Nike and Paul Rodriguez

I posted about Nike's new 'It Was A Good Day' ad last week and I had wanted to include a clip of an earlier ad that Paul Rodriguez did with Nike SB but I couldn't find the video anywhere. Thankful a friend pointed me in the right direction and it is just as good as I remember. Check this out...

Doritos iD3

You'd imagine that there isn't too much to an advertising campaign about a new flavour of crisps but you'd be extremely wrong. Doritos new iD3 campaign, invites users to guess the flavour of their mystery flavour by participating in a seriously slick online game. In a similar fashion to the recent Protocol viral, the game utilises Facebook Connect to pull in all the information necessary for you game profile and to personalise the game narrative and actually push the game out into Facebook.

The game runs as a three-part 'choose your own adventure' type game, where users go undercover against the London underworld to discover the secret flavour. The story revolves around a case of mistaken identity, in a blend of live action film with 3D interactions, sound recognition and interactive engagements. The whole thing is done through an extremely high quality production value giving an excellent cinematic feel to it.

In an interesting mechanic, users need to insert a promotional code from the inside of the new Dorito flavour to play the game. Each promo code gives six lives of game play.

Beyond this the most interesting part of the whole campaign has been the approach that has been taken to promoting the campaign. In what is now becoming an increasingly common tactic, the campaign was previewed and pushed through an exclusive blogger programme. Through this the campaign has seen a serious jump-start by gaining huge traction on blogs, forums, and Twitter, before it had even launched. In fact, event the campaign Facebook page already has 46,875 fans.

Don't think it's just a game though, by guessing the mystery flavour there's also £20,000 up for grabs to a lucky winner, and runners up prizes of Xbox 360's and gig tickets.

So without further delay, check out the trailer...



The campaign was produced by +REHABSTUDIO and Initials Marketing.

Digital Marketing School

Just over a week ago now (apologies for the delay folks) saw the launch of Ireland's first free, online marketing school. The Digital Marketing School, founded by Niall O’Driscoll and Andrew Jenkinson, has been set up through the vStream marketing company and is aimed at Irish SMEs and start-ups who are looking for an online consultancy resource.

While I would personally disagree with a number of points that are made in the new ventures press release, all in all I think this is a great idea and really well put together. The site already features 7 different tutorials, an interview and a case study, all provided as online videos by the two founders.

Andrew Jenkinson spoke about the reasoning behind the site, saying "From start-up companies to large multi-nationals there is a general lack of knowledge of this space. And it's also very hard to keep up to date, as last year's facebook is this year's twitter, and new technologies such as augmented reality are appearing all the time. It's hard for people to get grounding in this, as it can seem quite complex and confusing. That is why we decided to set up the Digital Marketing School and make it available for free. For Ireland to compete at an international level, digital marketing will be crucial."

Budweiser Lyrics Competition

At the beginning of the month I attended the launch of the new Budweiser ad - Lyrics. Budweiser's latest ad was released to coincide with the 4th July and was based around The Beatles song ‘All together now’. The ad was shot entirely from a moving train around the Chicago L.



Behind the ad there is a larger digital campaign running through the Alltogethernow.ie Website. Users are asked to create their own video or photo of themselves holding up a number, letter or word. This video is without doubt the best example I've seen...



A massive thanks to Darragh for sharing this.

When I first looked at this just after 6pm there were 13 views - an hour later it was on 114!

Display Ads: Video and Rich Media

Twentieth Century Fox are set to launch a serious cool online campaign for the release of the 'Dollhouse' Season One DVD boxset ('Dollhouse' is the latest program from Joss Whedon - he of Buffy and Firefly fame). The campaign utilises a suite of video and rich media display ads that, I hate to say, you would just never get to run in Ireland (publishers would flip a lid over the file size and CPU usage). As well as being able to watch 5 different in-banner video clips, the ads also allow you to follow Eliza Dushku on Twitter and send her messages, all directly through the ad.

Once you rollover the ad, it expands left revealing a panel to watch the videos and read/post from/to Eliza's Twitter feed. All logging-in to your account etc. is done straight through the ad. The banner does use a level of moderation and it is possible that your tweet could end up appearing in the ad.

Unfortunately I couldn't embedd the ad here for you to see, but you can pop over to the EyeWonder site to see a full demo of how it works..

Michael Rosner, senior vice president of global sales at EyeWonder, said: "We've recently seen brands using Twitter in different ways to help promote a product or service, but we wanted to take the technology a step further by giving users the ability to tweet directly in the ad unit.

"Given we wanted to launch this new rich media feature with a premier partner, we used Fox's Dollhouse season one campaign, as the social aspect of it allows people to share their thoughts on the show and drum up excitement about the Blu-ray/DVD release."