League of Gentlemen Film Flashmob

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New VW Gold Game

To celebrate the sale of 100m VWs

Very tricky!

Via Adverblog

French Viral Marketing Scam - TransAtlantys

A site supposedly promoting a new transatlantic train service between Paris and New York - an eight hour under-sea journey.

More details at Adrants

Amazing Deoderant Ad

Shame it's not a global brand

Another New iPod Ad

This time to DaftPunk

Darth Vader Plays Animal, Vegetable, Mineral for Burger King

Very clever!

By Crispin, Porter & Bogusky

He guessed Guinea Pig in exactly 20!

Find Cheap Gas - A Mash-Up of Google Maps and Gasbuddy

Just the latest great amateur Google Maps application - combining it with GasBuddy

Anyone fancy sponsoring an annual award for the best Google Maps application? Monthly award even?

[Edit]

& one of Google's own - track taxis via GPS

Another Great Open source App - Chicago Crime

Crimes listed in Chicago, linked through to Google Maps.

Homepage here

Mapping example here. Can someone do this for London, please?

Wired Article - the Beeb Shall Inherit The Earth

Making reference to BBC Backstage, this article lauds the BBC and it's work allowing open source access it it's information & archives.

As much of the BBC's content is free, this will create serious conpetition for other online media organisation, including ones who rely on advertising, but particularly those that rely on subscription fees.

New Mazda Viral

New Mazda Viral

Search Engine Relevancy Challenge

John Battelle's Searchblog points to a test being done to measure the relevancy of search results on 4 different search engines - Yahoo, Google, MSN and AskJeeves

Initial results are here - initial ranking on the 5 criteria is Yahoo, Google, AJ, and MSN.

Here is the tool - try for yourself!

New Levi's Virals

Action Men confused by the modern world

Dog gets anxiety

Via Adverblog

Another Great Open source App - Flickr Graph

This application, again built by hobbyists, allows people to map Flickr users, and how they share their photos.

Very impressive!

Dodegeball (now part of Google) Social Networking by Phone

Nice site

This service allows you to hook up easily with friends and friends of friends by phone. Described as 'like Friendster over the phone' it also includes geographical information, to allow you to find out who is near to you at any time.

New iPod Ad

This is a TV ad, so not strictly on-topic here. However...

1 - it's stunningly brilliant
2 - these ads work in any visual medium - TV, online, print & outdoor
3 - Apple know what they're doing when they put the ads online - and if you produce ads as great as this for your products, why not archive them for people to see

Virals for Firefox

This is how virals should be done. Engaging, funny, original films, which somehow manage to be interesting about something as (outwardly) dull as a new browser.

They even load quickly - would they load even quicker if I had Firefox..?

Banner Campaign Leads to More Searches

A very interesting study conducted by Yahoo and HarrisDirect.

Harris Direct, a financial advertiser ran a banner campaign and search test, using an exposed and a contraol panel, to see if the presence of a banner campaign would affect the number of searches for a brand.

What they found was:
- Number of relevant searches was 61% higher among those exposed to the campaign
- Clicks on sponsored results leading to theHarris.com site were 249% higher
- As a result of both, the exposed panel clicked on 139% more links (PPC & SEO combined) than the unexposed sample.

Clearly more reserach needs to be done. This is very encouraging however, in terms of backing up what we have always argued as the indirect effect of banner campaigns, and the need to track effects using post impression as well as post click metrics.

More on:
Marketing Vox
DM News

Yahoo BWM Ad Integration - Going too Far?

An ad for BMW 3 Series on the US Yahoo finance site shows some interesting integration - all of the 'E's on the page have been turned into '3's. Neat idea - but is it going to alienate site users?

Via PaidContent

Google WebAccelerator in Beta

Google WebAccelerator works by connecting users (who have a fast connection and first have to download software) to special Google servers that hold cached versions of the most popular pages.

Therefore you will get a faster search result than by searching normally.

& this is the FAQ

Yoof UK Election Virals

3 Election Virals - from Dan and Lee of VW Polo notoriety.

Labour - woman wakes up to realise she's stuck with a guy for 4 years

Conservative - all the things wrong with Britain

LibDem - Someone actually gets things done while two others argue

Webby Award Winners

The 9th Annual Webby Awards were announced yesterday, giving prizes to the best sites in more than 30 categores from Activitism (World Citizen's Guide) to Youth (ChannelOne.com), via Auto, Blog, Games, Restaurant, Travel, and um - Weird.

This is pretty much the definitive list of current great site design. For example if you're asked to give an example of how a national tourism site shold look, you can immediately refer to the ones in the Tourism category.

Webby Award winners & nominees - Full list

Three Applications Using Databases

Like the earlier example of the property search using Craigslist and Google Maps, here are three examples of what can be done with Google Images and Amazon:

Montage-a-Google - creates a montage of Google images around a search term

Guess The Google - a quiz again using the Google image search, where you have to guess which search word delivered all of the different pictures

Both via Protein Feed

What's This Song? - this game uses Amazon's 'listen before you buy' music clips to create a quiz where you have to recognise songs. You can even create your own game around specific bands