Two of the stronger pieces of Nissan Rogue’s advertising campaign over the last year was a series of viral videos about the "maze," that quirky tilt board game, as well as association with the “Heroes” TV show, all to get “men in transition,” says Kristi Vandenbosch, president of Tequila USA, the agency for Nissan. Those are men on the way up, getting promoted, moving out to the suburbs, says Vandenbosch, in obvious desperate need to be entertained. Nissan had done an earlier product placement deal for its Versa model on "Heroes". Nissan sponsored the popular “Maze Master” videos …

Kristi Vandenbosch, president at Tequila USA, kicked off the OMMA Global Hollywood conference on Tuesday with an interesting case study on the Nissan Rogue, but also provided a sneak look at the campaign launch for the Nissan 370Z. The car had no budget to go to market. The video ad tapped into cultures and scenarios that would appeal to "guys." This is the first time a car was launched in a video game from Electronic Art, Vandenbosch said. A series of episodic videos ran, too. Nissan took the car across the country to let people touch and feel it. …

During a OMMA panel “Gaming Comes to Play: Games as a Media Channel,” Brien Downie, senior digital planner of Initiative Media, says one major objection about gaming from marketers is that placing ads in video games can be “too niche.” Some marketers believe video games can be young and mostly male. But industry executives say that isn’t true. Downie tells clients some games can pull in a half a billion dollars in a week, such as “Grand Theft Auto IV”: “That’s not too niche to me.” Tina Liao, media director of Freestyle Interactive, which has Electronic Arts as …

You may have seen the zippo app on the iPhone, which uses a video app to make an iPhone look like a Zippo lighter. Unsurprisingly, this app was a brand campaign sponsored by… Zippo! However this never occurred to moderator Michael Burke, founder and president of Appsavvy, and probably many other people who downloaded the app, just thinking it was “just made by some guy” with a weird enthusiasm for fire and stylish lighters. Most marketers would agree a piece of branding content is highly successful if the consumer doesn’t know it’s sponsored, embracing it with natural enthusiasm like other …

Whether or not iPhone apps can sell stuff, it’s a hot topic: every chair is taken and people are lined up along the back and sides of the room. Apple’s cool cachet strikes again.

When will the Internet research model in aggregate audiences extend to other media? First, the Internet needs to get its own house in order. “We still don’t understand the online audience,” says Frank Addante, Founder/CEO of The Rubicon Project. “If you don’t who they are, how do you pass this along to other medium?” Addante believes for this to work one needs to be believe that all media will eventually be consumed over IP networks. But he believes right now no one can put a time frame around when all this will happen. A related problem â€" …