If nothing else, Twitter continues to bring out the strong opinions. AdRants has a nice overview of the current war of words (here, here) between “marketing guru” Seth Godin and blogger Ryan Kuder.
It’s fascinating to see how Twitter evolves – since it is basically a completely open communication forum it is up to the users to decide what is deemed “acceptable behavior.” I’ve already witnessed, and been a part of, admonishing what was perceived as a misuse of Twitter – mostly when people posted what amounted to unsolicited sales pitches or links to products/services (i.e. spam).
We’ll have to wait and see if Twitter collapses under the weight of it’s own openness or if it is able self-regulate itself into a fruitful community.
I liked this little follow up from AdRants on the Firebrand flame-out.
“Fighting to the end, Firebrand CEO Roman Vinoly shared his frustration over doubters of the ads-as-content concept with AdWeek, pondering, “Isn’t it proven every Super Bowl and on lots of Web sites where people go? Isn’t it proven by being one of the largest categories uploaded to YouTube? Is it that difficult to conceive that great creative created by great artists with all the money in the world could be compelling to consumers even though it’s trying to sell a product?”…And those “great artists” Vinoly thinks would be so “compelling” to people are making ads mostly to pay the bills in between their primary artistic gigs. They’re not doing it with the goal of creating Oscar-worthy content people will flock to on a site such as Firebrand.”
That should pretty much wrap things up as far as this topic is concerned.
That seems to be the thinking behind a couple of TV promos right now. First, I noticed that the USA show “Psych” offers viewers the animated adventures of the two protagonists from the show as kids. It’s kind of like the Muppet Babies. These cartoons are chopped up and played in pieces during the actual commercial breaks of the show. You can also watch them on the site but, as is sadly often the case, they are not embeddable or directly linkable.
Now, AdRants has news that the Courtney Cox/FX series “Dirt” is doing its own animated promos:
“To help kick of Courtney’s Cox’ second season of Dirt on FX, recently launched design and production company Arsenal created six animated “vignettes of Hollywood stars and celebutaunts caught in the act of wild, unbecoming behavior.” Each vignette is finished off with witty commentary from Courtney Cox.”
These are more standalone promos, and use what looks like a cheap knockoff rotoscoping technique (ala “Waking Life”).
The question is whether or not shows that are pretty much geared to the “grown-up” set really get a lot from promoting their shows with animation.
AdRants pointed me to a new web-video site sponsored by Volvo called Mr. Robinson’s Driving School. You can check out the site or the embed below or just take what AdRants had to say:
“We would rather watch Charlie Bit Me! 9.8 million times than sit through this working class wannabe-Isaac-Hayes crap even once.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzE5DtH8row]
Uncategorized | admin | 
April 14, 2008 8:36 pm | 
Comments (0) 
Subscribe