Schools Sell Naming Rights

"A suburban Detroit school district has decided to sell naming rights to buildings and athletics facilities."
-- USA Today, x-posted on Branding Cultures

Earlier:
Advertising on School Buses

Virgin Atlantic Podcasts Travel Destinations

Virgin Atlantic airline started offering audio (podcast) guides to major destination cities. The first one is New York; you can listed to a sample here, or download the entire thing here. I can't wait for the Virgin Galactic to follow suite.
-- via Adverblog

Earlier:
Podcasting: Advertising on iPod

Study: TV Viewing is Rising

Who would have thought? "TV viewership is actually up over the past four years, according to new research from Turner Broadcasting, and it’s been climbing over the very same years that internet penetration has grown. People may be using the internet more, but they’re also turning on their TVs more."
-- Media Life Magazine via Lost Remote

MTV Games to Sell In-Game Ads

Adverblog points out that not only MTV is launching a game devision, but it is also planning to sell in-game ads, as their recent press release says.

Ringtone Kiosk

Just came across a month-old story about McDonald's testing kiosks for downloading ringtones straight to users' cell phones. In case you want one of those in your basement, here's where you can get it.

Earlier:
Content-Vending Machines
Ringtone Advertising - Check

Video Feeds from Brain

Unmediated says (quoting someone else) that this article (pdf) titled "Reconstructed Natural Scenes from Ensemble Responses in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus" is actually about how to extract video feeds from a brain. Being at the wrong department at MIT, I can't really tell, but consider this quote: "From the activity of 177 cells, we have reconstructed natural scenes with recognizable moving objects."

Earlier:
Sony Patents Telepathy
Future: Product Placement in Dreams

Ringtone Advertising - Check

Six months after I first whined how nobody was making their brand tunes into free ringtones, somebody finally did. Check out Purina's offerings: precisely their theme tune, a bark and a meow. And cell-phone wallpapers, too.

Foodvertising: Cookiegram

"Let us personally deliver your message on a delicious chocolate chip cookie! Any message you wish... great for corporate logos and promotions, or just to make someone's day!" Can you cookiegram "you are fired" to make someone's day? Anyway, I think that's the service mentioned by Brendan and Jana in their famous job hunting story.

Earlier on edible ads:
Advertising With Alphabet Soup
Branding Food With Laser Cutter
Branded Food: M&Ms
Branding Food

People Are Taking More Pictures Than Ever

"America's amateur photographers produced 28 billion digital pictures last year, 6 billion more than they shot on film, even though only half as many own a digital camera, according to the market research firm InfoTrends. People are not just switching formats. They are taking more pictures, 13 billion more last year on film and digital combined than in 2000, when the price of digital cameras began to decline.

Some critics warn that a great photograph's singular power to trigger memory may be at risk. For many people a photograph they have seen a thousand times itself becomes the memory. With digital pictures it is rare for a single photograph to achieve that kind of status."
-- NY Times

DVRs Used To Replay Ads

"While research increasingly shows that a high percentage of DVR users do skip through commercials, new information suggests there is a DVR advertising upside--including the fact that people actually use the devices to replay interesting commercials, and they appear to be restoring the kind of family viewing that marketers and agencies relish."
-- Media Post

Earlier:
Study Shows DVRs Lesser Threat Than Feared
One-Third of DVR Users Watch Ads

Epidiascope Strikes Back

Remember that piece of presentation hardware with an arcane name "epidiascope"? Well, Samsung just got a silver IDEA award for creating a digital presenter, or an epidiascope on high-tech steroids. Business Week writes: "The Techwin UF-80 can capture images of both flat objects (such as documents) or 3-D objects and relay them to an LCD projector or via the Internet to a remote audience."

Hypersonic Sound Laser For Sale on eBay

If you are interested in buying that mega-cool sound laser beam, Boing Boing says one of them is now selling on eBay. The starting bid was $800, it now (10 am CST Monday) has reached $1825. But, "DO NOT BID on this auction if you plan to [...] use the unit for abruptive advertising (to traffic or people passing by your store/billboard/etc)." Can we use it for non-abruptive advertising, thank you very much?

Event: Ads In Games Forum

The Game Initiative is putting together a West-coast edition of its "Advertising in Games" forum, which will happen in San Francisco on July 28. More on this website.

Second Life Launches In-Game Video Feed

Boing Boing quotes Corante: "Second Life, a multiplayer online game, has launched a live video stream from their virtual world that you can watch on their homepage."

Flashback: Boombox Keyboard

Music Thing came across a boombox museum featuring this amazing Casio boombox with a real keyboard.

The Coming Death of Audio Cassette

"The cassette may have hissed, been prone to wow and flutter, and often ended its life chewed in a tape deck, but it ruled for four decades before MP3s and downloads.
However, the cassette's reign now seems to be over."
-- BBC

Earlier:
The End Of Analog Audio Reels
Who's Killing Whom

Rethinking TV Design

"Gone forever is the complacent view that consumers should have to accept mass produced gray boxes in the center of their living rooms, bedrooms and offices. We believe this landmark launch will change the TV market in the United States forever," says a VP if sales at Hannspree, a company that just had launched a line of TV sets that look like anything but TV sets.
-- DesignTechnica

Alien Crop Circles Advertising

Become an alien and spread your ads all over the unspecting farmers' fields. Pictured above is a production by the CircleMakers for Nike in Italy. Here's another circle maker called Mount Baldy, and an oldish article in Wired.

Cell Phones Switch To Affect Media Consumption

"The number of people who use cell phones as their exclusive or primary telecommunications device is growing rapidly, and this raises important questions about their media consumption patterns--especially for mobile media such as radio, implies the new Arbitron study. The findings are important, because many believe that cell phone-only individuals are growing rapidly--and their behavior is beginning to influence how they use other media, as well as how marketing and media researchers measure them. Among other things, federal law prohibits market researchers from utilizing so-called random digit dialing phone survey techniques for mobile phones, a popular method of marketing research."
-- Media Post

"Face Off" Chat Bot

More robotic goodness fit for advertising; this doll (left, I guess) has a screen for face that displays any likeness you care to upload into it. Has a built-in projector, a DVD drive, and was developed in Japan under the name "Chatty".
-- Yahoo via BoingBoing

More Advertising Robots
Advertising Robots, Part III
Advertising Robots, Part II
Advertising Robots

Yahoo Tests Behaviour-Targeted Text Ads

"Yahoo has begun testing a program to show text listings on Web pages based on user behavior. In a pilot program with Revenue Science, a Bellevue, Wash., behavioral-targeting company, Yahoo's cost-per-click text ads are shown on Web pages using data collected by Revenue Science. The test comes weeks before Yahoo is expected to release its own AdSense-like contextual advertising network."
-- AdWeek

Ads On Sand

Her love for Snapple may be written in sand, but its impact is no less stronger. Beach 'n' Billboard has upgraded the municipal beach cleaning machines to print what can be world's largest billboards without a single drop of ink.

Teaching Old TV New Tricks

From the advertising festival in Cannes, USA Today writes about the recognition given to the new uses of the old media. "Renault Nissan Deutschland took the Grand Prix in Direct Marketing with two German TV ads — one happy, one sad — that ran at the same time on two different channels. Viewers were asked to click back and forth with their remotes, then were directed to a Web site to the story's ending. Clorox won a Media Lion for an ad stunt in Colombia that involved temporarily zapping the color from a TV show. When the color reappeared, a bottle of Clorox Bleach for Colors flashed. "All of a sudden, the passive medium of TV becomes interactive," says Joel Sobelson, chief creative officer of ad's agency, Wunderman, New York.

Wired Writes on Neuromarketing

Wired writes on emerging mind control ad technology that lots of people are dismissing as bogus science (a recent conference on neuromarketing had to be canceled due to lack of interest): "Scientists are scanning brain activity in the hopes of catching sight of the physical mechanisms that determine whether you prefer Coke over Pepsi. The nascent research, known as "neuromarketing," could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes." It's interesting that CalTech is already in the game.

Study Predicts Rise Of Out-Of-Home Media

"In less than five years, consumers will be spending $60 billion annually on DVR-like devices, satellite radio, iPods and mobile technology driving personalized media outside of the home. One-fifth of all consumer spending will be on new content access and distribution technologies now in their early stages of growth, according to Bernstein Research."
-- Hollywood Reporter