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.

Pele, Maradona & Zidane play table football

For Louis Vuitton.

The site's been live for about a month; you can finally watch the game. Pele Vs. Maradona, with Zidane as the referee.


You'll also be able to get an autograph in a few days time.

Part of the ongoing Louis Vuitton Journeys campaign, which is pretty much setting the standard in online media for luxury brands.

SATC2 competition on ThisNext

One of the biggest opportunities for brands these days is to partner with new companies and technologies to spread their messages and content into new arenas.

There are lots of examples of this - for example the promotion on Eventful for Paranormal Activity.

Another is the new competition on the social shopping site ThisNext for the film Sex And The City 2.

ThisNext is a social shopping site - members share what they are buying or have found with friends, creating lists of products around a theme, for example Chic Mothers Day Gifts. Members can recommend other products and lists, gain the respect of others, see what new items are trending and so on. Quite a few brands are already integrated into the community, for example Urban Outfitters, KidRobot and MoMA.

You can even see a live map of what members are buying.

For the SATC2 competition ThisNext members need to collate a set of 10 accessories that the four main characters would love, and tag them to a character - for example TN Carrie. (These are the matches so far for the tag TN Carrie.)


This is a really good way to engage with people who would definitely be in the target audience for the film. Yes, I'm sure they'd all be aware of it already, but it's a fun way to get them to talk about it and work with the community.

The only thing that lets it down is the pretty rubbish prize - a $40 gift card for the HBO SATC store. Why not offer a 'real' prize like a chance to see the film early, or your choice of $500 worth of items tagged to any of the characters?

Five Years of YouTube

...celebrated in this video



More videos here, including various celebrities telling their stories, or picking their favourites.

Here's Lauren Luke telling her story:



Here are Conan O'Brien's favourites:



(To watch his videos you need to go here)

Not your typical sportswear marketing

I really like these two films for Nike.

This one is for football

NIKE SPORTSWEAR: NSW+FBGT from fla on Vimeo.

& this one is for running.

The Runners from fla on Vimeo.

Not your typical sportswear marketing!

Facebook Search highlights privacy issues

Facebook Search is a new tool developed by Will Moffat and Peter Burns.

It lets users search through the 'public' status updates made by Facebook users. As an example it defaults to 'playing hooky', and also links to searches for other embarrassing phrases like 'Stupid Boss'.

Like Please Rob Me, it's an attempt to educate people about Facebook privacy issues - issues that the recent F8 updates have increased. Did you know for example that if you 'Like' something on another site like IMDB that site owner can post into your news feed?

See the pic below from the Webtrends blog.


It's possibly a sign that the world is turning against Facebook. Remember when people started dropping MySpace for Facebook? MySpace kept their heads in the sand then. Facebook can't afford to do so now.

Facebook Search also suggests how you can avoid your data being publically searchable; their top suggestion is 'Delete Your Facebook Account'

Fatboy Slim uses Radar Music Videos to find a video director

This is an interesting twist on social networking and crowdsourcing.

Fatboy Slim has a new track out soon called Machines Do The Work. Instead of going through the normal professional channels to find a video director, he's (or his people are) using the site Radar Music Video to issue the brief.

Radar Music Video is a creative community site. It costs approximately £20 to post a brief, and approximately £4 for creatives to see them and submit entries. The brief also specifies the budget available.

Fatboy Slim is the highest profile artist to use the site so far; other artists like dan le sac Vs. Scroobius Pip have used it already - example here:


"Sick Tonight" Final ALBUM Version from Pheasant Plucker on Vimeo.
Or this one by Slow Club, featuring Mackenzie Crook



See other examples here.

I really like this - Radar Music are offering a great service, and hopefully making a profit doing it. I can't give details of the Fatboy Slim brief, for example, because I'm not a paying member.

Via Clash Music

Update - June 2010 - here is the finished video

YouTube's Bubble

YouTube showed this new channel at their 'Think Video' event in London yesterday. It's a channel for the advertising team to use to highlight the best examples of advertising and viral on the site.

Check it out here

McDonald's Facebook localisation

This is a sign of things to come on Facebook.

In the US the McDonald's Facebook page has a 'local' tab on it that lets you input your zip code and select your local restaurant.


This is what you get when you put in your zip code. (I put in 90210, which is my default zip code whenever I have to fill in 'American' details on forms...)


According to this report they will soon be launching an app that will let you check in locally, and win prizes or incentives for doing so, like coupons for specific products, similar to Pepsi's Loot. With over 100m using Facebook on their mobile, this makes perfect sense.

In other location-based news, the Jimmy Choo trainers still haven't been claimed...

Pepsi Loot

Pepsi Loot is a forthcoming iPhone & iPod Touch app that rewards loyalty for Pepsi restaurants with points that can be traded for music.

This article has all the details, but essentially:

Users download the free app from iTunes. It's effectively a white label Foursquare
They get a map of the local participating venues, including Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (I think all are owned by PepsiCo)
Check in at 3 different venues and get a code to download an exclusive track
Venues will also offer specific deals, like free Pepsi when you buy a starter

This whole 'location' thing is really starting to take off!

McDonalds play 'Shoot the Duck' with interactive poster

This is a brilliant example from London.

McDonalds ran a poster with moving images of a number of objects, including some of the items on the menu.

If you managed to take a photo of one of them with your phone you could claim a free one at a (named) local McDonalds. Nothing else required.



Brilliant.

Via the incredible Interesting Snippets