate, we'll soon have to directly pay the real cost for most of our high-quality media. And this is when the revolution starts. Take away welfare, send their kids to war in Iraq — poor people will deal with it. But now that they've taken away Stern's "lesbian-dial-a-date," there could be rioting in the streets.

That would be fair. In today's society, entertainment is education. Not having seen "The Sopranos" is the modern equivalent of not knowing which fork to use." (LA Times)

QL Links

We're back following four very rainy days in San Francisco.

Here are some links we're catching up with:

Wikipedia co-founder's new project
Feel good, be successful
Stealth-marketing, the Onion take
Disagreggation now!

More on Transmedia

Grant McCracken with some more thoughts on "transmedia" and branding.
"Transmedia" is a powerful idea, as it effectively addresses, and potentially resolves,  a number of thorny issues surrounding media fragmentation, consumer-created-content, co-creation, brand meaning management and the erosion of mass culture. My head's still spinning reading Grant's thoughts!

...could we, should we, open brand or cadet narratives to many authors in several media.  This is the heart of transmedia.  To quote Jenkins once more, "A transmedia story unfolds across multiple meida platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole."  Could this be allowed to happen for Mr. Clean or Sophie?

Here too the corporate instinct is to dig in and say "no." After all, the brand manager is supposed to manage brand meanings, and, surely, this can't mean handing over the reins to everyone.  But isn't this already a central problem of the cocreation strategy, and isn't this very much in keeping with our understanding that brands that have immaculate conception and hermetic seals  are not really very interesting to the world any more.  Letting lots of people play is a problem that all of us face already.

No, the real issue with the Jenkinsian challenge is allowing other professional meaning managers in on the game.  It is one thing to allow consumers in on the game of meaning manufacture.  It is quite another to bring in film makers, comic book artists, bloggers, writers, and then to let them loose in all the media they represent.  How would we exercise any thing like David Aaker's branding discipline in a world like this?  There are too many cooks in the kitchen.  Too many messages in the world.  No real chance to control the inevitable diversity of treatment that would ensue.  No real way of protecting oneself from brand mischief or malice.

They Had So Much In Common

MERDE!

A love-struck Frenchman wooed the online girl of his dreams for six months - only to discover at their first meeting that he had in fact been chatting up his own mother, Yahoo! reports.

This nightmare scenario (for Daniel Anceneaux that is - as far as we're concerned Xmas has come early) began when the Marseilles X-Ray technician came across a fellow internet lurv-seeker called Sweet Juliette.

A shaken Anceneaux takes up the story: "Mum called herself Sweet Juliette and I called myself The Prince of Pleasure, and unfortunately, neither one of us had any idea who the other was. The conversations even got a little racy a couple of times. (via Yahoo!)