Hebbes.be, eBay's competitor in Belgium, has just launched an online guerrilla campaign on eBay itself. Basically the agency, snow by LG&F;, came up with the idea of selling some items on eBay complete with pictures saying "Sorry, already sold on Hebbes.be".

Check out the snowboard, the lamp or this motorbike. Hurry up if you want to see the campaign in action, since eBay will be probably remove it sooooooon, no wonder why :-).

Yes, the pages have been already removed, but here I've saved a screenshot of a page: click on the image below to enlarge it.

Excellent guerilla marketing campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi New York to highlight the public restroom shortage in New York. Cardboard people were placed around certain locations to get people's attention to the problem.

[via A/D Goodness]

Barnes & Richardson Belgium created a viral campaign for Renault during the annual Car Salon to promote their special offers during this period.

The way it works is that you can send a friend a message to let them know about the Renault special conditions. The fun factor is that your friend's name will be mentioned in the movieclip. Pretty funny but some more action would have been nice. Anyway it's a fun way to get your message spread.

Trafo Turkiye, has recently created a car display project for Renault MeganeCC in Istanbul. They put a platform which holds car upright and meanwhile rotate it. This project were displayed in three populer location in istanbul.

Ryan passed me the link to Nike's Join Bode site, developed by Opus Creative together with Wieden + Kennedy Portland. Maybe it's already a little bit late to post about it, since the Olympics are almost over, but I believe it's still very interesting from a marketing perspective.
Join Bode presents several elements which show how smart Nike is when it comes to online marketing. Just browse through the site and discover elements like: community integration with MySpace.com; video content; silly advergame but perfectly in line with the "Bode brand"; Niketown store just one click away; the tree (and Nike ID).

PUMA has started a microsite on www.adoptagerman.com, searching for 12 Germans as global ambassadors to promote football. The campaign "Adopt A German" wants to set the records straight with the 'Sauerkraut' and 'Lederhosen' stereotype of the worldcup hosts.

The adoptees will start promoting their contries in person with a European tour and online with personal weblogs. The users then decide which of the 12 persons to 'adopt' as their favourite German.

From Brazil, an advergame to promote the Axe seductive effective. Don't expect anything sexy or daring. I'm posting about it because I believe it's good to see how different countries promote the Axe "effect" through advergames.

Fbiz did it.

InstantMessengers are may be youth generations’ biggest habit. They live online, and connect their friends via messengers. Replacing our brands on messenger is big challenge. Now, marketers have an innovative tool to engage people with messengers. IMVironments are instant messaging environments that are interactive, themed backgrounds for Yahoo! Messenger conversations that appear directly in the instant messaging window.

With IMvironments brands connect people directly, reshape messenger with branded images and entertain them with branded content .They are already some brands (Mountain Dew, HP, American Express, Napster...) using Imvironments. But we think, possibilities are bigger.

One of my favourite animated films ever "Ice Age" is about to come back with the second episode. To promote the upcoming movie release, Twentieth Century Fox has created a viral marketing campaign featuring one of the funniest characters, Sid the Sloth. The Bling My Sid site allows users to "dress" Sid and share their creation with other visitors who can also vote for it. Below you can see what I came up with... Maybe you cannot tell I work for a fashion brand now ;-)

[news via New Media Age]

Guinness beer has launched a blog. Probably it's not a big, big news, but it's definitely worth some space, especially for the interesting discussion it has generated on Gapinvoid last week.

The good thing about the blog is that it's written directly by the Guinness marketing people. No agency involved. The bad thing is that to access the content we need to live in the UK or, at least, this is what you have to declare when you try to access the site. "Blogs" are free content by definition: free in the sense that you don't have to pay to read them, and free in the sense that they're open to everybody. Unfortunately the Guinness blog keeps a lot of readers out. Complying with the "orders" of the legal department it's important (vital?) but then what's the reason of opening a blog if the access needs to be so limited?

In France, PUBLICIS Net has just launched a web promotion for the new Renault Megane. In order to present the car and generate word-of-mouth around the brand, they have created a mini-site with advertainment content: an exclusive online album with free music to download and a webfilm showcasing the hands free feature of the new model in a stunning and humorous manner.

In the UK, mobile carrier T-Mobile has started an in-game advertising campaign to promote its Mates Rates pay-as-you-go tariff. As reported on New Media Age, the campaign targets 15 to 24 years old gamers, with in-game banners and ads displayed while they wait for the game to start. An advergame, distributed via email, is also part of the promotion.

In Turkey, litespell has launched a new viral game for Gilette M3 Power. Name of game is kizarkadasiminarkadası (translation is "girlfriend of my girlfriend") Aim of game is to charm your girlfriend’s girlfriend with your eyes, but be careful don’t be caught your girlfriend.

From a marketing perspective, brand is connected to the advergames very successfully. Game’s target is the same as Gillette M3 Power. Game is already most successful advergames in Turkey. It has hundreds of registered user. Moreover, concept of the game is based on get the girls with your shaving. This is what gillette want to say.

The game is very funny and sexy and has amazing viral potential. Game consist of three level. In order to play next levels, you should invite your friends. Whenever they register you have a passport to play next levels.

Pioneer launches a second viral campaign to promote their DVD recorders with storage space up to 455 hours. Their first viral was mentioned here before. It was amusing but a bit too short.

Also this viral is dubbed "Need more space?" but the approach is different. Originally the 2 viral movies should have been released together but some problems in Belgium with one person complaining about the obese people in the clip had put a halt on spreading.

Umbro had launched the "One Love" campaign, to challenge the dominating communication by Nike and Adidas on the way to the World Cup in Germany. As explained on New Media Age (sub. req.), the football brand has partnered with media giants like BBC Sport, MTV and Yahoo! to drive traffic to the revamped Umbro site, and to generate buzz around the new England kit which will be revealed online on February 27th.

Next month Umbro will launch another initiative to take advantage of user generated content: an online Mosaic where football fans will be able contribute to the big picture by submitting their own football images.

From the lovely Amsterdam a crazy idea by Bsur Concepting for Glamour: the Stiletto Run. On March 9th women will be challenged to race 75 meters in high heels, and the winner will be awarded with 10,000 euros. The event is currently being promoted with Tv, print and online ads, even if buzz will definitely make the difference to spread the word.

In the image below, on the right side you see the heels you are allowed to use, while on the left you see what you cannot wear.

The event will take place in an A'dam shopping district, which is still not known. I'd love to see the race taking place on the Leidestraat... think how difficult (and funny) it will be running in heels avoiding trams and tourists :-))

[news via AdRants]

From Belgium a good idea taken too far. The Humo Magazine campaign by Duval Guillaume Brussels started with an humorous ad (the one I publish, with Saddam), but then just became stupid (and sad) taking the concept to the extreme by featuring a plane about to crash into the WTC. See the campaign on Coloribus and share your comments.

Reading Humo can have serious consequences.
See another controversial Humo ad.

Adidas is promoting its new shoe, the Gigaride, with an online advertising campaign and a dedicated micro-site. It's a product mini-site so we shouldn't have to too many expectations on it, however it turns out to be rather disappointing. I mean, it promises a 360 Spin to discover the shoe, but you can actually only click and drag to move it left to right (and viceversa) and not up and down to see how the sole looks like. Also, I'm sorry for being so negative, but it would have been better not to have the advergame rather than putting online something totally flat. The "Unstoppable Game" advergame isn't original nor entertaining and it doesn't even make people experience the shoe.

“The U.S. and the rest of the world have much to learn from the Norwegian PR-market.”
Responsible for that “modest” statement is Jerry Judge, a former top manager of the PR-agency Lowe. Never underestimate your audience, like the Americans do, is Jerry Judge’s advice.
Jerry Judge says that the Norwegian PR sees its audience like intelligent human beings.
Maybe the Olympic gold medals to Norway have gone to their heads…

Duval Guillaume Antwerp is one of the brightest European agencies at the moment. This is an ambient campaign they recently created for Schweppes... yes, Schweppes it's sparkling!

Ikea is online with a new campaign to promote its kitchens. The Swedish Chef is a funny mini-site explaining the secrets of "meatballing" and pancakes. An ironic (but a little bit too long) video unveils the original receipe and a pretty basic competition allows visitors to sign-up and win a party with the Real Swedish Chef cooking and Ikea's kitchen stuffs worth 1,000 pounds.

In Belgium, Ford allows users to send special Valentine's SMS with branded love messages for uninspired lovers. Actually Ford gives people the opportunity to send free personalized messages, but if someone is (sadly) out of ideas, some suggestions are provided. For example: "Vandaag ligt de FOCUS op mijn liefde voor jou en als bewijs stuur ik je duizenden kusjes"... which means (if my Dutch is still good enough) something like "Today the fire (FOCUS) of my love is for you and as a sign I send you thousand kisses"...

Video installation of nuked boddies using Malin+Goetz products.

From Press Release

GORILLA KINGDOM is bringing a new level of fun to the (MALIN+GOETZ) flagship store in Chelsea. Every evening, young men and women will be showering together to show the locals how the (M+G) shampoo, conditioner, and body cleanser are really meant to be used. It's all part of a unique video installation designed by GORILLA KINGDOM, a multimedia production company based in New York. New videos will be added monthly in 2006, so stop by often between 5pm and 2am to take a peek.

[via coolhunting]

Yep! We did it! Thanks to your support Adverblog won the Battle of the Ad Blogs!
GRAZIEEEE!

And a special thank you to AdLand for setting up the competition.

BBDO New York for Aquafina (sparkling!).

(click the image to enlarge it)

I don’t know if it was the intention, or not. The lingerie company Lindex has anyway stirred up the Sweden’s minds with its latest ad campaign. The purpose was anyway to get people (read men) to buy bras to their beloved ones as Valentine-gifts.

Ads outdoors and in papers and magazines have the slogan “We Love Boobs” (www.lindex.se) A close-up of a woman in a white, pretty innocent bra was obviously too much for the Swedes and the “nakedness” has been wildly discussed in the tabloids lately. The ads have even got banned in the underground of Stockholm.
The company has got pretty much free publicity and I suppose the PR-agency behind is quite satisfied. I don’t think there’s been such a fuss about an ad since Ann Nichole Smith was the model (thin at that time) for H & M.
That’s the famous Swedish Sin for you!

We are all aware of blog-buttons. But self-expressing ourselves with these buttons are new. Publicons.de offers people to choose bunch of buttons in different categories to strengthen their online identity. Here is mine. Tell me who am I?
(via ad++ blog)

Another way to expressing ourselves via brands is userbars.: They are small graphics for your forum signature, which help you to show a tiny bit of your personality in an attractive way. Example: Let's say you love drinking a 7-up, You are a party-man. And your favorite brand is Adidas. In this case you can express all that in your forum signature by inserting the following bars:

[via marketallica]

The Football World-Championships 2006 in Germany will be sponsored by Lufthansa. The airline wants to be seen as a Football-enthusiast in its home-country, so they came up with the idea of adorning the noses of 40 aircrafts as a black and white football ball.

Agency: Wunderman Deutschland.

A transparant running athlete stickers are adhered to cars’ mirror. It is very fun way to give “Impossible is nothing” message.

Client: Adidas
Agency: Savaglio\TBWA Argentina.

If someone is running out of ideas on where to place an ad, "sandadvertising" could be an option...

In France, Ford gets inspiration from the movie "The Full Monty" to launch a series of funny videos and a micro-site to promote its KA model.
The KA Boys campaign, created by Wunderman, gives a shake to the traditional Ford's communication approach, generating word-of-mouth especially among women who will surely laugh at these improbable strip teasers...

[via Marketing Alternatif]

From Australia an original and ironic campaign to promote milk's benefits. By Marketforce, West Perth.

[via Advertising/Design Goodness]

Frappr is a Google map based application where you can create a map for your group and invite people to join. There are a lot of community maps on Flappr. Some of these maps are brand-based coomunity maps. For example, ipodowners map is aim to join iPod Owners around The World. Vespaonline do the same thing for Vespa owners.

These maps are able to provide some unique feelings for brand community. People can experience “Here i am” and “I am part of a whole” feelings. These maps are also strong tool for co-create projects. For example, brands can invite people to share pictures of product while using it. They are a lot of untapped opportunities for branded maps. Branded maps would be hot topic on interactive marketing.

The first MMS marketing campaign by Samsung Mobile proved to be a success with a response rate of over 15 percent and a conversion rate of 2. The campaign, developed by Enpocket, gave Samsung Fun Club members the possibility to view a preview of the mobile game "Skipping Stone" and then then the chance to instantly download a free demo using a WAP link embedded in the message. Once respondents had trialled the free demo they could then go on to buy the full game from a dedicated WAP site.

Mike Baker, President and CEO, Enpocket commented: "Conversion rates are more immediate and more dramatic when brands market to customers on the same device where mobile content is downloaded and consumed".

No one can call me the Italian mafia! Adverblog readers, lovers and supporters, click here and vote for me at the battle of the Ad blogs: Best Ad Commentary not from the United States.

Experimental playstation ads on urinals. Increase your score with hitting icons. Messege is gaming philosophy is everywhere.

Agency: Rafineri istanbul.

The Yahoo! Widget Engine is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols. May be a strong marketing tool, too. Widgets are waiting to be discovered by marketers. Content in widgets come directly to their desktop, bypassing e-mail. It's one way to combat a decline in e-mail open rates.

For example, this widget is car rental wigdet. On customers' desktop and directly... It is an easy one-click way to compare prices and availability on over 40 car rental companies at every city and airport in the world. You can specify any brand or class of car to include in your search or even the "Best Buys" for each company.

Remember when BMW said it was giving up its efforts on branded content? Well, maybe they were lying since they just launched a series of audio book podcasts... Leading authors at the publisher Random House have written 45-minute audio books, each one featuring a different BMW car. The audio books are available for free at www.bmwaudiobooks.com.

The first podcast is Don Winslow’s The Beautiful Ride.

NeoMedia has been awarded a patent covering the capture and processing of bar codes explicitly from camera cell phones. NeoMedia’s technology enables capturing the image of a bar code by the camera device on a Web-enabled cell phone, and processing the bar code so as to deliver the appropriate URL – or Web-based information – to the user’s cell phone screen.

[via The Pondering Primate]

From Brazil, an ad created by DM9DDB Brazil, Sao Paulo for Companhia Athletica (creatives: Demir Karpat Polat, Mariana Sa). Copy says: You can swim any time you choose. Open every day including Sundays and holidays.

Last week eMarketer has published the results of a research by Sharpe Partners which investigated the potentials of viral marketing. The results are interesting, since they confirm the power of viral marketing: 89 percent of US users are likely to share content with friends and colleagues, and only 5 percent refuse to share content that contains a clear brand message.

German telco provider and football world cup sponsor T-Com is starting a campaign to form the biggest German national team ever.

The online special is powered by user generated content with photos of participants in the national dress. All the contributions are added to a long team photo, extending the picture of the German Elf.

The official shirts are available in promotion packages at the T-com outlets. The campaign is supported by TV, print and outdoor media.

In Germany, BMW has been trying to artificially boost the popularity ranking of its site. The mighty Google found out the automaker was cheating and apparently kicked it out of its index. As reported on several blogs, BMW has been caught employing doorway pages to attract search engines spiders. While BMW almost immediately removed the pages after the news broke (after having them live for almost 2 years), apparently it was too late. German BMW are now suffering what is known as the “Google death penalty”: a ban from almost any imaginable top search result, and a degrading of the PageRank to the lowest possible value.

No online advertising campaign was good enough last year in the Middle East to win the Campaign awards in the "best online campaign" category. Strategiy reports according to the judges none of the entries in this category could garner enough points to win an award. The final nominees in this category, which was sponsored by the Maktoob Group, were Arc (Arabian Adventures, Lost, Special K), Wunderman (Service Bell, Microsoft), Face to Face (Rani) and Omnia (Royal Jet).

Apparently the real problem wasn't about the quality of the campaigns, but rather about the quality of the presentations submitted with the work. Tim Burrowes, Editor of Campaign Middle East explains in the article: "Agencies have not helped themselves with the way they have presented their work. It’s not the work that is the problem, but how it is presented. A few campaigns might have been chosen over others, only because the jurors have not received the information they needed. Agencies need to be more professional when they enter such awards".

Land Rover has launched a new website to support its G4 challenge where finalists from 18 countries compete in extreme sports including rock climbing and kayaking over four weeks in April, across Thailand, Laos, Brazil and Bolivia, for a chance to win a Land Rover. As reported on BrandRepublic (sub. req). an intensive new media marketing activity will support the competition, with emails sent out to the Land Rover database, online advertising, a dedicated WAP site and special 30" film to be broadcasted on mobile phones.

The agency behind the campaign is Freestyle New Media.

CNET has an interesting article on big consumer brands gradually moving their attention to mobile phones. Cell phones offer the possibility of establishing a direct relationship with customers, and brands obviously hope to take advantage of such opportunity. However, jumping on the mobile bandwagon is not for everyone. As some expert point out, branded content needs to be relevant and high-quality in order to succeed. As you know, content is expensive to produce and, when it comes to mobile phones, it also gets expensive to deliver. This means brands really need to understand whether such investment is worth or not, in terms of ROI but also of brand strenght over time.

If you're looking for a new job opportunity, you might consider this... Junior Lucky Bastard at 55DSL.

55DSL is looking for two young and gifted individuals to join our new Kick Ass Department. This isn’t a joke, we really do have a Kick Ass Department and we really are looking for someone to fill our Junior Lucky Bastard position. The job is simple. You get paid to go around the world looking for cool stuff, filming it, blogging it, living it for 55 Days. When your 55 Days are up, you will be spat back into the real world a little bit confused but none the less richer for all your experiences.

Mercedes-Benz has launched a series of 6 videocasts to support the new R class. In the clips launched on the German site www.mercedes-benz.com/videopodcast, testimonials, such as jazz singer Dianne Reeves or skateboarding legend Tony Hawk are philosophising about design, comfort, performance and other aspects of the new R class.

The web special on www.r-class-webspecial.com is also worth seeing.

To properly celebrate (and of course take promotional advantage) of the upcoming Olympic games, Fiat has partnered with Google Earth to launch an extremely cool online competition. Under the snows of Turin and the Olympic valleys Fiat has hidden an exclusive Ferrari 360 Experience pass and four Fiat Sedici cars. The game (Sedici contest) challenges users finding on a Google Earth map the places where suche prizes have been hidden. The competition is also in English, so I definitely invite you to give it a try.

The campaign has been created by TestawebEdv, and I'm glad I can eventually post a nice Italian interactive concept. Of course :-), I have one thing to complain about: the quality of the web site. Such a nice concept should have been promoted with a much more appealing site (also checking the English copy...).

[news via Pubblicità Italia]

According to a new research by the European Interactive Advertising Bureau, the average European internet user spends 10 hours and 15 minutes online a week; a 17 per cent rise on 2004 and a 56 per cent rise on 2003. As reported on Revolution, With the exception of early mornings (6am to 10am), the internet is the second most-used medium throughout the rest of the day. The research also found blogging is becoming more popular, with 13 per cent of European users regularly contributing to online blogging sites.

Integration. Integration. Integration. This is what interactive marketing is about: it helps you integrating different media channel. And any marketer should learn to take advantage of such opportunity.
This SonyEricsson campaign probably doesn't have the most original concept ever, but does an excellent job not only integrating channels (Internet, mobile and TV), but also putting the user at the center of the stage.

Basically, what the German agency b+d new media has created is an interactive crossmedia videoclip contest for the new Sony Ericsson cell phone D750i. At www.d750i.com everybody can create his own 5 second video clip and shortly after the clips will run in German television on VIVA Plus (MTV network). All shown clips are published in galleries on contest site and weekly the best clips get rewarded by exclusive Sony Ericsson D750i cell phones.

Heavy.com has launched a dedicated section featuring Tv spots which were intended for, but didn't make it to the SuperBowl. The SuperBannedBowl isn't really exciting, but can help wasting some time at work.

[via Adrants]

Are looking for more cool interactive ideas? Check the archives