Great case study by Creativity on McCann's new Halo 3 Believe campaign. When you see that the franchise is bigger than Spiderman in terms of opening dollars generated you realize just how powerful games have become.

The Stan Winston built model with impressive dimensions of 30 feet x 40 feet, 900 figurines will become an amazing collectors item to rival the bigitures of LOTR.

Oh and if you have an hour to spare, check out the AKQA built promotional site. While I think the character designs look lame compared to GOW the site itself is a a nice original experience. I like the screen grab system and the way it loads is quite smart. The videos are well done and wasn't what I was expecting.

Overall it's an impressive campaign so far.

This is a similar strategy to what Gears of War did with their TVC. They focussed on the one hero and made it feel film like and emotional rather than a one dimensional action game.

I am also impressed by the Creativity website. They have a lot of great content and case studies all of which I never noticed before.

Do check out AMC's new original series Mad Men. From one of the people who brought you The Sapranos.

The production, acting and story is multi layered and top quality. It's a sly look at not just advertising today and in the 60s, but on how we were as a society was back then. Well not me exactly I'm an 80s child but you get the idea. This before cancer, AIDS, computers, seat belts and other worries complicated our lives.

There's only up to episode 5 right now so you haven't missed too much.

Update: Looks like Channel 9 in Australia has picked uo the show and has episode 1 for free download. More info here.

From independent publisher Crikey.com.au, comes this leaked e-mail - although to be honest if you worked there, you'd probably want it leaked anyway. An apparently 'leaked' memo would get more attention than say a press release clarifying the original findings...

"Ninemsn CEO tells staff: we're still number one. Message from ninemsn CEO Tony Faure to all staff yesterday:"

All, You may have seen some media coverage of recent Nielsen numbers on the online news category. Some media have taken these numbers and used them in a naive comparison of apples and oranges. Claims that SMH has overtaken ninemsn as the leading online news source are wrong. While we don't dispute the data reported by Nielsen, the ninemsn news referred to in the Nielsen number is just that - only the ninemsn news URL. Nielsen's figure for ninemsn does not take into account the UBs for the news within other sections of ninemsn such as the homepage, sport, weather and entertainment. It also doesn't take into account the huge homepage news UBs, which are difficult to break out, but clearly very large. By contrast, the SMH news number quoted by Nielsen is almost their entire site including news, sport, weather, business, entertainment, Travel, technology and Life & Style. Our news publisher number - which takes into account news, weather, sport (still not everything that SMH includes) - would be higher. In this far more accurate and like-for-like comparison, ninemsn currently has higher daily and monthly UBs than SMH. Max and his team have been kicking some great goals with recent live news streams, getting the cadets up and running and as we all saw at the company meeting, our foreign correspondent Henri. We know we have the leading online news whatever numbers you look at, and we will be correcting this to the media in the coming days."

There has been one commenter who has been a negative force on Bannerblog for quite a while. His/her alias is MC. With no more than 32 comments each negative and harsh with a rare dash of actual constructive criticism.

Click here to read the full article and find the identity of MC.