• I Just Love Your Flashy Ways
    This had to be the best pitch we got all month: "I found you can hypnotize yourself if you stare at the creative long enough." This came courtesy of Dana Mellecker at iCrossing, in reference to the company's launch of the Vail Resorts Web site, snow.com.
  • Trouser Snakes
    If it takes a donkey named Ramon, a blinged-out sock puppet and a trout to generate some online buzz for Levi's ever-popular 501 jeans, then so be it. Especially if they're peeking out of the denim's wide-open fly.
  • Little Boxes
    Perhaps all iPod spots - even before Feist got in everyone's heads - have begun with the music. The latest are no different, but they don't end there. The tag claims the newest iPod touch is "the funnest iPod ever." At first, the latest interactive ad for the mp3 player that does it all doesn't look that fun. Just sort of like a regular banner ad with video.
  • Spaazstic
    Take it from one who knows. Storming out of a salon in tears mid-haircut is not a pleasant situation. Whether you're looking to spare yourself the agony of a full-on salon failure or just want to see how insanely hot you'd look with long, flowing blond locks, new virtual makeover site taaz.com allows you to give your looks a complete overhaul. After uploading your photo, you can try on different hairstyles, pop in colored contacts, groom your eyebrows, and test every color of lipstick, blush, and eye shadow that can possibly be reproduced on your monitor (that's millions, for those …
  • Splashdown
    Nike, a brand built on hero worship, has gotten downright inelegant. Now, fans at extreme-sports events can sit on a toilet seat in a branded porta-potty and get a bucket of water thrown in their faces. Nike films the splash in high-production slo-mo and posts the edited, branded videos on a social media app, where kids can watch it, comment and share. The booth debuted at the two-day AST Dew Tour in Portland, Ore. Within a few weeks, one fellow had watched the video of himself 227 times. If he buys 277 pairs of sneakers, they might be onto something.
  • Sexually Transmitted Viral
    Safe is in the eye of the beholder. What about vintage porn clips, painted with strategically placed cartoon-gag covers - so the "actors" appear to be, say, eating corn on the cob, shaking maracas or riding a pony? Safe? Maybe. But it is definitely popular. An 80-second clip racked up 2.5 million views in its first 48 hours, and hit 8 million two weeks later. The purpose: Drive viral excitement about Diesel's 30th anniversary, playfully titled XXX: Dirty Thirty.
  • 5 Questions for Matt Kaplan
    Vice President of Solutions and Chief Strategy Officer, PermissionTVWhen asked about his preferred Olive Garden entrées, Matt Kaplan, PermissionTV's vice president of solutions and chief strategy officer, straddles the casual dining fence: "Chicken Parmigiana is leaner and generally eaten by Republicans, whereas Chicken Marsala contains more fat and is mostly consumed by Democrats. I'm undecided as to which I like better." However, he had stronger opinions about the promise of "video 2.0." And he has the numbers to back up the talk: "In a recent PermissionTV survey of marketers, nearly 85 percent of the respondents agreed that online video …
  • Creative Roundtable: The Great Face Race
    In the battle between MySpace and Facebook for world domination, Facebook is on top. While MySpace still has the largest U.S. audience of any online social network, Facebook was declared the world's largest online social network as of last April in a report issued by comScore.
  • Not Like Everybody Else
    Most of us, given the chance to chat with an Intel engineer, might hope that such a conversation would happen over a few beers and quickly turn away from microchips to, say, football.
  • Behind the Numbers: The Death of the Party
    The dollars pouring into social media might be slowing. eMarketer now projects that while advertisers will spend $2 billion on social networks worldwide in 2008, that figure will rise to $3.8 billion in 2011 - an estimate revised down from $4.1 billion after MySpace announced it would miss its revenue targets by about 10 percent.
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