A funny little thing happened while I was watching football this sunday. A funny little TV spot introduced me to Walmart’s Modern Warfare 2 promotional site.
Beyond the prominent incentive message, the site is wrapped around a gamer campaign which revolves around the lives of Steve and Nick. Both are gamers and predictably like to trash talk.
From a social media standpoint, there is a twitter component which lets you select from antagonizing messages (tagging them with #mw2).
All and all a solid and well rounded mini-campaign
Gap’s newest campaign (courtesy of akqa), Born to Fit is a powerful sign of the times. What would have been a few years ago a TV campaign is now squarely digital. Experts, pundits and amateur marketers alike should have plenty to dissect. With mobile being a centerpiece and more importantly audience participation this is a great example of a great integrated campaign which utilizes all our favourite social media destinations (twitter, iphone, youtube and facebook) in a great way.
Just when you thought smart advertising had become an oxymoron Showtime and their media agency OMD sign a deal with advertising deal with Amazon, giving them banners on amazon.com and wait for this, the ability to offer up a free book download on the Kindle.
There certainly has been an explosion of marketing campaigns this year which have used twitter as a key messaging point.
Aside from the cute name, this is the second site in seemingly the same amount of days to leverage the community and really content created by Twitter through a sponsored deal brokered by Federated Media.
This time around AT&T and not Microsoft are the sponsors of this effort. Built around March madness it’s mainly a mainly US centric campaign that seems to rally folks around their team in the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament.
The lack of being click on call to action taking me away from this “app” and unto some campaign form or page means that AT&T is seriously making an attempt at utility, by not seemingly pairing this site with any production or product.
Although a bit more constrained than Exectweets, kudos to AT&T, Federated Media and Twitter for their nod to Utility, are well deserved.
Late last week, Facebook “twitterized” their landing page by making a live update feed, the primary focus. For it’s part, Twitter seems to have just responded to that move by re-introducing text advertisements. It seens Facebook may be after the Twitter user base while Twitter wants Facebook’s media revenues.
In order to promote the latest PS3 game Killzone 2 (remember that was the franchise that was going to dethrone Halo), Sony launched an innovative media campaign featuring an in-browser game. After downloading a tiny (45k) Firefox plugin, users would be trusted into battle as they surfed select websites. These random battles appeared for example if you were visting popular social network destinations such as mySpace, Facebook and Flickr to name a few.
The Michelin guides are to Europe what the Zagat guides are to the states. For their 100th Edition, Michelin decided to pick 100 artists and have each of them create the Michelin cover in their own eyes. Site visitors are then able to vote on their favourites. Simple but well done and executed. Often when talking about big experiences it’s the small projects and details that aggregately make the big impact.
To announce a new store opening in New York, Diesel took a decidedly different approach. Instead of the cult DJs and celebrities and fashionistas descent for an evening, they staged five real life intimate parties that would normally be no access for the rest of us. The dinner parties featured various NYC celebrities spawning a wide cultural swath from DJs to Athletes.
Odopod just relaunched their website. For those of you who don’t know Odopod, they are a San Francisco-based shop that’s done some of the better flash work out there. The interesting part of this redesign beyond the usual visual improvement is the minimal use of Flash. The going with an XHTML site from a shop that has made its name in Flash, is a trend i first saw with the Barbarian Group’s redesign last year and seems to be gaining mometum.