10 million views in 12 days

The success of the new Nike World Cup ad is extraordinary. Sor far over 10 million views in 12 days, and still growing by about 500,000 views a day. & that's before the World Cup has even begun. Nike aren't even an official World Cup sponsor, but they've created a major talking point around the event.



The ad itself is amazing; directed by the man who directed Amores Perros and Babel, it weaves multiple stories together to great effect.

What's also great is how well it's been managed online. It features so many different people and ideas, and pretty much all of these are included in the tags for the video, to help fans of Roger Federer, for example, to find it:

Nike commercial Nike Football commercial Nike TV advert Nike Football TV advert Nike ad Nike Football ad Nike TV ad Nike Football TV ad Nike Football Write The Future Cristiano Ronaldo CR7 Homer Simpson Didier Drogba Fabio Cannavaro Wayne Rooney Theo Walcott Franck Ribéry Nike Elite Series Landon Donavan Ronaldinho Tim Howard Sir Wayne Rooney Cesc Fabregas Roger Federer Gael Garcia Bernal European Final ad Alejandro González Iñárritu

(Love the 'Sir Wayne Rooney'; notice also that they're not using the words 'World' and 'Cup')

The ad also lends itself to having lots of 'extras'. Nike have uploaded multiple scenes and additional material to add to the effect of the original - for example this video of Roger Federer talking about playing table tennis with Sir Wayne Rooney.



They've also left it open for fans to upload clips themselves - for example there is no extra footage of Homer Simpson with Cristiano Ronaldo, but there are lots of individual uploads of the 5 second Homer clip - see here.

Really, really well done.

SureMen 'Mousetrap' World Cup viral

This style of video has been done before, not least by OK Go, but I like the clever twist on the 'Mousetrap' style contraption from SureMen to promote their World Cup sweepstake.



Model maker Andy Gent designed and built it; it takes in objects from many of the countries playing in South Africa this summer. It's very well done.

See more info on the sweepstake here.

YouTube Moderator feature

Lauched yesterday, the new Moderator feature in YouTube lets channel owners poll their viewers and subscribers, to increase the dialogue.

Here's an example - musician Mystery Guitar Man (860,000 subscribers, over 70 million total views) has asked people to suggest an instrument for him to use in a future video.

Users can suggest an instrument, others can vote on them.

In under 24 hours he's had 15,570 people submitting 7,265 ideas and casting 89,582 votes. It's insane how popular this stuff is!

Sparta-Cuss random insult generator

This is a fun web toy produced to promote Spartacus - Blood and Sand, currently showing on Bravo.

(This is what Charlie Brooker thinks of the show)

Create your own insult, and send it to a friend, or get it to generate a random one for you. Nice one!

Win free Glastonbury tickets with Orange's Where's My Welly?

This is a fun competition, organised by Orange as part of their Glastonbury sponsorship.

The event is long sold out, but you can win tickets every day until 9th June by spotting an Orange Welly in some pictures from old events.


The site uses Silverlight (I think), which allows you to zoom into the photo with amazing clarity. Every day there's a new picture, with a clue, and other clues hidden in banners in the picture - see the examples below.



It's not as easy as you'd think, because there are other orange things in the picture and the welly is very small. (I managed to find today's)

Great idea; and excellent use of the technology.

If you go to the Orange site you can also find a mobile app, and the usual Chill and Charge tent.

Drake knows how to market an album

I wrote about American R&B star Drake before, saying that even though he had no music on sale he still had a dedicated site to sell ringtones from the songs he was streaming on P2P sites and elsewhere.

Now he's signed, and ready to release his album. It's a bit of an object lesson on how to market music in 2010.

The three cleverest things are the url, the packages, and the instant download for pre-orders.

First, the url - ThankMeLaterJune15.com - no messing about there. Presumably the plan is to do this for each future release.

Then the packages - 4 different ways of buying the album from the 'Super Deluxe' at $29.99 to the 'Digital Version' at $13.00. The 'Super Deluxe' comes with a T-Shirt, poster, and sampler for other acts on the record label. All of them, apart from the 'Digital Version' come with some kind of physical souvenir, like a poster or T-shirt.

Finally, the best thing is that if you pre-order you can immediately download two Drake tracks that are on the album - that's a pretty good incentive to pre-order rather than wait until it comes out.

Elsewhere on the site you've also got 90 second samples of two songs, and an embedded Vevo video player. Drake's most recent song on Vevo has had 9 million views in 6 weeks.

Let's see how much of a splash this one makes! I'll update in June.

Update - 3rd June - The album is apparently leaking online, 2 weeks ahead of release, and Drake is fine about it. "I gave away free music for years so we're good over here ... just allow it to be the soundtrack to your summer and ENJOY! JUNE 15th!" he wrote on twitter.

AdMob's mobile ad examples

Displayed here, on their YouTube channel.

For example an interactive video ad for Landrover



& a full screen expandable ad



What I'd really like is a mobile 'ad examples' app - so that you could see how the ad formats work on your own phone.

Dr Pepper prank status updates

This is a very clever use of Facebook.

Building on their strapline "What's the worst that could happen", Dr Pepper (in the UK) wants to be able to post random bizarre updates as their fans' statuses.

If you log into the app to let them do this you can win £1,000 - but your friends will see your status as such random statements as:

'Sucked a mate's finger for a pound today'

‘Lost my special blankie. How will I go sleepies?'

Very clever, and a very good way of using Facebook. I'm guessing that the winners will be people who get the most comment, or most bizarre comments or something.

Update - 21st July - Whoops.  It seems that this went a bit too far, and Coca Cola have had to apologise and are considering dropping the agency

Ro*Tel recipe competition on Facebook

This competition is a good illustration of how Facebook is now the platform that many brands are using instead of using microsites.

Ro*Tel is a delicious-sounding mix of diced tomatoes and green chillies. They are holding a recipe competition through their Facebook app. Fans submit recipes, judges pick 10 finalists, and then fans vote on the best. The winner gets $2,000.

In other Facebook news, look out for lots of new stores on the site. Payvment has just launched it's new service, letting people set up their own store in minutes. It makes perfect sense to have a store in Facebook - that's where the audience is.

Google TV

Coming soon!



More here

Via Tantramar

Add your own annotation to a YouTube video

I've never seen this done before.

It's an entry to the YouTube Cannes Lions competition; YouTube issued the brief for a WaterAid ad on Friday and teams had 48 hours to make and upload the ad.



This one lets viewers add their own names to the ad, using YouTube Annotations. It may work better on YouTube than embedded - see it on YouTube here.

Very clever!

Drive the A-Team's Van in Google Earth

This is a new game in Google Earth, to promote the new 'A' Team film.


Go to this YouTube page, and then, if you have Google Earth installed, you can drive the A-Team's van around in Google Earth.

You can choose from multiple cities, including LA, San Francisco, Berlin, Sydney, and London. You can see some screen shots of my driving around London.


If you acheive certain goals, like going over 100 miles per hour, driving 6 miles, or jumping for 5 seconds you can unlock exclusive videos.

Very well done!

Full disclosure - 20th Century Fox is one of the clients of the company that I work for.