SocialCASTER:

Simply Awesome Campaign for Transport of London

via AdverBlog

Stunning. Emotional. Creative. Groundbreaking. Post 9/11 "keep your eyes open" public safety ads.

• The Man with The Bowler Hat
• A Familiar Face
• The Forgetful Lady

Orville Redenbacher-Brand of The Undead

via AdFreak

Ok, this ad isn't even funny. It's just plain bad, creepy, and really embarassing. I started watching this commercial thinking it was a parody and that maybe there would be some clever zombie joke or really special effects near the end. But no, this is a real commercial.

$26mm in Funding for In Game Ad Agency Double Fusion

In Game Ad Agency Double Fusion just got a whopping $26,000,000 in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP). Round participants also include the company’s existing investors, Accel Partners and Jerusalem Venture Partners, and strategic investors Time Warner, Hearst Corporation, IDG Ventures Pacific and Sedona Capital (Japan).

The press release states that Double Fusion will be using most of the money to help scale the agency internationally. That's pretty huge. In game advertising is growing very rapidly and has a great built in audience.

Earlier this month Double Fusion signed an exclusive deal with game publisher Take Two Interactive Software to handle North American and European advertising sales and integration with up to nine of Take Two’s 2K and 2K Sports titles. Double Fusion will handle advertising across all consoles except for the XBOX (XBOX is made by Microsoft who owns  in-game ad agency Massive).

The question is will publishers pass the saving from this new revenue stream to the consumers? Probably not. With games costing up to $20,000,000 to develop every penny counts.

"Ads inside games can bump up the profit margin about $3 per unit, according to Jonathan Epstein, chief executive of in-game ad agency Double Fusion"

Technorati Tags: double fusion in game advertising

So You Want to Start a Social Network

The social networking buzz is pretty hot right now. You are enthusiastic about what it can do for your brand or even what it can do at an enterprise level for collaboration within your company. Or maybe you just have a large group of friends, fans, or family that you want to connect. Basically, you want to build an answer to MySpace, YouTube, and the rest. Let's take a look 9 possible options.

KickApps- A hosted white label solution. They also have a widget platform so your community content can be more viral. Check out their press page for the buzz on them.

CrowdFactory- From the site: "Our backgrounds include key roles at Google, Oracle, Yahoo, Remedy, Intertrust, Tribe.net, and others". That alone makes it worth at least a demo.

Ning- Easily build a photo sharing, video sharing, or community site. They have a company blog too so you can get the inside scoop and pics of the digs. Developer? Ning likes you too.

Sparta- Very corporate homepage. They claim to be "the standard" in social networking software and they seem to cater to brands willing to fork over the hefty $5,495 set up fee for the hosted solution (plus monthly bandwidth charges). They also offer a self hosted enterprise solution with the high end being $125,000 for 5 million users.

Blogtronix- One of the best enterprise 2.0 apps I've read about. Blogs, Wiki, RSS, Podcasting, Rich media support, Mobile accessibility and more. Very social but big brother corporate can still monitor activity and regulate permissions. Click here to watch the app demo on the Scoble Show/Podtech.net

SocialClix- Interesting solution in that users can make any attribute of their profile private or public.

Also, they have p2p (peer to peer) integration for file sharing.

Snapp by Me.com- The platform that powers the community builder site Me.com.

See the demo.

BuddyZone by Vastal- Affordable branded solution. Check out who uses their app here, here, and here.

SocialNetworkServer- One thing I liked about their site was they made a section specifically for prospect seeking the right buzzwords.

Technorati Tags: social networking app apps

Google Gets Into Radio

via MarketingVOX

Google is on a rampage lately. YoutTube news is getting old. JotSpot news wasn't a huge splash. But now I think they are onto something really big: radio. Offline media may not have the hype online and social media does these days, but it still works, especially for local business.

Google and Clear Channel are supposedly in talks for a $1 Billion dollar media buy. I bet Clear Channel is pretty happy about that considering the amount of inventory radio has leftover. This news is big to me because I still love offline media, but would rather deal with it online. Best of all, if I can buy radio spots via AdWords, I'll be a media guru.

BOTTOM LINE: Offline works great for local, better than Google Maps and VirtualEarth. Businesses looking for local advertising still get more from offline.

Technorati Tags: google advertising offline radio

Microsoft VirtualEarth w/VirtualBillboards

Real billboards in virtual worlds. Games, SecondLife, and now MS VirtualEarth.

From TechCrunch

US users with Vista-ready Windows computers and IE 6 or 7 will be able to navigate through an aerial view of 15 select cities with enough detail to discern the texture of buildings and read clickable billboards from the likes of Fox, Nissan and John L. Scott Real Estate. Virtual Earth 3D is expected to expand to cover up to 100 cities around the world by the end of next summer.[...]advertising was being integrated into Virtual Earth for the sake of realism. In real life, soda machines don’t appear with black or white labels - they say Coke or Pepsi on them, he told me. To insufficiently brand Virtual Earth would apparently be irresponsible in some way, perhaps as an artistic or cultural loss.

"Artistic or cultural loss"? Oh man, now we NEED advertising to legitimize our culture even when culture is virtual. I bet some of these quotes will "go viral" in board rooms across America. Suddenly every CEO, PR rep, and media planner will be saying "To insufficiently brand REAL Earth would  be irresponsible. Culture and art are counting on us people!!"

Technorati Tags: microsoft live.com live advertising branding virtual earth

A 30 sec Spot with Impact

I found this on AdRants. The campaign is for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. It's very simple, very effective, and chilling in a subtle way. It's brilliant and I hope it helps shed more light on the problem.

View it here.

Below is one of the print peices (no, it's not sideways).

You can see the rest here. Again, very well done.

Technorati Tags: advertising apav violence women

CafePress uses tagging for ad targeting

Adotas and Techdirt are both reporting that apparel e-retailer CafePress.com will offer contextual advertsing to their affiliates. The program will use tagging to help serve the ads based on relevancy and timeliness. Can we trust owners of CafePress stores not to spam or abuse this?

Technorati Tags: tagging, advertising, cafepress