Summer is almost here and the battle for what deodorant guys will use is heating up. Here's what I've seen the leading brands doing lately. If I've missed anything please let me know in the comments.
World's Dirtiest Film
Axe has partnered with College Humor to put the call out for dirty directors to create The Word's Dirtiest Film.. They've enlisted David Spade to be the face of the competition which seems a good fit as does College Humor.
Lynx in Australia held a stunt on Bondi where 30 women landed om the beach and were met by the Nerds FC.
The girls are now all tagged with GPS wrist bands which you can track on the site and you can see coverage of the event on the site. It's a little fiddling navigating though, so be aware.
I'm not sure guys want to be referred to as testicles but Tags new Tag Testees site doesn't hold back on the innuendo. Interesting choice of female talent. They seemed to have gone with a more realistic representation of females.
World's Biggest Bikini Shoot
Sadly they all get trumped by Cosmo who recently held the world's biggest bikini shoot at Bondi Beach. Now not exactly competing with the deodorant brands this was sent me to me by more friends than any of the other promotions combined. With 1010 women in bikini's they beat the previous world record of 300 by a long shot. It also got them coverage the world over.
The site extends their latest tag line "See something that makes you feel something". It's the first step in many to position Foxtel away from just price based offers and more towards emotional ties people have with their TVs.
There's four more people being added this week, along with the usual downloads and other media as well as a "making of" for those who are interested.
If you watch mainstream news here in Aus, we're a bunch of fatties too. It's a wonder I can even type on a standard size keyboard with my fat fast food eating fingers.
Here's a few Behind the Scenes green screen photos T.Scott Major from Mono sent us.
And here's the treatment from Daddy from which the site was built from.
I wonder what the talent think when doing these types of jobs. "Yeah I was an angry lunch lady and I pretended to throw food at the camera"
I was delighted to see that after clicking the mysterious banner seen here I was taken to an even better experience on the site www.070829.com. The audio is particularly nice.
I'll let you all solve the site's puzzle yourself but here's what you are left with in the end. A silhouette of what looks to be a Nokia N81 (Nokia's iphone killer) and a countdown to it's release.
A quick Google search of "070829" reveals there was a lot of interest in this campaign. So I'd say it has been successful in generating buzz.
This type of marketing is also doing well for J.J Abrams new film untitled film codenamed "Cloverfield" with their site 1-18-08.com.
Here's one film that's generating lots of buzz by letting the fans imaginations go wild. As seen in the many blogs like Cloverfield Clues, Cloverfield News and Project Cloverfield. The guys at Paramount got this one right as everyone is doing the work for them.
If you need any more proof that this type of marketing brings out the nerds check this very nerdy Youtube analysis of everything released for Cloverfield. 350,000 views for this!? He sounds like Perez Hilton.
Also Ethan Haas Was Right is another recent promotion which I wrong stated was related to Cloverfield. It's actually for a new pen and paper based Role Playing Game Alpha Omega.
It's funny reading the comments in forums that people were actually disappointed it wasn't related to Cloverfield. And that the majority of the news coverage online linked it to Cloverfield.
B!X and his site OMGWTFEHWR was the first to uncover the link between EthanHaas and AO and covers the promotion quite well.
So let that be a lesson to all you experimental marketers. If you are going to go underground and do an ARG or mysterious promotion, make sure there is some link, even if tiny, to the product or service you're actually selling or risk having it attributed to something else and all your hard work wasted.
Have you seen any other good examples of this type of marketing? Please link it up in the comments.
In and effort to help EMI promote physical CD purchases and their artists we created Sleevage: The world's best CD cover blog. This is purely self proclaimed but we needed Google to index us properly. Why buy a book on the best covers which is probably out of date by the time it's printed when you can get the best online for free. We also wanted to go one step beyond the usual "10 best covers" or "10 worst covers" you see occasionally.
EMI's presence, they use the name Musichead in Australia as EMI represents so many labels, has been kept quite minimal right now and EMI artists have been interspersed with other labels releases. This is all integral to it's success, as support by the other labels is very important. Just as support by agencies is on Bannerblog, we didn't want this to be a Soap Creative blog.
It's growing organically and has been well received by the design and music communities. Also as with most blogs the longer its alive the better it becomes. Also search engine traffic is growing exponentially as more covers are posted. This isn't a 6 month promotion that will be abandoned it will become part of EMI Australia's online arsenal.
We're hoping to grow it above and beyond what Bannerblog has become and with a broad topic of music and design this should be easy. Although there is much more competition for the topic of "album cover design". We've seen two new ones pop up since we launched Sleevage.
This is the main reason updates to Bannerblog have been slightly slower as my attention has been divided.
