The Shortest PR Pitch

Google "Rampenfest". Short. To the point. (How did they get to the top of Google results? Because of the URL?)

The "Interesting BWM viral" is this movie below (the campaign started some time in February with a teaser). There are also a few satellite sites, such as this one for the town Oberpfaffelbachen. Even though the town is mythical, you can find touristy pictures of it on Flickr. See also a blog by the documentary's maker and his YouTube profile.

An aside: gotta start hoarding accounts on popular sites so that they look "aged" by the time they are put to action.



Earlier:
How to pitch bloggers

Time's Blog Rank Buggy

Something's not right with Time's rank of 25 top blogs. #21 on this list is The Dullest Blog in the World, a literary masterpiece of a diary that hasn't been updated for two years. When you click on the corresponding cell in the table, you are taken to a description of a different blog called Regret the Error. Is Time trying to tell us something? To quote Time, "Everyday, thousands of bonehead mistakes are printed in newspapers and magazines and go out over the airwaves, and only a tiny fraction of the errors are ever corrected."

Don't know why I'm posting about this linkbaiting list at all.

KazInvestBank (КазИнвестБанк): About Face

[navel gazing]

A reader-friend from Kazakhstan (where's that) sends in this link to KazInvestBank that has this picture of the AdLab editor (me! me!) working as a skate guard all over its site and most prominently on the About page. Unexpected and unauthorized, but I like.

Let's see now if this post gets to Google's top for the bank's name.

Earlier:
Can you use Flickr pics in ads?

[/navel gazing]

Absolut Nationalism

Note to self: Only approve creative that offends people in the countries that either don't import your product or don't have the internets and photoshops.

In Mexico, Absolut is running a print and a billboard that shows Mexico with borders from the early 1800s as part of its In An Absolut World campaign. LA Times blogs about it; pissed off readers create their own version of an ideal world:



Absolut responds on the campaign blog (742 comments to date): "As a global company, we recognize that people in different parts of the world may lend different perspectives or interpret our ads in a different way than was intended in that market. Obviously, this ad was run in Mexico, and not the US -- that ad might have been very different."

As one of the commenters on the blog points out, Absolut sales by country in 2007 were 50% for the US, 3% for Mexico.

This is fun. The creative is gonna be a hit on the Balkans where every country dreams of a "Greater" (and historically accurate) version of itself. A good place to start is Serbia that just lost Kosovo. Here, let me help: Greater Bulgaria, Greater Albania, Greater Macedonia, Greater Serbia, Greater Romania, Greater Croatia.

Kinda like this Smart billboard from South Africa boasting how there's nothing American about the car.

Earlier:
Local Billboards and Global Information

Branded Human Hair

"Dr. LaPierre's group [at McMaster University in Hamilton's department of engineering] used a focus ion beam microscope (FIB) to shoot a beam of gallium ions at the surface of a human hair, carving atoms off the of the surface of the hair to etch these McMaster University logos."
-- BoingBoing

Earlier:

• Nano-Advertising with Insects
• Advertising on Bugs
• Advertising on Eggs
• Advertising on Leaves
• Branded Butterfly Wings
  

It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature

Does it count as engagement when people are blogging about your art dept's Photoshopping blunders? Can you claim that these errors are in fact Easter Eggs?

Also:
Ads in Game Easter Eggs
Easter Eggs in Products

Gmail Soap - PR campaign

These images of Gmail-branded soap have been circulating around over the past couple of months and eventually ended up on a Wired blog along with many others. They have been dismissed as either a clever Photoshop job or an art project. Instead, the soap apparently was an actual campaign done to promote Gmail's spam filtering might to Russian students. The connection is the Russian wordplay on the soundalike slang for email and soap. The copy on package reads: "Gmail: the cleanest soap." There's an entire YouTube channel full of Russian CGM on the subject. There's an official statement from Google's Russian PR people on Sostav.ru.

You've seen this recent Russian TV spot for Gmail, of course.

Balihoo’s RFI/RFP Module [Ad]

Cutting Inefficiencies out of the Process

This is the third post in the series. Today, Shane Vaughan explains Balihoo's RFI/RFP management features.



Balihoo’s step-by-step RFI/RFP builder allows buyers to easily create fully-customizable requests.


"My last post focused on building a consideration set. Today let’s talk about the next step in the media buying and planning process: the RFI/RFP.

Media buyers know the RFI/RFP step in the planning process is where they’d like a wormhole to appear and shorten the journey from request to fulfillment. The administrative burden is heavy and inefficiencies abound. Today information is often gathered via email with the requisite Excel attachment. Numerous emails are sent, some disappear into the ether, while others spawn responses yielding carpal-tunnel-inducing hours of cutting and pasting. Here’s where Balihoo earns the moniker “Advertising’s Best Friend”.

Whether it’s a request for information or a formal proposal, Balihoo offers a step-by-step process to build a fully-customizable RFI/RFP. Buyers can send along budget information or upload documents to accompany their request. Proposal grids within the tool allow for greater organization of data. Another time-saver is the ability to save RFIs/RFPs as templates for future campaigns; no more creating requests from scratch.

Getting an RFI/RFP to the right person and obtaining a timely response are obviously critical. To that end, Balihoo contains contact information for each property in our database. And if a buyer’s go-to rep (or property, for that matter) isn’t in the tool, they are easily added. As for responses, Balihoo’s data research team works with sellers to get your requests the attention they deserve. As those responses come in, data flow into an online worksheet for easy analysis. There’s no need to aggregate data from disparate documents into one – Balihoo securely manages the data for you.

Media sellers save resources and time by using one interface with prepopulated standard data fields. Balihoo makes the communication of necessary data easier and more efficient for sellers and buyers alike."

[This is a post by AdLab's advertiser]

Study: Why E-Mails Are Often Misunderstood

image credit: csmonitor

Paper "Egocentrism over E-Mail" (2005, pdf): "People tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else."

Assorted April Media Hoaxes

This year's ad prank is Trust Banners that gain "consumer trust through high frequency (90fps) banner adverts which stimulate specific regions of the visual cortex (Visual area V5/MT) producing instant effects on consumers."





Turning black and white TVs into color sets by wrapping them in nylon stockings must be the best media-related April 1 hoax ever (Orson Welles's War of the Worlds was on Halloween so it doesn't qualify). Above is the original broadcast on the Swedish TV back from April 1, 1962.





Among the pranks that would actually make sense to implement for real is last year's announcement by XM radio that it is launching a new channel entirely powered by podcasts.


The always adorable Google added a new function to Docs this year that creates a blank document with an outline of a paper airplane.



Also:
Remote Control Jammer Chip Activated By Commercials