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.