Interactivity in Movie Theaters

As a part of the new "A Fuller Spectrum of News" campaign, MSNBC.com will launch NewsBreaker, a tricked out Break Out game where bricks become RSS news items.

SS+K, the agency behind the campaign, is also "developing a unique multiplayer version of the game to be played inside movie theaters. It is interactive and relies on collective audience participation.

Several theaters in LA, Philly and NY will be equipped with a camera that tracks the motion of the entire audience. Projected on the screen will be a modified version of the NewsBreaker game and a faint mirror image of the audience in the background.

When the audience leans their bodies to the left in their seats, the paddle on the bottom will react with their movement and move to the left. When the ball makes it way towards the right, they will all have to collectively lean to the right to keep the ball in play, and so on. Like NewsBreaker, many of the bricks will have msnbc.com headlines (via RSS) embedded in them, that fall as the bricks are destroyed." (source: email tip)

-- thank you, Sam

Update [Apr 12, 2007]: Our friends at Brand Experience Lab are working on the movie theater part of the project. Stay tuned for pics and video.

Earlier:
Fiat Advertises With Interactive Movie in Brazilian Theaters
New Gaming Media: Movie Theaters and DVDs
Movie Screening to Be Enhanced With Scents
Theater Combines Stereo Projection with Live Performance

Geocaching and Advertising

Advertising students in U of Georgia have put together a geocaching (?) campaign to promote Coca-Cola for their entry in the National Student Advertising Competition, the school's newspaper writes:

"The idea being presented by Kapa's team starts with online coordinates for 2,500 different caches on the Coca-Cola Web site. After putting in only their zipcode, a cache-seeker can find GPS coordinates for the closest cache to their position. Then, the treasure hunter can drive to the correct location and look for the cache. Once they find the cache, the treasure hunter would discover a lockbox full of Coca-Cola merchandise."
-- via GPS Lodge

Wireless Card on Visa Platform

"Montreal-based Smart SMS Corp. has signed with mobile marketing firm MP3NY to launch a mobile Visa debit card through Columbia Card Services in the U.S. The T-Weed Wireless Visa, accessible by cell phone, PDA, computer or landline telephone, is being aimed at America’s “unbanked” consumers, small business owners, and immigrants." (Banknet360, more about the platform).

Make a (Decent) Scene with Mr. Clean

Ah, Mr.Clean is soliciting user-created videos. Would amateur porn qualify? Probably not, the rules say. "It must meet basic standards of decency."

In-Game Advertising Update

source: BBC

-- BBC is wondering whether the game industry is about to crash. An EA VP also says game piracy was instrumental in building the brand in Asia. For a historical perspective, check Wikipedia on the Crash of 1983.



source: Gameasure

-- According to the Gameasure (how do you pronounce it?) study by Interpret, the playing audience is vastly underestimated for ad purposes because of the unaccounted pass-along and play-along factor, writes Mediaweek. "Therefore, if advertisers want to truly get a handle on just how many folks will potentially see their ad in a game, media buyers may need to weigh how many gamers play a game per each copy sold--a measure along the lines of the magazine world’s readers-per-copy metric."

-- "Microsoft has made no bones about the fact that it is expecting a combination of ads and subscription revenues to fuel its company-wide "Live" software + services strategy. [...] Katherine Hays, a senior director with Microsoft's platform and services division — and the co-founder of Massive, told March 15 conference-call participants that her division currently has more than 200 active ad campaigns running across 53 game titles. She said Microsoft expects to have in-game advertisements in place in more than 100 game titles before the end of 2007." (ZDNet)

-- GameDaily interviews the CEO of Jogo Media, the newest entrant in the in-game advertising business who takes a swing at the more established competitors: "I look at the funding that IGA and Double Fusion have and I say, 'How are they using it?' Is it going into technologies or are they throwing out money to publishers to secure titles?" But nothing about the technology that, he says, is still in development.

-- Master New Media has a cheat sheet on a number of new virtual world offerings (via Metaversed). For more detailed reviews, go to Betsy Book's Virtual Worlds Review, though.

-- A Danish bank plans to offer services in Second Life, Reuters wrote last month: "Denmark’s Saxo Bank plans to offer Second Life residents the ability to manage their real-life financial portfolios from within the virtual world, and may eventually create a market to trade the Linden dollar against real-world currencies."



-- Lacoste is inviting (in Flash, so no permalink) Second Life avatars to try out for a fashion shoot (till May 4). Send in a pic of your avatar, tell how you dream about world peace, and you get a shot at L$1M to be shared among the winners.

-- Silicon.com asks whether 3D worlds could eventually replace call centers. Wouldn't be a bad idea, really, if you could build a large replica of, say, a computer and literally walk the customer through some upgrade. Speaking of which, Best Buy is opening a Geek Squad island in Second Life.

-- Griefers attack Scion island in Second Life, writes Info Week.

AdAge: Transparency is Overrated

Eric Webber says he doesn't buy all this new-age transparency twittering and prefers his conversations with clients and publics fully clothed and not naked at all, thank you very much: "But it seems to me that all this talk of being "totally transparent" is overrated and takes things entirely too far. What's worse, it's just not honest." He's so getting shredded.

The one thing this whole deal about conversations brings to mind:




Perhaps because I've lived through the original perestroika (?), I'm wary about being irrationally exuberant over this one. I think the Cluetrain Manifesto and its derivatives really boil down to these few principles. My favorite one is about taking naps in the afternoon.



Comments are open (moderated for spam).

Offtopic: Change in Blog Name

I started this blog as a school project while at MIT CMS and then kept it going after the graduation last August. Even though I'm still affiliated with the program, I haven't been feeling it was appropriate to use the school's name and have been slowly phasing it out, and now I'm dropping the MIT part entirely, so it's just Advertising Lab from now on. There's a problem with FeedBurner not wanting to play with Blogger, so the RSS feeds will be under the old name until I sort things out. Since I've been the lonely poster here (with the readers' and tipsters' help, of course, and a few exceptions) from the start, there shouldn't be any change in quality.

And this is probably a good time to point in the direction of the remodeled Billboardom.

-- ilya

Offtopic: Karmasheetra

Karmasheetra has nothing to do with the topic of this blog, but I thought I'd share anyway.
Here's something to make this post less offtopic:

Ford truck matches
(source: advertka)

Earlier:
Rethinking Matchbox Ads

100 Million iPods Served

image source: wikipedia

"Apple today announced that the 100 millionth iPod has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in November 2001, and since then Apple has introduced more than 10 new iPod models, including five generations of iPod, two generations of iPod mini, two generations of iPod nano and two generations of iPod shuffle."
-- press release

Selling TV Ad Time By Frame

In a plot inspired by the Million Dollar Home Page, OurAdTV.com is raising money by selling individual frames in a TV ad they are planning to run on the national TV once all inventory is sold out, although, the site warns, "of course we will not be on prime time." Some math from the makers: the video will be 8.5 minutes long, or, at 25 frames per second, 12,750 frames total. Eight frames have been sold as of this post. You can buy more than one frame. If you buy two seconds worth of frames, you'll get to insert you own sound effect. The goal is to raise half-a-million bucks.

It looks like they will need to do some recalculation because NTSC (the American TV format, see wiki) is 30fps. The guy who's put the site together is from Portugal, which, I think, runs on PAL at 25fps. The site also encourages people to buy the frames ASAP since the first 30 seconds are probably the most valuable.

In case you are wondering, a frame in a 30-sec Superbowl ad that this year cost $2.6M is $2,889 (at 30fps, that is).

Earlier:
One Second Commercials
GE Launches Campaign of One-Second Commercials
Million Dollar Building
Million Dollar Peepshow
Last Pixels On the Million Dollar Home Page Sold