Hasta La Creative!

LONDON – Video advertising network Vibrant Media has hired former Omnicom digital boss Sean Finnegan as its chief media officer.

To promote its all girl, all the time website ChickiPedia, somebody’s created yet another PC versus Mac-style ad.

LONDON – Emap’s Yours magazine, a lifestyle title aimed at over-50s women, has launched a new bookazine called “50 Years of Everyday Fashion”.

OMFG! WTF? We don’t know what drugs they use over in Sweden but, damn, we want some now!

LONDON – TNS is to extend the reach of its interactive research division into South America, with the launch of an online access panel next week.

A Michigan paper mis-placed a horse-for-sale classified ad under its “Good Things to Eat” heading. Hilarity ensued.

LA Times sent a reporter to DomainFest, the annual get together of domain name speculators, brokers and developers.

Two of the biggest practitioners, Oversee.net and Demand Media Inc., are based in the Los Angeles area and have collectively received more than $450 million in venture capital investment to fuel domain name buying sprees.

The bidding paddles flew Tuesday and Wednesday in the hotel ballroom at DomainFest. Individual speculators and deep-pocketed companies snapped up domains such as Porn.net for $400,000, Bookmarks.com for $300,000, Alimony.com for $75,000, Butcher.com for $50,000 and Satinpanties for $10,000.

The more than 600 people who paid as much as $995 to attend the conference also got to hear from one of the “domainer” idols: college dropout Frank Schilling of the Cayman Islands, who started buying Internet addresses with credit cards and eventually amassed 300,000 addresses valued by some would-be buyers at more than $100 million.

Schilling works out of his beach house, where he watches what was until recently the largest TV in the world, and clears about $20 million a year from sites as varied as Homeforeclosure.com and Crosswordpuzzles.com.

Advertising Agency: DDB Stockholm, Sweden
Creative director: Andreas Dahlqvist
Copywriter: Magnus Jakobsson
Art director: Fredrik Simonsson
Animation & Design: Gustav Dejert
3D: Jakob Dahlström
Sound: Plop

We’ve reached the zenith—or is it the nadir?—of Web 2.0. You can now visit the Dunkin’ Donuts channel on YouTube. Of course, there’s a UGC contest going on there. Explains Dunkin’ honcho Frances Allen: “Our loyal customers regularly tell us stories, both heartwarming and funny, about how they keep this country running. We’re pleased to launch our new YouTube channel to give people a chance to tell their unique stories in their own creative way.” Oddly, I have seen folks at Dunkin’ tell “stories” in “creative ways” about how they “keep this country running.” Scary stuff. Anyway, I enter all marketing-related contests here on AdFreak, and this one’s a no-brainer. Rachael Ray walks into a shop with a cup of joe from Starbucks, and Fred the Baker takes his doughy, caffeinated revenge. That’s how I keep America running. Here’s Fred in a classic ’80s spot. Bakerman, this French vanilla’s for you!

—Posted by David Gianatasio

LONDON – The UK’s newspaper websites suffered a significant fall in unique users during December, with Telegraph.co.uk being hardest hit and losing more than 2m users, which pushed it below the Times Online, according to the latest ABCe newspaper website figures.