Win a House on Twitter

Back in 2007, Channel 4's 'Grand Designs' featured a house in Cheltenham owned by Tim Bawtree. Tim's £800,000 house failed to sell and soon after the airing property prices in the UK started falling. Faced with no certain turn-around on the current market, Tim decided to give the house away. Honestly.

Tim's plan is to link a microsite for the house to a Twitter account and generate enough traffic to sell ads on the site to raise £820,000 to cover the price of the house (and all costs) and allow a donation to 'Help for Heroes'.

Ads on his site are being sold for £100 a block, and Tim needs 90% of the blocks to be bought for the give-away to be activated.

The winner will be chosen at random from Tim's Twitter followers

Tim said: "Similar things have been done, but there was no hook. The hook here is that people can win a house for free, which will drive traffic from Twitter to the home page."

Koogle

According to a Brand Republic article, a new Search Engine is about to launch specifically aimed at orthodox Jews. The Search Engine, named Koogle, will allow orthodox Jews to search the net without breaking any Torah commandments. The site has been designed to meet guidelines provided by orthodox rabbis and will ensure that no sexually explicit material is shown.

The site will be Hebrew language based, offer a filter for ultra-orthodox Jews (so cannot have things such as TVs in their homes), and will not allow any activity on the Sabbath.

The name 'Koogle' comes from Google and the traditional Jewish dish 'kugel'.

36% of all Advertising will be Online Advertising by 2013

In a report on the British Entertainment and Media Market, PricewaterhouseCooper have concluded that 36% of all advertising will be made up of Online Advertising by 2013. Although these are UK based predictions, the figures indicate an almost 100% increase in Online Advertising spends in just 4 years. This follows an April report from PricewaterhouseCooper that showed UK Online Advertising expenditure had grown by 17.1% year on year in 2008 to £3.35bn, an increase of £540m compared to 2007. This was a growth from 15.5% to 19.2% of total UK ad expenditure.

Phil Stokes, the leader of the entertainment and media practice at Price Waterhouse Coopers, said:
"We anticipate fundamental structural change in many of the business models across E&M sectors to happen imminently. Perhaps surprisingly, a slowing economy will accelerate the migration to digital technologies among both providers and consumers of content, meaning the industry that went into the recession is very different from the one to emerge the other side. Segments will have to consolidate, the least loyal customers have already left, higher quality products will be valued by both consumers and advertisers, and digital distribution will have become mainstream -- commanding fees more in line with its value. For each of the industry's diverse segments, the winners will be those who focus on driving and leading change which delivers real value for consumers."

Tampax: ZackJohnson16

This is an odd one for sure. In fact it's beyond odd, I'm surprised that Proctor & Gamble were able to be convinced that this was a good idea. Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying it is a bad idea. I'm just surprised that the Brand Manager on this campaign was willing to go down this route. Seriously good move on thier part - forward thinking, risky and definitely leading edge!

The new Proctor & Gamble Tampax campaign is based around 16 year old Zack Johnson. Zack has the mis-fortune to wake up one morning missing his 'boy parts'. Instead Zack has 'girl-parts' and doesn't know what to do. Things get even worse for poor Zack when 9 days later he gets his period.

The campaign utilises online short video interviews with Zacks family and friends, a video-blog, a blog and a micro-blogging feed, all brought through a dedicated microsite. The campaign is not branded with P&G or Tampax but does feature regular mentions of Tampax products from the point that Zack gets his period.

The first episode of Zack's blog already has 6,036 views on YouTube, and his Twitter profile has 973 followers.

Vodafone Twitter-Google Maps Mashup

Vodafone UK have launched a great Twitter and Google Maps mashup that lets users tweet where they’re going on holiday and have it automatically appear on their microsite map. The site also gives a trend analysis of what users are talking about in relation to their holidays.

Users just have to drop the '#ukhols' hashtag, their age, the first half of their postcode and where they're going into a tweet. All of this comes from the same guy that developed the #uksnow hashtag system that allowed users to tweet their post code and amount of snow, to create a truely accurate snowfall map, Ben Marsh.

The whole campaign is designed to promote Vodafone's drop in roaming charges this summer.