Talk about convergence! Girls and (fantasy) football, courtesy of the advertising geniuses at Weiden + Kennedy. ESPN.com fantasy football implements a tried-and-true way to get the attention of the coveted 18-34 male demographic – babes. Link to the videos here(Quicktime).
(Via Adrants)
On August 9, Web gossip Matt Drudge reprinted the cover of an issue of Small Business Computing magazine on his website. The cover showed CNN American Morning co-host Soledad O’Brien posing next to a computer monitor displaying the Drudge Report website. Drudge’s item is headlined “CNN ANCHOR DISPLAYS HER FAVORITE WEBSITE.” While Drudge presented the cover as though it were a current issue, the cover actually dates from September 1997 — a time when O’Brien wasn’t even employed by CNN. Click image to see a larger view
The item’s text proclaimed:
Soledad O’Brien knows where the latest news can be found on the Internet: The DRUDGE REPORT! The fast-rising cable news star was all smiles as she posed for SMALL BUSINESS COMPUTING magazine, proudly displaying her “favorite website.”
When the September 1997 issue of Small Business Computing was published, O’Brien was the host of MSNBC’s now-defunct daily program The Site. O’Brien did not join CNN’s staff until 2003.
(Via MediaMatters.org).
Video game advertising company Massive recently signed a deal with Vivendi to integrate ‘live’ advertisements within their titles. The first title was the strategy-shooter SWAT4. As one might expect, gamers took about two seconds to find a way to block the origin of the ads. Details here. Nothing a dedicated anti-marketing gamer wouldn’t have already done to block ads on his favorite gaming sites – disallowing ads.* in your hots.etc file is an old trick to block web ads – but it’s probably not going to be long before a patch is going around to enable this with a simple Doubleclick of the mouse (pardon that ad-related pun, please) to allow the less-technical gamers to avoid these in the future.
Gamers love to hack these titles (see ‘Hot Coffee’); if in-game ad technology is going to take off, it’s going to need to be smarter about how these features are implemented. And I have to guess that there may not be too many sponsors who would be happy to see that hostage’s blood spattered on their ad if the player is too slow and the terrorists get to her first. Or maybe that’s just me.
Link: Details of how the hack was found are here.
(Via MarketingVox.com)
Kitten War is a site with a simple idea: people send in scans of their kitties, and then two kittens enter, with only the cute kitten leaving. Fair enough, but the golden nugget of this site is not the cute stuff, it’s the hall of losers. These are not happy animals. Looks like the kitten equivalent of a media indecency watch group.
Link: Kitten War
(Via Eyebeam, via Screenhead)