Hardware Store as Contest Prize

The April issue of MediaPost's Media Magazine has an article (free reg.) about a contest by Ace Hardware with a prize that's as unusual as it is exciting: a one million dollar hardware store in Houston, TX:

"In an effort to make an impact with an advertising budget far smaller than what the big-box retailers spend, Oak Brook, Ill.-based Ace Hardware execs created a “once in a lifetime” contest linked to the company’s entrepreneurial philosophy. “[Dream Ace] is for all those who have always wanted to own their own business, but life always seemed to get in the way,” says Paula Erickson, director of advertising and brand development."


The winner Gower Talley with "The Apprentice I" winner Bill Rancic.

Check out the official contest rules: the participants had to write three short essays, take a "sales aptitude test", go to a bootcamp, submit a marketing plan, among other things. Pretty serious stuff.

Why Blog Feed Readers Unsubscribe

The top five reasons why people unsubscribe from blog feeds out of 34 identified by ProBlogger:

• Too many posts (the post levels are too overwhelming)
  
• Infrequent Posting (or the blog is effectively dead)
• Partial Excerpts Feeds
  
• Blog Changes Focus (too much off topic posting)
  
• Too many posts that I see elsewhere (redundant, repeated or recycled news)
  

-- via Mark Goren

Sim Game Teaches TV Ad Planning

TV Station Manager is an indie game of the simulation / tycoon genre that puts you in the shoes of, surprise, a TV station manager. Wonder if it can be used for training; will run it by the agency's media guys to see how accurate it is. From the game description:

"In this game, you'll take the role of a new manager, just graduated, which is appointed by an almost bankrupt TV Station, hoping that you'll be able to fix the situation and maybe even raise the TV Channel popularity.

The day starts at 5:00 pm and ends at midnight. You don't have to necessarily fill all the slots: by default the TV management will put some minor show/ads, you need to decide only the most important ones.

You'll have to choose which ads to show during a particular show. Some ads are just geared towards a generic audience, so the only important thing will be the attendance, while other ads might require a particular kind of audience, so are more difficult to put. Each ads has also a number of time to be shown, and a deadline."

Wonder if after having played this game with some success and getting the sense of the business constraints, people will be more tolerant of the real TV ads.



-- via gamesetwatch

Endemol Takes Its Shows To 3D

Apparently inspired by the successes of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach and its own Big Brother show set in Second Life, Endemol is teaming up with EA to build Virtual Me (virtualme.com redirects to EA press room), a virtual world that will allow "avatars to compete in online versions of Deal or No Deal, Fame Academy and Big Brother." Coming soon.
-- BBC. Screens and press release on info.ea.com.

Study: In-Game Ad Spend $295M This Year

More datapoints from the eMarketer study: "eMarketer projects that $295 million of the 2007 total will be spent on in-game advertising and that spending on advergaming (the creation of games for the purpose of promoting a brand) will reach $207 million. By 2011, the balance between the two will have shifted significantly. US spending on advergaming will climb to $344 million in 2011, but US spending on in-game advertising will climb faster, reaching a total of $625 million that year."
-- press release

Offtopic: Gallery of Light

Enjoying a few spare hours on my first trip to New Orleans, wondered off to the French Quarter and stumbled upon this amazing Gallery of Light.

More Refreshments for Gamers

Woosung Ahn writes in response to the Mountain Dew for Gamers post to point out two similar tie-ins between Pringles, Coke and Lineage 2, a popular MMORPG, done a few years ago in Korea. Of course, there was another famous collaborationg between Coke and World of Warcraft in China that among other things resulted in this ad and this launch event (and a site that seems dead now).

NY Times on Collective Preferences

NY Times on the network effect: "Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing."

The author is a professor of sociology at Columbia Uni and has written a book called Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.

-- thank you, Mark.

Million Axe Home Page

I was wondering if a big brand would ever tap into the (now fading) popularity of the Million Dollar Home Page. Axe just did, in Brazil. It's apparently part of a larger campaign that involves a webcam stripper on YouTube (NSFW and in Portuguese), a phone number, an answering machine, and one other site that isn't yet live.
-- thank you, Gisele

Earlier:
Million Dollar Building
Million Dollar Peepshow

The Future According to Intel

A YouTube video by Intel showing the company's vision of the future: interconnected devices with voice recognition and sleek interfaces. (via Engadget).