Mitchell & Webb's Apple Mac Ads

I love these new ads for the Apple Mac. Effectively copies of the American ads from last year they feature Mitchell and Webb from TV's Peep Show (and of course their own sketch show) as the uptight PC and the funky Mac.

I think that M&W have created their personas so well that the ads work easily as well as the originals, and having shown them to a colleague who was totally unaware of their previous work, I can vouch for the fact that they get their point across even to non-fans.

I would even go so far as to say that these are the best ads made by British comedians since Fry and Laurie's ones for Alliance & Leicester ("compact & bijou") in the eighties.

See them all here, or on YouTube here

Also, it won't harm the chances of their first movie Magicians finding an international audience.

The Heidies Take Over Diesel.com

This is an interesting one - for the last week the Diesel.com website has been hijacked by two girls who call themselves The Heidies, and are after their 15 megabytes of fame.

The site will revert to Diesel pretty soon, but the archive of their activities are on YouTube here.

This seems like an interesting way of attracting viral attention - I wonder how it was seeded..?

Tom has 150m friends

There's less of a frenzy about MySpace than there used to be, but it' still growing as fast as ever.

Back in August I made this post celebrating Tom's 100 millionth friend, and now he has hit 150 million, meaning that notionally there are 150m members of MySpace.

Of course it's not quite as easy as this, because some accounts get deleted, and others fall into misuse as the members move on, but it is still a significant milestone.

Great integration between web and mobile for 24

My colleague Dan sent me this one:

Go to the site www.ctuagent.com

Type in your details, including your phone number, plus the password D9D5JJ

You'll then get a phone call from CTU, and a text leading you to somewhere else...

Borat MSN Emoticons

Over the past few months I've got quite a lot of traffic from Google on the search term Borat MSN Emoticons, because I've blogged about Borat and MSN Emoticons separately.

So why doesn't someone make some? Seems like a good idea to me. You could have:

Niice!
High Five!
Jagslamesh!
Great Success!
and so on...

Anyway, if you do want some new MSN emoticons, why not try these ones for Capri Sun?

The Venice Project is now Joost

The Venice Project, a much-discussed move into peer-to-peer video by two of the Skype founders, has now been officially named Joost - see the site here

It ticks all the web 2.0 boxes in naming - phonetic name, not actually a word, strange sounding - but best of all on their sites they have a number of screen grabs, like the one above, for bloggers to post onto their sites.

I've registered to be a beta tester, but nothing yet.

Ford Sponsors Ben Griffith on MySpace in the UK

I found this yesterday: ford have been advertising in newspapers to promote their sponsorship of a young British singer-songwriter Ben Griffith who has a MySpace page.

The deal is very subtly done, with no Ford branding on his page, but Ben has this to say about it on his blog:

"So, I have some very exciting news.

About 2 weeks ago I was contacted by Ogilvy and Mather who represent fords advertising interests. The people at Ford were looking for an artist who they felt was well on their way to big things. MEEEEEEEEEEE i shouted? and they said yes you.

So ford have loaned me a Ford Focus to drive around to all my gigs in, and in return they're taking photos of me on tour, in the car, at home, chillng out, writing my songs, and then I have to write a journal that'll be used for an advert.

It's going out in lots of papers and so as you can imagine I'm very excited. It means a whole audience of people will check out my myspace site who don't even know I exist. I think in music, if you're passionate about what you do, you basically need help to get out there and be heard. And I'm hoping that is what this ad will do.

So if you see me or have seen me in a paper or magazine and that's why you're here. Please leave a comment about my music, cos then I know you've been, and also add me as a friend so that we can stay in touch."

Chevy Sponsors YouTube for New Years Day

Chevy sponsored the YouTube homepage globally on new year's day 2007 - see the screen grab above.