Archive for March, 2009
Coraline subway advertising
Posted by: | CommentsThe definition of creative advertising? Has to be this ad for Coraline.
“Shown in the tunnel between Metro Center and Gallery Place in the Washington DC subway system”
After doing a bit of searching, I found the website of he agency responsible for promoting the film in the United States. They have an incredibly detailed and fascinating account of their advertising strategy.
Part 1 of this strategy was to “activate influencers”. They came up with the idea to create 50 one of a kind, hand made “influencer boxes” which were sent to targetted bloggers. The boxes contained relics from the set and passwords to unlock behind the scenes footage.
Super Punch has photographs of the various boxes, and links to the bloggers that received them.
What is so brilliant about the boxes is that they were tailored to appeal to each blogger and their passion. The agency came up with 5 target influencing groups :
- Fans of Selick, Gaiman and anyone involved in the creation of the film (“Creators”)
- Fans of the craft of filmmaking and especially the type used in this film (“Craft”)
- Comics, animation and collectibles geeks (“Geeks”)
- Folks who we knew would be excited about the themes/aesthetics of the film (“Culture”)
- People in the video game world (“Gamers”)
Is this campaign the best example of marketing/pr engaging with bloggers? I don’t know, but it sure as hell impressed me.
Google Street View SMS Alerts
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Above is from The Guardian today.
Another idea would be to have a car driving in front of the Google Street View car. Equip the car with speakers on top playing big brother music and the voice of Morgan Freeman with a 3 minute warning. Or perhaps instead of Big Brother music, they could use that foghorn sound from the tripods in the Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds. That’d scare anyone shitless and the streets would be guaranteed empty in no time – apart from the vomiters of course who have more important matters to attend to.
See – no fancy schmancy technological solution needed.
The honest scammer
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The CEO of a security software company gets a Skype message from a scammer who admits it is a scam upfront.
The screenshot of the first brief conversation is funny but it’s worth reading the full blog post by Mike Nash which has a follow up conversation from the scammer.
The final word on picturegate
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I mostly avoided the Internet and Twitter last week but it was still hard to escape the whole “picturegate” saga. Brian Cowen needs to sack his press officer for making a non story into something which rumbled on through the week and onto the Late Late Show on Friday night.
The real question in my mind is whether or not there would have been a picturegate at all if Brian Cowen sported a six pack instead of a double chin and big belly? It was the equivalent of kids in the schoolyard taunting the overweight child and calling him or her “fatso”. It had nothing to do with political satire and why RTE even bothered running it as a news story is beyond me.
Image owned by sukisuki and used under the terms of a creative commons license. The original image is some very good advice from Chip Kidd.
