Super Bowl Advertising Raises its Digital Game

Super Bowl advertisers have stepped up their digital game this year, with digital activity including interactive TV ads, sophisticated search strategies, social networking campaigns and mobile apps. Advertisers this year range from Anheuser-Busch InBev, CareerBuilder, PepsiCo and Pedigree dog food, the latter of which is uploading outtakes from its Super Bowl TV ad to its website.

With Super Bowl ad time costing up to $3million for a 30 second TV spot, marketers are looking to garner as much value as possible out of digital advertising in their campaigns, signalling a shift from traditional media ad spend towards digital media. Previously more of an after thought, digital activity is now taking centre stage, with the TV commercials aired during the game appearing on key sites such as YouTube’s Super Bowl AdBlitz.

"The economic climate has forced people to wake up and be more efficient with their marketing dollars. A couple of years ago, this kind of collaboration would never have happened," says Josh Stylman, managing partner at Reprise Media, a digital-ad agency owned by Interpublic Group which managed the search and social media strategy for Super Bowl advertiser Castrol motor oil.

Brewers Labatt have launched ads where viewers will be able to click via their remote on links embedded in Budweiser ads. They will then be able to watch longer versions of the ads; an interesting way of getting around the 30 second Super Bowl spot time limit. Labatt is testing out interactive technology in its ads, the first time Super Bowl has employed such technology. The brewer is paying up based on the number of unique views.

Castrol, meanwhile, is opting for online ads connected to web searches for its Castrol Edge brand, a new eco-friendly product it is advertising during the Super Bowl.

Doritos has employed digital to maximise buzz around their ads even before kick-off. By sponsoring a competition offering $1 million to the lucky winner of a competition to create the best Doritos ad, the advertiser has succeeded in generating a significant amount of free publicity and user engagement, with some contestants even launching their own website.

For those with access check out the full article here

- Sam

The Best Job in the World….?

Yes it may sound too good to be true, and perhaps it is, although the Australian Tourism Board insists it’s legitimate … Check out http://www.islandreefjob.com/ for the website advertisement of what is quite possibly the best job in the world… acting as the ‘caretaker’ of a tropical island near the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, working 12 hours a MONTH for six months while carrying out such achingly difficult tasks as whale watching, feeding turtles, swimming and snorkelling.

Interested applicants can upload a video to the site to submit their application, while viewers rate the individuals.

The perfect antidote to the credit-crunch strapped British winter.

- Sam

Bacardi launches Online Music Sharing Platform, B-Live Share

Following on from the announcement last March that Bacardi had signed an exclusive global music agreement with Groove Armada, B-Live Share has now been launched to encourage and reward users for sharing the music.

Quite simply, the more users share, the more music they can get. Users sign up, create a profile, then receive the first track to start sharing. By hitting the sharing targets, music fans can eventually ‘unlock’ all four tracks. Those who share the most tracks, i.e. the super sharers, will receive a special award from Bacardi and Groove Armada. Nice.

There are many ways for fans to share, including email, blogs and social networks. All that’s required is to send the URL to friends who are then eligible to download the first track.

Click here to find out more about B-Live Share and to start sharing.

- Sam

samantha has shared an exclusive Groove Armada track with 0 people on B-Live Share

Get the track for yourself and start sharing

Google planning on becoming even more indispensable to computer users

Word on the street is that Google is planning on launching Gdrive, a hard drive stored on the internet which aims to replace the traditional hard drive. Users will be able to store the entire contents of their hard drive on any device with an internet connection.

Google currently already has an online data storage product connected to its email offering, Gmail, but this new service offers a much larger capacity, potentially powerful enough to run programmes.

However concerns over privacy have already been raised regarding just how secure such an operating system could be in terms of storing commercial and private data.

- Sam

New Form of Video Advertising: The Clickable Canvas

For all of you who hate pre-roll, this article, which takes a look at the launch of an array of new video ad formats, from interactive product placements to video billboards, is for you. The USP of Innovid, the Israeli company behind the developments, is the “clickable canvas,” whereby the viewer sees entire surfaces within a video transformed into a 3-D interactive canvas. Pretty cool stuff.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/22/innovid-launches-new-form-of-video-advertising-the-clickable-canvas/

- Sam

The Top 40 Brands on Twitter according to Mashable

Mashable has put together a nice round up of what it considers to be the top 40 brands on micro-blogging platform Twitter, proving that used right, it can be a meaningful and powerful medium. As Mashable comments, the research demonstrates “why brands do belong on Twitter. No other medium gets you inside a business or brand quite like Twitter.”

- Sam

http://mashable.com/2009/01/21/best-twitter-brands/

Social Media Triumphs during Obama Inauguration

Hello and a belated Happy New Year to you all. What better way to kick off the blog in ‘09 than with what is surely already one of the biggest news stories of the year, the inauguration of Barack Obama as US president.

Social media played its own leading role as Obama was sworn in, with extensive internet coverage via live video streams, blogs, social networks such as Facebook and micro blogging sites such as Twitter. The latter surpassed fellow social media site Digg for the first time since its launch, with five times the average number of Twitter messages, or “tweets,” per second.

Over 7.7m people watched video streams simultaneously, according to the Associated Press, in what is potentially the most widely covered breaking news event on the internet in history.

See below for a round-up of activity on key social media sites:

The offical inauguration blog, www.pic2009.org, contained real-time updates from staff throughout the day. US citizens could also submit photos, videos, quotes, links and blogs to the site, with the chance to appear in the official inauguration book.
Microblogging site Twitter set up the official presidential Twitter stream @obamainaugural.Current TV, the user-generated TV network co-founded by Al Gore, combined a live-stream of the event with "tweets." Messages from viewers played at the bottom of both Current's broadcast and webcast.

Photo sharing site Flickr created a special Inauguration 2009 group with members adding their photos throughout the day.

Meanwhile on Facebook users could friend "Barack Obama Inauguration" and send a glass of champagne to friends in the US using the Real Drinks application. The social networking site also partnered with CNN to allow members watching the event on CNN.com to sign in and update their status alongside the video stream, all in all resulting in over one million inauguration-related status updates.

- Sam